by Force, Marie
I pour vodka on ice, hand it to her and then stand back to watch her move. I do that a lot. Watch her move. I do it in the office and when we’re at parties and other gatherings. Looking never hurt anything, or so I’ve told myself. Now I’ve touched her, and she’s gone quiet, which is so not like her.
“What’s wrong?” There’s a question I’ve never asked a woman before. Most of the time I’m not there to care. I’m there to fuck. I fuck, she comes, I come, we call it a day—or a night. That’s how you keep things uncomplicated. Asking questions such as “what’s wrong” is the road to complication.
“What? Nothing is wrong.”
“You’re quiet. You’re never quiet.”
“I’m quiet sometimes.”
“No, you’re not.”
“And you know me so well?”
There it is. The sassy retort is much more like the Leah I know and lo— Whoa. Stop. Taking another deep drink of vodka, I gather myself and my thoughts and take a second to get my shit under control before I say something that can’t be unsaid. “I know you well enough to know that ‘quiet’ is not a word anyone would use to describe you.” I move so I’m behind her, arms propped on either side of her, my body pressed against hers. “Things got kind of intense in there, and now you’ve gone silent on me, which leads me to wonder what’s wrong. And if you don’t tell me what it is, I’m going to think I pushed you too far and you didn’t like it.”
“That’s not it.”
“All right, I’ll bite.” I bend to nibble gently on her shoulder, and she goes rigid before pressing her ass against my cock. “What is it, then?”
She turns to face me and looks up at me with big eyes that see all the way through my bullshit. I begin to fear that she can see the very heart of me. “I liked it. A lot. I’ve never had any kind of sex like that, and I can’t wait until we can, you know…” She licks her lips, and I go rigid with lust. “Do everything.”
I want to tell her those are the last fucking words she should ever say to a guy like me, but I don’t tell her that because I’m a selfish, horny bastard who can’t wait to do everything there is to do with her.
She flattens her hands on my chest and slides them up to my neck, giving a gentle tug to bring me close enough to kiss. I don’t resist her in any way, which should set off alarms of every sort, but I’m too busy losing myself in her to think about resisting. When I should be pushing her away, I pull her closer.
Things are officially out of control.
My crush has exploded into something far bigger than I ever expected. I’m in love. If this is how Nat feels about Flynn, no wonder she ditched her life in New York to be with him. I’m reeling from the way Emmett touched me and how he made me feel, leaving me like a sleepy kitten. I want to purr with satisfaction and rub up against him until he gives me more.
I want it all, and after tonight, I’m more determined than ever to have it all with him.
“Does this mean we’re a couple now?”
“We are not a couple.”
“So I can do what we just did in there with anyone I want? That’s good to know.”
“Who else do you want to do it with?” he asks, his eyes narrowing in a sinister look that makes me laugh. “And what the hell is so funny?”
“You are. You don’t want to admit we’re together, but God forbid I get busy with anyone else.”
“With all the attention you give me, how do you have time to be interested in other guys?”
I realize I’m getting to him, so I feign nonchalance as I stir the sauce. “There’re twenty-four hours in the day. I’m only at work for eight of them.”
“Are you screwing with me right now?”
“Would I do that?”
His arm bands around me from behind, and he lifts me right off my feet.
I let out an inelegant squeak of surprise and indignation. “Put me down!”
“Who else are you getting busy with?”
“No one you know.”
“I don’t share, Leah,” he says in a low growl that makes my clit and every other important part of me tingle. “While you’re doing that with me, you’re not doing it with anyone else, you got me?”
“Hmm, exclusivity would imply that we’re a couple, and since you just said we aren’t, I’m kind of confused.” The growl that comes from him should scare me, but rather, it makes me laugh. “Stop being so ridiculous and put me down. I thought you were hungry.” Trying to get free of him, I squirm against the hard column of his erection, pressed tight against my ass.
“Stop.”
I stop. But only because I love that commanding tone of voice he uses when he’s aggravated with me and trying to take back control of the situation. I like to let him think he’s getting the upper hand. He seems to need to be the boss, which is fine with me. His brand of bossiness has led to the sort of orgasms I thought only unicorns got to have.
For the longest time, he only holds me, his face buried in my hair as he seems to breathe me in. I’m confused and moved and absolutely crazy about him. Being held by him, surrounded by his obvious strength and desire for me, is a powerful feeling. He may not want to admit that something is happening between us, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that we’re combustible together. He feels that every bit as much as I do. I’m so sure of it that I relax into his embrace, relieved as much as I’m aroused.
So it won’t be easy, but I can do this. I can make this happen, even if he thinks it’s not what he wants. The hard ridge of flesh sitting between my ass cheeks is proof that he wants me, even if he thinks he doesn’t. Yeah, I know. It’s hard to follow the twisting turns of my mind, but try to keep up. I want him. He wants me. It’s all good.
“Put me down, Emmett.”
He takes his sweet time in letting me slide down the front of him.
I turn to face him, looping my arms around his neck. “It’s okay.”
“What’re you talking about now?”
“It’s okay to admit that you like me and that you like being with me. That doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad employee or a bad lawyer. It makes you human.” Oh my God, I love that fierce feral look of his. He’s clearly not accustomed to women who force him to confront his feelings. Or, maybe it’s just that he’s not used to having feelings. That’s probably more like it, and we have that in common. I’m not sure why I’m so calm in the face of these overpowering feelings, but the more wound up he gets, the calmer I become.
“I thought there was going to be food. I was promised food.”
I kiss his pouty lips and step back to salvage dinner. I’m sure the pasta will be overdone and the carbonara was perfect an hour ago. But how can I be bothered caring about such trivial things when I’ve got much bigger things to be concerned about. Such as how am I going to live until his wounded penis heals and we can get down to serious business.
The carbonara is good—seriously fantastic. Or maybe it’s just that I’m famished and it’s food. No, that’s not it. It’s that good. And so is she. Fuck my life. I blame Connor. If he hadn’t kicked me in the junk, we wouldn’t be here right now eating her delicious pasta while I try to pretend that she hasn’t burrowed completely under my skin in the last twenty-four hours.
It started long before then, my blasted conscience reminds me, that fucking pain in my ass. I can’t recall exactly when I realized that every time she was in the room, I was drawn to her, even as I told myself I shouldn’t be.
I take a bite of chicken that melts in my mouth.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asks.
The question startles me, and I debate whether I should lie or tell the truth. I go with the truth. “Once.”
“What happened?”
What didn’t happen? “Didn’t work out.”
“I’ve only been in love once, too.”
Don’t ask. Don’t ask. “What happened?” I take a sip of crisp white wine from the Quantum vineyard that I opened to have with dinner.
“I don’t know yet. I’m waiting to see how it’ll work out.”
I choke on the wine. Son of a bitch. What the hell is she saying? You know what she’s saying. Shut the fuck up!
She jumps up and smacks me on the back. “Breathe.”
I’ve got wine in my sinuses. And let me tell you, that’s almost as much fun as needles in the penis. When I can breathe again, I hold up a hand to fend her off. “I’m okay.” I blow my nose and wipe my eyes, which burn because… wine.
“She must’ve done a real number on you,” she says after we resume eating.
“Who?”
“The one you were in love with.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask, even though I know I shouldn’t.
“The possibility of me being in love with you makes you choke.”
“You’re not in love with me.”
She laughs. “You wish you could control how I feel. That’d make everything easier for you, wouldn’t it?”
I concentrate on shoveling food into my face so I won’t say something that makes this worse, if that’s even possible. She is not in love with me. She’s nursing a crush. She likes the orgasms. Hell, I do, too. That’s all this is. Leave it to a woman to turn sex into love. “You don’t even know me.”
“I love how you keep saying that, and P.S., I know you.”
“No, you don’t.”
She sits back in her chair, crosses her arms over breasts that I now know are perky and supersensitive. “What don’t I know?”
“That I like it rough and kinky.”
Goddamn if her eyes don’t glitter with interest and arousal. “So? Is that supposed to be a turn-off? If so, it had the opposite effect. You’re going to have to come up with something better than that.”
I shake my head and release a gruff laugh. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. If you did, you’d run for your life.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?”
“Yes! If you had any sense, you’d be scared.”
“Well, I’m not, so what else you got?”
“That ought to be enough.”
She rolls her eyes, gets up and takes both our plates to the sink to begin cleaning up the kitchen.
What is wrong with her? I tell her I’m a kinky fuck who likes it rough, and she just rolls her eyes and goes on with her life like that doesn’t matter? “Do you even know what it means to be with a guy who’s kinky?”
“I know enough.”
“No, you don’t.” She doesn’t have the first fucking clue.
“How do you know I don’t? You’re not the first guy I’ve ever dated or fooled around with.”
Why is it that the thought of her fooling around with other guys makes me want to pound something—namely the other guys she’s fooled around with? I can’t allow myself to think too much about why that is, or I might be forced to admit that she’s gotten deeply under my skin, where I most definitely do not want her to be.
“And stop glaring at me. I’m not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish with all the glaring and snarling, but that doesn’t turn me off you either.” She soaps up a dishcloth and wipes down my countertops and stove, and then loads the dishwasher. “Do you have storage containers somewhere? There’s enough left over for another meal.”
“Bottom drawer.” This would be a good time to tell her that she shouldn’t bother to learn her way around my kitchen. She’s not going to be here again. That’s where I made my first mistake—letting her in last night and again tonight. If she wasn’t here, she couldn’t be under my skin.
She stores the leftover food in the fridge and washes the pans by hand.
The entire time, my gaze is glued to her. I gorge on the sight of her when there’s no one around to see me staring and when her back is turned to me so she doesn’t know either.
She’s totally not my type. I like curvy women who have some meat on their bones. Leah is tall and lean and spare in the curves department, in other words, not my type. And yet… Here I am gorging on the sight of her, watching the way she moves and turned on once again by the hint of sexy pink cheeks. It makes absolutely no sense to me. I don’t want to like her or want her, and yet I’m staring at her. Again.
It occurs to me that I should’ve offered to help clean up since she did the cooking. If she hadn’t been so matter-of-fact about my kinkiness, perhaps my brain would’ve come to that conclusion before she was nearly finished. I’m a dick. But I already know that. It’s probably good for her to figure that out before too much longer.
When she’s finished, she dries her hands on a dish towel that she folds in half and hangs over the door handle on the stove. In eight years of living here, it’s never once occurred to me that I could hang a towel on that handle and that it would give the kitchen a homey, lived-in sort of vibe.
“Do you want me to go?” she asks, again so blunt and matter-of-fact when I’m much more accustomed to women who’d do whatever it took to stay, even if it was clear I wanted them to leave.
“You don’t have to.” Yes, she does. She needs to go so things can get back to normal around here.
“Maybe I should anyway. You’re in a mood.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.” She stares me dead in the eye in that honest, unflinching way of hers that makes me feel ashamed of myself for being so much less than her. “Look, I like you. I haven’t made any secret of that. This was fun tonight, but I don’t want to be here if I’m not wanted.”
“I believe there was ample evidence of the fact that you’re wanted earlier.”
She shrugs. “That was awesome, but since then, you’ve been kinda… bitchy.”
I’ve never met anyone like her, and I know a lot of people. There’s not an ounce of pretense or artifice about her. If I’m being honest with myself, and I always try to be, there’s something so fucking refreshing about her that gets to me. I stand and go to her, wrapping an arm around her waist and jerking her toward me. “Bitchy?” I ask in my most sinister tone, the one that has no effect whatsoever on her.
She looks me dead in the eye, fearless and gorgeous. “Yep.”
“Telling a Dom he’s bitchy can get a little sub in a lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” she asks, her eyes glittering with excitement again. Most people have a “tell” or two. Leah’s entire face is a tell. It provides a direct channel to her innermost feelings, and knowing she feels that way about me…
“The kind that makes it hard for her to sit for a week.”
She gets very close to my face, so close her nose is nearly touching mine. “You. Are. Bitchy.”
I go from not hard to hard enough to pound nails in the flash of an instant, and holy shit, that hurts.
“I want to change my safe word.”
“To what?”
“Bitchy. As in you are bitchy when you don’t get your way.”
I don’t want to laugh or smile, but she makes me do both. A lot. Another thing to think about later, after I show her who’s boss in this relationship or whatever this is we’re doing. It’s not a relationship. It can’t be that because I don’t want that. But I do want her, badly enough that I might defy medical advice and fucking have her before I die from too many erections. If I have her, perhaps things down south will settle down enough that he can actually heal.
As I carry her into the bedroom, I remember that I’d intended to make her leave, and here we are back in the bedroom, where I’m about to teach her a lesson about talking back to one’s Dom. What’s it they say about best laid plans? Laid is the keyword here.
I stand her up next to my bed and strip her naked.
She participates by raising her arms when I tell her to. Kneeling before her, I flatten my hands over the backs of her legs and up to squeeze her ass, and yes, it’s not lost on me that I’m on my knees before her rather than the other way around. But as I breathe in the sharp scent of her desire, I can’t bring myself to care about what I should be doin
g. Not when everything about this feels so good and, fuck me to tears, it feels so right.
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
But this… This is happening.
Chapter 10
Seeing him on his knees does something to me. My heart pounds and my own knees go weak when he touches me with such reverence. And yet, I can still sense the conflict raging within him. He wants me. But he doesn’t want to want me.
I run my fingers through his hair while I wait to see what he’ll do. This was supposed to be about punishment, but it feels far more like pleasure than punishment. I love pushing his buttons and watching his eyes flash with arousal and maybe a hint of anger at the fact that I get to him the way I do. All of it gives me hope—even anger means he’s feeling something. If it’s even one iota of what I feel for him, then it must be completely overwhelming to someone who doesn’t do emotion or feelings or relationships.
And why is that exactly? I may need to do some digging to find out if he won’t tell me himself.
I lie on the bed and watch him strip off his clothes, wincing to myself at the sight of his bruised penis, which is so hard, it’s leaking. Does that hurt? I want to know, but I don’t dare break the fragile accord to ask. The whole time, he keeps his gaze locked on my face, watching my every reaction.
If this is how he plans to punish me, sign me up. I’m so turned on that I squirm, seeking some relief.
“Be still,” he says, stroking himself with careful movements that are probably far gentler than usual.
Most guys like to be stroked hard and fast. I can’t imagine he’s any different, but he probably can’t take hard or fast right now.
“Does that feel good?” I ask him.
“Not as good as usual.”
“Let me do it.”
“Not this time.”
“Not even with my mouth?”
His eyes flare with heat and interest. “If you want to.”
“I do.” I scramble to my knees and reach out to bring him closer. I don’t like the angle. “Sit on the bed.” Bringing a pillow with me, I drop to my knees in front of him, kneeling on the pillow. Much better. Up close, the bruising is even more pronounced than I thought. “Are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you.”
