Feeling something was new. And searingly, breathtakingly different.
“I thought the point was that you were going to do something,” she said, trying to focus on him instead of the ruckus in her body. The downside of that being that her mouth took over. “I thought that was what all the posturing was about. You were going to do something in thirty seconds and rock my world forever, blah blah blah, like every other guy I’ve ever met. Guess what? Your penis isn’t world peace. It’s not even that interesting. It’s just a penis—lots of people have one just like it.”
The intensity in his gaze didn’t drain away, but it changed. And he let out what she would have categorized as a reluctant laugh.
“Are you going to issue stage directions?” He still hadn’t touched her, and she felt wrecked. But she didn’t break his gaze. Or run. “Or do you think, perhaps, that your personal history might suggest you’re not the expert in these things?”
“You’re the one who seems to think it’s a problem.”
“If you don’t think it’s a problem, Rory, I once again invite you to leave,” he said, in that quietly masterful way that made her want to slink off. And also cry. But mostly, it made her want to do anything he asked, if he would just ask it. What was that? “I assure you, my altruism only stretches so far. I can certainly find better things to do with my time than perform public services for ungrateful young women who I already know to be astonishingly disobedient.”
He kept telling her that she could leave. She kept not leaving. And Rory honestly couldn’t tell why it was that her feet seemed fused to the floor beneath her.
This wasn’t how she liked to play. She was never normally so...out of control. And, like it or not, convinced that this man might know something she didn’t.
Though she would bite off her own tongue before she told him that.
But there was that look he got, like now, all navy blue and certain, that made her think he already knew.
She felt that pulse in her clit again and really did have to bite her tongue, then, to keep it to herself.
“Move back against the wall,” Conrad said. Very calmly.
Rory took a breath as if to argue, but thought better of it. The wall behind her was brick and she kind of liked how solid it was, there at her back, when she felt so off-balance.
“Breathe,” he told her. Looking amused again.
The men she dated never found her amusing, at least not like this. It should have made her furious that he did. It was patronizing, at the very least. But instead of demanding he stop laughing at her, she felt her cheeks heat up. And somehow, feeling that flush move all over her skin, and deep inside her, made her more comfortable. Instantly.
Because whatever Conrad Vanderburg was—with his sex room and all those things he’d said that she wanted to dismiss as bragging, but sensed wasn’t him being boastful at all—he wasn’t scary. Or, she thought, revising that a little, he wasn’t scary in any kind of predatory or gross way.
He scared her all right, but because he was so quiet and still. So obviously confident. And so wholly uninterested in attempting to impress her.
She expected him to jump on her, or something. To throw himself against the wall on top of her, and do whatever it was he was going to do.
But instead, he stayed where he was. He crossed his arms, lifted one hand to his mouth to toy with his lips in a quietly sensual way that made her ache, and then...studied her.
Intently.
She felt herself actually flinch. Her knees buckled and his gaze darkened.
“No,” he said, still very calmly, but his orders were perfectly clear. “Stay still, please.”
And she did.
Rory kept the bricks at her back, and she pressed her palms against the stones until she could feel the faint, rough abrasion against her skin.
He regarded her as if he was looking at a work of art in a gallery, like the many scattered all over Paris. She had the impression that those midnight blue eyes of his saw every single part of her. That they touched every bit of skin that she’d left exposed, from her neck to her wrists to the tips of her ears. More than that, she was sure he could see her body behind the baggy careless clothes she wore to clean.
She wanted to shout at him. She wanted to make sure he knew that she was no commodity, to be analyzed so closely and picked apart and judged, as if there was something wrong with her—
Rory felt her breath pick up. And in the next second, she realized that all the sensation she could feel charging around inside of her—lighting everything up and making her feel as if she was melting, from the top of her head to deep between her legs, wasn’t her feeling like there was something wrong with her at all.
She’d never felt less wrong.
“Take off your shirt,” Conrad told her.
And a part of her wanted to stop and discuss that voice.
She still couldn’t figure out the particular flavor of his accent. It wasn’t British. She didn’t think it was Australian. And anyway, it was the tone that seemed to careen around inside her, setting her on fire wherever it touched.
Because the calmer he sounded, the more she wanted to please him.
A thought that should have horrified her, but didn’t.
And at the same time, Rory had no doubt that no matter how calm and mild he might have sounded, that had been an order. An order he expected her to follow, clearly, or he’d throw her out of his house.
Rory wished she could understand why she absolutely, positively couldn’t have that.
She told herself she was entirely too feminist to take orders from some strange man with an en suite pleasure palace who thought he was Christian Grey.
But then she reached down, pulled her shirt off, and stood there in nothing but her bra.
Because apparently she took orders after all.
Something she would have to interrogate herself about later.
“Take that off, too,” he told her, his gaze inviting her to look only at him, think only of him, and let her head go quiet. She shuddered at the thought. “And then you may drop your clothes to one side.”
Something about that made a kind of kick reverberate inside her, as if she was a tuning fork and he’d set her to humming. It started in her spine and then bloomed outward. Because it hadn’t occurred to her that he intended to control even what she did with the clothes she removed at his command. It seemed so over-the-top to her—so fussy—and yet, something in her found it thrilling.
That he noticed details, maybe, when in her experience the moment she showed a little skin it was basically a race to the finish.
His finish, something in her commented. Never yours.
She dropped the T-shirt to one side. Then she found herself too hot, awkward and sweaty—yet still too bright, straight through, with all that molten longing—as she wrestled her bra off. She finally managed it, tossing it to the floor beside her as well.
Rory braced herself for him to jump on her, then. To reach over and grab her breasts, the way men did, and fumble around until all the cool control disappeared and he forgot himself. Because that was what men did, wasn’t it? All kinds of promises, but then they did as they pleased.
But not Conrad.
He hardly seemed to notice that she was now naked to the waist. He stayed where he was, observing her from a foot or so away, as if he could do nothing but that forever.
Rory had no idea why she wanted to weep. Again. Why her eyes felt hot with too much emotion when she should have felt nothing at all. Because nothing was happening. Her breasts were hanging out between them and nothing was happening.
She couldn’t bear it. “I really can’t believe—”
“No, thank you,” he said, so casually. So very, very casually. “No talking, I think. I’ve heard enough about my penis from you tonight.”
Rory couldn’
t tell if the flames in her were temper, desire, shame—or all of the above. “That’s fine, but I think it’s already been ten minutes. Your big promises are all bullshit. Just pointing that out.”
“It has been ninety seconds,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “If you keep talking, it will be longer. It’s up to you.”
She closed her mouth. And though he didn’t actually smile, there was something about the gleam in his gaze that made her think he considered it.
It made her skin prickle, and that jangly, greedy thing inside her seemed to hum again. Louder than before.
“I like where your hands are,” Conrad continued, pleasantly, as if she hadn’t said anything. “Keep them there.”
He paused, as if he expected her to say something else. Acknowledge him, maybe? But it was only for a scant second and then he seemed to collect himself.
And then, finally, he moved toward her.
Still looking the way he had when he’d appeared in that doorway. Like he belonged on the cover of GQ. The only thing he’d done was remove his jacket, but otherwise, he looked rich and corporate, astonishingly capable, and deliciously...stern.
All things that should have repulsed her.
But instead, she was standing in a converted church, pressing her hands back against a brick wall with her shirt off because he’d told her to strip, holding her breath as she waited to see what he would do next.
Something inside her, panicky and desperate, seemed to swell—
But then he touched her, and she settled.
She settled.
All he did was smooth his palm over her cheek.
Rory blew out the breath she’d been holding, long and shuddery.
He was so close that she could smell him. And she didn’t understand how a man so big, so intensely male, who had been wearing a jacket, could smell good in the middle of a Parisian summer. But he did. There was a hint of something too fresh to be cologne, more complicated than soap, and the rest was simply him.
Heat, maybe. Sheer confidence, if that was possible.
And God, his hand.
His palm was hard, and large. And he moved down, slowly, over her cheek to her neck. He paused for the scantest moment, long enough for her to gulp and possibly to feel her traitorous pulse, and then he kept going.
He stood there before her, his attention on what he was doing, not her. So intense, so sure, that it didn’t even occur to her to hurry him along. Or say something to break the spell. Or attack him, more likely, because she felt so off-balance and uncertain.
And then he filled his palms with her breasts.
His eyes gleamed when she made a broken little noise. Rory waited for him to bend his head. To take a nipple in his mouth, or start treating them roughly with his thumbs, but he didn’t do any of that.
Instead he only tested their weight, noted the color on her cheeks, then moved lower.
She thought maybe he was going to do some slow, languorous thing with her navel, just to drive her truly crazy, but he ignored it. He moved instead to the waistband of her jeans. She heard a clunking sound, but only dimly recognized that as him removing her spray bottle and tossing it aside. Rory couldn’t really seem to do anything but press, and press harder, against those bricks.
Until his gaze lifted and pinned her even more firmly against that wall.
He didn’t speak. Her world narrowed to that demanding navy blue gaze while below, he snapped open her jeans.
Then slid one hand down the slope of her abdomen and directly into her panties.
She expected him to tease her. To play.
He didn’t.
Conrad’s fingers were bold and as rock hard as the rest of him. He cupped her pussy, then squeezed, and she knew the exact moment he felt her piercing.
There was another pause, and his gaze caught fire.
But all he did was stroke into her. And whatever else she might have told herself, whatever she kept telling herself about what she should feel, there was no argument here.
She was slick and wet and molten hot. Already swollen with need, the ache of it almost too much, and he didn’t wait. As if he knew.
He didn’t pause again.
Conrad lifted one hand and covered her breast again, and she couldn’t seem to help but arch into his palm, making that sharp ache in her nipple better and worse at once.
The hand in her panties moved at the same time. He twisted his wrist so that the heel of his hand pressed down hard against her piercing and therefore her clit, pinched her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and then he speared two fingers deep inside her.
All at once.
It was all a shock. An intrusion. A bright burst of too much sensation to bear—
He retreated. He lessened the pressure on her nipple.
Then he thrust in deep below. Pinched above.
And again, ground that heel hard against her clit.
And everything inside of her seemed to spin, in a dizzying, breathless, pulsing loop—then collide.
It was as if there was a train bearing down on her, something huge and awful and wonderful and terrifying—
Rory was arching off the wall, or she was shaking apart, or she was convulsing, maybe. Her hands were supposed to be on the wall, but she could feel his shoulders beneath her fingers, and she was lifting, trying to outrun it, trying to stop the growing swell of it—
“Don’t fight it.” His voice was a dark invitation. A command. “Come, Rory. Now.”
One more deep, lush thrust of his fingers. Stretching her, invading her, claiming her, while his palm ground down on her clit, and that lancing bite where he pinched her nipple—
It walloped her, then.
And she was lost.
Her eyes went blind, and maybe she was sobbing.
She’d had orgasms before, but this—
But Rory couldn’t analyze it. She was too busy falling apart, somewhere between that hard hand still thrusting in her pussy and the other one on her breast. And if she could have, she would have given thanks for the wall behind her, too.
Because she was limp and she was a livewire. She was lost.
She shook and she shook. And the world disappeared. And everything was the howling roar inside her that went on and on and on.
Years could have passed.
She could hardly handle it, not sure where one endless, glorious convulsion began or ended.
Until vaguely, somehow, the shaking lessened. And she became aware that her face was tipped forward and she was surrounded by his scent again.
It took her a lifetime or two to realize that Conrad was holding her and her face was buried in his chest. She was breathing, so loud and so heavily she was surprised her lungs didn’t pop.
She thought he moved, though she couldn’t be sure until she felt his hands, surprisingly gentle as they shifted her back and propped her up against that wall again. She had to grip onto the bricks again, her head lolling forward as if she couldn’t hold it up of her own volition.
And for a long while, she tried to breathe. She tried to make sense of all the eddies and swirls of sensation that still moved around inside her. Her clit felt swollen, and she was so wet she was tempted to imagine there was something wrong with her—
But there couldn’t be. Not when she felt like this.
As if everything had changed.
As if nothing would be the same.
As if this whole time she’d been staggering around talking boldly and confidently about color in black-and-white spaces, only to discover that she’d never known color at all. She’d never even glimpsed it.
She felt another wallop, but this time, it was emotional.
Rory lifted her head, feeling panicked and exposed, and somehow wasn’t surprised that Conrad was still standing there before her, still studying her, with
the same expression on his face.
Infinitely patient, with that dark edge.
She felt all that rawness inside her ease a little. A lot.
Wordlessly, he handed her the T-shirt and bra she’d discarded. Rory clutched them to her, covering herself, but not trying to wrestle her clothes back on. Not quite yet. Not when her arms felt like noodles and she was desperately afraid that her knees might give out, or her pants might fall down, or any combination thereof.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do now. Praise him? Thank him?
Cry?
Rory tried to pull herself together, which was hard to do under all that dark navy regard.
She’d never felt so naked in her life, and she understood the piercing irony of that, given how often she posted seemingly accidental scantily clad photos of herself on the internet because she knew her followers loved it when she did.
And she didn’t know if what she felt then was shame—or where that curl of heat was directed, maybe. At all the skin she had shown, with no inkling of how she could feel? Or the fact that it had taken a stranger to show her—despite all her protestations about her feminism and her sexuality and what she owned and what she didn’t, and all the long, involved conversations she’d had about this or that identity—that she didn’t know her own body at all.
That she never had.
As if it was more his than hers.
But something in that triggered her temper, and she was glad.
Fiercely, wildly, almost giddily glad.
“Let me guess,” she said, with all the carelessness she could muster for what she really wanted. “This is where you tell me that it’s my turn, and you make me suck your cock.”
But this was Conrad. He was confounding.
So perhaps she should have known that all he would do was laugh.
At her.
Again.
“I don’t know what makes you imagine that you could possibly have earned that kind of privilege,” he said, all that rich amusement in his voice. “You certainly haven’t.”
She scoffed, temper getting the better of her. “What do you mean? Who thinks it’s a privilege to blow you?”
Tempt Me Page 4
