He only smiled, darkly, and she flushed. And even though it seemed impossible to her, Rory had absolutely no doubt that when he talked to her of lists and begging, he meant every word.
She believed it against her will.
Inside this body that still felt like his.
“Well, I’m willing to do whatever,” she said, still gripping her shirt to her chest, not sure if she was trying to clear a debt. If she thought she was supposed to. Or stranger yet, actually wanted nothing more than to take him deep in her mouth. “In return for...this.”
“A tempting invitation, I’m sure,” he said dryly, sounding insultingly uninterested. “Regretfully, I must pass. Put on your clothes, Rory. Pick up your things. And then go. And the next time you have sex with one of your little puppies, remember. You’re supposed to come. That’s the whole point. Accept no substitutes.”
And to her astonishment, he actually walked away.
“Wait...” she began.
He didn’t even turn around. He only made what she assumed was a kind of backward shooing gesture with one hand, and walked off toward the living area of his sprawling house.
“If you’re still here in five minutes,” he said, in that same maddeningly calm way of his, “I will either bodily remove you or call the police. Neither will be fun for you. If I were you, Rory, I’d go now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO WEEKS LATER, Rory faced her latest date outside a café on the Left Bank, where they’d had a long dinner and drink during which she’d felt...nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Trouble was, she could no longer remember if she’d ever felt anything on these dates of hers. Was this a new thing, now that she knew what she could feel? Or had it always been like this and she just hadn’t known any better?
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to mine?” he asked in the charmingly accented English she’d been enjoying all evening, flashing his dimples at her from beneath his floppy hair. “I’ve a bottle of wine I’d love to share with you, Rory.”
The dimples were why she’d gone on a date with him in the first place. And the way he said her name, rolling the first R so it almost sounded like Lori, had seemed almost unbearably cute when she’d offered it to him like a ripe peach outside the Musée D’Orsay. He was from northern Italy, was in graduate school of some kind or another in Paris—he had told her all about it at great length, but she’d been surreptitiously checking her phone—and a couple of weeks ago, Rory would have loved nothing more than to let him take her home to whatever flat he lived in.
Wine or no wine.
She would have rolled around with him all night long and taken great pleasure in the provocative things she could say to him while they did that. Bold, careless, contradictory. He would tell her how amazing the sex was, she would smile mysteriously and talk about the sensual and the erotic while never coming close to any climax herself, and he would follow her around for months thereafter. Begging for another go, which she would deny him.
Rory had always liked to think of herself as madcap and mercurial, and that was why she liked to play with boys but rarely get serious. But now she wondered if all along, her body had been hoping she’d wise up and stop wasting her time with puppies.
She had been on three other such dates since Conrad.
All of them cute, just like this one. Boyish. Eager to please and impress.
She hadn’t bothered to have sex with a single one of them.
Because every time she drank a little more wine and told herself she might as well, because she was young and free and in Paris, she had Conrad in her head.
That navy blue gaze, pinning her to his wall. And her clit would light on fire all over again, and she would have to clench down hard to keep herself from coming just from thinking about him—
And every time that happened, the prospect of getting fully naked with some boy who would do nothing for her at all...paled.
“I won’t change my mind,” she said, smiling to take the sting off it. “Au revoir.”
And then she walked away quickly, throwing herself into the late night crowd milling about on the cobbled stones of Rue Bonaparte, so there could be no further wrangling.
Conrad had wrecked everything. He’d wrecked her. She should never have let him touch her.
She glared at the old abbey across from the café, rising into the Paris night, because it made her think of him. But then, so did everything else. Even walking up a famous street toward the Seine, which had nothing to do with him. Ever since she’d staggered out of Conrad’s converted church with her cleaning supplies and her shirt on backward, she’d been...flustered. Days later. Two weeks later she still wasn’t right.
Rory hadn’t felt like posting, for once. She hadn’t felt like much of anything, for that matter. She spent more time than she wanted to admit feeling listless and a whole lot less interested in the brand she’d been building. Because what even was a brand when she was nothing but one person trying to pretend social media likes were the same as...well, as anything? When all she could think about was one person and whether or not he, personally, liked her.
Or ever could.
Even if he had threatened to call the police on her.
She went out on dates, because they’d already been scheduled, but it was always the same. They were nothing but a waste of her time.
Puppies, she could hear Conrad say, as if he lived in her head and had complete control of her clit.
She felt that same jolt that she should have been used to by now, out there on the historic street in the thick, warm, summer dark.
All she thought about was sex. And that locked room of his. And the amusement in those navy blue eyes of his. The magic in his fingers. And she thought he might actually have wrecked her. For good.
Because she didn’t understand how she was supposed to survive now that she knew.
Now that she was entirely too aware that there was a world filled with pointless men who didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with her body. And that she happened to possess the name and address of the one man who knew all too well.
And had proved it.
Tonight, the weather was mild. There were people strolling down the boulevards, talking happily, probably all on their way to have mind-numbing, life-altering orgasms with each other. Meanwhile Rory could do nothing but brood her way along the Seine, everything inside her clamoring for one more taste of Conrad Vanderburg.
Who, by now, she also knew a whole lot more about.
She walked along the Left Bank of the river, lost in thought, turning over the information she had about him now in her head. The accent she couldn’t place likely came from a childhood he’d spent between his native South Africa and swanky European boarding schools. Not to mention his time at Oxford, la di dah. He had taken over the management of the family fortune after his father had died, and was therefore very, very wealthy. He was the kind of wealthy that impressed her father, who liked to call himself “comfortable” when he was clearly rich.
Rory had never heard of him, but she had heard of his sister, Erika, who she was pretty sure she’d been following on social media for years and years. Especially during Erika’s scandalous phase. When she thought about Erika Vanderburg, she pictured images in the white dust of Burning Man. She’d thought that was wildly romantic and devil-may-care, and the outfits were always so delicious, but Rory did not camp. In a desert. With or without costumes.
She’d read a lot a distressingly boring corporate online magazines that talked about Conrad in glowing terms. He was apparently not only good at what he did—growing the family fortune from astounding to stratospheric—but he was considered something of a prophet, too, if one gushing blog was to be believed. The way Vanderburg sees markets is nothing short of extraordinary, said one otherwise deeply staid British article.
At the same time, he wa
s also renowned for his discipline. His quiet ruthlessness and implacability. Better to be on his team than against him, numerous financial papers had declared.
Even when his high profile engagement to Lady Something or Other had ended some two years back, he had seemed...unmoved. Icy straight through. Fierce and immovable, which had made the paparazzi less interested in following him around. Might as well try to snap a glacier, one had complained.
You should really consider those warning signs, Rory told herself. Not for the first time.
But her pussy had a different take on the whole thing.
And the next breath she took was a shuddery one, as ever, because she was hot and damp and needy. All the time now.
Rory crossed the river and made her way into the Golden Triangle, a collection of lovely old buildings packed full of famous stores not far from the Champs-élysées. She had found herself here almost every night since she’d met Conrad, no matter how she vowed that she would stop. Sooner or later, no matter where she was in the city, she found herself walking down these same grand old avenues until she found the little side street, hardly more than an alley, that sneaked around to what had once been a churchyard and was now his domain in the center of Paris.
Sooner or later she was simply drawn there, a moth to the flame, whether she liked it or not.
She told herself it was enough to simply walk to the place where the street snaked away in between two upscale shops that catered to the wealthy, then leave. She told herself that tonight would be the night that she broke the spell. That she absolutely would not make her way to the front gates surrounding his converted church, where there were trees to lurk behind, cobblestones to slip over, and looming buildings all around.
But she didn’t keep walking when she reached his turn.
She didn’t double back when she reached the end of the building that opened into the small plaza where the church stood.
And she didn’t pretend she was anything but sad when she found herself at her favorite tree. The only surprising thing, she’d thought repeatedly throughout these two weeks, was that there weren’t besotted idiots like her behind every tree.
Because once again, the hold he still had on her—even though she was pretty sure he’d already forgotten she existed—won the day. She stood there outside that old, Gothic church, her head spinning.
Paris was electric and alive on the other side of the stately buildings that surrounded the church, but down on the old plaza stones, it was quiet. Dark. That meant there was nothing to distract her as image after image of the things he’d done and could do to her plagued her. With sensations to match, storming around inside her body, making her feel deliciously weak.
Her clit felt swollen. Again.
Always.
Rory had barely slept these two weeks. When she did fall asleep, her head was filled with all the images of the deliciously dark sex acts she’d spent entirely too much time researching online. Because she wanted to know what all that furniture in Conrad’s locked room was used for.
And now she did.
If anything, that made the chaos and greed inside her burn all the brighter.
She was opposed to all of it, of course. Actively appalled, and so on. As a feminist.
Rory told herself variations of that all day long, while she cleaned for her various clients with a fervor she had never before applied to her work.
She would get home to her flat in the evenings, filled with righteous indignation. Certainly not thinking about the kind of things that man got up to. Not that she begrudged consenting adults their fun, but she was certainly not going to do those things.
“I’m an influencer,” she would remind herself out loud. “Not a pony. Or a little one.”
And then the next thing she knew she would be hunched over her laptop, one hand between her legs, looking at things that shouldn’t have turned her on at all.
But they did.
The things that most horrified her by day made her wettest, and hottest, when she stopped pretending she was horrified at all.
Suddenly, there in the hushed darkness behind her tree of choice, she remembered when she—with all of her self-righteous zeal—had decided that Christmas dinner, the year after she graduated from college, was an excellent time to demand that her father accept her as pansexual.
Because she had decided, after much careful consideration and deep conversations with her friends, that she was. Therefore, she thought everyone should know.
Especially her parents.
Her mother had sighed and reached for her wine, then headed back to the kitchen to direct the staff. Her cousins had either laughed, sat forward to watch the show, or both. Her aunt Melinda had invoked the Good Book, and none of her uncles had ever met her gaze directly again.
But Marty Morton had stared at her over the turkey he was carving with a studiously blank look on his face and his signature Santa hat slightly askew.
Darlin’, he’d said, in his usual booming way, do you want me to stand here with my hands in the Christmas turkey and talk to you about what I do with my drawers down?
Ew, Dad. She’d been horrified. No.
Then why don’t you concentrate on the gotdamn baby Jesus in Bethlehem and not whatever the hell you just said about Wonder Woman. Everybody thinks that woman is attractive, darlin’. That’s her gotdamn job.
She’d posted a selfie from the bathroom five minutes later to detail how her father had silenced her truth.
But here, now, it occurred to her for the first time that finding people attractive wasn’t the same thing as wanting to have sex with them. It had always appealed to her, deeply, that she be seen as carefree, sexually. That anyone who followed her online might think that they had a chance with her. She’d always loved the notion that sex could be anything, and if it was anything, than anyone was an appropriate partner.
Just as she’d always imagined that, if given the opportunity, she would love nothing more than to dance down mountainsides in the moon.
But loving the image of a flower child on a mountain beneath the stars didn’t mean she wanted to take up hiking. And loving pretty images of pretty people didn’t mean she wanted to have sex with all of them. In both cases, it just meant she liked pretty things.
Because actually having sex with people—in her case, only and ever men, no matter who she claimed she was attracted to—was a remarkably low impact, mechanical sort of thing. For her. So much so that she’d come to the conclusion that she maybe wasn’t the sort of person who felt a lot of things deeply. Sexually, anyway. And she’d been starting to think if there were words she should use to describe that part of herself, too. Because all of those things—attractions, erotic moments, sex—operated on that same low frequency in her. Like soft notes she could play or not play, when what she thought she really liked about the whole thing was the attention.
She liked a curated picture of a thing, she realized now. Not the thing itself.
Because curation was comforting. It kept her safe. It let her stay in control, always.
Except then she’d met Conrad.
And literally none of the words she’d ever use to describe herself seem to be remotely true anymore. None of them fit.
She barely fit in her own skin.
Rory still couldn’t decide if she wanted to cry about that, punch something, or just find him and beg him to show her more of the intensity she hadn’t known was out there. Or in her. To show her parts of herself that either thrilled her or scared her—she couldn’t decide.
But whichever it was, she wanted more.
She blew out a breath and told herself to walk away again. The church was dark, the way it always was. What was the point of creeping about like a stalker if she couldn’t actually see him? She would go back to her little flat, look at more things that should have disgusted her, and pretend her own fing
ers in her panties were his.
But before she could do any of that, she saw headlights dance across the facade of the church. And then a sleek, low-slung sports car coming down the little alley. It had a low, authoritative rumble that made her think of his voice, and she knew it was him even before it turned in to the church and remotely opened the gate.
All the other nights she’d stood here, hating herself, she’d never seen him. Not even a whisper of him. She’d imagined Conrad off in some sex club—and if it hadn’t been Paris, literally brimming with such places, she might have gone and tried to find him in one of them.
She was gripping herself, hugging her arms across her abdomen in a way that only hurt, but she didn’t stop. The gate closed behind the car that then slid into the garage that waited. The garage door closed, too. And for moment, Rory was simply alone on a cobbled Parisian street, spying on a man who had already threatened to call the police on her once.
When she was usually the one who had to roll her eyes and shoo away boys who didn’t get the picture and leave when she told them to.
She watched the lights go on inside. And the church stood, bright and beautiful and compelling, claiming its own little plaza the way it must have done for centuries.
But all she could think about was the man who lived there.
Rory made herself a promise, there and then. If she actually did what she wanted to do—cross the street, knock on his door, and beg him for...anything, really—
If she actually begged—
No matter what happened, if she did these things, it would be the last time. She made a vow to herself as she stood there, the summer night close around her. If he said no, as she expected he would, and then demanded she leave and never come back, that was what she would do.
Even if she had to leave Paris just to keep herself from ending up in his street no matter her intentions, she would.
But first, tonight, she would try.
Rory was already crossing the stone plaza before the thought was fully formed inside her head.
She skirted the gated part of the church’s grounds and went instead to the big, ornate doors. They rose high and proud, but she headed for the smaller door tucked inside them, and didn’t bother attempting to use the code she’d had when she’d worked here. She felt certain that he had changed it, but even if he hadn’t, she wasn’t foolish enough to think he would find her letting herself in the least bit entertaining.
Tempt Me Page 5
