by Reiss, CD
“Your games annoy me. This? What you’re doing now? I’m sorry.” It wasn’t an apology but the soothing of a self-possessed woman to a man she was too busy to bother castrating. “It’s just not that interesting anymore.”
I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I hadn’t sharpened the barbs to a point, and I hadn’t aimed them at any of his specific soft spots. But I also didn’t care if I hurt him. I didn’t care if I didn’t. I didn’t care about a single thing he had to say… but he kept on talking anyway.
“This is the hurt talking.” Shockingly, he was so bad at taking my cues he touched my hand again. “I can make it up to you.”
“You. Bore. Me.”
Then Dante was looming over us, his presence undeniable, his voice impeccably neutral and somehow all the more menacing for it.
“Renaldo DeWitt,” he said. “I always knew you were a fool, but why do you insist on acting like a clown in front of everyone?”
He looked down at where Renaldo’s hand touched mine, and the scorch of Dante’s glare had Renaldo pulling his hand back as if he’d been physically burned. Dante hadn’t even had to touch him.
Renaldo was a worm, and I’d spent too many days of my life thinking he wasn’t.
And that was the last time I was capable of thinking about anything other than Dante. That same gaze he’d used to humble Renaldo swept over me. It didn’t make me shrink. It made me feel powerful enough to get on my knees again, to feel his hands in my hair, his tongue in my mouth, his cock thick between my legs. He knew exactly how to put people in their place, and I had the agency to beg for him to open me up the way he had in Cambria, let me fall apart in his arms all over again.
That sense of controlled surrender. That exquisite, aching release.
“Nice to see you too,” Renaldo said. “Is there something you want with this lady?”
I had to cover my mouth to keep in a burst of laughter.
Dante lowered his face a few inches to meet Renaldo’s gaze at the same level. “Shoo.”
Renaldo looked from Dante to me and back as if he didn’t know what to do.
“Have a great night,” I said, patting Renaldo’s shoulder. “Thanks for the drink.”
My ex straightened his jacket and walked away with the self-conscious steps of someone trying not to limp off the battlefield.
“You attract the worst men,” Dante said.
“I do.” I met his gaze helplessly, knowing he would see it on my face—that despite my firm promises in the parking lot, I wanted him again, wanted him now. I’d do whatever he commanded me to do.
Hadn’t I just thought of myself as self-possessed?
My self-possession ended where Dante’s ownership began.
“Come with me,” Dante quietly demanded, and I was helpless to do anything but obey.
We walked through the crowds, and I imagined the punishment for indulging Renaldo—and the fight I could put up because I hadn’t wanted to speak to him at all. Dante and I had agreed we weren’t going to fuck anymore, so I had zero guilt, but what if the punishment was a spanking? Just to remind me what it felt like when the hurt was worth something?
Dante pulled me through a black door and shut it firmly behind us. We were inside a dark room covered in shards of mirror and glass, so what light there was reflected giddily and dizzily in every direction, shattering our faces and bodies against the walls.
“I’m sorry,” I said between kisses. “Dante. Listen.”
He let me speak by kissing my throat.
“I cut you off. After the texting, I shut down, and I’m sorry I treated you like that.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” he said.
An deep, intense hum emanated from him, drawing me closer, the before version of myself rushing into the blown-apart version reflected with his.
“You sure?” I laid my hand on his lapel.
“Are you?” He grabbed my hand, gripping hard but not pushing it away. “This is your last chance to break the deal.”
“Break the deal. Break me. Break everything.”
And then he was kissing me, tugging up the hem of my dress so that he could stroke his fingers against my slit over my underwear, the other hand hot and possessive at my waist.
“You’re a provocation,” he growled. “Do you know that?”
“I know what the word means,” I returned because if I got a spanking for my punctuation, who knew what kind of painful pleasure he’d deliver with a vocabulary lesson.
“Do you though?” He dipped his mouth to nip at my collarbones, then lower, kissing each nipple through the fabric of my dress. “Your body changed the shape of my universe, and your words… your way of being.”
He backed away enough to stare at the length of me, leaving his thumbs to brush against the tight bumps on my chest. I wasn’t wearing a bra, and I’d have to walk out of here and let everyone see me ravaged and wrecked, my nipples hard, my cunt wet, my mouth swollen with the plunder of his kisses.
“You’re gravity,” he said. “No matter how high I jump, I come back.”
“Does this mean you’ll do it my way? You’ll stop putting limits on us?”
“Yes.”
He kissed me again, hands in my hair, pushing me against the wall as if we could disappear into it. I moaned my surrender against his mouth and clung to him, feeling him hard and ready against me. Had we sexted just a few days ago? It felt like a lifetime. Right now, I would have let him take me in the middle of the warehouse with everyone watching.
Anything to give myself to him.
I tugged at the fly of his pants. On the other side of the wall, the music stopped. This room—whatever it was—wouldn’t be viable for privacy for long.
“Come home with me,” he said.
Which meant I’d have to wait and get through all the times I’d try to talk myself out of this.
But it also meant I’d get more than a quickie in a room that was going to open at some point during the event.
“Yes, sir.” My heart thundered in my chest. I nodded, then remembered where I was and who I had responsibilities to. “Ella. I can’t just bail on her.”
“She won’t even notice you’re gone.”
“And my mother.”
There was a long moment of suspended time while neither of us moved. Then Dante stepped back and adjusted himself in his pants. He looked me over, eating me up with his eyes.
“I don’t want anyone else to see you when you’re like this,” he said. “You’re a whore, but you’re my whore.”
He slipped off his suit jacket and hung it around my shoulders. There was nothing to be done about my lipstick or my hair, but this way, it would be harder to tell that I’d been seconds away from sucking someone’s dick in the middle of what was surely an extraordinarily expensive art installation. It was better that we weren’t going to fuck in here, I reflected. Another five minutes and my back would have been against the shattered-glass wall, and neither my dress nor my skin would have survived the experience.
He guided me out of the room, back into the event. We skirted the edge of the crowd, his jacket over my shoulders, his hand tight on the back of my neck—a reminder of who owned me for the night.
We watched the fashion show from the back of the room. The walls of broken glass that Dante had pushed me against pivoted, opening to the runway, where the models walked with shattered versions of themselves as a backdrop.
It was a great show. Truly great, even with Dante’s fingertips under his jacket, stroking the curve of my ass. And I was one hundred percent sure it was inspiring—but it couldn’t be as inspiring as his touch.
The show had broken into speeches.
I tried to listen to the speaker and failed when he murmured from behind me, “I’m getting inside your ass tonight.”
I swallowed.
“All the times I’ve mentioned it, you never said if you liked it.” He grabbed my ass and squeezed. “I won’t know how gentle to be.”
&nb
sp; “Be gentle,” I whispered unevenly.
“How gentle?”
“Very. I haven’t before.”
“That’s right. My filthy little slut is only mine.”
The room burst into applause, and I joined in, but Dante didn’t take his hand off my ass.
“Now,” he said, and this time, I didn’t disobey.
Chapter 33
MANDY
My group text with Aileen, Millie, and Ella had to be muted before the notifications asking who I was leaving with and why ran down the battery. My mother took the news well, apparently assuming I was taking off with Caleb Hawkins. My direct text to Ella didn’t get an answer.
In the passenger seat of Dante Crowne’s truck, I pressed my legs together to relieve the pressure that grew between them. I’d assumed he’d be handsy on the ride over, but he didn’t touch me—hands at ten and two on the wheel, eyes on the road. He betrayed his impatience only by driving slightly over the speed limit, and I marveled at his control even as I longed for it to break.
His condo was one of the ones strung along Wilshire, a building with a green glass roof that lit up emerald against the night sky. The elevator was private, one long ride up to the penthouse, and he waited it out casually, hands in his pockets. The elegance of him in that suit was overwhelming. When I was done with him, I wanted to examine its stitches to see if whoever had made it was some kind of genius craftsman or if it only elevated him to such a godlike level.
“Someday,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ll have you strip while you ride up to see me so that when I open my door, you’ll already be naked. Ready and waiting for my cock. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I would.”
“Good.”
At last, the elevator dinged that we’d reached our floor, and when the doors slid open, the lights went on in a palatial foyer. Dante let me out onto the marble floor.
After the Cambria house, I hadn’t known what to expect, but this place was less severe and much more modern. There was probably cell service and Wi-Fi, along with enough water for a bath and a connection to electricity that worked in the rain. But besides the obvious, the west-facing windows spanned from floor to ceiling, lording over the city and its threads of red lights as they moved to and from the dark horizon of the night ocean.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked, sliding his jacket off my shoulders.
My mouth had suddenly gone dry. “Water.”
“Stay here.” He went to the open kitchen and retrieved a plastic bottle from the fridge, but when I reached for it, he pulled it away. “Hands at your sides, amea.”
“You’re going to draw this out all night, aren’t you?” I protested while keeping my hands at my sides.
“I don’t have to.” He touched the cold edge of the bottle to a nipple, waking it up again, then moved to the other. “This isn’t our last time. We didn’t make any promises I can’t keep.” He glanced up from his work on my breasts, meeting my gaze to check my reaction.
“And what if you wake up and want the promises back?”
“That I won’t see you again?” He said it as if he was the one making the decision.
“That this is the last time,” I said. “What happens when you change your mind?”
“It’s going to hurt.” He cracked open the bottle. “Me and you both.”
He looked down at the bottle, tapping the rim in thought, then he touched it under my chin and gently pushed upward until I was facing the ceiling.
“Open your mouth,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why.”
When I did what he commanded, he tipped the bottle to my lips and poured water over my tongue one drop at a time.
“You’re reckless with your feelings. You say too much and think too little. You’re unprepared, unrehearsed, and oversensitive.”
When I tried to tell him to fuck off, he increased the water flow. I closed my lips around the bottle to swallow, sending the water streaming over my neck and chest. My dress was quickly soaked and stuck to my skin.
“You’re fearless,” he continued. “And I’ve lived in fear. You’re everything I’ve been too afraid to become, and without you, I’ll never be more than I am.”
“Mnn.”
He took the bottle away, put it down, and walked behind me. My dress had a dark-blue triangle spreading from my chest to the divot of my navel.
“You going to ask me what I want any time soon?” I asked.
He lowered my back zipper.
“Tell me what your heart wants.” He pushed the straps over my shoulders and down my arms, exposing my damp skin to the air as he kissed the lines of my throat. “And your body will show me what it needs.”
He took my hand and helped me step out of my clothes. He was still fully dressed, right down to the studs and cufflinks
“Let’s do the body first,” I said.
He smirked, taking a nipple between his fingers and yanking it hard enough to thicken a hot thread of pleasure that ran directly to between my legs.
“You are truly reckless with your trust.” He said it as if it was a compliment. I shrugged it off. “Follow me. I owe you a bath.”
I followed him up the granite steps to the master suite. The bedroom had a western wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, which made me feel shockingly exposed until I remembered that we were the highest thing in this part of the city. I could see Los Angeles, all of it spread out under us, but it couldn’t see me.
The bathroom was stark white and gray, with a wall of mirrors obscuring the door to the toilet. The freestanding tub was long and bordered with a platform against one wall. Dante leaned against the counter, a predator alone with this prey at last.
“Wash your face,” he instructed.
“I—”
“Wash your face.”
The second time he made the request, I understood it. He was a man who took care of things that mattered to him.
I bent over his sink and soaped off my makeup, wiped away the rest of my lipstick, and with a lotion he presented, removed my eyeliner and mascara. When I was done, he came behind me and slipped the pins from my hair so that it fell, loose, around my shoulders. I regarded myself in the mirror: cheeks flushed, nipples hard as diamonds, my carefully thought out but hastily made dress in a pile downstairs.
In the mirror, he was still buttoned up, a man who held the world in his closed fist. I was still in my heels, nothing but upward breasts, wide eyes, and a wet cunt, my ribs heaving with the effort of every breath.
“Look at yourself,” he said into my throat. “Look at what I do to you. Think about how much you want this. How you’re willing to do anything for it.” He touched under my chin and pointed it a little upward. “You should be proud to be my whore.” He paused, then added two words. “My Mandy.”
Dante had turned his resistance to my name into pure sex.
“Thank you,” I said.
He smiled in the mirror and backed away, leading me to a leather bench opposite the mirror wall. I sat on the edge, and he stood over me with his arms crossed as if waiting for something.
Using the high heels for leverage, I opened my legs. He nodded and drew a bath, getting out of the way of the mirror.
You want this.
My want was all over my body and in the shadow where my legs met. I wanted it, and I was going to have it. The roar of the water reduced to a few spitting drops. Dante set the heater, then stood over me with his erection visible in the shape of his pants. I couldn’t help myself—I reached up for it, and he grabbed my wrists.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Your cock.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“Say it.”
“To suck it.”
“You were a good girl tonight,” he said as he unzipped his tuxedo pants and fished out his dick.
He didn’t look half as undone as I felt. The shirt and tie were still on, but his dick jutted out from his pants, fat a
nd red with a drop at the tip, undeniable proof of the animal he’d tried to hide under cufflinks and starched cotton—the animal I had coaxed out of him and whose prowl and pounce were all for me.
One hand gripped the back of my hair while the other guided his cock into my mouth.
“You like it like this,” he growled, grunting as he shoved his length down my throat. “You’re not hungry to suck any man’s dick. You want me to fuck your face.” He let me breathe, then used me again. “I’m going to ruin you, and you’re going to let me.”
The pulse between my legs receded to a distant pounding. I gazed up at him, wide-eyed, letting all the adoration I was starting to feel for this impossible man wash over me as he ruthlessly pounded my mouth.
“Tomorrow.” He gasped, yanking me off by the hair. “You’re going to beg me to keep you.”
“Yes.”
“Say yes in the morning.” He let go, stepped away, and undid his pants. “Get in.”
He indicated the bath, which he’d added soap to while I was observing my reflection. I kicked off my shoes, and I obeyed. The heater worked, and I had to slowly lower myself into the steaming water.
He stripped efficiently, giving me no time to appreciate the sight of his broad shoulders, or the definition of his chest and abs, or the hard thighs holding up the rigid glory of his cock. Without taking a moment to adjust to the scalding water, he sat across from me. I crawled on top of him, kissing him with all the passionate intensity I’d been lavishing on his dick.
Which was now right underneath my cunt, even hotter than the water around us. I ground down onto his length, then reached down to pull him inside me, where he belonged.
“No,” Dante growled, and I stopped in my tracks. “Not tonight. Sit back.”
I settled back and lifted my feet, putting each on the edge of the sides of the tub. He slid two fingers along my seam. My back arched when he got them inside me and thumbed my clit.
“You’re wet.” With his other hand, he reached to the ledge behind me.
“I am.”
His hand came back with lotion on it, and he rubbed his thumb along the length of his fingers to spread it.
