Dark Secret Love (17 page)

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a lot to process.”

“But you accept.”

Now I nodded. “Yes, Sir.”

He smoothed my hair off my face. He ran his fingertips along the ridge of my collarbone. He held me to him so that I could smell the scent of his skin. I stayed like that, in his arms, as I tried to imagine what life would be like in this condo. I had lived with Byron for three years, first in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles, and then in a townhouse by the beach. This place was in the heart of Sunset, and Jack moved in the same circles as my former boss. I felt overwhelmed at the thought, but safe in Jack’s arms.

“We’ll go out for breakfast,” he said, “and then we’ll get your stuff.”

I nodded. “But maybe I should call,” I said, not even thinking of Jack’s reaction. “Garrett and Nate might be worried. I’ve never been out all night. Not since I moved in with them.” There was silence, and when I looked up
I saw that Jack’s face had darkened. I felt my heart sink. Was he upset with me? Had I said the wrong thing?

“It’s commendable of you to be concerned,” he said finally, handing me the phone from the table next to the sofa. “Make the call.” There was a pause. “But you’ll have to pay.”

“Pay?” I stammered over the word.

“Nothing major,” he said, “An over-the-knee spanking. No panties. You make the choice. Leave them wondering what happened to you, calling the hospitals, calling your job, or assuring them both that you’re fine and climbing over my lap to accept the punishment for caring what another man thinks about you.”

Jack was jealous. Nate had gotten to me first. Jack had been watching, waiting, biding his time, and yet I’d left him in Beverly Hills and gotten what I’d needed from Nate and Garrett. At least temporarily.

“Your choice,” said Jack, offering the phone again. I sensed which decision he wanted me to make, and I dialed the number with trembling fingers, relieved when the machine picked up. “It’s me,” I said, “checking in to let you know I’m fine. I’ll be home later on today.”

Jack didn’t say a word when I hung up the phone. He looked at me, and I understood the silent message. He’d already showed me where the paddle lived in this room, in a drawer under the bar. I got up, so aware of my nakedness, and retrieved the weapon, then handed it to Jack, my eyes down, my breathing shallow.

No words. No instructions. This was a test, and I was determined to pass.

I draped myself over his lap, and felt his hand caressing me, the way he had the night before, up and over the curves of my ass. I have—false modesty aside here—a fine
ass. In high school, when my friends and I became aware of the more attractive parts of our appearances, it was my signature: Elena has killer breasts. Caitlyn has blue eyes you could swim in. But I have a hind end that men naturally want to cup in their hands, stroke, and in the case of someone like Jack, spank.

He ran his palm over my skin and I could feel the welts from the previous night, little echoes of pain, reminders that I would have for quite some time. Then he hefted the paddle and began to spank me.

Jack was a master, plain and simple. He knew how to create a rhythm in which I was momentarily lulled into believing I could handle the punishment. And then he would land a startling blow, wringing a gasp or cry from me, making me lift up slightly before catching myself and lowering my body back into the proper position.

I didn’t count. He didn’t ask me to. He simply paddled me until he got what he wanted. At first I held my body as still as possible. Next I squirmed, unable to stop, and he kept me in place easily, gripping my sore wrists in one hand and pinning them in place at the small of my back. Finally, he won the tears of total submission, when I simply pressed my face against the cool leather sofa and cried.

“That’s the last time I ever want to hear that you care what another man thinks.” Jack pushed me off his lap and over the coffee table, so that he could review his work. “The only man you need to worry about is me.”

“Yes, Sir,” I sobbed. “Yes, Jack.”

“Clean yourself up,” he said, giving me one last slap on the ass with his hand. “And we’ll go out to eat. I want to watch you try to sit comfortably while you order your breakfast.”

I headed down the hall to the bathroom, bare feet on the cold wood floor. I closed the door behind me and started to adjust the temperature of the shower. And when I looked in the mirror at my reflection, I saw excitement in my eyes—pure pleasure that didn’t reflect even an ounce of the pain I’d just received.

“Tell me about Brock.”

I flushed and looked down at my breakfast, a fancy fruit plate filled with papaya, mango, pineapples. Although the exotic assortment was beautifully arranged, my appetite had vanished.

“Look at me when I speak to you, Sam.”

I gazed back at him. I had known when he asked me for my list of lovers that he wasn’t simply being curious. He had plans. He was a lawyer, after all. He used whatever facts he possessed to his own advantage.

“He’s the man who showed you what you were really like, isn’t that right?”

“No,” I shook my head, scared to disagree with him but needing to explain. “I already knew. He was the first one who saw what I wanted. Who understood.”

“And you idolize him for it.”

I’m not an idiot. I figured out immediately that this was one of Jack’s trick questions. Not really a question,
even. Yet he clearly expected a response.

I shifted on the chair and Jack grinned. He was enjoying how difficult sitting still was for me. My ass throbbed from the pre-breakfast spanking. And Jack hadn’t let me slip my panties back on. All I was wearing was the slinky sundress from yesterday and those tie-up white shoes.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, “we weren’t together all that long. It wasn’t good all that long. But at the start, it was kind of … magic.” It had been. I no longer had to fantasize. I had a real-life, flesh-and-blood man to take care of my needs, my kinkiest desires.

“And what happened? Why did you split up?”

“He disappeared. He’d told me on our first date that he was in ‘importing and exporting.’ I hadn’t know that meant drugs. I was naïve. What did I know? One day he didn’t show up for a date. I didn’t hear from him for almost a week.”

“What did you do?”

What did I do? I cut my hair. And dyed it fuchsia. I wore his sweatshirt every day. I stopped even pretending to care about what people at school thought about me. I got too thin. I tried to track him down, and his roommate told me to forget he had even existed.

“I mourned him.”

Jack stared at me for a moment, and I wondered whether he would accept this answer. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I refused to speak to people. Did he guess that’s what I meant by my three-word response?

“And then what happened?”

“He came back. Called me and asked me to meet him at a coffee shop. When I saw him there, I couldn’t even go in. I walked away. He ran after me, chased me down, dragged me to a park bench and started to talk. He said
that if he’d told me the truth when we first met, I’d never have gone out with him. Probably true, but I don’t know. He had a pack of Marlboros in his chest pocket and he opened it up and showed me the twenty joints all rolled neatly inside. He said he mostly dealt coke to the higher-ups in Silicon Valley. He said he loved me.”

“And you believed him?”

I stared directly into Jack’s eyes. “Yes,” I said evenly. “He did love me.”

I knew that if we hadn’t been in public, Jack would have slapped me for my tone of voice. I don’t know how I knew. I just did. Jack’s expression hardened, and I swallowed over the lump in my throat but didn’t look away.

“You asked me,” I said, “and you told me not to lie to you.”

“And then what?” Jack pushed on.

“We went to this twenty-dollar-a-day hotel on the edge of town. Creepy place. And we stripped down and messed around. But it was different.”

“That was it?”

“No, of course not. It dragged on for a while. We both pretended that everything was the same as before, yet now he seemed determined to show me that he was broken. Dirty. Damaged. He was more open about his underworld dealings. He called me from jail. He asked me for money. And then he disappeared again, and I went off to school.”

Jack nodded, and I felt him memorizing my story. Learning it.

“Tell me three bad things about Brock.”

I thought I had. “What do you mean? He was a drug dealer. He lied to me. He disappeared.”

“No. Tell me three things that you don’t like to think about. Three things that fill you with shame.”

He was trying to break down my memory of Brock. I got it. But I didn’t like it. I could feel Jack looking at me, waiting, and I tripped through my mental storage and shared what I could.

“When he came back, somehow he’d lost his power. I don’t really know why. But he had. He begged me to take him back, and it made me cold inside. I despised feeling like that.”

“That’s one.”

“I flirted with someone else in front of him. I wanted to see him get back in charge, and he wouldn’t. He refused. I couldn’t get a rise out of him, and I hated him for that.”

“Two.”

“He tried to be gentle with me. He tried to show me that he could fuck me sweetly, and it killed me inside. I felt wretched afterwards. He couldn’t get an erection, and I felt as if it was my fault.”

“Not your fault,” Jack said. “Stupid man. He thought he was giving you something you wanted, when it was the last thing on earth you craved.”

I nodded. Jack was the most focused, the most consistently interested man I’d ever been with. Most guys I’d dated had spent a great deal of our time together talking about themselves. But all Jack seemed to want to do was talk about me.

“Sam,” he said suddenly. I’d made the mistake yet again of losing myself in my thoughts, of not paying attention to what was going on around me. “You didn’t think I told you to leave your panties at home for no reason, did you?”

“No, Sir.” See? I was learning.

“Head to the bathroom, but leave the door unlocked.”

I stood immediately and walked through the café to the
single restroom at the end of the hall. I turned on the light and waited. The room was tiled in blue and white, decorated French-style like the rest of the café, with a basket of potpourri and angel-winged mirrors. In seconds, Jack had joined me. He looked at me from the doorway, stared at me in total silence, and then flicked off the light, shut the door, and locked it.

I felt my heart racing. We were in inky blackness. A tiny beam of light from the crack at the bottom of the door was the only illumination. Jack was on me in a heartbeat, turning me around to face the wall, lifting the hem of my dress, pressing his body on mine. I could feel how hard he was. So fucking hard. He bit into the back of my neck and then undid his jeans and thrust inside me.

“I can see you in my mind,” he whispered. “This young girl, desperate. I can see you. And I only wish that I was the one who found you first.”

He slammed me up against the cold tiled wall. Darkness enveloped us. “I want to know everything about you,” Jack continued, his voice low. “I want to know it all.”

Again and again he thrust into me, and right before he came, he slipped one hand in front of my body and pinched my clit, sending me spiraling with that glimmer of pain. That spark of pleasure. I pressed my face against the wall as the climax flared through me, and I felt limp as Jack pulled out, tucked himself back into his jeans, and then flipped on the light. He pulled my dress back down, then turned me to face him. I kept my hands to my side and stared at him, waiting.

He slapped my face, as I had known he would. How were we so in tune? I gritted my teeth and stared down at the floor. I deserved it. He’d already instructed me not
to let him know whether I cared what some other man thought of me. And I’d told him bold-faced of Brock’s love. But I was trapped in a no-win situation. He didn’t want me to lie. Yet he didn’t want the truth.

I’m lying now. No-win? Of course I won. He slapped me, and I had craved the feeling of his strong hand on my cheek. I had tested him, for once. I had been bold, been cocky, even, and Jack had brought me right down to earth, right down to my place.

“Adjust yourself,” Jack commanded. “And meet me at the car.”

I nodded and then, on a whim, dropped to my knees. He stared down at me, not looking surprised in the least, as I fumbled with the buttons on his fly, releasing his cock once more, still wet with my juices. The taste of him, salty and reminiscent of my own flavors, overwhelmed me. The warmth of his skin in my mouth made my pussy throb. I licked and sucked from shaft to tip until he grew to full size once more. My head bobbed up and down as I worked him. After a moment, Jack petted my hair, letting me know with that simple touch that he was pleased. I’d taken initiative and he was pleased. Pride rippled through me. My tongue worked around the head of his cock and he sighed and gripped onto my shoulders, but I was surprised when he pulled me away.

“At the car,” he murmured, his thumb tracing along my jawline, then resting on my bottom lip. “Meet me out back. At the car.”