Fixed 01 - Fantasy Fix (15 page)

“Thanks, A—”

“Because I don’t think Reggie’s adventure counts as her Fix. She still needs to take care of that.”

Reggie went pale. “What? But you can’t Fix me. I mean, I already had a Fix. I mean, Dmitri was—”

“Not part of the game,” Ava declared. “I had someone set up to take care of the two fixes you submitted, Regina, but you didn’t stick around to meet him. Therefore, you missed your Fix.”

“I didn’t miss anything! Dmitri and I—”

“I don’t care if your new friend wore a black cape, plastic fangs and made you call him ‘master.’ He wasn’t your Fix, so he doesn’t count.”

Reggie’s shirt paled beside her flaming cheeks.

“Oh, my God! He did!” Danice shot to her feet and did a little victory dance in front of the sofa. “Reggie’s man fulfilled both her fantasies, and we didn’t even get involved. You go, girl!”

Her appetite gone, Reggie set her plate down on the table and checked to see if there was room under it for her to hide.

“Wow, Reg. That is so cool! None of us were able to get our fantasies without a little help. And here you go and blow us out of the water.” Missy grinned and gave her a thumbs-up sign. “I guess you didn’t need our help after all.”

“Let’s not be hasty, Melissa.” Ava set aside her empty cup. “Reggie may have gotten a couple of her fantasies fulfilled, but it wasn’t an official Fix. We’ve all had dates outside of the Fixes, and it doesn’t matter what happens on them. It’s only the arranged Fixes that count. After all, we can’t check with Dmitri, so how do we know Reggie isn’t lying about the S M just to get us off her back?”

Reggie saw the others taking Ava seriously and tried to cut in, but the other woman bulldozed right over her.

“I won’t say it’s impossible Reggie could be telling the truth,” Ava continued, “but we have no way to know for sure. So I move we throw out these fantasies and start over. Reggie gets an all new Fix.”

Reggie stared at her, astounded and terrified. “Oh, no!”

“You know, Ava may be right,” Danice agreed, grinning. “Must be your lucky day, girl, because you’re up again.”

“Right. Can’t have you missing another turn,” Corinne said.

“Look, guys,” Reggie began, trying to reason with them, even while the idea of sex with any man other than Dmitri made her stomach churn. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but it’s really not necessary. Dmitri would—”

“Dmitri would what?” Ava asked, her voice soft but far from gentle. “You said Dmitri didn’t control you, Regina. Was that true?”

 
“Yes, but I’m…involved with him. I can’t do this. Ava, you said it yourself last week. I’m monogamous. Now that I’m involved, I can’t just sleep with someone else.”

Ava looked determined. “Two fucks do not make an involvement, Reggie. I don’t care how good this guy was in bed. Unless you ended your date in Vegas in front of a JP, you’re
not
exclusively involved. You never even said when you’re seeing him again.”

Reggie scowled. On the one hand she wanted to deck Ava, but there was the corner of unease inside of her that wondered if maybe her friend was right. Maybe she was letting Dmitri control her. Maybe she should strike a blow for independence while she still could.

She ignored the way her insides recoiled at the idea.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Give me some paper, and I’ll give you a new batch of fantasies.”

“Oh, no.” Ava’s eyes glinted. “After last time, I don’t trust you. I had Missy bring along your original fantasies. We’ll draw from those.”

Reggie stared at the papers in Ava’s hand for a minute, then glanced up at her friends. They watched her expectantly.

“I still think—”

“Don’t think, Regina. Just sit there and be a good girl while we Fix you.”

Reggie let her head fall against the chair back, and she squeezed her eyes shut. After Dmitri, she wasn’t sure any of her old fantasies still applied. It felt as if he’d fulfilled them all.

God, I’m like an addict,
she thought, frightened by how deeply Dmitri affected her.
I think I might really need to do this. I’ve never acted this way about a man in my life. And I don’t even really know him…

“My, my, but you are an adventurous girl, Regina McNeill.” Reggie heard the satisfaction in Ava’s voice and decided she didn’t want to know what had been drawn. “I’m sure that a very lucky man I know is going to love your night out together. In fact, I think both of you might come to view the opera in a whole new light.”

The memory of that fantasy flooded her mind with erotic imagery, and Reggie buried her face in her hands with a groan. Every single image in her head painted Dmitri as that very lucky man. Too bad she’d be acting out the fantasy with someone else.

Chapter Eleven

For the first time in her life, Reggie experienced Monday morning with a sense of profound gratitude and relief. She could hardly wait to get to her office and discover the deluge of paperwork and crises that awaited her. At least maybe then she’d be able to think about something other than Dmitri and the stupid Fantasy Fix.

As it turned out, she wasn’t. Oh, she had a hell of a day. The small ad agency where she worked had gotten word on Friday that they’d landed a major new account with an up and coming electronic retailer, and on Monday morning, Reggie found out she’d been assigned to manage their first project, putting together a new logo and corporate look. The sales and management team were high on the success, and the art department was reeling under their impossible new deadline. That left Reggie to smooth all the ruffled feathers and coax a miracle out of her design team.

But even while she fielded phone calls, reviewed meeting notes, composed emails and even talked a temperamental graphic artist out of quitting on the spot, her mind kept straying back to Dmitri. She felt a little like a new junkie who’d only just discovered her high and couldn’t get the memory of it out of her mind. Only, in Reggie’s case, the memories were also in her mouth, on her skin and hovering in the air around her.

She had barely slept last night, too caught up in her discovery that Dmitri’s scent had lingered in her bed. She wrapped herself up in the sheets that bore his distinctive, intoxicating fragrance and wrapped her arms around the pillow he’d lain on. Her pussy had throbbed and ached and felt empty after two nights of erotic excess, but she hadn’t wanted to chance Dmitri watching her again while she made herself come. She’d had to lace her fingers together around the pillow she held to keep them from straying between her legs.

In any other situation, she would have been embarrassed by her obsession, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d felt she would go crazy if she couldn’t have at least the scent and the memory of him to wrap around her. She’d fallen asleep with the echo of his hands stroking against her skin.

And she’d woken up terrified.

She’d never in her life acted like this with a man. Even in her few and failed relationships, she’d seen her lovers as partners, as men she would share her life with. They had complimented her, but she’d been complete without them. With Dmitri, his absence from her life, even for one night, had been hell. She’d missed him like an amputated limb, with the same ache and disbelief and the phantom feel of his presence. She needed him, and the thought scared the crap out of her.

“Yoohoo! Earth to Regina.”

Reggie snapped back to reality with an audible pop and tuned into Sherry’s voice while the other woman tried to get her attention. “Sorry, Sher. What’s up?”

The administrative assistant, whom Reggie shared with the two other Project Managers, rolled her eyes. “I hope you had a nice mental vacation there, because Banks is saying he needs to see the Alien Entertainment annual report draft five minutes ago.”

Reggie sighed, pushed her chair over to the metal filing cabinet beside her desk and pulled out the appropriate folder. Charles Banks always wanted something five minutes ago, but since he owned the agency, she figured she could humor him.

“Here.” She handed the thick folder to Sherry. “Tell him the photography is in the lab as we speak. Mike promised we’d have it by three.”

“Cool. Thanks.” Sherry turned to leave, remembered something and paused in the doorway. “Oh, I almost forgot. You’ve got a call on line four. Some guy.”

“What does he want?” The last thing Reggie needed to deal with was an unknown artist hawking his talents.

“I asked, but he said it was personal business.”

Dmitri
.

For one, fabulous moment, the idea made her heart race and her stomach jump. Then reality set in, and she realized he had no way of knowing where she worked and so no way of getting her number. Giving disappointment and relief a chance to slow down her pulse, she took a deep breath and prepared her standard, “send us a portfolio and we’ll get back to you” speech.

“Hello? This is Regina.”

“Hi, Regina. This is Marc Abrahms. Ava Markham gave me your number.”

Yikes, he must be the Fix
. “Oh. Um, hi.”

“Listen, I know you’re at work, so I won’t keep you,” he said.
Well, he gets some points for manners, at least
. “But Ava mentioned you’re an opera fan, and I was able to wrangle a private box for
Turandot
on Thursday night. I hoped you might join me.”

Join you; fuck you. Why quibble over semantics?
At least he was being delicate about the whole thing, even if that didn’t keep Reggie’s face from turning a peculiar shade of magenta. He could have just gotten right down to the bottom line and asked how many condoms to bring. “Um, well…”

“Ava’s told me a lot about you,” he offered in his pleasant, mellow voice.
Yeah, like the fact that I’m a guaranteed score
. “I’m really looking forward to meeting you in person.”

I’ll bet.
His comment only made her blush harder, but there really was no graceful way out of the situation. Tightening her grip on the receiver, Reggie took a deep breath and said, “Sure. Thursday sounds fine.”

“Great.” He actually did sound happy that she’d accepted.
After what Ava must have told him, did he think I had a choice?
“If I pick you up at six, we can have dinner before the show. Does that sound all right?”

Reggie nodded, realized he couldn’t see her, and hastened to reassure him. “That’s perfect. I’ll look forward to it.”
Like a root canal
.

“Me, too. It was nice talking to you, Regina. Take care.”

Reggie hung up the phone with a knot the size of Brooklyn twisting her stomach. The last thing she wanted was to spend Thursday night with a stranger, but she needed to exert her independence, to show herself she didn’t need Dmitri, no matter how her mind and heart and body screamed for him.

She wasn’t altogether sure she could bring herself to act out the opera fantasy with this Marc person. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more the idea made her uncomfortable. Her skin almost crawled, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. If she hadn’t known her office was private and empty save for herself, she would have looked around to see if she were being watched. Her unease was that strong.

Shifting in her chair, she suppressed the urge to look over her shoulder anyway and neatly penciled the date with Marc onto her desktop calendar. As if she were likely to forget it.

She waited for her discomfort to ease, but if anything, writing down the date only made her illogical sense of foreboding worse. Reasoning with herself didn’t seem to help, since even her conscious mind couldn’t quite shake the idea that seeing any man other than Dmitri counted as some sort of betrayal, as if she were cheating on him.

“Ugh! Don’t be ridiculous,” she muttered to herself, tossing down her pencil and reaching for the stack of ad proofs she had to review. “I didn’t promise Dmitri a damned thing, and he didn’t even have the decency to call after he disappeared in the middle of the night again. This is not cheating. Get rational, Reg.”

But there was nothing rational about the feeling telling her that although her speech might be logical, it was also very, very wrong.

* * * * *

The taste of her haunted him. If he could have dreamed of it he would have, but instead he staved off sleep as long as possible in order to preserve her flavor on his tongue. Dmitri knew he would never have enough of her.

He had dragged himself from her bed that second night, his head spinning and his cock aching. She intoxicated him, and he knew he would never be able to let her go. Regina was his mate, the one woman he could spend an eternity with and never grow bored.

The knowledge astounded him and echoed through him when he slipped into his rest just before dawn. She filled his last thoughts until he slept, and her image appeared to him the instant he fought back to awareness. His Regina. His woman. His mate.

He thought of her when he left his bed and made his way downstairs to his study. Not going to her immediately became an exercise in discipline. His fangs and his cock stretched and hardened at the thought of her, but he’d spent most of the weekend wrapped up in her, and even vampires had work to do. Besides, if he cleared off his desk tonight, Regina would have time to recover from his demands of the last two nights and would be rested and ready for him again soon.

Settling behind his desk, he logged on to his computer and got down to business. Over the course of his long life, he had developed a talent for financial matters, and with little else to occupy him through the years, he began to look on business as a game. Like chess, it all boiled down to strategy and to warfare, two concepts with which Dmitri felt very comfortable. He substituted corporations and mergers for pawns and checks and moved everything along according to his plans and to his whims. It had made him an extremely wealthy man.

Tonight he used business as a distraction. It kept him from butting yet again into Regina’s mind, a habit he knew she hated, but which gave him so much pleasure. He adored listening to her thoughts, appreciated her sharp sense of humor and the overwhelming core of honor and love underlying everything about her. She fascinated him.