RIPPED: A Dark Romance (Killer Lips Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter SIX

When my phone service comes back intermittently, I call the airline and rebook my flight home for next available. I've trespassed on Mark's good nature long enough.

“No you can't possibly leave on Thursday,” he informs me. “Josh is coming for the weekend and he'll be so disappointed if you're gone.”

He will? He'd been very flirtatious in the alley but surely he has a personal bevy of model girls his own age to play with in London. His type has to know every woman is under his enticement. In reality, I'm barely on his radar.

“I have to get back to my job,” I say for the umpteenth time. Half-hearted and still afraid to counter Mark's wishes.

He looks at me oddly. No doubt the concept of being the slave to an evil employer your entire life is alien to him. I envy him that freedom more than all the palaces in the world.

“You can leave Sunday,” he insists.

“Then I'll have to go straight to the office with jet lag,” I say.

“You're young, surely you can handle a little jet lag. Stay here for another few days.” My hand is encased within his two large palms and it’s strangely impossible to refuse him. He's so enigmatic, beguiling me with his forceful charm and truthfully, I'm a little scared of seeing the rage shiver across his features if I decline his demands.

“So- it's decided.”

He pours me another glass of the aromatic Brunello wine into a heavy crystal glass etched with cherubs and stuff. I'm terrified of lifting any cup or glass in the palazzo- all priceless antiquities I'm sure to smash.

He hands me the glass but doesn't let go when my fingers collide with his around the bowl. We stand in the center of the enormous room with our eyes frozen into each other, fingers nuzzled and breath quickening.

Then his face is close enough that his warm breath strokes my lips and they plump up in eagerness for more. It's so long since I'd felt a man's firm kiss. After that alluring connection in the streets or Carnival, I want his mouth on mine, devouring me, making me his once and for all. That kiss beneath the big black cloak inspired all my imaginings.

I've dreamed of Mark two nights running.

He comes into my room and pulls back the heavy pure silk covers while I sleep. He gently slips the satin and lace peignoir off my shoulder and reveals my breast. Do nipples get hard when you're asleep? I have no idea but mine are raging pellets of lust. He grazes his palm across the bullet peak and bends his head to lick and pull it between his soft but insistent lips.

He frees the other breast and stands back to admire the plump flesh after kissing both into a fever of hunger. In the dream I'm avid for his expert fingers to tug and twist the rage of need out of those eager peaks but he believes me to be sleeping so too much aggression is hardly on the cards.

Instead he pulls the slinky fabric up over my thighs to reveal my bare naked slit. I feign disturbance at the cool air assaulting my wetness and open my legs a little.

Even in my dream I flush livid with my wanton behavior but it's too delicious, how he examines every part of me with such intense longing. He tenderly places his fingertips on my lips and pulls them apart, revealing my vulva, pounding and flexing with greedy desire.

Oh my god does he know I'm faking sleep? I have no idea what my body is capable of in slumber, but in my dream I'm dripping wet and begging for him to slither his fingers across my folds. As though reading my mind, he arcs one fingertip along the length of the ridge then snatches it back when my shudder.

Waiting until he's satisfied that I'm still asleep, in my dream I'm pretending to be, he teases the length of the ridge on the other side, then circles around my entrance, waiting for the quiver to pass before stroking back along the clit itself.

When he reaches the nub I think I might cry out with the waves of excitement barreling around my core, but with another wriggle I'm able to bite down on my lip briefly and open my legs wider at the same time.

He rolls his fingers in tantalizing circles around that triangle nub standing up in my spread folds then corkscrews a finger inside me. He holds it still there until I shudder and my convulsions clasp at his finger, trying to drag him in further.

Oh my god it's so divine and decadent how he waits with his finger buried deep while I calm and fall back to pseudo sleep. He pulls out almost all the way then brings a second finger to meet the first at the entrance before pushing both inside.

He strokes the walls of my tunnel in and out until he's sure I won't wake then pushes a third deep into me and I almost come, dripping all over his hand. The pressure pools, gathering behind my pulled open vulva and I'm mindless with the need to fall over the edge.

Will he take me? Will he push his cock inside me while I sleep, hoping to ravage me before I come around? My mind pleads with him. As though I can communicate my intense desire across the sub-conscious world.

His three fingers saw in and out, grazing across the spot halfway along the length that makes me delirious with insatiable need to let go of everything I'm holding on to and have been holding on to too long. His thumb presses on my clit and I begin to writhe, letting my moans come wildly as though in a delicious erotic dream.

Please fuck me. Shove your cock inside me and fuck me hard. I promise I'll stay fast asleep if that's what you need but I need you now.

But his insistent fingers are too clever. My body gathers at the edge and throws itself over before I can prevent it. I scream with full force, knowing I can indulge every sense because it isn't really me. I let go with wild abandon, thrashing and bucking my body as wave after wave of bliss crashes against my edges then recedes.

Oh my god.
That
was a climax. Every man before now is like a teenager in comparison to this absolute fucking genius. Mark carefully puts my slinky nightgown back in place, leaving my soaking thighs as reminder or proof of my sexy dream when I wake. I roll over and fall into the deepest most relaxed sleep I've had in- ever.

I shouldn't stay here any longer. It's purely indulgent when I know the cubicle is waiting and will always be there like a chain at my ankle. I have to get back to my life and make a new one somehow. Because that's how it feels. That I have no life remaining, it's been torpedoed to shrapnel and I have to start all over again.

I don't even know that I'll stay in Las Vegas now. Everything reminds me of Dwayne and my miserable failure as a married woman. A woman who was joined with a man and building a life with him. A life he had no intention of living. That never really existed at all. It was a total facade. My husband wore a mask every single day instead of once a year.

Maybe I'm tempted to stay with very little pressure on Mark's part because he gives me a place to hide. 

“What are you afraid of?” he'd asked me when I demurred, saying we were total strangers.

What
am
I afraid of? In truth, maybe just about everything. Every decision I've ever made was taken out of fear. I got married because I was afraid- of being alone, of managing life without someone else. Now I have to learn to do things because I want to, not  because I'm scared.

Being in Venice is a dream. A dream of life. I've woken out of a nightmare into a dream and although it can't continue, I just want it to be my life a little longer.

Chapter SEVEN

Josh & Mark

When we're three together again on the weekend, we go out on the town. We put Riley between us, looking gorgeous in the perfectly fitting clothes we bought for her, clinging to that divine welcoming body and walk along the
calli
.

“I feel so secure between you two powerful, strong hunks,” she says. “At least I'm sure there's no chance of me tipping into the drink now.”

“You'll never fall again with us to hold you, baby,” he says, tugging her closer to him.

I twine her arm through mine so I can feel the press of the side of her fabulous full breast into me while we walk between the bars and restaurants off the tourist trail.

He watches through narrowed eyes as I feed her a forkful of calamari, stewed until tender soft. Her ecstatic swoon as the full flavor of meaty ocean bursts across her tongue.

His entire body reads ownership of her. But not this time, no, not this one. I'm not sharing Riley with him. She's mine. And I want to keep it that way.

Last night at dinner, too cold to go out, we dined at home. La Signora Bonomo, our cook for years since childhood, brought in the special dish of sliced organs. Dripping in blood red sauce, she set his favorite meal before him and waited for his compliments. He drowned her in his effusive remarks, that flow as fast as the canal on high tide.

When she tottered out, her full chest puffed up with pleasure, he grabbed the dish and pulled it close. After devouring a huge spoonful, he insisted on feeding it to us with the tiny salad fork, as though it was the greatest delicacy on the planet. Which in some ways it is.

I declined. I was never eating that particular dish again. Too many years of it had turned my stomach. Especially now that Riley had come into our lives.

“Too much garlic,” I told Riley. Anything to stop her from taking the offered morsel between her lips.

“It smells divine. I don't mind if you guys don't,” she said, flirtatiously, looking back and forth between us.

Divine was hardly the appropriate fucking word. My stomach flipped watching her lick her lips with the tip of her inciting tongue. Then open them up again, just enough to pull the flesh into her delectable mouth.

She chewed delicately, swirling the flavor across her taste buds looking slightly embarrassed at two sets of eyes gouging into her. On the knife edge waiting for her response.

“Hmm,” she teased, enjoying her power. “Absolutely delicious.”

“Open wide.”

He pressed her to take another forkful, then another, while she laughed each time he told her to open up and let him inside. The blood pushed against the fascia of my skin until I felt I might erupt at the table, but I managed to remain calm. This too shall pass.

“God it's amazing, so tender. Is it liver?” she asked, glowing with the enthralling taste sensation.

“Lips,” he said.

“Lips?” she repeated, her nose pinching in an adorable twist. “Whose?”

“Lips of a lamb.”

“Oh. I didn't know you could eat lamb's lips. They're so sweet.”

She looked so happy I couldn't stand it.

“Yes. It's almost a shame to have to slaughter them,” he said.

“And the sauce. I love it.”

She had blood red gravy running down her chin.

“Juicy isn't it?”

He reached across and wiped her lower lip with his thumb. Taking his sweet fucking time about it until he made her cheeks color vivid as the liquid.

Once they'd lapped up the entire dish between them, he licked his lips lasciviously while she watched wide-eyed, then looked down at her lap and swallowed hard.

He went to the buffet and refilled her wine glass. A smile curled the furthest corners of his mouth.

Her fingers met his as they wrapped around the stem of the heavy goblet and she raised a toast. My mind filled with a vision of those small but firm and eager fingers grasping the breadth of my rock hard dick as she brought her mouth slowly down on the head. The mouth that just had that vile dish filling it.

“Cheers.” I raised my glass but said nothing and avoided meeting her eye.
 

Riley

Josh is on edge all weekend. He can't sit still at home and insists we go out. The three of us dress up and I have to say it's the most fun I've had – ever. Being the girl in a designer dress and shoes with the two most handsome men in the entire Veneto is exciting.

We drink Bellinis at Harry's and other bars around Dorsoduro. They're both so divinely and impossibly gorgeous I can't stop looking at them. And strangely they're the same with me. Sitting at the round table, it's hard to believe I have two rugged handsome studs fixed completely on me. Not looking over my shoulder for someone better, just gorging themselves, their eyes that is, on me.

I wake late again, sleeping right though my phone alarm. Every night I fall into the deepest sleep filled with the same dream. Although truthfully, I never see the face of my lover. I'm too subsumed in the overwhelm of pleasure, so realistic my thighs are soaked in the morning.

Shocked at my sensual indolence, I hurry out to find the guys and see what the plan is. It's such a trip being secured between two searing hot guys and walking through Venice, drinking up the surreptitious glances of the women of all ages we pass.

I trail through the piano nobile, looking in every room, which takes forever. My boys aren't anywhere. The kitchen rooms are unusually empty so I continue down the stone steps to the
portigo
level – the ground floor of the palazzo where Mark pulls the speedboat inside.

It ought to be called the water floor as there is no 'ground' on the ground floor in Venice. A rip of displeasure that they've gone out without me pushes me into trying all the doors along the passage, dank with ages old mold.

This is the level housing the old storehouses from the time Venetian aristocracy made their fortunes trading with the East. Maybe Mark spends his time down here at whatever work he does. Something he keeps cloaked in total mystery because he's rarely in his office on the
piano nobile
and I can never find him anywhere else in the palazzo.

His enigmatic behavior makes him even more alluring. Every day is carnival with Mark. I find it quaint the way he keeps his mask over his real identity. Same as the way he and Josh have a habit of describing themselves in third person, as though they're joined.

The first few doors I pull open are old store rooms, cold and slimy stone with centuries of dust and the next few are locked. Definitely locked no matter how vigorously I rattle their locks. The next I pull open and stand staring into for an age. The frown across my brow intensifies as incomprehension rattles through me. Questions, excuses, imagination.

The windowless room is a wall of closed circuit camera screens. Every room in the palace has been bugged with hidden filming devices. Including my bedroom and the bath I spend long hours touching my rediscovered new body in.

As I scroll across the shadowy gray images on the screens, my eyes alight on an image of a room more like a cell. Bare except for a stark bed in the middle with shackles attached to the underside at all four corners.

I shiver all through, part insane fear, part greedy hunger. Some bizarre responses are coming out of my body these days and I feel like I have no control. My skin starts to crawl, a chill moving up my arms and spine and I whip around at the sensation of someone behind me.

Only the open door.

I thought it was closed.

Oh crap, I'm imagining ghosts and ghouls in the basement now. Maybe I should get out of here and ask the boys about their dungeon later. Except I'm too curious. My eyes stretch to bring the grimy gray image into focus. And I see the cell is not completely bare.

On the back wall is a huge cross, which I guess is not surprising in a city with an ancient church on every corner. Although why would they do their worshiping in the basement when there's a whole private chapel room, all gold gilt and painted dome ceiling, on the
piano nobile
?

The side walls are lined with closets but it's hard to tell what they contain. The door of one is open, revealing neat rows of – instruments. I recognize the whips and the lashes with many tails, although I don't recall the particular term for them. But there are many tools, toys, I can hardly imagine the use for. Whatever it is, there's no way it can be pleasant.

They're like items from a medieval torturer's chamber, or used by the inquisition back in those dark times. I know my history. Hundreds of thousands of women were tortured and put to death by the men who accused them of witchcraft.

My heart expands too large in my chest, forcing the air out as fear presses down. A cold shiver runs the length of my spine. I don't dare turn around again. Someone is there. I'm absolutely sure of it this time. And I don't want to face it.

Him.

There are no ghosts.

A finger trails down the back of my neck making my heart thound harder. My breath is dragging in bullet sharp points to my chest. The warmth of a solid chest brushes into the length of my back and I slowly turn my head.

As I come around to face him, his hand cups around the back of my head to pull my face to his and press his mouth over me. Before I've put it together in my mind still dazzled with terror, his tongue has entered me and is swirling around mine. Exploring me deeply.

He clasps my head in his firm palm, holding me immovable as his mouth claims me. He doesn't just kiss, he consumes. Totally.

I am overwhelmed, breathless, taken and totally in his possession as he bites and sucks on my mouth. My breasts are crushed against his rigid rippling muscles and spasms of desire flood down from my racing heart into my thighs.

If I don't break away from this right now I'll be lost. Even broken.

But I can't help but respond to his powerful devouring of my mouth and my pussy tugs with need. I arch my back so he can take more of me and he grips me tighter into him. He's a demon with his tongue, exploring every corner of my compliant mouth. Thrusting into me.

I feel as devoured as if he'd ripped off my panties and probed my other lips with his maniac tongue. I want him devouring my inner chasm, pulling it apart. Ohmigod. His other hand slides down my curved back to cup a handful of flesh. My eyes pop as he squeezes my ass cheek lustily and presses his wondrous hard cock against the side of my hip.

His fingers curl around the flesh of my ass where it meets my thigh and opens into my crevasse. They pull gently, so I am compelled to lift my leg and wrap it around his thigh, allowing him access. His heaving bulge presses into my open spread and I feel the burning heat of him through layers of fabric.

I push back but his hold on me is too intense. He kisses me more urgently, taking my mouth with his firm tongue. Why is my body responding with such eagerness? He's hot and more stunning in every way than any man I've ever been within ten feet of. But somehow this isn't right.

If I don't stop this now-

I push him away harder which encourages him to pull back more violently. His mouth is filling me so I can't breathe, crushing my airways but part of me wants it. My body is twisted awkwardly so I can't gather enough force to get him off me.

His cock grinds into my swollen pussy and sends twanging pulses through me in response. I shudder and shudder again.

Oh shit, this is not right. His hand releases its grip on my ass to curve around my hip. Is he going to plunder between my thighs? Without thinking I move my raised leg slightly, just enough to open my legs a little more. My ravenous pussy twitches eagerly for his fingers.

No. What am I doing. I have to stop this.

Except it feels so amazing. His mouth is hot and soft and firm all at once. His body pressing into the full length of mine so we're touching at every point is making me delirious with need.

But.

His hand slips across my hip and up over my stomach to cup the underside of my full breast that he squeezes aggressively. My nipple, in a rage of hunger, reaches out toward his avid fingers. I am delirious with the need to feel his heavy hand crush and mangle my needy flesh. But no.

I'm going to be decimated by this.

“Please, stop,” I gather a massive effort to shove him off without too much insult. I rouse myself from the delirium and am horrified when I open my eyes.

“Josh, we can't-” My knees bend and I feel like I might faint. It's Josh. I cannot believe I was almost fucking Mark's son, a man years younger than me. But so fucking hot, I'd willingly burn to have him inside me just once. To be perfectly filled and possessed by him.

His solid mass blocks the path to the door and his eyes gouge mine, searching for answers. All the air has sucked from the room. Josh is too close to me still. Now I see his white shirt is undone, as though tossed on in haste and his abs are carved like a Thai chef's fruit tree.

They ripple in sliced chunks all the way down into his low slung pants. He's inked across his chest and around the tops of his shoulders with a black as night tribal abstract. My eyes are glued like a bee to honey, just staring at the way the voodoo imagery dances, thrusting along his flexing biceps.