Privacy Code (Shatterproof) (9 page)

A hot wave
of desire rolled through my body in response to his words. In all the fantasies I’d had about him, I’d never come up with lines like that.

He loved control. Loved the power.

And I was more than willingly giving it to him.

Our faces were millimeters apart, noses almost touching.

We locked gazes and before I could process anything else, Watts pushed inside me. A long, slow, even thrust.

My breath stalled. I
struggled to keep my eyes open so he could see them. He didn’t blink as he watched my reaction to him sliding inside of me.

My mouth involuntarily formed the shape of an O, and I gasped in a deep breath.

Watts started slow and deep, then faster, kneeling again, leaning over and taking a nipple into his mouth once more.

My hands were on his head, fingers deep into his thick hair. I held onto him
that way as his movement became more powerful, bucking my hips and making them rise off the bed.

The
sheer power of this man….

From his kneeling position, his hands engulfed my hips, turning me, and before I knew it I was on my stomach.

Watts had pulled out of me and was moving away. I looked over my shoulder and saw him reaching to the floor.

He picked up whatever he had reached for and returned behind me.

Without saying anything, he stretched my arms straight over my head. I raised my eyes to try to follow what he was doing and saw black fabric.

My panties.

Watts was wrapping them around my wrists, securing me.

“
I want to play with you,” he said, his breath hot on my shoulder and his hand cupped my thigh and parted my legs. “You’re going to be my toy for now. And soon, I will be yours.”

He pushed into me again. From this position he immediately hit the spot, sending a spike of adrenaline coursing through my blood, causing me to cry out to him.

“Watts…yes…”

“Come for me, Catherine.” The words were so even
ly measured, the command so natural to him.

He knelt once again. I raised my hips to meet his thrusts.
His palm was flat on my back, then moving, his finger made a trail down the center of it, across my ass, around my hip, and down to where he was fucking me.

His fingertip
rested on my clit. He wasn’t moving it around. No circles. Nothing like that. Just his finger applying pressure. Literally pushing a button.

Making me get closer, closer, until I cried out his name
again and my orgasm crashed into me, making my hips rise off the bed to meet the rhythm of his movement.

I felt his other hand on the side of my face, turning me gently so he could see my expression.

Watts kept his finger in place as I continued coming. I was growing more and more sensitive. I wanted him to remove it, but I also wanted him to keep it there and make me feel even more things I’d never felt before.

As quickly as he’d put me on my stomach, he turned me over once again onto my back. He reached above my head and held onto my tied wrists.

“You’re so tight,” he said, driving harder into me. “And you’re still coming. I can feel it.”

My muscles were clenching around him, milking him.

His thick cock swelled inside me as his face turned a different shade of red. He pushed into me even deeper one more time, holding that position. He threw his head back. I could no longer see his face, I could only hear the heavy exhale.

I felt his cock twitch and surge inside me as he came.

We were silent for a few moments. My vision was fuzzy on the periphery, and I thought,
So this is what they mean by “fucked blind.”

Chapter
Sixteen –
Watts

Catherine had fallen asleep after our second round, which was slower,
lasting longer, and exhausting in the best way. We’d done it hard and fast, fucking furiously the first time, so it was time to slow things down a little on the second.

There would be more times—
many
more times—for testing her limits. And I already had several ideas in mind.

It was a few minutes past ten, and I lay there listening to her even breathing. She was on her side, and I was behind her. She was so at ease with me, her body so perfectly tucked into mine that you would have thought we had done this hundreds of times.

She stirred when I ran my fingertips along her arm from her elbow up to her shoulder. Damn, these shoulders. It was an odd attraction for me. Until Catherine, I was always focused on the parts most men assess first: tits, legs, and ass. Catherine had all of that going on, but there was something enticingly artistic about the contour of her shoulders.

Maybe it was just another facet of my seeing her in a wholly different light than I’d seen any woman before.

I wondered when she’d last been touched like this by a man. It was something she had never volunteered in our emails, and something I’d never asked.

I wondered when she’d last slept so easily with a man in the room. Clearly, there was something in her past that kept her away from men. I just didn’t know how horrible it could be. Whatever it was, though, it didn’t seem to affect her desire for sexual contact.

When it was clear that she was in a deep sleep and I had no hope of getting even a second of sleep myself, I gently got out of bed without disturbing her.

Her bedroom was almost completely dark, illuminated only by the screen-saver on her computer. It was a slideshow of pictures from various tropical beaches around the world. They looked to be stock photos, not ones she’d taken herself, and she’d never mentioned having traveled much in her life.

In fact, she’d never mentioned much of anything about her life prior to age 18. If I hadn’t been so guarded myself, I might have thought it odd.

As the photos faded in and out, the room lightened and darkened alternately. I watched Catherine’s sleeping form for a moment, as I pulled on my jeans and left her room.

When we arrived here, I didn’t get a chance to look around. Didn’t try. Didn’t care. All I wanted was her naked, beneath me, finally fulfilling my promise of giving her the fucking of a lifetime. I took her deep sleep as confirmation that I’d delivered.

I was thirsty so I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and guzzled it down before refilling it again. Sex always did that to me. I don’t know if
it would be considered technically dehydration by a doctor, but it had to be something close.

She had a small kitchen, not much counter space, certainly less than I could deal with, but typical for a small one-bedroom apartment. She had a coffee machine with about a half-inch of room temperature stale coffee still in the carafe.

I opened her freezer to get some ice and saw that it was packed with low-calorie, low-fat microwaveable dinners.

I wanted something to eat, so I opened h
er refrigerator and found that it contained a half a dozen bottles of different kinds of salad dressings, a bag of romaine lettuce, two carrots and an avocado. No meat. Nothing hearty that would stick to my ribs.

I wasn’t in the mood for vegetables, but
I found a container of fresh blueberries. I grabbed a handful and closed the door.

I went into her den. Going through her refrigerator was as nosey as I was going to get. My knack for finding interesting
things in people’s houses had always served me well, but it’s never out of curiosity, it’s always out of necessity.

But those were
surveillance and investigation related. I was doing no such thing with Catherine.

I
was curious about her, but had no intention of invading her privacy. Her purse was on the kitchen counter. I could have rummaged through it and found out anything I wanted—her last name, who she banked with, and maybe some indication of where she worked.

Same with the small stack of incoming mail she had placed on the edge of a round t
able next to the small kitchen window that looked out over the parking lot. Any of those pieces of mail would have had her name on the outside, and who knows what kind of information inside?

I resisted.

I couldn’t stop myself from looking at her bookshelves, though, and the enormous collection of titles she’d amassed over the years. Thousands of them, arranged alphabetically by genre, just like a bookstore. It didn’t appear that she had anything rare, but what an eclectic collection it was. Hardbacks with all the dust jackets, paperbacks with most of the spines cracked. I wondered if she’d read them all or if she’d bought some of them used.

One shelf held a collection of contemporary erotic romance novels. I didn’t have any of them in the bookshop, but being an avid reader I recognized the titles from browsing online book retailers.

She had a modest collection of literature from abroad: French, Russian, and at least one from Greece.

I spotted a couple of travelogues. They weren’t something I was interested in, but for a fiction
lover who loves to get lost in stories, those are about the closest you get to being whisked away to somewhere you’ve never been and encountering stories from people you would never meet. Based on what she told me about her love of reading, those made perfect sense in her collection.

She had one of almost everything, but I noticed there were no children’s or young adult books. Odd. Lots of adults were reading young adult these days. I had even picked up a few
myself and found them surprisingly appealing.

I ran my finger across the books, from one spine
to another, wondering what kind of erotic thoughts these books might have put in Catherine’s head. Or maybe those thoughts were already there, all her own, and I could find out her limits myself.

I was thinking about her going through my bookshop and the gems she would find in there when I heard the words,
“Thank you.” Her soft voice drifted into the room.

I turned around
, pulling my hand from the row of books.

She was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, the white top sheet loosely wrapped around her body. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but otherwise it looked like she’d slid out of bed naked, taking the sheet with her and standi
ng there facing me.

I wanted to walk over to her, pull the sheet off and not even take the time to go back to the bedroom. The couch was right there. It would do.

But she had thanked me. “For what?” I asked.

She pulled the sheet tighter around her.
“For telling me your first name.”

I walked over to her, putting my arms around her. Her head dropped to my shoulder. She felt so delicate, something I hadn’t noticed last night. Maybe she was tense then, and relaxed now.

“Can I still call you Watts?” Her voice was slightly muffled with her lips against my skin.

I let out a little laugh. “You don’t like the name Daniel?”

“No, that’s not it. I just—”

I cut her off.
“I was kidding. You can call me whatever you like.”

As soon as I said it, a pang of guilt stabbed me in the gut. Jesus, the secrets I was keeping from her.

“I’m sorry about the whole name thing the other night,” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s in the past. Forget it.”

She lifted her head, looked me in the eyes, and said, “And yes, I want to call you Watts. It’s just that I’ve known you by that name for so long. And even though I’ve only seen you twice now, that’s who you are to me. I have this thing about names,” she said, pausing, and I let her take as long as she wanted before continuing. “I think it’s from reading. You know, associating characters with names because even when an author describes them you still paint your own picture in your mind. But for me, it’s the names.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, I can’t really explain it.”

I kissed her forehead. “
I get what you’re saying.”

She shook her head slowly, as if she were about to say something negative, but instead said,
“You always have.”

We stood there in silence for a few moments, me holding her, and the urge to move her to the couch getting stronger by the second.

“You hungry?” she asked, breaking my train of thought.

I visualized what I’d seen in her refrigerator and quickly came up with a solution so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. “Let’s order Chinese. Know any places that deliver this late?”

. . . . .

The food arrived within th
irty minutes. We spread it out on her coffee table and sat on the floor next to each other as we ate.

Catherine handed me a fortune cookie. “Do you believe in these things?”

“No,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin. “Do you?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. But open yours anyway.”

I did, and read it aloud: “Now is the time to try something new.”

“Oh,” she said, “maybe we’re both wrong and we really should believe in these things.” She laughed and cracked open her own cookie and read it to me: “
Do not fear what you do not know.”

I stopped mid-chew when she said the words. Fucking hell, there were no better words than those to describe her current situation with me.

“That’s not much of a fortune.” She crumpled the slip of paper and tossed it into an empty rice container.

How wrong she was.

After we ate, we were lying together on the couch. I was on my back. Catherine was on top of me. The fitted sheet—which she’d been wearing for over an hour now—had drifted down to her mid-section. Her full breasts were against my chest. Warm. Soft.

Making me hard.

Her chin rested on the back of her hand, her palm flat against my chest. We weren’t speaking. Her eyes were closed and she had a faint smile on her lips. I was twisting a ringlet of her hair between my fingers.

A nice, easy, comfortable situation.
Perfect.

Until she said, “Since you told me your name, I want you to know something about me.”

I was torn, but tried not to let it show in my expression. Yes, I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to know it all. But that would mean telling her all, as well, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

“I mean, do you want to know more about me?” she said, sounding a little fragile
, probably doubting her offer since I hadn’t responded.

“Of course I do.”

She smiled. “My best friend is named Winnie.”

I continued looking at her, waiting for the rest. I raised my eyebrows a little, not following where she was going with this or why it was something she felt she needed to share.

“She’s a dog.” Catherine smiled. “Literally, a dog.”

I chuckled. “I figured that’s what you meant.”

She went on to talk about her time at the no-kill dog shelter and how much it meant to her. She told me about Winnie, and how they had been drawn to each other like magnets when Winnie first arrived at the shelter. She expressed regret about living in such a small apartment, and said that if she had a bigger place or a place with sufficient yard space, she would have adopted Winnie long ago. She had never mentioned any of this in any of our emails over the six months we wrote to each other.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m looking for credit or something.”

“
Did your parents let you have a dog when you were growing up?”

It was
a natural follow-up question in the conversation. People talk about their pets as though they’re members of the family—and why shouldn’t they?—and invariably the conversation turns to the subject of first pets, childhood pets.

But her facial expression changed when I asked the question. Her brow furrowed, her lips pursed, and she closed her eyes for a moment before
laying her head back down on my chest.

“I’m sorry,
” I said.

The pain from deep down inside of her, the pain I saw the other night in the hotel room, was no longer entirely a mystery. It stemmed from her parents.
I just didn’t know the details and it was clear to me that she wasn’t ready to share them.

“Was part of the excitement of this not
knowing much about me?” I asked, trying to bring the subject back to us, a more pleasant topic.

“I do know a lot about you.”

“I mean the details of my life. The things we agreed not to share.”

She shrugged a little. “Actually, yeah.”

“Then there’s no reason to take that excitement out of this just yet,” I said. “We can draw it out as long as we want.”