Surrender to Temptation Part III: Tempted to Obey (5 page)

“Trust me, Devon.” His touch gentling the tiniest bit, Zach pulled my head forward until the head of his cock brushed my lips.

Clamping my lips between my teeth, I shuddered in a breath and looked up at him. What I saw on his face halted my anger in midstride.

Gone was any anger, any arrogance from his gorgeous features. In their place were wonderment, encouragement, and even pride.

I felt my mind empty of everything except sensation as he pushed forward between my lips.

I did nothing more than to purse my lips around his thick length as he thrust into my mouth again and again. The head of his cock rammed against the back of my throat, and I gagged, but still kept my mouth clamped around him.

If this was what he wanted, then this was what he would get. I would try to learn about pleasure without emotional attachment.

I felt a trickle of salt stinging the back of my throat, heard him hiss in a breath as his thrusts came faster and faster. I opened my mouth wider, strained to take him deeper, pressed my body against his legs.

I gave him everything.

With a hoarse shout he pulled free of my mouth with a wet popping noise. Grasping his cock in one hand, he fisted the shaft up and down once, twice; and then he was coming, hot, salty streams of ejaculate that he caught in the handkerchief he always carried.

“Mine.” His voice was harsh, coarse with need. “You are mine.”

I nodded and licked the salt off my lips with my tongue. Eyes closed again, I lifted my head and let him shake the final few drops of his orgasm onto my tongue, which I tucked back into my mouth before demurely swallowing.

I stayed kneeling, my knees numb, feeling as though a great well inside of me had been filled. I kept my eyes on the floor as self-awareness gradually came back to me.

Above me, Zach was breathing heavily, his hands still tangled in my hair.

“Jesus.” The word was a whisper. I heard him search in his pocket, then felt him clasp my chin in his hand. “Devon, look at me.”

I looked up, but I had nothing to say. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t embarrassed. I just didn’t know how much longer I could play his games.

“Come here.” Hauling me to my feet, Zach wiped my face with the tail of his shirt. He wiped away most of my makeup with it, but I didn’t care.

I was strung tight, and yet peacefully empty. It was incredibly strange.

“Devon.” Zach growled when I refused to look him in the eye. Lowering his head to mine, he claimed my mouth with his own. Forcing his tongue past my lips, he claimed me with his kiss, branding me. He had to have tasted his own release on my skin, but he didn’t seem to care.

His lips moved to the curve of my neck, and as they did he slipped his hand between my legs. I cried out softly when his skilled fingers found my clit. He manipulated the engorged nub skillfully and I came apart beneath his touch, screaming as the pressure inside of me finally exploded.

He held me to him until my shudders quieted, then smoothed my skirt back over my hips. My tears ran freely then, purging my flesh of all of the nasty emotions that I had been clutching at so tightly—my devastation and the sense of inferiority from seeing Tom again, the anger at Zach, even the guilt over not living up to what my parents had expected me to be.

Embarrassed, I shrugged my face into my shoulder to dry my tears as Zach undid his belt from my legs, my panties from my wrists. After a long moment he tucked them back into his pocket.

They were far too stretched out to wear.

I was silent as I massaged sensation back into my wrists, assessing the situation as Zach pulled out his cell phone. We were in the elevator at Phyrefly. Surely by now someone had noticed that it was stuck between floors. That someone was going to know exactly what had transpired as soon as we started moving again and I had to step off onto my work floor, my clothes wrinkled, my hair a snarled mess, and my makeup smeared across my face. Tears had left salt tracks down my cheeks, and I smelled of sex and of Zach.

“Mrs. Gallagher. This is Mr. St. Brenton. I have sent Miss Reid on a personal errand for me. She won’t be returning this afternoon.” There was that thoughtfulness again, shown in his understanding that I couldn’t face my colleagues right then—and possibly ever again.

“Philippa. Are there any meetings waiting on me? No? All right, then. Please head down to the Starbucks on the corner and get me a venti dark roast, black. Yes, you.” As he ended his call, Zach ran his key card in front of the elevator sensor again and then slammed a fist into the button for the top floor—his floor.

“Zach, I can’t take any more today.” My voice was tired. The day had been an emotional roller coaster.

I wanted to go to bed. And when I got there, I wanted to sleep. I needed time to think about how I was feeling.

How could he inspire such passion in me, how could he make me want to do these dirty things, when he hadn’t told me straight out that he felt as strongly as I did?

“I’m taking you to my office so that you can clean up.” His voice was steady, but was underlaid with something that I couldn’t quite identify. “I have a shower, and something that you can change into. Then I’ll have Charles take you home.”

I almost corrected him, reminding him that I didn’t currently have a home, since the hotel where I was staying certainly didn’t count. But what did it matter, really?

I needed some space. I was seriously freaked-out.

The elevator doors opened onto an empty reception area on Zach’s floor. I was thankful that he had had the foresight to send Philippa the paper-doll princess on an errand, and I smirked a bit to myself at the thought of just how disgruntled it must have made her.

“The bathroom is through there. There are towels, soap, a robe— use whatever you need.” For the first time since I had met him, Zach sounded off of his game. Avoiding eye contact, I hurried into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind me.

“Christ.” I whispered out loud to myself and breathed in deeply, bracing my arms on the counter and leaning over the sink. “What the hell was that?”

My head cleared minutely now that I was in a separate room. Zach was so charismatic, his personality so imposing, that I couldn’t help but attune myself to him entirely when he was with me. Though I was acutely aware of him in the next room, I gulped at my aloneness, trying to slow my thundering pulse and calm my skittering nerves.

You are in way over your head, Devon
. Slowly I looked up, looked at myself in the mirror. I barely recognized the woman in the mirror. Oh, the wide blue eyes were the same, and so was the blond hair. Same face, same body.

But Zach had revealed a part of myself that I hadn’t known existed. Somehow I knew that he wouldn’t hurt me. I trusted him—and I had from the very start. What scared me was how much I had liked it. The kink, the edge of violence, the obsessive need,
that
was what made me terrified.

I was craving more, even as my flesh was still tender from his touch. And what I craved wasn’t restricted to the physical—no, those rare glimpses into the vulnerable Zach, the one that I suspected no one else saw, those were more addicting than the pleasure he pulled from my body.

Squeezing my eyes tightly together, I talked myself out of banging my head into the wall repeatedly in frustration. Instead I turned on the shower—unlike the one in his bedroom at his mansion, this one had a normal faucet. As I stepped beneath spray that was as hot as I could handle, I tried to get a grip.

He had warned me—he wasn’t interested in a typical relationship. And I knew that I would accept whatever proposal he threw my way, because now having had a taste, I was desperate for more.

But could I do it without losing myself along the way?

***

I schooled my face into a smile as I stepped out of the office bathroom. My hair was slightly damp from the mist of the shower, but I had combed it and pulled it back into a tidy ponytail. Zach hadn’t had any makeup in his drawers—which I couldn’t deny pleased me, because that meant that he didn’t often have women in his office shower—but I had at least washed the remaining smudges of makeup from my face.

Though my skirt was still fairly presentable, my blouse was a disaster. It was missing two buttons, and had wrinkled horribly. One of Zach’s dress shirts had hung on the back of the bathroom door, and after a long hesitation I had shrugged out of my shirt and into his.

Though I regretted it as soon as I had, I didn’t have a choice. He must have worn the shirt and not had it laundered since, because his unmistakable scent—the one that he had branded me with—rose from the fibers of the garment as I tucked it into my skirt.

Well, I wouldn’t be able to return to my department dressed like this. But I was at least presentable enough to go home.

Nerves rioted through my belly as I crossed the office to stand in front of Zach’s desk. He was at the window that comprised the entire wall of his office, and though his face was expressionless, his body had tensed as soon as I had opened the door to the bathroom.

“Zach.” What I was about to do terrified me, but I felt compelled to regardless. He might have considered it a “misplaced sense of give and take,” as he had called it the night we met, but that was just how I functioned.

As much as it scared me, he had given me an emotional release that afternoon that I knew had taken me one giant step forward on my personal journey.

I owed him one.

He didn’t respond to my soft query—he may not have even heard me. I repeated his name, a little bit louder. He turned, an eyebrow raised, and when he fully faced me I almost ran out the door.

The arrogant billionaire who ran a massive corporation had displaced the emotional, vulnerable lover completely.

“I—I know you don’t want anything serious.” His lips thinned, and I stuttered, struggling to get the words out. “But you gave me something today, something big and scary and . . . well, big. I owe you.”

I inhaled deeply and forced myself to expel the next words on a rush.

“I will whip you. That is, if you still want me to.”

Pain and pleasure streaked over his face, then fury. I stood with my hands balled so tightly into fists that my nails cut through the skin. I watched as the enigmatic billionaire fought through his emotions and finally emerged on the other side as the calm, controlled man who was king of his own empire.

“I’m not interested.”

I blinked, certain that I had heard him wrong. The man who had just fucked me seven ways to Sunday in the office elevator was more than interested; he was in as deep as I was.

But the words stung, and a trickle of insecurity worked its way through me.

“If you want to forget it, that’s fine.” My eyes scanned his face anxiously. What was going on?

“You presume too much, Miss Reid.” Pulling his chair away from his desk, Zach sank into it with controlled precision. He stared up at me with cool disinterest painting his features, and sickness rolled over me in a wave.

“What am I presuming, exactly?” Ice frosted my veins as I looked at the stranger across from me, the stranger whose taste was still in my mouth.

“Presuming that I want anything more from you at all, Miss Reid.” Casually he reached over to his computer monitor and flicked it on, seeming ready to dismiss me and start work. “I have had you now—had you more than once, so kudos to you for holding my interest. But I’m done with you. There is a world of beautiful women out there to fuck.”

Pain blossomed within me, in a surge of bright red and tasting coppery like blood. I was smarter than this—I knew that this was just an act. He had to be as scared as I was, but he was being a coward about it, pushing me away instead of clinging tightly like I wanted to.

“You fucking bastard.” I stared at him, my body stiff with pain. Why was he doing this? Why now, once I had become addicted to him and in need of my next hit?

“No one has ever claimed any different. Now, if you please, I have a lot of work to catch up on. I hadn’t planned on taking such a long break this afternoon.” I stared as he deliberately turned toward his computer, seemingly ready to get back to work.

As he did, I caught the smallest of flickers in his eyes. It was there and gone in a flash, but it told me what I needed to know.

He wasn’t as unaffected as he was pretending to be. But the mere fact that he was acting like this when we were both in over our heads was more than I could take.

Slapping my hands on his desk, I leaned over, getting so close to his face that he had no choice but to look at me.

There was that flicker again, right in those licorice eyes, pushed away mechanically. I saw the slight shift in his body, the miniscule amount that he allowed himself to angle toward me.

He opened his mouth, presumably to say something else cruel. I didn’t think, I simply acted, pulling my hand back before letting it fly.

I slapped him across the left cheek so hard that my palm stung. To his credit he barely moved, certainly didn’t flinch as he assessed me with those cool eyes.

“Fuck you, Zach. Fuck you.” I straightened, daring him to say something, to do something, anything.

He blinked, then looked back down at his computer.

Turning on my heel, clutching the loose folds of his shirt to my chest, I left, slamming his office door behind me.

Read more of Devon and Zachariah’s tumultuous passion in

Part IV of SURRENDER TO TEMPTATION

TEMPTED TO ENTICE

Available from InterMix on January 22, 2013

Keep reading for a preview of Lauren Jameson’s

sizzling upcoming erotic romance

BLUSH

Available from NAL in May 2013

I don’t want to leave him. That isn’t good.

“I want to play a game of blackjack.” Oh, this sounds so lame. I’m sitting in a casino bar in Las Vegas. Every other person wants to play a game of blackjack. “I . . . I know how to play, but I’ve never done it in a casino.”

“Why haven’t you?” Alex’s voice isn’t derisive, nor does he seem anything but genuinely interested.

I squirm on the chair, my face heating as I do. My fingers fidget with the locket that I always wear. How can I explain that new things, any new things, terrify me? They didn’t always, but since . . . well. I don’t want to go there,
can’t
go there, not right now.

I moved to Paradise, Nevada, two years ago. I started seeing a new therapist two years ago, too—a clean break from my old therapist, who, while perfectly adequate, was a tie to my old life. Dr. Vapauta, my new doc, took great interest in my reluctance to try new things, and together we have constructed a list of activities that scare me, ones that I nevertheless want to attempt in order to conquer my fear.

This is number one: urging myself to enter a casino. Urging myself to have the courage to walk up to a table and play a game. Since I know how to play blackjack, this is the game that is on my list.

For the woman who will drive ten extra miles on empty simply to go to the same gas station, it is a huge step.

It doesn’t mean that this stranger will understand.

“I have a list.” My voice is defiant, and I swig the last of my hideously expensive wine, shoring up my courage. “A list of things I need to do. Like a bucket list, I guess, except . . . it’s things that scare me. This is on it.” I dig my fingernails into my knees, watch the small crescent moons of white that appear on the skin that is bared beneath the hem of my flowered skirt. I wait for him to snort with laughter, or to wonder aloud why a game of blackjack would scare me.

Alex doesn’t speak. When I dare to glance up, he has pursed his lips, regarding me as if I am an exotic animal that he has come upon unexpectedly.

“Then you should do it.” For reasons I don’t quite understand, my spirits lift at his words. “And don’t be afraid. Most of the people at the tables are there only because of greed. You aren’t, and that will give you an edge.”

I shiver at the sincerity shining in those blue eyes, looking down at my intertwined fingers hastily. I feel like this man can read me—can see right into my soul—and it makes me uncomfortable.

***

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