22. Scarlett
TWENTY-TWO
Poker? He’s betting me in a fucking poker game?
Now this… this is the cruel, dark man I’ve unfortunately come to know. Miles away from the one who confided in me about what happened to his family. A world apart from the man who was nice and calming to my cousin.
Which tells me he is complete bullshit.
He’s less the fallen angel I started to see him as and more the Devil I already know.
“At least I’m not dressed up like one of the girls in here.”
“I should hope not. They’re all being paid a small fortune.”
“Of course they are. Is that how you usually get a woman?” I ask, my words dripping with disgust.
He laughs soft. “I never pay.”
“Except with me.”
“Some might argue that you’re paying me for my help.”
Malone’s words sting. God, he’s such an arrogant ass.
“And here I was thinking you were some kind of damaged soul when you’re just a cruel bastard.” I grit my teeth, trying not to stare at the beauties who are wandering around to bring the men drinks, who drape over them like they’re mindless dipshits.
I know they’re not. I can see the calculating light glimmering in their eyes.
The contempt for most of the men behind the soft smiles and stroking fingers, how they let the men touch their almost-bared breasts in their short, slinky outfits.
Next to them, I’m basically in a hazmat suit. Sure, my pretty royal-purple dress is short, and it dips in the front, but I’m not like them.
They’re basically wearing glorified bathing suits.
When he laid it on my bed and said we were going out, I believed him. Not that we’d be at dinner necessarily, but I figured he was taking me somewhere with at least some kind of decency to it.
“Your best and worst nightmare?” he asks, hand spreading out on my lower back. “One you loathe and want in equal measures.”
I shrug off his hand. “How the fuck does your ego fit into a room?”
“It’s very flexible.”
“If I’m the… what did you call it?” My voice drips with sarcasm. “Party favor? Shouldn’t I just strip naked now?”
“No. You’re dressed as the prize, and you look so pretty. If I lose, they can unwrap you.” Then he leans in and whispers against my ear, “I’m very good at poker, but better at reading the room, and you’re the exact distraction I need.”
Malone runs a finger over the outline of my lips, leaving a tingling path in its wake.
I fucking hate him.
Like, truly hate him with everything in me.
“Is that displeasure flashing bright in your eyes, Red?” He draws me up against him, his mouth skimming along my skin.
I should push him away. Kick him, punch him. Anything to get his hands off me.
But fuck my life, for as much as I hate him, I still want the bastard. “Fuck pretty and fuck you.”
“Do you even understand how much it turns me on when you talk like that?”
I try and pull free, but he puts just that small bit of pressure on the small of my back, and wedging out of his grip will get me nowhere fast. The girls in here won’t help. They might not like the men, but they like how much they’re being paid, and I’m betting they’re being paid a lot. “That’s too fucking bad for me because I don’t see any end of it in sight, you asshole.”
He licks and bites at the sensitive spot below my ear. Tiny little bites, whispers that send need fluttering through me. How does he always know just what to do, just what to taste? “Good. Hurl abuse. It racks up the points for punishment.”
“If they leave me in one piece.”
“If. But then again, maybe I’ll win.”
I struggle to drag in a breath through my suddenly constricted throat. “Malone… what the fuck happens if you don’t?”
He grins and shrugs. “Maybe you’ll like being shared.”
A sharp, hot spear of pain hits me, right in the heart. I know there’s no love between us. This thing we share is all sex and hormones and dirty fantasies I never knew I had. But the fact that he doesn’t care about me even the slightest bit fucking hurts. It rips parts of me out and grinds them into the ground.
One of them might even be my heart.
My eyes blur and they’re hot, and a lump lodges in my throat.
Oh, shit. I’m going to cry.
Malone sighs and looks over at someone. “I’m gonna show her around your club. You okay with that?”
“Sure, just be back for the game.”
“I’d never fucking miss it,” he says and leads me out of the room.
I stumble in the heels. I don’t like heels. And I hate him. He’s right about everything he’s said to me. About how I want the sick things he does to me. How inexperienced I am. Not that I ever saw it that way. I thought I had average experience. I wasn’t a virgin, but I also wasn’t someone who slept around.
But he knows exactly how many people I’ve slept with. What did he say? A virgin three times removed?
Because I am. Peyton was the big boyfriend, if you wanted to look at it in a sex way. We had tons of sex. But he was the second guy I slept with. And compared to this man here? It was like heavy petting at best. Never down and dirty and wild. Never up the ass. Never throat fucking type of blow jobs. We were the same age and?—
Cool air hits me as he takes me up two flights of stairs. And as we climb, there’s a reverberating booming beat of music pulsating under my feet. It gets louder the closer we get to wherever it is he’s taking me.
I’m still blinded by the tears I’m trying desperately not to cry.
Then the noise envelops us, swallows us whole. The techno beat of a nightclub. But we’re up above it, I think. I don’t hear voices, and the music is loud, but not that deafening loud that you’d experience on a dance floor.
I smack my hand against a wall and he pulls my chin up.
“Fuck,” he says. And his mouth crashes down on mine.
I try to pull away. I don’t want to kiss him, I swear I don’t. But my stupid mouth has other ideas. Endorphins rush to that kiss, and suddenly my lips part for him and his tongue’s there, stroking mine, dancing with it. His mouth is hot on mine, his deviant tongue tasting of scotch and temptation and lust.
He tastes like bad choices and wicked delights, and I melt into him, eagerly kissing him back.
When he finally stops, I put my hands on his chest to force him back, but he only surges farther into me, backing me into the wall, and he’s hard. The fucker’s hard, just like I know I’m wet because I’m a total headcase and glutton for punishment.
Pun very much intended.
“Malone, please don’t… please…”
“Baby Red,” he murmurs as his mouth drops small kisses on mine. “You know what I am. But I can still play.”
“It’s poker, you can’t guarantee you can win. And I don’t—I don’t want them touching me.”
His fingers move down my side, then they slide under the hem of my dress and up between my thighs. “Are you sure?”
“I’m wet,” I say, pushing out the words and hating them as they hit the air, “because of you. I wish to God I wasn’t. You’re a monster.”
“But one who gets you hot. I bet if I asked, you’d get on your knees and suck me, right here. Right now.”
I would. We both know I would. I don’t know what kind of hold he has on me. I want to chalk it up to him opening and expanding my sexual horizons, showing me the things I never knew I liked. And I know… I know if he invited someone into the bedroom with us, I’d do whatever he wanted, but this? Those men?
Never.
Except if he loses, he’s giving me to them.
This is the man who was sweet to my cousin. The man who?—
Dammit. Stop. Just because he was nice to her and told me his sad story doesn’t make him a good man. And it doesn’t mean there’s not another agenda hiding under his layered surface, no matter what he tries to feed me.
There are secrets.
I can feel them shift when I touch him.
Like I’m somehow tuned into the very depths of him.
And I want to uncover them almost as badly as I want him.
“If I do that,” I say. “If I get on my knees, will you promise not to give me to them?”
“I think we can do better than you on your knees, Scarlett.”
He grabs me and flips me around so my face is against the wall. This time he pulls up my dress and yanks my lacy scrap of panties to one side.
Then his cock is there, grazing my slit. His big, beautiful cock. My heart leaps into my throat when he thrusts into me, fucking me hard, fast, brutal. I slam into the wall, my hands on either side of my face as I choke back the moans that threaten to escape. With each push deeper, I can feel that perfect stretch, the way I mold to fit around him. He hits something delicious at this angle, and when he pulls out, I whimper, needing him back where he belongs, deep inside of me.
“Touch yourself, Scarlett.”
I reach down and start to rub my clit, and everything happens at once. I come so hard I scream, not that anyone other than him can hear me.
“Fuck yes, I love it when you scream, Red.” He fucks me again, hammering hard through the spasms, a slew of filth coming from him.
“When your cunt squeezes me, it’s like it’s trying to swallow my dick. You were made to be fucked like a little whore. When we get home, I’m going to tie you up, take your ass, and just before you come, I’m going to pull out, making you suffer. And then I’m going to paint you in my cum. I’m going to fuck you so hard that you can’t walk afterward. And then I’m taking you all over again.”
He slams into me until his cock twitches, the hot liquid spurts of his cum hit my insides deep and I explode into a second orgasm around him.
“Oh my God. Why are you so good at this?” The words spill from me, and he pants, laughing.
Slowly, after a minute, he pulls out and straightens our clothes. Then Malone swings me back around. It dawns on me what we just did. Where we are.
“I suspect,” he says, “it’s chemistry. You and me work, Scarlett. And you’re mine.”
Hope sweeps me. “So I don’t?—”
“No, Baby Red, you do. You’re the party favor if I lose. I just wanted you before they get to you. If it comes to that.”
“I’m not going. We’re in a public space?—”
“This is a private space. If someone was looking, they’d have seen. But the public space is downstairs. So be a good girl and come with me, and while you’re waiting to find out your fate, listen to the conversations. You never know what you’ll learn.”
He gives me zero option but to follow him.
Malone is a cruel, ice cube-cool god. And the other men in the room know it.
I hate the way they look at me, hate how some of them corner me, and the things they say are nothing less than perverted. Twisted under the guise of polite, they’re after a chance to try me out. But no one dares to touch. Because if someone’s hands get too close, Malone is there, guiding me away.
“Maybe you should just let them have me since you’re basically giving me to them,” I snap when he leads me away from Mariachi right to the bar.
He just kisses the corner of my mouth, ignoring my hard glare. “If that’s what you want.”
“You know it’s not.”
“Then, my sweet little fiancée,” he says mockingly. “Tell me, did you learn anything?”
I take a breath and his drink and down it since I lost mine a little while ago. “Only that three of them like hurting women.”
He just looks at me and I want to slap the expression from his face.
“Not for fun,” I say.
Malone turns to the bar and gets two drinks and presses one into my hand. “No, Scarlett, they definitely do it for fun. In fact, I think they get off on it.”
The words sink in, and I jerk, spilling my drink.
“All these girls and…” I stop because I can’t understand how these beautiful women—and they are beautiful—let these men fuck them and hurt them for money.
“The girls are paid a small fortune, and the person they work for? Let’s just say she’s one scary woman. These men don’t do a thing that’s even close to being out of line if they want their balls to remain on their body. Now, if one of the girls agrees to certain things, that’s on her. Worry about yourself, not the other women in here.”
His words hit home. “You… you’d let them hurt me, wouldn’t you?”
“Not too much.” Then he looks past me and smiles. “The game’s about to start. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.” I push out the words, almost choking on them.
He doesn’t ask me to sit with him, but he takes a seat where he can watch me. And probably so I don’t run. Not every man plays, some watch, and some watch me. Their eyes sliding sticky and greedily over me, even the one fingering a gorgeous redhead. I drink my drink and try to sit calmly on the barstool in the dark place.
It’s hard. I can still feel Malone fucking me. Like a ghost memory.
And worse, I can hear the faint beat of the music that thumped when he thrust into me. Down here, the music’s low, a different sound than upstairs. It’s moody, there to accentuate, not distract.
At least the others don’t come near me.
For now.
Until he loses.
Someone comes in the room, and I furrow my brow, watching him walk over to the bar. He’s older, handsome, and there’s something oddly familiar about him. He talks with the bartender and sips his drink, eyeing the game with interest.
His gaze slides over me. It only pauses momentarily, but I can’t shake the feeling that this man recognizes me. Maybe he’s come to the Wellness Gardens before?
My phone isn’t with me so I can’t even text with Lacey. What the hell would I say to her, anyway? That I’m being bartered for sex games by my fake fiancé?
I put my hands to my face, cheeks flushed with heat, head spinning. Had he even given the ring to me then? So much has happened so quickly that my brain is short-circuiting.
My gaze shifts around the room again and my shoulders heave with a sigh. Maybe I should just get drunk if he’s going to essentially sell me off.
“Rum, please. Line up some shots,” I say when the bartender comes over for my order.
She gives me a look that one might call pity. She’s just as gorgeous as the other women, but I don’t think she’s one of them. I think she’s just someone who works here. She does what I ask, and I begin working my way through them when she puts down a glass of rum next to them.
“From the gentleman at the end.”
Startled, I turn, and it’s from the latecomer. I’m drinking rum shots, so I figured the bartender just gave me a larger one. I guess that’s one perk with these underground rich men paradises—you don’t pay for the drinks.
I nod and shoot him a tight smile, but he turns back to the game.
Malone smokes a cigarette, leaning back lazily in his chair like he doesn’t care about the outcome.
He probably doesn’t, the bastard. But I do.
I’m smart, but I can’t think of a way out of this. Probably because there isn’t one.
Picking up the drink, I slide off the barstool and my legs wobble. Jeez, I’m such a lightweight. The room sways a bit. And then someone—I don’t know who—says, “Whores and gentlemen, we have a winner.”
Oh. My. God.