Chapter 40 Rae
RAE
MEETING REQUEST
Location: The Door Between Us
Attendees: Lukas Lazarev, Rae Everett
Agenda: TBD...
Sleep is for suckers, apparently. I’m lying in bed, still wearing the red dress because I couldn’t bring myself to take it off.
Pathetic? Big time.
But there’s something about peeling it off alone that feels too much like admitting defeat. If I unzip it myself, I’m basically conceding that Lukas won. That his cold retreat worked. That I’ll just fold up my little rebellion and tuck it back in the closet where it belongs.
Meek little Rae, always doing as she’s told. Going along to get along. Submissive to a fault.
But what about the Rae I can feel myself becoming while I’m here, with him? The feisty Rae? The mouthy Rae? The Rae who says make me to dangerous men twice her age?
That Rae doesn’t fold.
That Rae doesn’t retreat.
I kinda like that Rae.
Restless, I stare at the ceiling beams overhead.
The wine I drank has settled into a pleasant buzz, warm and loose in my limbs.
I’m no longer drunk enough to do something truly moronic—though I was for a little while there, all at the dinner table by myself, when several rash ideas crossed my head—but I am drunk enough that the voice of reason has been gagged and hogtied.
Don’t play games you can’t win, little girl.
Maybe Lukas is right: I can’t win this. Maybe the crocodiles in the moat are going to tear me apart before I ever make it across.
But at least I’ll have tried, right? Isn’t that worth something?
The clock in the hallway chimes two. Then two-thirty. Then three.
It’s sometime soon after then that a familiar, shuffling sound reaches my ears, just like the night before.
Footsteps.
They’re unmistakably his. Even if I didn’t know we were the only two souls in this house, I feel like I’d know they were his by now. I could pick them out of a stampede of buffalo—no one else walks like that, confident from the hairs on his head to the soles of his feet.
But restless. So restless. Just like me.
Because he’s pacing again.
Back and forth, back and forth. I can picture him out there, hands clasped behind his back, jaw thrumming, fighting whatever war is raging inside his head.
Then the footsteps stop…
Right outside our adjoining door.
I don’t breathe. I don’t blink. Every cell in my body is tuned to the two inches of wood separating us.
Silence follows.
Long, agonizing silence.
And then—
The handle moves.
In the dark, it’s almost imperceptible. Just the faintest twitch of metal, a hint of movement in the darkness. But I see it. The brass lever dips a fraction of an inch, catches on nothing—because, obviously, there’s no lock for it to catch on—and then stops and reverses.
He’s testing it.
He’s standing right there, on the other side of that door, testing to see if he has the strength to resist.
My fingers curl into the sheets. Every nerve ending is screaming at me to call out, to say something, anything…
Open it. Please, for the love of God, just open it…
I will the thought at him with everything I have. I imagine it passing through the wood in a telepathic beam, wrapping around him, urging him forward.
Open the door, Lukas. I’m right here. I’m waiting. I’ve been waiting.
But the handle doesn’t move again.
One second passes.
Two seconds.
One minute.
Two.
And then I hear a low, tortured breath, like it’s being dragged out of him against his will.
At first, I think he’s just standing there, wrestling with himself, caught between what he wants and what he thinks is right.
But then there’s another sound. A shuffling. Fabric against fabric. The creak of floorboards shifting under redistributed weight.
My breath catches as the realization plows into me all at once.
Oh my God.
He’s not just standing there.
He’s masturbating.
In the dead of night, when all bad ideas are at their most potent, with only a door between us, Lukas Lazarev is touching himself. His hand wrapped around his cock and pumping while he thinks about…
Me?!
My thighs press together instinctively. So many things run through me all at once that it’s a miracle I survive the onslaught. Horror, disgust, outrage—all of them come and go so quickly they might as well not have even bothered.
Because the things that follow them are far, far more powerful.
Lust.
Craving.
Hot, potent, irresistible, drool-inducing desire.
As for my hand? My hand is drifting south without my permission, fingers trailing across my stomach toward the hem of this silly red dress.
The silk bunches around my hips as I keep going. My other hand finds my breast through the thin fabric, palming the weight of it, thumb circling my nipple until it peaks against the material. I bite down on the inside of my cheek.
On the other side of the door, Lukas’s breathing grows rougher. The shuffling quickens.
I wasn’t wearing any panties under this dress, so when my fingers reach between my legs, they drag through wetness.
I’m embarrassingly turned on, slick and swollen and aching in a way I’ve never experienced before.
Not with my vibrator back home, nor with any of the fumbling, disappointing encounters that make up my pathetic dating history.
This is different.
I blame him.
I part my folds with two fingers and orbit my clit.
I’m just teasing at first, but when the whole day has already been one long tease, it turns out I don’t need much.
The first proper stroke sends a jolt of pleasure through me so intense I have to clamp my free hand over my mouth to stifle the whimper that tries to escape.
Through the door, I hear him grunt. It’s so male, guttural and just filthy.
Meanwhile, I’m rubbing my clit in tight, deliberate strokes, matching the rhythm I imagine his hand is making around his cock. Is he thinking about the dress? About tearing it off me with his teeth, like he threatened? About spreading me open and—
Another sound from him. Almost pained this time.
My back arches off the mattress. I slide one finger inside myself, then two, curling them up toward my belly button while my thumb keeps working my clit.
Stay quiet, Rae. He can’t know. He can’t…
But then again, why can’t he?
Why am I the one who has to suffer in silence while he gets to grunt and groan on the other side of that door?
I think of the princess again. The crocodiles. The consequences. And I decide…
Fuck it.
I let the moan slip free.
It’s soft. Not much more than a breath, really. A delicate little whine that passes my lips before I can second-guess myself.
For one horrible, stretched-out second, I think I’ve miscalculated. Is he going to storm off in disgust? Have I’ve finally pushed too far—?
And then Lukas groans.
It’s deep, tortured, and most of all, intentional. It’s a response to my mating call—I know that in the marrow of my bones.
It means he heard me.
He knows.
And he’s not stopping.
I’m getting bolder now, drunk on Bordeaux’s finest and Brooklyn’s worst. My fingers move faster, slicker, more urgent. I spread my legs wider and one knee falls to the side as I work myself with shameless abandon.
Through the door, Lukas’s pace matches mine. I can hear the wet sound of his hand on his cock, the panting that punctuates each stroke. We’re moving in tandem, separated by a flimsy little door and a lifetime of reasons this shouldn’t be happening.
I don’t care about any fucking one of them.
My fingers are knuckles-deep inside myself, but I imagine it’s Lukas’s hand instead, those scarred, powerful fingers doing what he promised.
I’d spread you open with fingers until your throat gave out from crying.
Another whimper flies from my throat. I don’t bother to suppress it.
I’m climbing now, that familiar tension coiling tighter in my core. But it’s different this time. Because it’s no longer just my fingers—it’s the phantom weight of him pressing me into the mattress.
It’s his beard scraping against my inner thighs.
It’s his mouth on my center, licking and sucking until I’m screaming myself hoarse, just like he swore I would.
My hips buck against my hand. I add a third finger, stretching myself, imagining the impossible fullness of him inside me.
I’d bottom out and hold there, making you spasm with how big and cruel it is.
“Oh, God,” I breathe, too far gone to care if he hears.
He does. He falters for a second, then redoubles. The sounds coming from him now are almost animalistic: grunts and growls that make my toes curl and my walls clench around my own fingers.
I’m right there. Right on the edge. My whole body is trembling, sweat beading at my temples, the red silk twisted and ruined beneath me.
Make you tell Mr. Fucking Lazarev exactly who this pussy belongs to.
That’s the magic password. The climax rips through me like a holy devastation, wrenching my spine into an impossible bow. Every vertebra lifts off the mattress as though some invisible hand has reached inside my chest and pulled me toward the heavens.
“Lukas—!”
His name tears out of me as I cum. I’m clenching around my fingers, burst after burst of pleasure crackling through me as I arch, gasping, shaking, completely undone.
Thirty seconds later, I hear him break. And as he does…
“Rae.”
My name in his mouth, in that voice, wrecked and reverent, sends an aftershock rippling through me that almost makes me scream. I clamp my thighs together, riding out the last tremors while his breathing gradually slows on the other side of the door.
My fingers are sticky and my throat hurts when I finally return to myself. I have to look around to convince myself this world is still real, that we didn’t accidentally splice over into some depraved alternate universe.
I said his name when I came.
He said mine.
That has to mean something, right? That has to matter. You don’t moan someone’s name like that unless they’ve burrowed so deep under your skin you can’t claw them out.
The floorboards creak. Lukas’s footsteps retreat back toward his room.
Then there’s silence.
I lie there in the dark, red dress hiked around my hips, staring at the door that never opened. And I think: This isn’t over.
It can’t be.
Not after that.
Or maybe it can be. Because, when I come downstairs the next morning, two suitcases stand by the door.
Mine and his.
I freeze at the bottom of the stairs, one hand still on the banister.
He didn’t ask. Didn’t even have the decency to tell me to my face.
He just decided: We’re leaving.
He’s told me again and again that this is the kind of man he is. A man who will move me from here to there like a doll, a pawn. But there’s something different about this particular power play. Something that doesn’t quite track.
Because Lukas Lazarev doesn’t run from anything.
He’s a man who stares down boardrooms full of hostile executives without blinking. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he pinned me against a wall and threatened to defile me six ways from Sunday, and he meant every depraved word.
But last night, he stood outside my door and touched himself while listening to me do the same. He moaned my name.
And now, he’s fleeing back to New York like the hounds of hell are nipping at his heels.
It all points to one obvious truth:
Lukas Lazarev is terrified—of me.