For Pleasure Or Worse (Dirty Delta #2)

Chapter 1

chapter one

Natalia

I was used to seeing my fiancé twisted into many revealing and appealing positions. Both of his ankles tied to the metal slats of our bedframe by my old sorority ribbons. Or with lean muscles and corded thighs flexed, one leg up on the mattress to find that perfect angle. Sometimes with his knees spread so far apart in a squat one might ask how his perineum wasn’t also doing the splits.

Mateo Duran was the love of my life, my future husband, and the only man I’d ever unironically shouted at to “put a baby in me.” Which, for me, meant just as much commitment as the two-carat rock I intentionally left off my finger anytime the two of us were filming sex. Too rough, too much gyrating, too many fluids. We took our safety precautions very seriously.

Today, my brutishly handsome, freckle speckled Special Forces veteran of a man—all two hundred pounds of honed, Florida sun-kissed skin and perfectly shaggy salt-waved hair—was on hands and knees in front of me. His cute, dimpled, boyish asscheeks pinched together so tightly I couldn’t even swipe a credit card through the crack.

I had the upper hand. Not only physically—because the plum purple strap-on wagging like a limp noodle and attached to my waist was not going in my secret garden this go-around—but mentally as well, because he couldn’t see my face as I curled my lips into my teeth and stifled the urge to make yet another joke about the amount of lube Matty brought home in preparation for our regularly scheduled content night.

Just like any other job, Mondays were the beginning of Mat often the list of requests from our Monday night stream would get so long Mateo would break out a ruler and separate the whiteboard into columns.

Tuesdays were theme night, roleplay. The usual, predictable doctor/patient, rodeo rider/ cowgirl, school teacher/naughty little student. Wednesdays I was the director for my better half, and Thursdays Mateo put on a ridiculous fedora that he insisted made him feel like Tarantino and stood behind the camera for me. Saturdays were reserved for our kinkier crowd—all the bells and whistles and belts and leather were pulled out of a tote under the bed. Sundays were for the Lord, of course. We watched the porn back instead of making it.

But on Fridays we filmed. Tonight’s sticky note was triple-tiered: green, red, and orange.

“These have to come apart at some point.” I rubbed my palms down Mateo’s tailbone and tried to coax his whiter shade of cheeks apart with gentle circles.

“Just…give me a minute, Tally.” He reached across the mattress and popped the cap off a near empty bottle of lubricant. “Are we sure this is the right angle? I feel like we might need an adjustment on the lights. It’s too yellow; the hue is throwing me off.”

Our display screen mimicked us as we turned our heads slightly to peer into it. Mateo’s gold cross dangled from around his neck, glinting in the staged lighting. His naturally tanned Italian skin and chest tattoo glowed under the layer of oil and dew drops of water I misted out of a spray bottle onto his naked body minutes prior. One of our tripods was at the side of the bed, both of us filling the horizontal frame; another was front and center to catch every hanging jaw and eye-rolling second of the cam video we were commissioned to produce by mommyhole91 .

“This lighting makes your eyes pop, though. It brings out all those burnt orange notes. Too bright and we both get washed out.” The lube bottle squelched on its last slimy legs as I emptied it over my faux cock. “I’ll do some color correction during editing. Don’t worry about it now.”

Mateo’s fingers sunk into the white duvet and the veins in his forearms bulged thicker. “Maybe being on my back would look better.” He adjusted himself, flopping over, so negatively turned on that his dick could be mistaken for a ballpark hot dog stuck to some chewing gum.

I glanced back into the display, my black lace push-up bra and criss-cross harness giving me a wicked power trip, and made an unimpressed sound. “To be honest, this is more submissive than the doggy.”

“I’m not submissive,” Mateo pouted.

“You’re not ,” I agreed. “You are a trusting, giving, all encompassing, pleasure seeking, euphoric sexual partner. One who is so kindly fulfilling his woman’s erotic dream of pegging her Dom and claiming all of his body as he has claimed hers.”

Mateo sat up, our noses brushing. “Wait, that’s seriously your erotic dream?”

“No. It’s mommyhole91 ’s. They were very detailed in this prompt.”

He huffed, throwing himself back into the pillows. A bit of lube dripped off my purple friend and landed on his fleshy one and he flinched. “How much money is this person paying us again?”

I tangled my fingers in the cold metal chain lying on his collarbone and tugged him up by it until his ear met my lips. “Ten.”

Mateo’s eyes widened, a forced, delighted shiver rippling across his shoulders and lighting a spark underneath him as he promptly flipped back over onto all fours. “Do they want me to bark?”

There’s my business partner.

“That pays for all those orchid centerpieces for the cocktail hour,” I murmured, leaving tiny kisses on the tail of his spine as my long dark hair hung down and tickled him.

“God, I love when you talk dirty to me.”

“Extended open bar,” I added.

“Fuck’s sake, Tally, I’m hard as a rock right now.”

I reached between his legs and tugged experimentally. “Fully stocked bathroom toiletries, with the classy mints and the name brand over-the-counter migraine meds.”

“Sweetheart, if you don’t stick that Barney dildo in my ass right now I’ll do it myself.”

I bit his butt playfully and gave it a lazy swat. Tension worked itself out of Mateo’s shoulder blades, those big wings of muscle opening up ever so slightly across his back. “If I knew wedding talk could get you going I’d have started sooner.”

“It’s not the wedding talk, it’s the smile on my future wife’s face as she spends all our money on lobster crostini and an ice sculpture in the middle of June in Key West.”

June. We had six months to plan and execute the most extravagant wedding my mind could muster. The kind of wedding everyone expected from a Russo girl. I’d been planning it in secret in diaries, with scissors and glue from magazine cutouts, and on private Pinterest boards since I was old enough to binge-watch Say Yes to the Dress .

My family all had some very strong opinions about our relationship and the pace at which Mateo and I decided to get hitched. Not that anyone had outright said it, but if the phone call to my mother after our Christmas engagement gave any inclination, I’d say “ how pregnant are you? ” doesn’t equal an exuberant congratulations.

Not pregnant at all, by the way. Were it any other couple I might understand the hesitation, but Mateo and I were different . We did things differently. Not just the lube and the sex toys and the getting naked on camera aspect of things, either. From the moment we met last fall my life felt like I had hopped in the passenger seat of a fire red muscle car and stepped on the gas pedal on a never-ending straightaway.

I was a bored, overworked, uninspired bank teller when I met Mateo. I’d been doing cam work on the side in secret for years and finally experiencing an ounce of the financial freedom that I needed to feel like I wasn’t entirely the family disappointment.

My parents wanted me to go to Johns Hopkins—I settled for the other side of the country at Colorado State. They wanted me to study medicine—I majored in art studies. They wanted me to marry an age-appropriate businessman with a trust fund and connections—I climbed the thirty-five-year-old Delta Force veteran with a mouth like a sailor and family construction roots in the Bronx like I was a monkey and he was a fucking banana tree.

We were technically still on our first date, because we hadn’t spent a full day apart in over a year. Although against Mateo’s nagging, I had kept my apartment across town in Coconut Creek as a buffer of independence…and subliminally to keep my parents from having another reason to give me grief about the path I’d chosen to pursue in life. But when the first of January rolled around, I decided not to renew my lease and instead packed all of my belongings into the bed of Mateo’s truck and moved officially into his house where I’d been unofficially living anyway.

This wedding had to be perfect. It had to be everything my parents would expect from my sisters and more . So that I could truly show them that I didn’t need to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a multi-million-dollar real estate agent in Florida to afford the finer things in life. I didn’t even have to leave the comfort of my own bedroom.

The deep red ambiance lights around us shifted to a regal purple. “We only have six months to throw this thing. We need to focus.”

“Is that not a lot?” Mateo wiggled beneath me, his hips inclining slightly back.

“It’s laughable,” I sputtered. “I already have pressure on me with Mom and the girls. If the dress doesn’t fit like a glove and my lips aren’t swollen with filler it’s going to be an issue.”

“I’ll swell your lips naturally.”

I rolled my eyes and squeezed a generous amount of Astroglide onto my fingertips. “Spread ‘em, Captain.”

Mateo grunted, not impressed that I used his call sign against him in such a compromising position—and finally let me ease a slender finger in between.

"Well, I mean, how much is there really to do?"

Fucking men . The mental list of wedding planning items that hammered me in the back of my head all day, every day, materialized.

"The dress fitting is tomorrow. Mom, Camilla, Isabella and Mia are all clearing their schedules to meet me there. I’m sure that’s not a coincidence at all. They're probably dying to critique in true Russo fashion, which means I'll be lucky to walk out of there with a shred of my dignity left."

"Your sisters aren't that bad." Mateo's voice shot up an octave as the pad of my finger absentmindedly traced his tight ring of muscle.

"It's telling how you left my mom out of that."

"Mother-in-laws are supposed to be the Devil, and I’m well equipped to handle a crazy mother hen. I'm a first-born Italian son; we are doted on and coddled and spoiled in a way that no other man in the world would ever have the pleasure of understanding. Sistine Russo might be a tough egg to crack, but I’m gonna split her open."

"I’m going to vomit."

"Anyway, the dress."

"And catering for the venue. We have to try the food and the cakes and?—"

"And you're complaining?"

"Have you forgotten who has the bottle of lube and the cock strap on right now?"

"No, ma'am, I have not."

"The catering," I continued. "Then the florist. The invitations have to be sent soon, which means the accommodations have to be ironed out for the hotel because this is a destination wedding for your entire family. We need bridesmaids gowns and tuxedos for the groomsmen too."

"The boys can wear their dress blues."

"Ew."

"Ew? Four decorated veterans and my wife is saying no to showing us off?"

"Four decorated veterans and Angelo ," I reminded him. "What the fuck is your brother supposed to show up in? His tool belt and that bright orange T-shirt with the permanent pit stains?"

"He might just do that anyway."

I groaned. That was a battle for another day, much like most of the next six months were going to be. Mateo and I were spoiled to death in our little palm tree bubble up until now. Other people didn't have any kind of sway or hindrance in our relationship; the majority of them probably thought it was one of those flings that would cool down to flickering coals and the wind would completely blow out with time.

I'd never even met his parents.

Not in person, anyway. Over FaceTime. We were friends on social media. His mom was the kind of woman who left stickers as comments on every photo of us together while mine was the kind who pretended she didn't see them at all.

"You of all people should appreciate the value of uniformity," I said.

"Fine." His voice had returned to normal, though I still had a very curious appendage tapping around between us. "Tuxedos, flowers, invitations, and I'll try all the cakes you want me to try. Don't worry about your mom and your sisters. If I need to come down to the dress shop myself and stand in the corner with my nose to the drywall I will. So there's no funny business."

"You're sweet when you want to be."

"I'm just picking and choosing my battles right now, baby."

The camera blinked across the room at the two of us still doing more talking than working. A curl of Mateo's hair had fallen perfectly in front of his forehead and I reached down to tousle a few more of those auburn brown locks into choreographed disarray. The "sweat" had dried and I spritzed him with the spray bottle again like he was a misbehaving cat.

"I never thought I'd say this, but can you fuck me already?" Matty sighed. "My back is starting to hurt on my hands and knees like this."

"You should really start coming with me to yoga." I adjusted myself behind him nonchalantly, lifting the purple silicone to rest on the base of his tailbone. "Lengthen your spine a bit. You're so tense right here."

"I could not imagine why."

I paused. "Are you sure you're comfortable doing this?"

"Just a little nervous," he admitted.

Orange sticky note—things we hadn't done before. Mateo and I shared something that transcended intimacy, especially when it came to our cam work. It wasn't just necessary, it was crucial. We got so many requests per week in so many different shapes and sizes, some more enticing than others, some downright ridiculous and immediately disregarded. The price tag on this one made the two of us sit down and discuss it like we were at a high-level business meeting. We sat at either head of our dining room table and presented one another with the job. I usually shuffled around a stack of printed how-to manuals; before and aftercare prep; my ideas for costume, lighting, editing, and sound design; and a very large pros and cons list that Mateo always took a marker to and added to the pros: I get to have sex with you.

I also ran the financial side of it—ironic, considering I wanted nothing more than to escape my bank job. Payments, funds, investments, taxes, et cetera. The boring albeit necessary side of any business. My complaints couldn't extend any further though, because in our day-to-day lives Mateo ran TechOps from the ground up and never asked me to lift a finger. That business was his baby, and this business was mine. He was happy to play sidekick, trophy, ornament, and fucktoy if I asked him to.

"You do have the hottest ass I've ever seen on a man," I encouraged. "The back dimples are aesthetically perfect."

"I don't want to be aesthetic. I want to be tough and rugged. And covered in dirt, but not dirty. Like I might get under a car or something and fuck around with the engine every once in a while, but maybe also read a book for pleasure on a lazy afternoon."

I looked down at his little pink hole and did that stifled, mouth-curling-in-on-itself laugh again. "You definitely have the ass hair for it."

"You're one to talk."

My jaw popped open. "Okay, that's enough lip out of you, Cinderella. Cameras are rolling. Smile big."

My finger dared to breach him, and as if divine intervention, the telltale sound of our kitchen cabinets slamming shut down the hallway ripped our attention toward the door. We waited cautiously, both entirely sure we weren't hearing things but also eagerly hoping it was a freak occurrence. Our cellphones were across the room.

"Cup probably fell," Mateo reasoned. "A mouse."

Another cabinet hammered shut, followed by a fainter noise.

"Did the mouse open the faucet, too?" I let loose a hard breath. The metronome of my heart picked up behind my ribs and sent a cool wave down my body.

Normally the noise wouldn't have stirred any kind of panic. We were used to an extra body milling around the house day and night. We'd actually learned to completely tune it out. Mateo's best friend, Frankie, lived two doors down in his own bedroom up until two weeks ago when he'd up and shipped off to Colorado with my best friend. The two of them fell head over heels for each other over Christmas and left us official empty nesters.

It wasn't Frankie getting himself a glass of water and a snack from the fridge at 9 p.m. but there was someone, something , milling freely about the kitchen.

"All right. Stay put, Natalia." Mateo had exited submission and entered the side of himself I rarely got a glimpse of, but marveled at when I did. The retired veteran half. The no funny business, all work no play, lethal and militant, sharp as a knife side. He climbed quietly off the edge of the bed and grabbed his boxer briefs from the floor, pulling them on.

The closet door across the room squeaked open on its hinges and unveiled a heavy safe I thought about so seldomly I often forgot it was even there. A keypad beeped beneath his steady fingers and the door dislodged before he reached inside and pulled out a blocky, black handgun.

"Oh my god." I gasped. "Not the rifle."

Mateo's eyes flickered to me, a pain that wasn’t physical stricken across his face. "We will talk about whatever the fuck it is you just called this later. But seriously, Tally, lock yourself in the room. Do not answer the door for anyone but me. I'll knock twice, jingle the doorknob, then knock again."

"Can't you just say, like, 'hey babe, it's me’?"

He racked the gun back and stepped in front of the bedroom door. "Can't you just, like, listen to me for two minutes?"

"What if I hear something bad?"

"Call the cops."

He left me alone on the bed as the door clicked shut quietly behind him.

Fuck. Fuck. I shot over and squashed my ear to the wood, attempting to listen over the thump of my pulse in my eardrums. It was silent on the other end which was just as terrifying because it allowed my mind to race and the anxiety to take over. This was a nice neighborhood. No one ever had their house broken into. There was sweet, old little Gino living next door with his tomato plants and the Corleys across the street with their kids. We had potlucks, and joint garage sales, and a block party on the Fourth of July like it was The Sandlot .

What if he got ambushed? What if there was someone out there with a sleeper dart waiting to shoot it into his neck and drag him away by his underarms? What if I was standing here waiting to hear a knock and my fiancé, my future husband, the father of my unborn kids needed my help and he couldn’t call out for it?

"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, FUCK—" I chanted, rounding the bed and scrambling in the nightstand drawer until I came up with a cold, metal pocketknife. I tried to whip it open as I’d seen Mateo do a thousand times, but my fingers weren't quite strong enough and so I wrestled it with two hands until the sharp tip of the knife finally dislodged.

Instead of letting myself deliberate any further I slipped out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Listening be damned. Mateo’s shadow was plastered to the hardwood farther down at the edge of the wall, and I crept in behind him, wielding the little knife and ready to take on whatever lay waiting on the other side of the divide.

More cabinets opened and closed and voices murmured in the quiet. Mateo rolled his shoulders back. "Cops have been called," he announced. "I'm armed."

Instead of waiting for a reply he turned the corner and barreled into the kitchen, faster than I could follow without tripping over myself. The light inside flipped on and two intertwining screams rang out, followed by Mateo's own bellow of shock, which triggered my fight or flight. I came around the corner screaming like a wild banshee and waving my knife beside him.

"Don't shoot!" A short, plump woman stood in the center of the room with her hands in the air. "For Christ’s sake, Mateo David Duran! Giving me a fucking heart attack!"

Time froze. I could see the dawn of realization crest Mateo’s face, softening his eyebrows, widening his eyes, flaring his nostrils. His mouth dipped from a straight line into an open frown.

"Mom?!" Mateo shouted back, dropping his weapon immediately to his side. My head followed him on a swivel to the other person in the room, the uncanny resemblance of an older, grayer Mateo staring back at us. "Dad?!"

"Mom?!" I yelled at Mateo. "Dad?!"

And then all three of them turned to look at me. My chest rising and falling in a chaotic rhythm, hands shaking with the pocketknife still suspended between us. And a bright purple strap-on dildo dripping lube between my legs and onto the floor.