Chapter 28
28
Kit
Why do I hate it when he calls me that?
Because Kitty’s not my name? Or is it that it’s what everyone at work calls me? Maybe the problem is actually that he says my full name—Katarina—when he’s buried inside me and now it’s how I think of myself on his tongue. On his lips. On that sandblasted voice.
Whatever the case, I drop back onto my seat like he’s pushed a button, and let my head fall into my hands.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Kit.”
“I— I don’t know. We can’t… Oh, God! Why is this so hard?” I meet his steel-bright eyes for a half-second and look away. “Look, we can’t make this a…a…”
“Spit it out. Whatever it is. Say it.”
“A real thing. Real. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to explain that this is practical, not emotional. It’s not fucking real .”
My voice is too loud, the buildup so strong that it makes the ensuing silence seem all the deeper.
He says nothing. I stare at my hands. Two of my nails are chipped. They’re always chipped. Working behind a bar is why I don’t usually put on polish.
I did this week, though.
Because I knew I’d see him.
Crap. Crappity. Crap.
After a few more moments, he stands. I don’t move, but my mind’s racing as he stalks back to the kitchen. When he returns, it’s with two more beers. Good. Maybe we’ll just have another beer and I can go and we’ll pretend none of this happened.
With the kind of single-minded focus he exhibits while plating a daily special or lining up to fuck me behind my bar, he opens my beer, then takes his seat again. I still can’t look him in the eye. Not when he’s watching me like that. Not when I’m the only thing with a pulse in his vicinity and I know—I just know—how it feels to be in his sights.
“Let’s negotiate, all right, Kit? It’s all I’m asking.”
On an inhale, my gaze lifts to meet his with the kind of shock I’ve only felt when hit by something hard and solid at very high speeds. Like that softball one time in middle school. Or the time my friend’s car was T-boned by a minivan, turning our afternoon of Christmas shopping into a backache that still comes back to haunt me on rainy afternoons.
“We’ve already established that I want the lights on. Every single time I fuck you. I want to look.”
His words fizzle through me, leaving me weak and out of breath.
“We know that touching’s on the table. And I say whatever dirty shit I want while it’s happening.” He squints, watching me like he can see through the layers of skin and bone to the organs going haywire down deep. “The way your cunt clenches around me every time tells me you fucking love it. Am I wrong?” His big body hunches toward me and my brain’s got no control over the way mine cants to meet him. I’m a flower tilting toward the sun. “You got any objections to that, now’s the time.”
I want to say… I should tell him… We really shouldn’t…
My mouth is so dry I have to swallow twice before I can get my voice working again. Not that I know how to respond. I’d need brain cells for that and he’s just about fried them.
“Nothing?”
“I…” My vision’s gone a little dark at the edges—that is this man’s power over my libido. I swear he’s hypnotized my body into obeying his brain instead of mine. It’s a miracle that I finally dredge up the word, “Kissing.” I clear my throat. “No kissing.”
“Fine,” he spits out, somehow pissed that I’m working to maintain at least some healthy boundaries. “But I get to make you come whenever and however I please.”
Wait. What?
“Right now. Here. On the sofa. I make you come, hard, before I take you to bed and fuck you. Those are my rules.”
I’m nodding. I didn’t tell my muscles to move, but like his good little puppet, they’re obeying the man pulling the strings. What I want has no bearing in the face of such certainty.
“Good. Finish that.” Those eerie blue eyes flick to my beer, like he’s making me take my medicine.
Shaking, I obey. What choice do I have? My being’s slipped from its moorings and he’s the only thing keeping my skin and flesh attached to my bones. I take the bottle and sip slowly until it’s gone, then set the empty down.
“All right.” He stands and shoves the big driftwood and iron coffee table aside, then settles onto his knees on the glossy hardwood floor right in front of me. “Stand up.”
The second I do it, he reaches under my skirt for my underwear, which he drags down.
“Good girl,” he whispers as I flop back to the sofa, aware of how ridiculous I look sitting here bare-assed on leather with my panties hanging off one foot. He grasps my knees and spreads my legs wide and for a handful of seconds his face goes utterly blank.
“Katarina,” he whispers and, just that tortured sound is enough to send a frantic whimper spiraling up from my chest. “Fuck, baby, you’re beautiful.”
He looks up, into my face when he says this, swallows, and then drags that gaze back down again, inexorably drawn to that place.
In my contrary way, because this wasn’t supposed to be a thing, dammit, I still haven’t shaved properly since we started this thing. I regret that now for a handful of seconds and then decide that it’s not my problem what he thinks. I don’t care if he likes hair or doesn’t or if the patchwork situation down there is unattractive as hell. I don’t care because none of this was supposed to be… anything .
“Do it.” What was supposed to be an order to make him hurry up and get it over with sounds like a plea.
“I’ll do it when I’m ready,” he replies with a quelling look. “You’ll sit there and you’ll wait.” A grim smirk. “My rules now.”
And here’s the thing: the rules are his, suddenly. Entirely his. He’s taken the stupid contract and twisted it around and now we’re not here for me at all.
I didn’t sign up for this.
“Stop.”
He glances up at me, searches my face, then slides his gaze down my body again. “You don’t want me to.”
“Jake…” My voice trails off into nothing.
“ My rules.” Rough hands on my knees stroke up to my inner thighs. “You want me to stop, you say…” While he tilts his head consideringly, eyes glued to that hot, needy place between my legs, his hands turn and his knuckles make their lazy way back to my knees and then up again. “What do you like?”
“Um… Chandeliers.”
“You gonna remember that? Chandelier. ”
“What?”
“While we’re fucking? If you want to stop? Will you remember to say chandelier?”
“Are we…getting kinky or something?”
“I don’t know. You want to?”
“I don’t…” My mouth and eyes are wide open and my legs are open and I’m sitting here with him on the floor before me and the whole thing is as surreal as anything I’ve experienced. It seems wise, in this weird, out of body moment, to be entirely sure of what I’m saying. “I don’t want you to hurt me.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I…I think maybe what we’ve been doing is a little kinky already, right?”
He nods. “Probably.”
“And you want to do…more? Other stuff?”
He considers. “You make me feel…wild, Katarina. Like a fuckin’ beast. You make me want to…” He shakes his head, like he can’t actually believe what he’s saying. “I want to take you down. Hunt you. I want to bite you, claim you. I don’t know. It’s not a thing I’ve done or felt before, but it’s like…” He starts to laugh and it fizzles out when I try to close my legs and he gently, slowly, pries them back open, his gaze on mine the whole time. “Like that. Just like that.”
And though there’s no way I could describe exactly what that look, that moment, just communicated, I get it, deep in my bones. Somehow, the way we went about this opened me up to a whole new sexual…world and, like a language learned as a kid, I just know—I know—that this is how it would be between us.
How it should be.
God, admit it, Kit. This is how it is.
“I… I want an easier word. Something I won’t forget when…it’s happening.” I cast around for something. “Red. I want to use red.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
I shake my head.
“Say it.”
“Uh…” I shut my eyes through another lazy exploration of my sensitive skin. “Red.”
“You need me to stop, I’ll stop if you use that word.” His smile is diamond hard. “But you better mean it.”
I don’t protest. Don’t utter a word.
“No…no kissing,” I finally whisper in a final, pathetic attempt to control some part of this.
But like a lion let loose from its cage, Jake Brand is tearing through everything in his way. “I heard you the first five hundred times,” he growls, too closely focused on his objective to bother with eye contact. “Now lie back and let me feast on this beautiful pussy.”