Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
CAROLINE
Chase was— He’d just— He said?—
What the Hedy Lamar?
Chase was staring at me like he wanted to eat me alive, starting at my pussy.
As I reeled, our host Greta appeared at my side with my handbag and phone and set them down next to me on the bar. I should have apologized for making a scene at her birthday party—she didn’t even like ‘Teddy’ and I’d ruined her party—but I didn’t have the wherewithal.
His words were still echoing in my head. ‘ If I spanked you every time you misbehaved, the only thing redder than my hand would be your ass. Brat.’
“Should we take her up to Francis’s office?” Greta asked Chase, staring at my knee.
“I think she’s fine, Grets,” he answered, not taking his eyes off me. His low voice even sounded like sex. What happened to my blushing blogger?
“Yeah, she’s fine,” I echoed. “It’s just a scratch. I’m”—with massive effort, I looked away from Chase—“sorry, Greta. About everything.”
“No, you’re not,” he muttered.
I felt like I’d been turning non-stop pirouettes for an hour. I’d thought Chase was attractive before, but it was a safe kind of hot, more about symmetry than sexuality. But the way he was staring at me now, a little flushed but utterly focused, made me feel… feverish.
Earlier, at dinner, when Fiona had asked Chase about Joe, he looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. I didn’t know much about panic attacks in a formal, clinical sense, but I knew what panic looked like, and that was him. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sit by and watch Chase be picked apart by society vultures. I hadn’t stopped to think, I’d jumped into action and created a scene to pull focus.
I thought I had Chase’s measure, but then he’d surprised me with a peek at some deep cuts on his heart. And now, he’d surprised me again with this completely shocking turn of events.
The man I thought had been traumatized by the sight of my bra during strip chess had just talked about spanking me. And called me a brat. True, I was a brat, but no one ever called me on it!
Chase was supposed to be an uptight silver spoon whose family I could gently relieve of generational wealth they didn’t need and be on my way. This changed everything.
“Whelp, I’m going to go…” I tried to slide off the bar.
Chase stopped me with a hand. “Oh no you don’t, Candy Floss?—”
I groaned at the nickname. Not because I didn’t like it, because I liked it too much.
Nicknames made this a thing , and I couldn’t afford things. Not with him.
Greta looked from her friend to me and back again, her eyes wide. “Oh. Oh . Well, I’ll give you some privacy. The murder mystery is done anyway. I can’t find the host, and Francis told me if one more person called him guv’na he was selling the bar and moving to Berlin.”
Greta waved and disappeared upstairs, I assumed to Francis’s office. A few of the servers swarmed in the background, seeing off the last guests and putting the room back to rights. We were unnoticed.
“Where’s your future wifey?” I asked.
One of Chase’s eyebrows raised above the rim of his glasses. “Don’t be caustic, Floss.”
“Again with the five-dollar words.” I grumbled. “I’m not caustic. And I’m not jealous?—”
An annoying grin played at one corner of his mouth. “I didn’t say?—”
“I’m just annoyed because you kept looking at me. That’s poor date conduct. I would never stay on a date with a man who ignored me and stared at someone else.”
And threatened to spank said someone else, and turned her on so much she doesn’t know which way is up …
“Well, she didn’t. Stay, that is. Obviously, things were—” Chase stopped, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Anna and I discussed it and we’re better as friends. She went home.”
Satisfaction ran over me, sticky and warm like honey.
“And where’s Joe? I thought he was supposed to be here tonight.”
“Don’t ask me about my brother,” he said sharply. “You focus on me .”
CHAS E
Every day I received emails asking for my advice on ethical conduct—men from all over the country wrote to me for guidance. I’d carefully built my reputation for equanimity, integrity, and thoughtfulness.
And I was two seconds away from setting it all on fire for a con artist.
“Now I have some questions I want answers to. How old are you?” I asked, replacing my glasses.
Call it a hunch, but I didn’t think she was twenty-seven, like my brother Joe and the real Teddy Bircher. They’d gotten engaged when they were nineteen, and broke up a year later. Floss seemed older. Like she’d seen more. Maybe circumstances had meant she’d had to grow up early. I wanted to know. And that was the root of the issue: I wanted this woman so badly I couldn’t see straight, but I had no idea if she’d told me one true thing in the span of our acquaintance.
“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to.”
She tried to slide off the bar again. I blocked her with my body. Her legs were on either side of my hips. If she’d wanted, she could have swung off the other side of the bar and left. But she didn’t. She stayed where she was. She liked that I was pinning her in place, I knew she did.
Then she grabbed a nearby champagne bottle sitting on the bar and wedged it between her legs, a glass barrier between her groin and mine.
Palm up, she flicked a bladed hand toward it and said, “This is so you don’t get ideas.”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t need a bottle to stop me touching you.”
She sighed. “OK, OK. It’s to stop me touching you .”
“You’d need my consent, too, brat.”
Her eyes were wide and locked on mine. Finally, she was seeing me, really seeing me. When she recovered from her shock, her beautiful lips quirked at the corners. She was a con artist, so of course she was going to find a way to use this to her advantage. But I couldn’t find it in myself to be upset; I was too interested in what she might say or do.
I’d thrown down the gauntlet, and now everything hinged on her response.
“What do you consent to then, Mr. Moral?” She tossed her candy floss hair. “For example, if I put your hands on me…” She plucked my hands up off the bar and spread them over her upper legs. “How’s that? On a scale of fuck no to let’s fuck ?”
“Fuck off,” I replied, without malice.
Her practiced smile melted away and heat burned in her eyes. Before I could react, she scooted her ass forward on the bar and I had to twist my hips so she didn’t crush my rapidly thickening dick with the bottle she’d wedged between us. Then she leaned back on her elbows. A groan escaped me when I saw how she was pressing herself into the bottle. Rubbing it.
“You love tormenting me.” I tightened my fingers, watching soft dents appear in the generous flesh of her legs. Her thighs were magnificent. I wanted them draped over my shoulders.
She made a needy noise deep in her throat and tipped her head back. “Touch me, Chase.”
Being a good man was important to me. I never drank to excess, jumped queues, or ghosted a bad date. I called my mother on Sundays and gave a lot of money to charity. I didn’t grope women on top of bars or tell them to fuck off or call them brats—even if they were.
My sense of self had taken a lot of hits tonight, but enough remained that I knew this was a bad idea.
“Not here. I don’t like being stared at.” I grabbed the neck of the bottle between her legs. It was going to occupy a place of honor on my coffee table, but first I needed to contain the situation. Contain her . “Get down. Francis’s people will be trying to clean up?—”
She clapped her hands over mine on the bottle. “Everyone left. Greta and Francis went up to his office. We have at least twenty minutes before they finish whatever they’re doing—bet it’s sex—and lock up.”
I whipped my head around. She was right, the bar had emptied. There was only one person wiping down tables, and they couldn’t see us here on the upper level.
Floss tightened her fingers over mine, and when I looked back at her, she slowly rolled her hips into the bottle, baiting me.
My resolve crumbled. As she knew it would. Truthfully, I was grateful for her goading. I was tired of holding back, tired of not touching her.
Still, I had to ask. I always asked. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
She dropped her eyelashes, forcing me to lean closer to hear her. “I want you to rail me until I can’t remember my name. I want to come twice, once when you finger me and again as you push your cock into me and fuck like a hurricane wouldn’t stop you. But, sure, I’ll start with a kiss. If you’re offering.”
This woman will ruin my life.
I kissed her anyway.
Floss fought me with her mouth like she fought me with her words. Caution and better judgment crumbled around me. When our tongues tangled, I forgot about where we were and who she wasn’t. I wanted to press my soul into her lips and drag hers out in return.
Floss broke away to gasp for air, then threw her arms around my neck and pulled me into the hot prison of her body.
I’d had the presence of mind to keep a grip on the bottle so it didn’t maim either of us, but she showed zero gratitude for this, instead rolling her hips into the bottle, letting me know what I was surrendering to this proxy.
That was a dangerous line of thought.
All thoughts were dangerous now.
When she wormed a hand down between our bodies, my dick lurched in anticipation but she was reaching for the bottle. Carelessly, she tossed it over the side of the bar, but there was no time to worry about the smash of glass because she threw her legs around my waist. I pitched forward, grabbing her around the ass with one hand and catching myself on the bar with the other.
Floss ground her body against me like we were somewhere much more private and wearing far fewer clothes. I didn’t stop, I didn’t worry, I just went with it. I put a knee on the bar top and climbed over her, trapping her between my body and the bar. She gasped when I settled some of my weight over her and the flutter of her eyelashes told me she liked that, liked being pinned down by me, with no option but to take everything I gave her.
I knew she would. Some part of me had known from the moment we met.
“I was right,” she gasped, breaking our kiss. It was what I’d been thinking, so it took me a second to realize that she wasn’t reading my mind.
“About what?”
She slid her hand down between our bodies and cupped my cock through my pants. “That you wouldn’t fuck like a puritan.”
“You’d tempt a puritan,” I growled, then kissed along her collarbone, an urge I’d been fighting since the night we met. Her skin was warm and tasted of salt. “No one could have you under them and not give you anything you asked for. And you know it.”
Abruptly she put her hands on my chest. “Stop.”
I froze immediately. “Are you OK?”
“I have to go.”
“I’m sorry.” Awkwardly, I scrambled off the bar and offered her a hand down. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Floss ignored my outstretched hand and flashed a smile so false my stomach dropped. “It’s fine.”
Immanuel Kant wrote it was never wrong to tell the truth, regardless of consequence, because it was a moral duty. Kant had failed to account for situations like this.
She started fumbling for the things Greta had brought over as I surreptitiously tried to adjust my erection .
Her phone started buzzing on the bar and I picked it up, glancing at the screen. “Gerard is calling.”
She lunged, snatching the phone out of my hand.
“Is he the snorer from your apartment?”
“No. Someone else.”
I said that I didn’t judge people for casual sex, and I meant it. But this woman kissing me, grinding against my cock to get it hard for her, then going off to meet someone else had me feeling all kinds of unenlightened things. I knew it was bad, I knew she was wrong for me in every single way. But if she was going to wrap those legs around someone tonight, I wanted it to be me.
I made a split-second decision. “Floss, I know.”
“Know what?” she asked, still frowning at her phone.
“I know you’re not Teddy Bircher.”
Nervously, she looked around to see if anyone had overheard, but we were alone. I waited, but thankfully she didn’t insult us both by pretending further.
“What are you going to do?” she asked quietly.
I thought of Joe, and my log of rejected calls to him. “I don’t know. If you tell me who you are and what you want from my brother, we might be able to resolve this quietly.”
She stayed quiet. I didn’t expect her to fawn with gratitude, but some thanks would have been nice. I was being more than generous.
“Why are you doing this? Is it money?”
Her eyes dropped to her feet.
“You planned to extort Joe,” I answered my own question, feeling the truth of the words before I said them. “If you made a scandal big enough to give the trustees doubt, he’d pay you to go away. Or I would.”
She nodded. “That’s the gist, yes.”
“You do look like her. Teddy.”
“Yes.”
“It’s the?—”
“Chin,” we said at the same time .
Silence again.
“I have to go,” she said softly. “Lyssa, my roommate, will be waiting up for me.” She swung her bag over her arm and thrust one arm into a gaudy leopard-print coat.
Without her fake party-girl bluster she looked stressed. Tired. And I’d put that look on her face. Guilt clouded the edges of my better judgment, though I shouldn’t have been feeling guilty; she was the one trying to extort my brother.
I did though.
Floss exhaled as if she was on the brink of saying something, but her phone started buzzing again. Fuck Gerard, whoever he was.
She declined the call again, seemingly at a loss for what to do next.
I realized I’d probably never see her again.
She’d kissed me tonight like she wanted to merge her body with mine. She’d made me forget about my blog, my absent little brother, and all my principles. I’d been ready to slide my hands up her skirt and make her moan my name as she came around my fingers like the greedy brat she was, now she was just going to walk away.
“Wait—”
She gave a little shake of her head, and before slipping through Lueur’s doors into the New York night, she gave a small wave.
This woman knew the exact shape of my dick and had ground against it like she was trying to milk it through our clothing. She’d unlocked something in me, and I wasn’t going to forget it, I couldn’t, any more than I could let her disappear.
Simply waving goodbye was like trying to unroll dice.