CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
T HIS WAS A very bad idea, and he knew it. But he was gripped with need. He didn’t want her to know what a terribly rare thing this was. Yes, he enjoyed sex, he enjoyed women. He was not the sort of man to allow himself to be taken in like this. He did the seducing, not the other way around. And having a woman, a virgin, affect him in this way was...
It was...
He knew he shouldn’t want it. He knew he shouldn’t want her purity. That he shouldn’t want to be the first person to ever touch her, to ever take her, to ever show her what pleasure meant.
She had captivated him from the first moment he’d seen her. And then again at his house, and again when she’d had this makeover. And it was something other than beauty.
He just... He just wanted her. After the conversation with his father today, he wanted something to distract him, but not in the same sort of way he often craved mindless desire.
It was something new. Something different. And for a man like him novelty was an art.
A rare gift, and he intended to seize it. Intended to have this moment out of time.
As if you deserve it.
Everything felt raw and close to the surface, but that made him want this even more. He had a feeling that she saw him. More the real him than most women did. Than most anybody did.
And yet she still wanted him. Perhaps, she even wanted him because of it, and there was something about that that drove him now.
They left the restaurant, hand in hand, they didn’t stay out as long as they should have. The entire point of this was to put on a show. But he found himself growing impatient. He took her hand and led her to the car. And once they were inside, he gripped her face, forcing her to stare into his eyes. “What is it you want from me?”
“Nothing,” she said breathless. “Nothing more than you.”
“And what do you see when you look at me?”
She searched his gaze.
“A beautiful man. But a troubled one.”
“Not wrong. And you want me anyway?”
“I find you fascinating.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was being honest, he could tell.
“Maybe you just waited to have sex too long, and you think that I’ll make it good.”
“Yes. But that’s not... No offense, but there are many good-looking men. I went to college with quite a few.”
“As good-looking as I am?”
“Maybe not,” she said, shaking her head. “But if all I was after was a handsome man, I wouldn’t be a twenty-five-year-old virgin.”
“So tell me that. You’re a virgin. You steadfastly refused to have sex with me just earlier today. Why now?”
“Because you made me feel special. And I don’t care if it’s real or not. I don’t care if it’s true. That’s why I need it to be tonight, in fact. Because I want to stay in this dream. I want to be the person that’s seen. Do you understand? That has never been me. That’s never been my life. I am the wallpaper, Matias. Always and ever. I am the woman who blends in, the woman that serves drinks, the woman who assists. The child that brings medication, and makes doctor appointments, but I am never wholly myself. Or special. Or wanted. And you make me feel like I could be. I just want that. For a while.”
He wanted the same, he realized. Because she looked at him and saw someone who might treat her right. Might give her something real, something good, and he wanted to be that fantasy for a while. More than just a fantasy of good sex, more than just seduction. He wanted to have the same fantasy she was having. Because maybe, just maybe, they were both special in that world. Maybe she mattered and he wasn’t beyond redemption. Just maybe.
Then, he could hold back no longer. He closed the distance between them, bringing his mouth down hard on hers. She whimpered. And froze. He could feel that she wasn’t an expert, but she was soft, and she tasted like magic.
Sex had long ago lost any sort of magic. He enjoyed it. But it didn’t feel like this. It never had. He could remember his first time, which he had gone about grimly. Because it was time. Because he was trying to strip off the last vestiges of what he had been. Of who he had been.
Because he was trying to learn to be the playboy. Sex for him had been a series of scourings. Of stripping back layer after layer of who he had once been, to make something new beneath it.
But this didn’t feel that way. This felt like something singular. Something real.
He could not quite fathom it.
So he kissed her. He poured everything into that kiss. All the need, all the darkness that he suspected she saw. She gasped, and he took the opportunity to take the kiss deeper, to slide his tongue against hers, and make her his.
He kissed her. Again and again.
He wanted her. He wanted this.
“I am going to take you,” he said. “Just as you demanded. But you must be very certain that it’s what you want. Because you’re right, I don’t degrade women. Unless they ask.”
Her cheeks were bright and flushed, her eyes glittering. “I don’t even know what to ask for.”
“Then I shouldn’t have you. I shouldn’t have anyone so innocent that she doesn’t even know what she wants.”
“Everyone has to start somewhere, don’t they?”
Maybe that was the magic. That she was asking him to help be the one to reform her. To shape her sexuality. To make her his. Maybe that was it.
Because for all the experience his jaded palate had tasted, this was unique.
He had never experienced this.
Not ever.
Maybe it was the novelty.
And it would wear off. But not tonight.
“Will your friends be consumed with worry if you don’t contact them?”
“I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.”
“Some would say that you’re perhaps doing a very bad job of it right now.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But some would say that I’m doing a very good job.”
He chuckled. “A good point.”
“After all, you have to think that sex was inherently dangerous to think that I was putting myself at risk.” He rubbed his thumb over her cheekbone. “The way that I do it can be quite dangerous.”
“I need you to show me. Otherwise I’m going to be convinced that you’re all talk.” She was so bold. She always had been. But then, he imagined that she would have to be. To build this business out of nothing. To take the sorts of chances that she and her friends had when they were so young. When she had come from nothing. It was easy to believe that it wasn’t a skill to stand in the background. Easy to convince oneself that it was the wealthy who had succeeded through their cunning and prowess, but this woman came from nothing, and had created from that so much.
Of course she was brilliant. Singular. And very, very brave.
“You don’t fear much, do you?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“No, not much,” she said.
But she was afraid of things. Of course she was, everyone was.
But there was no room for that now. And thank God.
Because he just wanted her.
So he kissed her again, until the car came up against the curb. Until it was time for them to get out, and headed to the building. But he did not take his hands off of her. He found he didn’t want to. Dimly he was aware that they had been followed. The photographs were taken. All the better. Because people might cry PR relationship, no matter what they did, but if they saw them together like this, clearly about to go upstairs and engage in intimacy, then it would be much harder for them to convince the world of it.
There would be headlines tomorrow. A cascade of them. He knew that. But tonight there was just them.
That was all.
They were in a cocoon of passion, and he allowed that to propel them to the elevator, up to the top floor. And into that lavish penthouse. Where he was suddenly grateful that it was a playboy’s haven, because every surface was soft for a reason.
He took her into his arms and he kissed her. “I will show you,” he said. “Everything you like.” He kissed her neck, and he began to unzip her dress as he traveled down her body, kissing the curve of her breast as he separated the fabric away from her curves. As he stripped her down to brief, lacy underwear, and her red high heels.
“Beautiful,” he growled.
Her eyes were round, and he could see a hint of nerves, but she was doing her best to hide them, and he thought that he would honor that.
A virgin.
Of all the things.
There were gifts that no man could ever possibly deserve. This was one of them. To be the first man to touch her beautiful body? Outrageous.
He was worth very little. He had failed the one person that had ever loved him. That had ever needed him. Surely that meant he shouldn’t have nice moments like this one.
You are outside of time and space. Let her take you away.
That was a first. Sex, to him, was an opportunity to remove himself from everything he had been raised to be, one encounter at a time. He took pride in pleasuring women, and honoring them with the act, but he did not feel as if he was escaping. Did not feel as if he was getting something out of it.
But tonight, he did. Tonight he was claiming it for himself just as much as he was claiming it for her, whether he deserved it or not.
He licked the plump curve of her breast, and then undid her bra, exposing her generous breasts to his gaze. He was starving for her. So he fastened his lips to one raspberry nipple, sucking it in deep. She arched her back and gasped, forking her fingers through his hair. He loved her boldness. That she wasn’t bothering with protests, and virginal proclamations of embarrassment. But then, how was he to know if virgins actually did those things. He had never been with one before.
Plus, he couldn’t speak to the nature of her fantasy life. Or to the amount of other experience she had with men. She arched against him, and he pressed her firmly against the wall, before kissing down her body and tugging her underwear down her thighs. He parted her legs and began to lick her deeply. She gasped, moving in time with the rhythm of his mouth, his lips, his tongue.
She tasted like the dessert that they had left before they could have.
She tasted like a dream.
And he was getting as much as he was giving in this moment, if not more, he was on edge. Fulfilled and undone by the taste of her.
He licked her, deeper and deeper and she cried out, on the verge of a climax. So he decided to push her there. He pushed one finger inside of her as he continued to lick her, and he felt her unravel, felt her internal muscles clenched around him. Then he moved back up to her mouth and kissed her deep. “Let’s go into the bedroom.”
She nodded wordlessly. And then, naked except for the high heels, she began to walk toward his room.
She didn’t know herself. But she didn’t want to.
She didn’t want him to say her name, not again, even though it had thrilled her slightly to hear it earlier. Because she didn’t want to think of herself as Auggie Fremont right now. She wanted to be out of space and out of time. She wanted to be someone different than she had ever been before.
She wanted to be somebody new.
She wanted to weep because she didn’t feel like her. She felt like something more special. Brighter, better.
She felt exquisite. And it was because of him.
The orgasm that he had just given her had rocked her, shaking her. It was so much different than pleasuring herself. She had no control over it. He had called it from her body like he was the master of her pleasure. And she wanted to surrender. So when he ordered her to go into his room, she obeyed.
“Wait for me on the bed,” he said.
She did, her heart hammering.
He stripped off his suit jacket, his tie, his shirt. She had seen him half-naked a hundred times. But nothing prepared her for being on the receiving end of the intense look in his eye as he removed his clothing. Realizing that body was for her. That his touch was for her.
She was overcome with it.
She watched as his muscles rippled, his golden-brown skin making her mouth water. The dark hair that covered his muscles made her fingertips itch. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to lick him. It was like a dam had burst inside of her, and every desire that she had held back for all this time was ready to burst forth.
She had tried so hard to be good. Maybe she wasn’t good. She was okay with that.
Tonight, she was okay with it.
He moved his hands to his belt buckle, to the closure on his slacks, and he stripped off the rest of his suit, and right then, she understood something dark and terrible. Looking at the full power of his rampant masculinity, she knew something, a deep, real truth that had always been hidden from her before.
This was an addiction. This was why countries fell to ruin. It was why good women craved very bad men. It was why good men broke apart families. This was something more powerful than she had fully given it credit for. And she wondered if she was horrendously na?ve to believe that it was something that she could shut off after tonight.
It doesn’t matter. Because tomorrow is going to take care of itself.
Yes. It was.
So she surrendered to his beauty. To her need. To his touch, when he made his way to the bed and moved himself over the top of her. She kissed his neck. Kissed her way down his chest, his ridged abdomen. She moved to that sick, glorious masculine part of him, and took him into her mouth. She wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t anything except filled with the most alarming, terrible, painful need.
She took him in deep, pushing her own limits. She reveled in the fact that she could make him groan. That she could affect him at all.
And maybe it was because he was a man. And men were that simple. But maybe it was because she was a woman, and she was that powerful. She was going to remember that.
From this moment onward.
She licked him, because she couldn’t help it. Luxuriated in the taste of him, in the feel of him beneath her tongue.
Until he gripped her hair and pulled her back up his body and claimed her mouth in a furious kiss. “Now,” he growled, opening up the nightstand next to the bed and taking out a box of condoms. He took out one plastic packet, tore it open and rolled it over his thick length. She gave thanks for his speed and efficiency. He moved between her legs, but before he penetrated her, he pushed one finger inside of her, then another. “So wet,” he ground out, and his appreciation sent a spark of need shimmering through her, threatening to set off an explosion. “This may hurt,” he said.
“That’s okay,” she said.
He withdrew his fingers, and moved back to her, kissing her mouth. Then he tested the entrance to her body with the head of his manhood, pushing in inch by glorious inch. It did hurt. But she didn’t mind.
It was wonderful. To be filled by him, possessed by him. Claimed by him.
She arched her back, and cried out as he filled her to the hilt. As he took her. Just as she had demanded.
This was everything. And so was he.
He began to move, the spell he was casting over her finding her in its dark magic. Binding her to him. The pleasure that built inside of her was deeper than the pleasure from before. The climax coming from somewhere at her very center.
And as she cried out his name, she lost herself completely. But the real triumph was when he let go. When he shivered with need, pulsing deep within her, his own control lost at the threshold of desire.
She clung to him.
Matias.
Perhaps she whispered his name. Perhaps it was only an echo in her soul. She didn’t know.
But for tonight, it was perfect. Tonight, everything was wonderful.
Tomorrow would take care of itself.