TEN #2
Arousing as hell… until it twisted the entire rhythm of what I’d envisioned. Where I’d meant for hunger, she wrote obsession. Where I’d left control, she poured in surrender.
I blinked up at the silver clock ticking smugly on the wall.
Nine.
If she were anyone else, I would assume she was out with someone – drinking, dancing, maybe letting a stranger trace his name across her spine.
Which was… exhilarating and infuriating in equal measure.
But…
Paula wasn’t like that.
She was too much like me.
And that thought alone dug deeply into my ribs.
I made a bet with myself – if she were home, writing tonight, I’d put down the glass.
Just for tonight.
The devil knew I wasn’t stable enough for two major decisions in one week.
Picking up the phone, I typed:
I don’t remember telling you to add things to Ch 7.
Then I paused, finger hovering mid-air.
Too blunt. Too… me.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. And I asked myself: what would a normal person say?
With a muttered curse, I deleted it, typing again:
Just checking – did we agree on adding anything to Ch 7?
I dropped the phone onto the armrest and returned to the page. Her words blurred slightly through the haze of my madness.
But not enough to stop me from reading every filthy one.
The paragraph stared back at me.
‘He wasn’t here to break her. He was here to unmake her. One command at a time.’
It hadn’t been the version I’d handed her. That was all Paula. Her voice, her kink, her twisted understanding of power and submission.
And fuck me if it didn’t land like a gut-punch, scattering the shards of the past for a brief moment.
She’d stripped the page bare, exposing something the readers – and I, clearly – would eat up in a heartbeat. This kind of control didn’t come from dominance. It came from intimacy.
The phone buzzed against the armrest with a tremor that yanked me out of my head.
Paula: Just went with it, but happy to rework it if it’s too much for you – was her response.
This woman knew what she was doing – the same way Chloe knew, when she bared her throat but kept her eyes locked on Damien’s. Too much for you… a fucking challenge – whispered at nine in the evening with my blood boiling hot.
Temptation dressed up as compromise.
I didn’t reply.
Well… not straight away.
I flipped back to the first line of the paragraph and reread it.
‘Unmake her… One command at a time.’
It echoed louder, crawling under my skin and nestling somewhere between my spine—
And my dick.
Somehow… I needed to hear her voice when she said that.
A call would mean just that – hearing her voice.
And that voice might undo things in me I had reserved for Scarlett. But I needed it. Like a drunkard needed his drink.
Reaching for the brandy again, I paused. Stared at the fucking glass that mocked me with its moonlit sheen. Paula was home, writing. Which meant I’d lost the wager against myself.
Though somehow, it didn’t really feel like losing.
Ignoring the amber-filled crystal, I tapped out a reply:
Me: Give me ten minutes. I’ll give you a call – because I was a creature of my own vices.
I had to stand up, stretch out the weight in my spine, trying to exhale the tension Scarlett had wedged into me but Paula had managed to twist around with a single sentence and a casual offer.
I needed those ten minutes to wrestle myself back into shape – mentally. Although I was well aware that had been a lost cause.
I moved through the flat, grabbing my charger, closing the blinds as if I were expecting the night to look in.
Paula’s prose was already slithering into every inch of my mind.
Her scenes were vivid. Evocative. I could totally tell she ripped her readers apart slow and hard. But this wasn’t arousal. Arousal was easy. Predictable. And I was twenty years above that age when things like this would make me go crazy.
This went further than all that. As though she knew how to dig under the layers of character, ego, authorship – and find the reader.
Find me.
It did things to me – the understanding that she wasn’t afraid to play with fire, even if she didn’t even have an inkling how close she was to burning herself in the process.
Back in the armchair, I set the manuscript aside. Her handwriting curled in the margins – notes and edits I’d printed alongside the thing. I stared at the highlight beside the sex scene.
‘Too much.’ I scribbled, smiling. Darkly. Crookedly.
She had no fucking idea, did she?
I wedged an earbud into one of my ears and hit call.
I waited.
One Mississippi.
Two… Three…
Then her voice spilt through the line – husky and sleepy maybe? Honey-slow.
‘D’Angelo,’ she murmured.
Not breathless or flirty. Just her.
Fuck. Me. Where other women would falter, she didn’t even flinch. And that made my senses perk up.
I made my shoulders square up and coated my words into something obscure. My body refused to cooperate, heat curling low where it had no business staying.
‘Did I wake you?’ The question slipped out softer than intended, almost like I was asking her what she was wearing instead – a spectacularly bad way to open a call with an assistant who’d been working for me all of two days.
At forty-four, I was well-acquainted with my own rot.
Pleasure – sex, pain – anything that grazed that nerve was just another pressure valve.
I knew how the mind worked. I knew my own – and I knew my body.
If I couldn’t exorcise the darkness with control, I’d bleed it out through the only ritual that ever worked – flesh and surrender.
Her answer came back in a low, husky drawl.
‘No. Just… reading.’ A faint rustle, like sheets moving. ‘What’s got you hot and bothered?’
The exhale that left me was long, heavy. I told myself it was irritation at her edits, not at the image her voice conjured – Paula curled up somewhere, reading my words, maybe biting her lip.
‘Chapter Seven,’ I managed finally, keeping my tone level. ‘Your changes. You’ve shifted the power dynamic between Damien and Chloe too soon.’
‘Oh?’ Her voice darkened a fraction. ‘You mean the part where she refused to wait for permission?’
The phone creaked in my hand, and I realised I’d squeezed it too tight. ‘Exactly. Damien was supposed to be in control. It’s not a power struggle; it’s about deliberate dominance. Structure.’