by Olivia Myers
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his broad chest. Aside from the fact that he was sitting down instead of standing behind the bar, his posture was identical to the day she’d first walked into the bar. That seemed fitting.
“The other?”
Lexi swallowed past the lump in her throat, because here she’d gone out a bit of a limb. Well, in for a penny, she thought. Really, the whole thing was one big giant limb…
“That’s what you need to do if you want to gut the place and turn it into a premiere rock climbing facility.”
Duke just stared at her from beneath those thick, black brows. She shrugged and glanced away, her gaze lingering on the picture of him climbing in what she now knew was Arizona.
“I tried to think of a way to combine the two, you know? Like maybe a bar where people could rock climb? But… well, it just wouldn’t work. The insurance alone would be cost prohibitive. So, it had to be one or the other. I couldn’t decide which, so I figured… well, it’s your bar, so you should decide.”
“It won’t be my bar. Not if I take your advice.”
She was surprised he was being so calm. Honestly, she’d expected him to blow up as soon as she brought up her plan. Or at least to argue about the money. He knew, after all, how she felt about the trust fund.
“It would too. I’d just be giving you a loan. You’d pay me back. The terms are all in there.” Lexi felt the heat creeping up her throat. She needed to end the conversation and get out of there. That had been the plan. Drop off the paperwork, tell him she was done, and get out. She knew it wasn’t cool to leave him in the lurch, but it was Thursday. Thursdays were slow.
Her heart pounded in her chest as he scowled up at her. She wanted to crawl over the desk and climb into his lap, but instead she curled her hands into tight fists and squared her shoulders.
“Which is why I don’t think I should work here anymore. Either way, it would just make things… awkward.”
Yes, it would be very awkward if she had continue working with him and pretending she wasn’t falling ridiculously in love with the stubborn moron.
“And what if I decide not to take your advice? What if I decide to close it down? Would you keep working here then?”
His words were quiet, but they hit Lexi in the gut like a fist. “I… what? No! You… Don’t be a moron, Duke! You have to take the money!”
The anger and exasperation felt warm and familiar. She propped her fists on her hips and glared at him. Duke pushed both business plans away from him and shoved his chair back so he could get to his feet. He braced his fists on the desk and leaned over it, managing to loom over her despite the two feet of space between them.
“Oh, I assure you, Blondie, I most certainly do not have to take your damn money!”
“You stubborn ass! You would really turn down a loan from a friend just to…what? Save some of your damn pride?”
He kicked the chair away, sending it crashing against the filing cabinet with a clang. Lexi flinched but didn’t back down. Duke’s nostrils flared as he shoved the massive desk to one side in a feat of bulging muscle and grabbed her by her shoulders.
Lexi gasped at the feel of his hot, rough hands on her skin.
“A friend? Is that what you are, Lex? My friend?”
He snarled it at her, his cinnamon scented breath — from chewing his favorite gum, Big Red, and she hated and loved that she knew that about him — wafting against her cheeks. Unable to resist the alluring warmth of his body so close to her, Lexi’s hands rose and twisted in the front of his t-shirt.
“Yes,” she croaked, clinging desperately to that word. Friend.
Friends spent time together and made each other laugh and wanted the best for each other and were there when the other person needed them. Friends could even have sex more than once and still just be friends. She could do that. Friendship was safe.
“Bullshit. I don’t do this with my friends.”
And then he was kissing her, and Lexi was kissing him back and she was on fire with lust.
She’d thought she remembered how drugging and powerful Duke’s kisses were, but she’d been wrong. His lips were satin smooth but so strong as they moved against hers, and his tongue was a sweet flame licking into her mouth.
His hands shoved her vest off her shoulders and deftly unhooked her bra. A second later, the zipper on her skirt slid down and he dropped to his knees, pulling the silky fabric with him. Lexi panted, her hands on his broad shoulders as he divested her of her panties, boots, and socks… leaving her completely naked in middle of his office.
Duke pressed hot kisses to her inner thighs and her belly, stroking the tender skin behind her knees as he drew her legs apart. When his mouth reached her center, Lexi cried out and buried her fingers in his hair.
He devoured her, kissing her with every bit of the same passionate skill he used on her mouth.
Lexi’s knees buckled. She would have sunk to the floor if Duke’s strong hands hadn’t held her up. “Duke!”
He looked up at her, a wicked smile in his coffee colored eyes.
She laughed breathlessly. “I… I don’t do this with my friends either.”
The admission seemed to snap something within him. Duke surged upward, peppering kisses on her abdomen and breasts and throat until he made it to her mouth.
She clawed at his t-shirt, wanting to feel his skin. All of his skin, this time. Duke obliged her, reaching back to pull it over his head.
Lexi pushed him back against the desk, running her hands over every inch of his shoulders, back and chest. She pressed herself against his warm skin and rubbed like a cat. The faint swirl of rough, dark hair between his copper-colored nipples abraded the sensitive tips of her breasts, making her breath catch in her throat.
“Christ, Lexi!”
Duke’s hands tangled in her hair, dragged her back for another deep, wet kiss. She moaned, fumbling blindly at his belt buckle. It gave way with a muted clank and she yanked it free of the loops, tossing it haphazardly across the room.
She took a moment to palm the rigid length of his cock through the soft denim before she pulled the zipper down and reached inside. They both groaned as she curled her fingers around him and began to stroke.
Last time had been hot and incredible, but quick. And she’d been bound. She hadn’t had a chance to explore. At the time, she hadn’t cared.
She did now. God damn if she didn’t care a lot. About everything.
Duke managed to somehow toe off his boots without relinquishing her mouth. She heard them thunk against the floor as he kicked them away. Desperate to have him naked, she broke the heated kiss to shove at his pants.
He shifted his hips obligingly, highlighting the delicious groove of his Apollo’s belt. Lexi bit her lip and whimpered. Sinking to her knees, she pulled at the legs of his jeans roughly, taking his socks with them.
It was her turn to scatter nips and licks on his thighs and in the crease where his leg met his hip. She dragged her tongue through those tantalizing grooves, staring up into his glittering dark eyes as her hand pumped his shaft with tight, long strokes.
“Lexi, baby…please.”
Lexi licked a stripe along his length. Duke threw back his head and gave a shout of pleasure as her tongue flicked and rubbed against him.
She could have happily stayed there, sucking and licking until he spilled on her tongue, but Duke tugged at her shoulders, urging her up.
“Wait, baby, wait. Come here.”
He caught her around her waist and lifted her up to his lips, pressing her along the entire naked length of his body. His shaft pulsed, hot and hard against her belly as he kissed her. He caressed her ribs and palmed her breasts to tease her aching nipples for a moment before gliding his rough palms up to cup her face.
Drawing back just enough to meet her eyes, he stroked his slightly crooked nose alongside hers.
“I want to be inside you again, Lex.”
The words sent such a vi
vid spiral of pleasure through her body that Lexi gasped and shivered, goosebumps chasing themselves across her skin.
“Oh, Christ. Yes!”
She shoved at his shoulders frantically, urging him backward. Understanding, Duke swept his arm across the desk behind him, sending all the papers — including her meticulous business plans — fluttering across the floor.
The office looked like a tornado had blown through it, but Lexi didn’t care. All she cared about at the moment was Duke.
He lifted himself onto the desk in a maneuver that tensed his biceps and pecs and belly in a delicious display of muscle. Lexi’s mouth watered at the sight and she shuddered with the need to be touching him again.
She got her wish a second later when he reached out his hand.
Lexi paused. For a split second, she paused. She contemplated stopping. Stepping back instead of stepping forward. Putting her clothes on and walking out of the room and out of the bar and keeping to her ‘no repeats, no relationships’ rule. Keeping safe.
Duke’s brows drew down.
“Don’t be coward, Blondie.”
Her chin came up. “Fuck you, boss.”
His grin was bright and broad and heart-meltingly gorgeous. If she hadn’t been in love already, that would have done it.
“That’s what I thought we were doing.” He wiggled his fingers.
Lexi slid her hand into his and let him pull her up onto his lap. His cock slid against her inner thigh.
Staring into his eyes, she reached down and wrapped her hand around his shaft. She guided him into her, rocking downward to sheathe him completely. Her right hand dug into the muscle of his shoulder as he filled her, stretched her.
He stroked her hair back from her face, caressed down the long muscles of her back and curled his fingers around the soft flesh of her buttocks. His lips quirked as he squeezed gently.
“I knew you were trouble the first second I saw you,” he said, rubbing his lips along her jaw.
Lexi wrapped her arms around his neck and began to move her hips, lifting up and sliding down in a slow, rocking rhythm as inevitable as the tide. She chuckled at his words.
“Shut up and kiss me, you moron.”
He did. He kissed her and tightened his grip on her ass, urging her to ride him. The wood of the desk creaked under them, providing an almost musical sounding counterpoint to their gasps and moans and sliding flesh.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, feeling the pleasure like a wave washing through her, rising and crashing and ebbing only to rise and crash again. He kissed her while she called his name, swallowing the sound and then giving her her own name back while his body shuddered and spasmed inside hers.
Duke kissed her as she lay limp and panting against his sweat-slick chest. He kissed her hair and her eyelids and the tip of her nose. He kissed her breasts and her chin and lips. Her lips, over and over until they were swollen and sore, and she still didn’t want him to stop. She didn’t think she’d ever want him to stop.
Yeah, she was definitely in trouble.
Lexi huffed a ragged laugh against the warm, smooth flesh of his shoulder.
“I guess repeats aren’t so bad after all.”
She kissed the laughter from his lips and started all over again.
THE END
The Castle’s Dark Secrets
Coughing great clouds of smoke like wispy, black plumes, the train pulled into the tiny rail station of Nebelstatt, a town in the Austrian Alps. It was a bright, cold day in November. Flakes of snow floated by the carriage window and clung to it. Celia Barnette looked out onto the desolate, pure whiteness—the towering mountains with their perilous, clear beauty; the lakes that collected at the base of the mountains like large, liquid pupils. They filled her with a strange terror, as though the mountains and the frozen lakes were concealing some dreadful mystery.
She stashed her headphones and mp3 player back into her knapsack. As she collected her other luggage, the same thought came to her that had been running through her mind these past three weeks. What was she doing here?
Celia was one of the last passengers to disembark from the train. Most of the others had gotten off either the day before or earlier that morning when the train passed through the valley.
“Where are you headin’ to, miss?” the porter asked Celia. He was difficult to understand, his speech being a strange kind of German she had never heard before: garbled and twisted, as though he were speaking through something in his mouth other than his chewed cigarette.
“I don’t need the help, thank you,” she replied somewhat haughtily. She had been told to be aloof and short with the townspeople in Nebelstatt until she knew that they could be trusted. Pierre had told her this. He was an old colleague from the university where they’d studied together. Pierre was the one who had sent her the letter informing her of what had happened. Pierre was the one she’d be meeting in this tiny, cold village. How he’d ended up here after a prestigious undergraduate career, she wanted very much to find out.
“Suit y’self. Jus’ make sure you know where you’re going. Visitors can get lost here,” huffed the man.
It was the third time Celia had been told this. Nebelstatt, it seemed, was not a place acclimated to visitors. Celia could have guessed this by the few straggling people she saw disembark the train. There was an old, hunched man with a brown coat and a shady look about him like a French anarchist, a grey woman wearing a headscarf and a woolen skirt, carrying a sack of potatoes, a mother bundled up like a snowman with the hands of her two children clasped firmly in hers. She gave Celia a disapproving look, and Celia couldn’t tell if it was because Celia was traveling alone, or because of Celia’s casual, rather American outfit of jeans and a down jacket.
What was she doing among these people?
As soon as the thought occurred to her, she was reminded of the phone call she’d received from Pierre, the letters that had arrived shortly thereafter. Email wouldn’t work—there was no internet service in the village. He’d gone all the way down to Kramposhof to deliver those letters because there was no reliable mail service in Nebelstatt. This place was beyond remote, and yet she’d been called here at the whims of a stranger.
Thomas Bly. She remembered the first time she’d heard the name. Pierre had spoken it with a kind of reverence. How it had come to haunt her in the weeks to come!
“But I’ve never known any Thomas Bly,” she’d pleaded into the phone. “There has to be some mistake here.”
“If there has been any mistake, it has been in very poor taste,” Pierre had replied in his soft, formalized English. “But I am simply telling you what is already known. Believe me, I am as in the dark as you. Even in the town everyone is awfully confused.”
“But it’s absurd!” she said. “How could a man I’ve never met, in a place I’ve never visited, expect me to appraise the entire estate left by a woman I’ve never heard of before? It’s madness! And you said that Thomas is hardly ever at home—”
“Very seldom at home.”
“—very seldom at home, so how does he expect me to do the job properly if I don’t even know what sort of a job he wants done?”
“I’ve spoken to Monsieur Bly about this subject,” Pierre replied. “He stated quite simply that he wants everything gone and the castle sold. He made no mention of any special—how do you say—sentimentalities. I believe he wants everything gone, and he thinks you’re the best appraiser for the job.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Celia said. “Pierre, I don’t trust this man and I don’t trust this job. No rational person does something like this.”
“Monsieur Bly is strange,” Pierre conceded. “But it appears he trusts you. Perhaps this will be enough for you to do the job.”
***
Nebelstatt was built on a hillside and carved down the middle by a single, cobblestone road. It was hundreds of years old but none of the locals knew for certain how old. The town was so ancient as to have passed into rever
ence, where any mention of its age or its past history was irrelevant.
The road, bordered by guest houses and restaurants, ran up a small incline for about five hundred meters before it hit a greater rise in the hillside and dissipated into smaller, gravel pathways. These pathways led into the distant wilderness alongside the forest until eventually they reached the castle, roughly two miles’ walk away from the town.
Save for the castle, which, having been built next to a sizeable lake, was nearly always covered by the dense mist, Celia was able to make out most of the landscape as she trudged up the hillside to her hotel. Yet the snow was beginning to fall thicker and faster and the air to turn colder, and it wouldn’t be long before everything was obscured by the untimely blizzard.
She was thankful when she reached her hotel. Like most other buildings in the village, it was ancient and looked to be falling to pieces. The timber was cracked, slates were missing from the patio, and the chimney gurgled and puffed smoke asthmatically.
Inside was a little more promising. There was a merry fire burning in the corner of the room, alongside a shelf which was stacked with board games and books written in French, German, and some local dialect that Celia had never heard of. No one was waiting behind the reception desk but there was a cumbersome room key resting on a note scribbled in the strange language.
She put the note into her coat pocket and hiked across the hotel to her room: 118. The key was old and stubborn and seemed not to fit into the lock. With a lot of prying and grunting the door eventually swung open. The action released fumes of something burning.
Oh God, Celia thought, in her exhausted state of mind. The room is on fire.
The jolt of terror caused a bright surge of energy to resound in her body, which was swallowed up almost immediately by the exhaustion she felt after her two days on the train. I don’t even have the strength to run, she thought. I would let this fire eat me alive and not even have the power to defend myself.