by Score, Lucy
Ally’s eyes went wide.
“Salary from Indulgence not cutting it?”
My father’s charm cooled. Indulgence was a respected publication. But it was no Label. We both knew it.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he insisted.
The only time things mattered, the only time the world was supposed to care, was when Paul Russo was winning.
“I tell you what, Dad. I’ll give you the money.”
Ally’s eyebrows winged up.
My father looked surprised, then smug. “I appreciate that, son.”
“I’m not finished. I’ll give you the money when you pay Mom and me back for the cash settlements we paid to your victims.”
Our joined hands were vibrating, and I didn’t know if it was Ally’s fear or my rage.
“Oh, please. We both know those girls were just looking to make a quick buck—”
I rose so quickly my chair nearly overturned. “I’ll show you out,” I said coldly. “It’s time for you to go.”
He rose and straightened his jacket. He gave Ally another appraising look. “If you ever get tired of Dominic—”
I clamped a hand on his shoulder and walked him out of the restaurant, barely resisting the urge to throw him into the planter at the entrance.
“I don’t need an escort,” he complained. “I need money.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your needs. You stay away from Mom. You stay away from me. And you stay the fuck away from Ally, or you will regret that you ever called me son.”
“I don’t appreciate threats,” he sneered.
“This isn’t a threat. This is a promise. Remember that the only reason you still have a job in this industry is because Mom and I kept our mouths shut about your pathological inability to understand consent. And I’m getting very tired of keeping secrets.”
“Everyone has indiscretions. Look at you fucking a secretary. You can’t escape your blood, boy.”
An icy rage squeezed at my chest. I wanted to physically hurt him. To make him feel just a degree of the pain he’d caused others.
“Indiscretions? Try assaults,” I spat out. “We paid your victims for the suffering you caused. And if you think you’re getting another dime from Mom, I will personally see to it that every single one of your victims files criminal charges and civil suits against you. I won’t rest until the world knows that you are nothing but a disgusting piece of trash.”
“Don’t be so naive, Dominic,” he snarled. “They aren’t innocent victims in all of this. Women are attracted to power, to what you can provide for them. What has that girl in there gotten out of you? A few pretty baubles? Some couture in her closet? Did she make it look like it was your idea? Wake up, son. We’re all just using each other.”
“Stay away from us,” I said again, not wanting his words to penetrate my brain, but they were already burrowing in and releasing their poison. “I’m not protecting you anymore. I’ll burn down the family name if I have to.”
“You’d better rethink that strategy, my boy. I can do quite a bit of damage to your mother. You think I was the only one who strayed? That I was the only one with predilections?”
I was shaking my head. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of your lying mouth.”
He leaned in, and I could smell scotch on his breath. Because of course he’d already started indulging. Paul Russo didn’t know how not to. “Your mother, those girls, that secretary in there? They’re the liars, and you’re just the fool who fell for the lies.”
I did what I’d wanted to for so long. I hauled back and hit the man squarely in the face. His nose made a crunching noise that wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped.
“You’re the damn liar,” I said, standing over him wishing I could keep hitting him until he felt a shred of the pain he’d inflicted.
“Is there a problem here?” A doorman hustled over from his post and helped my father to his feet, shooting me wary looks.
“Not anymore,” I said.
My father took a step toward me, holding a linen handkerchief under his bleeding nose.
“Believe this, Dominic. If you don’t get me what I want, I’ll be forced to remind you just how important I still am to you and your mother.”
“Try it, old man,” I said, daring him.
The doorman was debating whether or not to get in between us. Passersby were giving us a wide berth. That was the thing about normal people. They could sense evil. And between my father and me, there was a vortex of it swirling.
“You’ve made your bed,” he said. “I gave you a chance. Next time your father asks for something, you’ll remember this.”
“You were never a father to me.”
“What a coincidence. You were always a disappointment to me.”
He strode away, coat billowing in the wind, looking like the villain he was.
I was so angry I was shaking.
“Dom?”
Ally. How much had she seen? How much of him had she seen in me?
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I insisted, refusing to look at her. I didn’t want her anywhere near this. Anywhere near the feelings that my father brought out in me. I didn’t want to taint her.
She reached for my hand and squeezed it. But I pulled out of her grasp.
“Dominic, listen to me. You’re nothing like him,” she said quietly.
“I said I don’t want to discuss it,” I snapped, blindly looking over her head. I couldn’t look her in the eye. She’d seen us side by side. There was no way to deny the similarities.
“Let’s go back inside,” she said.
I followed her, careful not to touch her. And when we sat, I ordered a drink. A double.
If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me.
64
Ally
I decided to give Dominic some space that night. Sometimes time and space were the only things that could heal the hurt. So I used my time in my second favorite way. I ran my dance class through a challenging routine that left them all sweaty and gasping by the end. But we’d rocked it, and everyone, myself included, left grinning.
It was the last class of the night, and rather than hurrying home to Dominic as had become my habit, I cued up a new playlist.
The song started. And I let my hips and shoulders find the driving beat.
Dancing helped me physically move through the things that were bothering me. Like the fact that Dominic felt comfortable sweeping into my life and solving all my problems for me but wouldn’t or couldn’t share his own problems.
Yeah, okay. So there was the typical “I don’t want to talk about it” guy thing that seemed to come encoded in the Y chromosome. But his vault preset was something different. His “I don’t want to talk about it” came with a side of “I don’t trust you.”
I was hurt.
More importantly, I was worried.
I knew as well as anyone what scars parents could leave on children. But I also wasn’t in the position to start a conversation about the future. Not yet.
Spinning around, I kicked high to the right. I danced and moved and crawled my way through the song and then another and another until my shirt was soaked in sweat and my muscles sang.
I kept going until I felt loose and strong. Until I felt happy again.
I took that happy home with me. The door to Dominic’s office on the second floor was closed, so I headed up to the bedroom and showered. Brownie was nowhere to be found, which meant he was probably staring lovingly at his grumpy dad.
The door was still closed when I came down in my robe. So I warmed up some dinner and ate alone in the kitchen. I gave it another ten minutes before I couldn’t take it anymore.
I knocked and then opened the door on his terse, “Yeah?”
He looked troubled. Brownie was sprawled at his feet, eyes mournful.
“Dom?” I paused in the doorway.
He looked up, and I saw the brightening in his eyes.
> He patted his desk, and I crossed the room to him. I stepped between his open legs, and he dropped his forehead to my stomach, his fingers toying with the belt of my robe.
The knuckles on his right hand were split and bruised. But I knew it was his heart that had taken the most damage.
“Can I do anything for you?” I asked softly.
He looked up at me. His eyes and that shadow of a smile were sad. “Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
He gripped my hips and lifted me onto his desk. “You can ask me for something.”
“Anything in particular?”
“I want you to ask me for something only I can give you. Something you need. I want you to need me.”
If I’d had a shot at Paul Russo, I wouldn’t stop until his face looked like ground beef. Then I’d wax his entire head, toss a stick of dynamite down his pants, and kick him off a pier into shark-infested waters.
“What’s that look mean?” he asked, his smile warming now.
“You probably don’t want to know.”
His hands slipped inside the robe and skimmed up my outer thighs. That tiny, butterfly-light touch sent my attention-whore lady parts into a tizzy.
What could I ask of him? Something that didn’t involve nudity and borderline filthy orgasms.
“Will you take me out to dinner tomorrow?” I asked softly.
He looked up at me, surprised. “Of course.”
Dominic slid his hands up and over my hips, parting the robe. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to the top of one thigh. “I was hoping for more,” he admitted.
More? The man had given me a job, a piano, a finished house, a future that didn’t involve me working myself into an early grave. What more was there to ask for?
I shifted, letting him open the robe the rest of the way.
Bored, Brownie tip-tapped out of the room and down the stairs.
Dom’s eyes were glued to the apex of my thighs, and I watched, almost hypnotized, as he took two fingers and lazily slid them through my folds. I shuddered out a breath.
“I want you to need me, Ally. I don’t care if its money or sex or a date to your cousin’s wedding this summer. Ask me for something. Let me give you something.”
His breath was hot on my thighs. Those long strokes of his fingertips were making my body buzz, my blood simmer.
“Come meet my dad?” I asked weakly.
His gaze flickered to mine, abandoning its vigil on my sex.
“You want me to?” His fingers found my already slick opening and pressed ever so gently.
Did I?
“Yes.”
“I’d like that,” he said. His eyes held mine as those glorious fingers dipped into me. I watched him watch me as he crooked them inside me. My grip on his desk was white-knuckled.
“This weekend?” I managed to squeak out the words.
“Yes.”
His tongue flicked out over the curve of my hipbone, electrifying me and making me wish it was my clit he circled.
“You’re wet,” he breathed, staring again at where his fingers were moving inside me.
“Your fault,” I whispered.
“Ask me for this,” he said gruffly, scratching his stubble against the sensitive skin of my inner thighs as his fingers worked rhythmically.
“Dominic?”
“Yes, baby?”
“Will you make me come? Please?” The please was barely a whisper.
“Anything for you, Ally. Do you hear me?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about his words. I was thinking about how much I didn’t like that he’d pulled his fingers out of me. But his hands were on my hips now, sliding me onto the edge of the desk.
“Lean back,” he ordered. I collapsed back ungracefully on my elbows and watched him spread my legs wide.
He gave a grunt of satisfaction. I knew what he was seeing. Swollen, pink flesh slick with arousal.
“You always need me like this,” he said.
It was true. I’d handed over all responsibilities for my sexual satisfaction to my boss. I had no interest in—
My thoughts were interrupted when his tongue darted out and tickled that needy bundle of nerves.
It was like I’d just discovered my body came with a Sex Now button. And Dom was the only person in the world who knew how to push it.
“I dreamed about you like this. Spread out for me. Open. Needing me.” He said between long, languid strokes of his tongue. He licked me from clit to center and back again. Over and over again.
I gulped, unable to respond. I had definitely fallen off a train platform, hitting my head, and the last three months of my life was a hallucination. Any second now, I was going to be plowed into by a subway train.
Yet here I was, on his desk. Dom’s face pressed between my legs. Every time I tried to close my legs to protect myself, he forced them wider. It was a game that I loved losing.
I brazenly fucked his face and felt no shame.
His fingers found me again. Two slid into me and pulled out. Then it was three. And when they crooked just the slightest, my head fell back.
He was growling against my pussy, fucking me with his tongue and fingers, and I was a blithering mess, melting on paperwork that hopefully wasn’t important.
The first ripple caught me by surprise. I was so close to coming already. The man was a maestro. An expert. A damn magician, producing orgasms with a casual flick of his wrist.
He groaned, tongue pausing its delicate assault.
“Don’t come,” he ordered.
“Uh, then you better stop what you’re doing right now,” I gasped.
He stood, his desk chair slamming into the shelves behind his desk. He held me pinned to the desk with one hand on the center of my chest. The other he used to free his massive erection from his pants.
I hadn’t failed biology. I knew how dicks worked. But Dom’s seemed to grow thicker and longer every time it got near me.
“I want to feel you come on my cock. I want to feel those greedy squeezes when you fucking come, baby.”
Yep. Definitely almost dead in a train station. Real people didn’t talk like that. Real people weren’t desperate to get inside me. To fuck their way into my body.
But Dominic was.
His jaw was clenched as he fisted the shaft. Stroking himself, fucking his own hand, he brought the crown to where I needed him most.
He slid it in the same path his tongue had traveled. Back and forth, through my wet folds. My clit was tapping out an SOS, my core ached with emptiness.
He was leaking precum like it was a competitive sport. And I. Was. Here. For. It.
On the next slick slide, he kept going, the tip of his dick parting my ass cheeks, pausing to tease me at that opening.
“Not without lube, buddy.” I shuddered the words out. The fact that he wanted to touch me everywhere made me excited about being touched everywhere. “And remember, I get my shot at you.”
“Fuck, Ally,” he groaned.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Fuck Ally. Now.”
He hinged forward, lining up the blunt head of his cock with my entrance. He bit my nipple, and I shivered.
“I love your tits, baby.”
“Love them with your cock in me.”
He was fully clothed. His pants were undone only far enough to get his cock out to play.
I loved it. I loved that he wanted me this fiercely.
Without warning. Without the finesse I’d barely had time to grow accustomed to, Dom thrust into me, holding my legs open at the knees. I really, really needed to work on my hip flexibility.
His groan was long and victorious. I spent another ten or twenty seconds arching off the desk in a silent scream of ecstasy. “I’m not going to last long. Not with you squeezing the life out of me with that pretty pink pussy,” he warned.
“Shut the fuck up and fuck me, Dom.”
He pumped into me without regard to items falling off his desk and crashing to the floor. “That�
��s my girl. I feel you fighting it.”
It was true. I was running away from the orgasm just so I could greedily be fucked a little longer.
But Dom wasn’t having any of it. He pinned my hips to the desk and rutted into me. “Come. Now.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that it doesn’t work that way. That women don’t just magically come on command because a hot guy tells her to. But I was too busy writhing under him as he ground against me, driving me straight off the edge of the cliff and into a nuclear detonation. I felt it in my toes. The roots of my hair. My entire being quivered and clenched and came.
He was there. He was with me. Pumping into me, coming so hard he was grunting gutturally on every wet thrust that wrenched more from him.
I’d never felt anything like it. Not before him. The storm breaking. The clouds parting as we jumped together into the abyss.
65
Dominic
I waited until I’d been able to lock down on my emotions surrounding my father’s spontaneous little blackmail demand before doing what had to be done. It was late Friday, and my mother’s assistants had gone home for the night.
“Come in,” she called a beat after my perfunctory knock.
I found her on the couch, shoes kicked off under the glass coffee table, bare feet tucked under Simone’s leg next to her. They were drinking what smelled like very expensive tequila.
I had the distinct impression that I’d just interrupted something.
“Dominic, darling. Come join us,” my mother said wearily. “Help yourself to a glass.” I knew that look. And I knew what always caused that look. Or more specifically who.
Simone gave me a sympathetic smile. A warning that this was indeed bad.
“What did that bastard do now?” I asked, taking a glass from the well-stocked bar cart my mother kept in the corner.
Simone took my glass and poured generously. “Not him this time,” she said.
“I just got off the phone with Elena’s attorney,” Mom said.
Incredulous, I frowned. “Why?”