F*ck Toy: A Dominatrix Enemies to Lovers Romance

by Sybil Swift

  “It’s not that simple, moron.”

  “We’ll make it that simple. I’m sure the poor girl’s mother can see it in her heart to allow her daughter two more nights of much needed happiness. Isn’t that what this bullshit rehab is all about, moving on and moving up? Well, with my help, she’s done quite well. Good grades all across the board and if anything, you should be paying me for helping a very unsatisfied client become less fucked up.”

  “Excuse me?” Chloe swiveled him to face her so his back was to his sister. “You made me less fucked up? Is that what you claimed? As if your dick is a miracle worker and I’m some pet project?”

  “Chloe, you clearly needed help when you got here, you and I both know that—”

  “And you’re the walking poster child for normalcy? Please, spare me! You didn’t cure me of anything, Noah. You were just as good a diversion as a free hooker, because in the end I didn’t even have to pay you for it. So, thanks for the good time, but next time I need a little rehab in my life I’ll think I’ll hire a gay interior decorator…at least then he won’t be begging to get in my pants like you were the second we met.”

  * * *

  Shit, everything was spinning out of control. Noah tamped down his anger knowing he had to do his best to salvage the current mess. He hadn’t meant—nothing was coming out right. Everyone just needed to take a step back so they could get where he was coming from and then things would chill out. He pressed his lips tight together, running a hand through his hair as Chloe stared daggers in his direction. Not as if taking his foot out of his mouth wasn’t a tall order when in normal situations he couldn’t form a single sentence unaided. A small humph of laughter got caught in his throat and Chloe’s eyes narrowed.

  “You have nothing to say? Why am I not surprised?”

  “Christ,” he bit out, snatching his glasses off his face to rub the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t mean, uh…”

  “Oh, don’t bother to take it all back now that you’ve said it. You were crystal clear with your delivery. I was pity sex.” Her gaze suddenly cut away from him and he swallowed choking on all the words that were unsaid while his chest squeezed tighter than a vice. “A screwed up toy that you only needed the right tool to fix and exploit, right? That’s the reason you were nice to me, after all, it was hardly altruistic and one-sided. I was just dumb enough to play into it.”

  “I’m. S-s-sor-r-y…”

  “Why?”

  He blinked only too aware of the other two people in the room. The walls seemed to be closing in on them with every short breath he was able to gather into his lungs and he saw spots dance at the edges of his vision before he put his glasses back on. She’d crossed her arms looking for all the world like she would clock him in the face.

  “You can’t have it both ways. Either it meant something or it didn’t…if I were the judge I’d say you’d already made your choice.”

  Noah winced shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “No. Not, um, not at all. I, uh…I didn’t mean…to in-s-s-sult you…I was, uh, um, only being…I thought, I thought I was being honest. Too honest…maybe. I don’t…I don’t want th-th-is to, uh, to…to stop—”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you want. Or didn’t I make that clear while I was dragging you all around this house on a damn leash, Noah? Serves me right for trusting your bitch ass. I’m sick of you, sick of hearing lies.”

  “Wait, I didn’t…sh-shit, I di-di-didn’t mean it!” He threw up his hands knowing full well he didn’t have the capacity to supply the words that would turn her back onto his side. Nothing he said could erase his first instinct to brush her off, brush off their relationship, in favor of staying in his sister’s good graces. At the end of the day Polly was all he had—he couldn’t screw that up. Not with everything he owed her from their past. How could he have been so stupid?

  It was too late to stand up for Chloe, too late to take anything back.

  But what choice did he have when this was his livelihood? What else could he do with himself…with his issues? It had been a dumbass idea to accept the reservation in the first place, to think he was above the consequences of getting caught. The whole plan had seemed easy. Fun. And he needed a little fun in his life. Still—the consequences. All of their gazes were drilling a hole through his skull and he couldn’t focus. Couldn’t think well enough to concentrate. Panic thrummed like a volt of electricity through his veins while he couldn’t draw his eyes away from Chloe’s betrayed expression.

  “I—I just need—a, uh, a sec—”

  They were equally as fucked up. A matched set. He’d never intended to imply anything else. His emotions were just so jumbled. His hand reached out through the air between them and she flinched even though he didn’t brush her with his fingertips.

  “Stop. Talking.”

  * * *

  “No.” Noah snatched her by the upper arms and she refused to look away from the hurt shining through in his gaze.

  “Wait, is this the part where you tell me you don’t love me anymore? Was I too mean for you?” Chloe threw him off balance and power-walked toward the door with a sick twisting in her guts. “It’s not you, it’s me. So don’t worry about letting me down easy, Noah. I never felt a thing for you beyond the thick skin I had beneath my teeth, so nothing about this hurts at all. It’s all fun and games, right?”

  She didn’t look back, even when Noah tried to stutter out a reply and something crashed behind her in the room. There was some more bickering from the siblings, but Chloe was beyond caring when every part of her was numb.

  “We’re leaving.” Her mother stormed out of the house leaving the weathered storm door to slam shut and she followed, not because she wanted to, but because there was only one car service outside to take her back home. Or anywhere that was away from Noah.

  “Mom, I know. I don’t need to stay anyway. I was planning on calling a cab tonight.”

  “Was that before or after you put your pants back on, my dear?” Her mother waited for the driver to open the door and slid inside as gracefully as royalty. But the second the door shut she slid a flask out of her purse and took a long nip. “You need some of this too.”

  Was there was way to bypass…nope….Chloe snatched up the flask and took a huge swig choking on the burn burrowing into her stomach. She gasped and coughed as her mother thumped her on the back, careful not to chip her freshly done nails.

  “Are you going to stop picking these idiots, Chloe? Is this the last one? Are we done?”

  “What?”

  Chloe got whiplash because she faced her mother so fast, dizzy as she tried to come to grips with what the other woman was accusing her of right after the big blowout that had destroyed her heart. Her mother frowned, patting her brown hair before she pasted on an over lipsticked smile.

  “Chloe, dear, you aren’t hard of hearing, are you? Last I checked that wasn’t one of your problems. You manage to stumble onto these men who want nothing to do with you but everything to do with what’s underneath your dress. Honestly, you’d think you would have better taste after what happened with that businessman. You do know I sent you to this place to get a grip on your problems, not to invent new ones.”

  Chloe’s mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. There were no words. Wait, there were plenty of words, but none of them were things she could get away with saying without a lifetime of regret. As horrible as her mother had ever been, destroying her only intact relationship was not how she wanted to spend the next few hours as they made their way back to New York.

  “Mother, the businessman that you’re referring to is the man you set me up with as the supposed next love of my life! That was not, I repeat, was not my fault.”

  “They always change when they meet you, baby. You let them do whatever they wish and they get lazy. You have to give a man what he wants to keep them happy and so far, I just don’t see you doing any of the right things. Maybe if you toned down the neediness and didn’t give it away so quic
kly, a good man would stand by your side long enough to take what he needed and find a good girl to settle down with for the long haul. You do know that man proposed after you, don’t you? He’s going to be happily married, a step we seem to keep missing with your life. One of many, might I add.”

  Was there any good way to go about this one?

  “Well, hopefully I can fix that, Mom. And if I can’t, at least I still like myself at the end of the day, unlike you.”

  “Clearly this fling rubbed off a little of your shine, my dear. When we get back I may have to re-enroll you into etiquette class.”

  “I would like that.” Chloe took another long sip from the flask and shoved it uncapped back into her mother’s giant expensive purse. “What about my luggage?”

  “We’re having it shipped to the penthouse on their dime. It’s the least they can do so I don’t sic our lawyer on them.”

  “First thing you’re doing when we get back to New York is buying me my own place. If I’m going to fix myself, I need to have my own space to do it. No more shoving me into cars to go on random adventures, no more having me spied on with camera’s all hours of the night to make sure I’m not having a nightmare, and no more using your personal assistant to color code appointments and charity functions and board meetings you want me to go to so my whole day is set before I even wake up in the morning. I want you to let me fuck up. In my own place.”

  Seconds lingered into hours before her mother sighed, rustled through her purse, and pulled out a roll of breath mints.

  “Eat one, you smell like man.”

  She took one. Not because it would make her mother happy but because the last thing she wanted was to smell anything like Noah. In fact, she could only wish their town car was a limo with a hot tub in the back so she could soap off all the slime still lingering on her skin. She rolled her shoulders and shuddered.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s not a no. I’m running out of ways to find you wedded and bedded, the least I can do at this point is find you a place to hold your future knick-knacks and an abundance of fowl cats, if that’s where your childless life is heading. But I won’t put you up in some artsy building in Soho, you’ll be near me or nothing at all.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll take what I can get.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “I’ll pay you rent. Every cent will be back in your pocket.”

  “You plan to get a job now too?”

  “I’ll have a lot of free time once you let me off my leash.”

  “Just don’t go barking up anymore trees.”

  “Celibacy is sounding real good right about now.”

  Two weeks later, Chloe stood in the apartment below her mother’s penthouse one floor below her childhood home with the scent of newly coated paint stuffing up her nostrils and shimmering tears in her eyes. Everything was lovingly painted in shades of violet with white accents. All of her furniture was coming in a day or two and until then she’d been spending all of her time propped up on a bunch of old throw pillows her mother had gotten out from storage and her Beauty and the Beast sleeping bag. There wasn’t a single lead in the city for a job that she could tolerate, but at least she had a place to drop on her ass at night.

  Was she being too picky about jobs? Without a doubt. Yet she felt like she had a good enough reason because if she was willing to go through the heartbreaking process of forgetting about Noah and finding herself, she was going to find herself, rather than settle for whatever fell onto her plate. Any old job at a coffee shop would do all right, but she wanted the right fit. Which meant she’d considered every option, each passion that she hadn’t attacked because her mother had her on a one way track to debutante, and she’d come up with…writer.

  All of her stuff had come back from the beach house a couple days ago and unpacking it had been a bitch in a half. Even worse was her held breath as she pawed through her luggage waiting for something, anything to fall out of some secret fold or pocket from Noah. Nothing. Not a single indication that he’d missed her more than he missed his hand after whacking off for too long. There had been one good thing to come out of it—they’d packed up her journal with the rest of her things. And that’s when she’d realized what she wanted to do for the rest of her life, by looking at all the filled pages she’d managed in so little time.

  And that was without the angst. Imagine what was possible with her beating heart being ripped out and enough hatred put in its place to pen nine hundred self-help tomes or several thousand women’s magazine advice columns? All she had to do was pick her first topic. Which, she could do after she cut herself a large slice of cake and made a latte from her coffee maker, the housewarming gift her mother had given her with a snide remark about her sleeping in, now that the assistant wasn’t getting Chloe up at the crack of dawn.

  The last thing she wanted to do was buy her way into a slick job. Not when she didn’t have the resume to get into on her own because she hadn’t picked up her life from the get-go and run like hell in the right direction. What did she want? She wanted to write. How was she going to get it?

  Chloe fired up her laptop and Googled “how to be a writer”…because it wasn’t like they made handbooks for that sort of stuff and even if they did she couldn’t afford them. What she came up with was an insurmountable amount of information. Until she took into account the unlimited amount of coffee in her new coffee machine.

  One all day and all-nighter coming right up.

  A couple hours after dawn had broken across the horizon, Chloe had gravitated from her pillow mound to an uncomfortable corner of the room to stay awake. The coffee had stopped working when she got the shakes around 4 in the morning. And she’d considered never writing another word around four-thirty. But at the end of it all, there might have been a salvageable book, if she did say so herself—which she did, a couple of times. Out loud. While half-chewing stale bagel she’d gotten at half price from the vendor down the street.

  Two or three more days of writing and she might have a working manuscript. Her very first mystery book. Something to send out for a professional edit and polish before she uploaded it to any and all e-book publishers. Maybe with a large backlist she could start paying her mother back for the glorious riches she was currently surrounded with…meaning four walls and a roof. Soon she might even dream to own a beat up, lumpy, ugly couch in crappy shade of beige or puke green.

  * * *

  Noah slapped another brush full of metallic gray paint up on the foyer wall, the silence in the room crackling until he repeated his motions. Polly was across the room stoically doing the same. There hadn’t been much in the way of talk between them over the past few days. She’d come back from her vacation in Maine because she no longer trusted Noah in the house alone—which was insane. It was as if he was a teen who’d been grounded. But he didn’t have much to say for himself either, at least nothing that would get him out of the grave that he’d dug the second Chloe had stepped out the door.

  “You were an idiot, you know,” Polly piped up in a toneless voice. When he glanced over his shoulder she was still painting the walls in even strokes.

  Okay, he could keep his mouth shut and roll with the punches. She needed to get it all out of her system and he wasn’t one to stop “the healing process.” He squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, and concentrated on the wall in front of him.

  “What you did—” she stopped and he waited, barely breathing. “I think she loved you, Noah. She at the very least liked you a little, which isn’t something to brush off as nothing. Little brother, when are you going to get it through your head that you don’t have to destroy good things because you think they’re just going to get broken anyway?”

  His lips thinned and he swallowed, the smell of the paint suddenly suffocating as his nostrils flared, pulse thrumming a million miles a minute.

  “It…wasn’t—”

  “No, stop. If you downgraded whatever you two had going on for my benefit y
ou need to know that shouldn’t have been an acceptable solution.”

  “How—”

  “I said, listen up.” He’d stopped painting completely, the silver dripping in thick drops to the tarp below his feet. There wasn’t a way to look back again, not when he knew his sister’s stare was drilling a hole into the back of his head. Her guru green eyes were probably doing that knowledgeable thing where they lit up, all wise and shit. He ran a hand through his hair and huffed out a large puff of air. There was never a good time for this—but why did it have to be now? “I run a rehab center for relationships, I think I can read yours, okay? You’re not that complex. And what you did, wasn’t okay.”

  Polly took a beat and Noah clenched the paint brush until his fingers cramped. What did she know about anything, they’d only been together since the dawn of time. He wanted to roll his eyes at her prying, wanted to block it out with a lot of hard rock and hard work. Too late now. Once his sister was on a roll there was no stopping her from getting her point across so the best thing for him to do was to open his ears.

  “But I understand why you did it. You panicked. You wanted to get her out of the line of fire as quick as possible, right? There was no thinking about what came spewing out of your mouth, which is remarkable given how long it takes you to formulate anything in that thick skull,” Polly snorted. “You wanted her to be safe. But you also wanted to keep your job.”

  “That’s…the, uh, gist.” He ground out through his teeth, still not finding the idea palatable that he was that easy to read.