He said only, “Wow—I’m sorry.” And she was glad.
Yet, again, any compassion from him surprised her. “Thanks,” she whispered. “But it was a long time ago.”
When she found him looking at her but saying nothing, she began to feel uncomfortable again. Glancing around, she spotted her pants and underwear on the floor near the coffee table, her top strewn a little farther away. “Can I get dressed now?” she asked pointedly.
“Not yet.”
“Why?” In one way, she had been forced to relax a bit, at least compared to how she’d felt a few minutes ago. But in another, she still wanted to get to her car, where she could be alone to cry and scream and maybe bang her hand on the steering wheel a while.
“Just trying to understand what’s going on with you, Ginger.”
She blinked. “What’s going on with me? What does that mean?”
Another head tilt from the wolf. “Just wondering why you get so freaked out over sex.”
It was like he’d just lowered a weight onto her chest. And he was making this sound so simple, and her so backward, as if their sex were . . . normal or something.
Her heart beat harder now, and if she had begun to relax at all, that was a thing of the past. She didn’t want to discuss this. God, she didn’t even want this to be real. And if she talked about it . . . God, that made it real. Something she couldn’t just shove into a mental closet as easily when she left here. Something she couldn’t pretend hadn’t happened just because she was a straitlaced, professional, suit-wearing woman the rest of the time.
Still, she didn’t want to prolong this. And she needed to make this clear to him even if the truth was unpleasant. “This isn’t just sex,” she said, her voice going lower as she spoke. “This is . . . weird sex.”
Again he laughed, the sound rich and deep. “So what? Weird is in the eye of the beholder, Ginger. It’s only weird if you think it’s weird.”
Her eyes opened a little wider. “Well, I think it’s weird.”
The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, and for some reason she remembered the slight scrape of the stubble on his chin across her tender skin. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“And . . . I don’t have sex with people I don’t know.”
His small smile deepened, giving him those little creases at the corners of his eyes that always seemed so much more attractive on men than women. “Oh, I’d say we’re getting to know each other pretty well at this point.”
“Hardly. I asked you one question and you blew it off.”
“You’re more interesting than I am,” he told her easily, adding, “though that’s not the way I meant we’re getting to know each other.” Which, of course, she’d already understood very well but had been ignoring.
“I am?” she asked.
And he said, “You fascinate me, Ginger.”
At this, April simply blinked, twice, trying to digest it, and attempted to keep any emotion from showing on her face. “Are you . . . teasing me?” she finally asked, suddenly feeling nearly as vulnerable as she’d been during the sex.
He looked completely serious as he replied, “No—of course not.”
She just looked at him—then was honest. “I don’t get it.” She shook her head slightly. “There’s nothing special about me.”
Another small, inquisitive head tilt. “I disagree. You’re gorgeous, but you’re so . . . stiff. Buttoned-up. And you’re so fucking responsive—to kissing, fucking, whatever we’re doing at any given time—but at the same time you’re so . . . scared.”
“I’m not scared,” she shot back at him, realizing as soon as the words left her how silly she sounded, like a little kid who’d been given a dare.
So it didn’t surprise her when this produced another round of laughter from the man at the opposite end of the couch. And that’s when he resituated himself, stretching out more, extending his legs alongside hers so that his feet ended up near her elbow. The denim of his jeans pressed against her bare leg beneath the afghan. “You’re scared to death of everything I make you feel, everything I make you want. And you want me to take it. You want me to make you do it.”
Her chest went tight at the words. She knew all that was true, but she thought it harsh, hard to hear. And she blurted out a reply without even weighing it. “I’m not comfortable with wanting a stranger, with . . . giving myself to a stranger.”
After appearing to think that over for a moment, he gave a slight nod, looking appeased. “Okay, I can get that. But . . .”
“But what?”
“But there’s way more going on here than that and you know it.”
She said nothing, having no idea what to say. She knew what he was talking about, but she couldn’t sort out the subtleties in her head.
“You like giving up control,” he said.
And she immediately argued. “I hate giving up control. That’s . . . the problem.” God, she also hated this discussion, hated that he was making her think through all this, making her talk about it.
He pinned her with his gaze. “Seems to me like maybe the lawyer in you hates giving up control, but maybe the sexual you doesn’t mind at all. You were . . .” His voice had deepened, his speech slowed. “You were downright submissive by the time I was spanking you.”
She wasn’t sure if her ass tingled and her breasts suddenly ached because he sounded so aroused or because the reminder excited her, too. She knew only that she grew more uncomfortable with this conversation by the moment. “That’s . . . not how I am,” she claimed. “How I’ve ever been. I . . . I . . .” Have no explanation. And her own voice sounded thicker, heavier to her now.
“But it’s how you want to be with me, and I like it.”
She started to protest, but he clamped a hand around her ankle to stop her and she quieted instantly.
“Once you get past the part about giving in, giving up your precious control, that’s how you want to be with me, and you know it. So don’t argue.”
April just lay there, propped on the throw pillows behind her, looking at him, trying to weigh all this. Had she stopped disputing it because she knew it was true and she couldn’t win? Or because . . . even in this moment, the second he turned a little dominant again, she wanted, deep inside, to submit to him? There had been something so . . . strangely comforting in the midst of all that emotional turmoil during the sex to just, at moments, get his approval, to just be told she was a good girl.
And that’s when it hit her. She’d missed out on so much of that, that feeling of pleasing someone who influenced her, of being coddled, adored, of being someone’s little girl. Even before her parents’ death, she’d always been the oldest one, the responsible one, the one who helped with her sisters and did the chores and kept all the plates of childhood so neatly, perfectly balanced. She could barely remember a time when she’d felt that kind of simple, pleasing approval—and even when she had, there hadn’t been enough because it had been stolen from her too soon.
April continued saying nothing, caught up in her own startling revelation—and feeling like a cliché. She’d always thought she was so mature, that she had it all so very together—when in fact she apparently had her own hidden demons, too, just like most people. The truth was, she’d thought she was above all that, above the mental maladies other people dealt with, above the emotional baggage so many women—like Kayla Gonzalez—carried around. She didn’t like finding out she was wrong.
“You deal with a lot of high-pressure shit on a day-to-day basis, don’t you?” he asked her then.
She weighed the question. Working to defend corporations whose practices were sometimes hard to support—in a court of law and even in her own head? Doing pro bono work on the side for women who were usually deeply troubled in one way or another? Taking care of Gram with little help? Taking care of two sisters who were both old enough to take care of themselves but often couldn’t? Yeah, she guessed that would qualify as high-pressure shit. “I suppose.”
>
Now he began lightly rubbing her ankle, replacing the tight grip of a moment ago with the mere graze of his fingertips, up and back, up and back. The gentle touch seemed to reach all the way up her leg and to her pussy.
“Tell me,” he said.
About the pressure, he meant. And one part of her wanted to refuse—since, after all, he’d told her nothing and she owed him nothing. But another part of her—that strange, foreign, docile part he’d just uncovered a little while ago—felt . . . almost obligated to respond to his quiet command.
She bit her lip, thinking through it. “Well, corporate law is pretty high-pressure by nature because the stakes are always big. Financially. And even in terms of people keeping their jobs, companies staying afloat. So the outcome counts. And it comes with a lot of long hours. Plus I do some pro bono work, like for Kayla Gonzalez.
“And then there’s my Gram—she doesn’t get around very well anymore, and a lot of her care falls to me. And sometimes my sister Allison needs help with her toddlers—she’s not a bad person, but she can be flighty and maybe a little self-centered. And my youngest sister, Amber, lives with me—she’s a budding artist without much of a real job, and she’s very into dating and socializing right now, so she’s not a lot of help with things.”
“Wait a minute,” Rogan said. “The part about your job and your grandma, I understand. But your sisters. They’re both grown-ups, right?”
She nodded. “Amber is twenty-five and Allison is twenty-nine.”
“Um, then I think they’re old enough to take care of themselves. And their kids. And to pull their own weight.”
She shrugged, trying to be light about it. “Well, just because they’re old enough to doesn’t mean they do.”
“Not if you do everything for them, no. I mean, I don’t know you well enough to know the situation, but I do know it’s not right when all the responsibility falls to one person. Maybe you should seriously consider not coming to their rescue so much, you know?”
Hmm. How did he know it was like that—that she came to their rescue all the time? Was it that obvious even with the very few facts she’d given him? And the truth was . . . “I try to, sometimes, but it’s difficult. When they need my help and I have the ability to give it, it’s hard to say no. It’s hard when you feel like the parent, and like . . .” She stopped, sighed. “Like maybe you didn’t do a good enough job.”
“But being the parent wasn’t your job.”
She knew that, of course. “But it’s not their fault they ended up without a mom and dad.” And she still wasn’t completely comfortable discussing this, but . . . well, if I can have that kind of sex with the guy, surely I can also . . . put myself out there with him a little. “I’m the oldest,” she went on, “so when my parents died, that made me the head of the family. Someone had to take on the role, like it or not. And no, it wasn’t easy. I . . . feel like I lost most of my youth to it, and I probably missed out on a lot of the fun things teenage girls get to do. But those are the cards life dealt me—to look out for my sisters and be there for them when no one else was. And so . . . if they can’t face life responsibly, I have to help them.”
“What if you didn’t?” he asked.
And, oddly, it was something she’d seldom thought about. In random moments of frustration perhaps, but not seriously. So now she did. “I . . . I don’t know. But I guess the end result is . . . their lives would become harder. And so . . . they ultimately wouldn’t be happy. And I value their happiness.”
“More than your own?”
God, how had this happened? How had he become so enmeshed in her personal life in less than two minutes? You let him. By answering his questions. By wanting to please him by doing so. Ugh, that was so weird. “I don’t know,” she said, thinking the question over, and again answering honestly. “Maybe.”
When he next spoke, his voice came out surprisingly gentle. “That’s why you like it, April.”
“Huh?” she mumbled absently. Because he’d continued rubbing her ankle, all this time. And it felt so softly, sweetly good. It somehow made her feel . . . appreciated. Cared for. Valued. And maybe even a little bit adored, though possibly that was taking it too far.
“That’s why you like giving up control to me when you let yourself,” he explained, still gliding his fingers ever so lightly back and forth, back and forth. “You spend the rest of your time taking care of other people, making big decisions, having everybody turn to you to handle everything. But with me, you’re able to just let go, not think, let me make the decisions, let me take care of it all and make you feel good.” His voice got deeper for the last part and she felt the words as much as heard them, squarely between her thighs.
And she’d read about that, of course, or maybe seen something on TV about it. In particular, she recalled a cable news story about high-level executive men who wanted dominatrices to treat them like babies or small, misbehaving children—and it seemed to her there’d been other examples that sounded equally freaky and disgusting to her.
And yet . . . she supposed this made perfect sense.
Which turned her into an even bigger cliché.
“I’m a cliché,” she murmured softly, a bit dumbfounded. “I’m . . . I’m a classic case for any wannabe psychologist. How did I miss this? How did I not see it?” She shook her head. The realization made her feel small. “I always thought I was . . . so much more.”
“You are more,” he told her, sounding so amazingly sure that, even coming from this man she didn’t know very well, it restored a bit of her confidence. “It’s only one tiny piece of you. It’s just the part of you that needs to be taken care of a little, the same way you take care of everybody else in your life. You don’t have to let it diminish you, babe.”
God, he sounded so smart suddenly. Like he’d thought this through. And understood it much better than she did. She usually felt so . . . pigeonholed by people she met. They saw her as the practical, responsible, no-nonsense attorney. Or the woman who had been hardened by losing her parents in adolescence. Seldom, this quickly, did she feel anyone new in her life looking beyond those simple facts about her. Maybe there was more to him than she’d begun to think—even if the afghan she lay beneath had only come from a random neighbor.
And since he was so smart, she did the next obvious-seeming thing at the moment, asking him, “So what am I supposed to do about it?”
At this, his fingers stilled on her ankle, and he slid his warm palm slowly up the inside of her calf as his dark eyes widened seductively, knowingly, on her. “You let me keep taking care of you. Like I did tonight.”
She bit her lower lip, appalled and . . . so bizarrely, strangely tempted that she barely recognized her own mind. It suddenly felt difficult to be comfortable within her own brain. “I . . . don’t know if I can,” she told him. She wasn’t even exactly fighting him—but again, he kept drawing honesty from her, even when she wasn’t sure it was in her best interest.
But he only replied, “I know you can. I know you want to.”
She drew in a shaky breath, let it back out. And again found herself stumped on how to reply. Another strange feeling. She was a strong, sturdy, professional woman. She knew how to have conversations with people. She was seldom stuck for a response. Except with Rogan Wolfe.
When he suddenly lifted his legs over her and stood up from the couch, it took her aback. Were they done here? Just like that? Could she finally get dressed? She simply didn’t know how these games worked. Or if . . . they were really games.
The small purse she’d carried in with her had fallen forgotten by the front door, but now she watched as Rogan picked it up and brought it back to the couch. Handing it down to her, he said, “Get out your phone.”
And again, like some unorthodox robot version of herself, she did as he instructed.
He took the phone from her hand without asking, and when he sat back down at the end of the couch and began pushing buttons, she said, “What are you doing?”<
br />
“Putting my number in.”
Oh. Okay. That wasn’t terrible at this point, she supposed.
But then a moment later a different cell phone rang and her eyes were drawn to the coffee table, where his own had lain unnoticed all this time. When he scooped it up and took a glance, she caught sight of her own cell number on the screen. He’d called himself from her phone to get it—probably knowing she’d still be hesitant to supply it willingly. And despite everything they’d done together now, she wasn’t at all sure how she felt about him having it. Her having his number was one thing—but him having hers was another.
After pushing a few buttons on his phone, he said, “There. Now we can get in touch with each other.” Then he glanced her way. “If you want me, honey, just call me. Anytime. And if you don’t, well . . . I know when I want you, and when I let you know, you’ll come to me.”
Chapter 11
Like before, she suffered that same strange, almost numb feeling from earlier, during foreplay and sex. Even if she thought foreplay sounded like far too light and simple a term for the things they’d been doing. She felt acquiescent and light-headed, almost like being drunk. On him. It was as if the mere words he’d just spoken had turned her that way.
She couldn’t answer. But that meant no denial or protest just as much as it meant no agreement. She simply lay there, taking it in—and wondering if it was true. Would she come back to him if he beckoned? Had he brainwashed her somehow? She knew he really hadn’t, of course, but she still couldn’t understand the bizarre urge to please him, to obey him, that kept coming over her.
“You can go now,” he told her.
And it was like . . . class being dismissed. Like someone with authority over her had just released her, restored the freedom she’d temporarily surrendered. And, like the puppet she seemed to have become for him tonight, only now did she sit up, holding the afghan over her chest, to begin looking for her clothes.
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