by Angel Payne
And fuming as Dante lifted a slow smile.
He knew. He just knew, didn’t he? He could see her thoughts, knowing that every moment of Friday night flooded back to her in a dizzy rush.
She stumbled backward and grabbed for the curtains. Like that helped. The room turned into a fun house anyway, tilting wildly on her. She tottered again, feeling ridiculous as a clown in that fun house. Guess that was what fury and exhilaration did when they hit like taunting squirt gun blasts.
Her mortification doubled when he closed the gap between them in three strides. “Easy, cara.” He braced her arms like she weighed no more than a feather. “You okay?”
“Easy.” She threw it back from tight teeth. “Easy? You’re daring to use that word on me right now? Really?” She squirmed, but he didn’t let go. She swung out a glare at both her friends. “Don’t either of you even think about some half-baked apology right now!”
“Who says we’re sorry?” Eve countered.
A giggle—a giggle!—spilled from Reiley, who hadn’t even left the elevator. She adopted a coy pose, holding the button to keep the doors open. “I’m just sorry we’re the ones who have to go.”
Celina ripped a stare between both of them. “Ohhh no! Wait a second! You guys aren’t—”
“They’ll be right up the street, stellina.”
Eve nodded. “Trev’s party is actually at Muldoon’s. It’s right around the corner. We’re a phone call away. Honest.”
Celina huffed. “‘Honest’ isn’t working so well for you right now.”
“And ‘denial’ hasn’t been working great for you this whole week, Cel.” Damn it, the little redhead pulled out her I’m-right-and-you-know-it stance. “He wouldn’t have had to resort to this if you’d just returned a phone call.”
“Thank you,” Dante murmured.
“Shut up,” Celina snapped.
“Damn it, Cel.” Her friend added a glower to the pose. “Why don’t you give him a chance?”
Celina dropped her head. She refused to let them all see the conflict that was certainly twisting its way across her face. Because I gave him a chance already. In a moment of hormones, pheromones, and crazy, I gave him way more than a chance. And I liked it. No, I loved it. And I can’t love it again. I can’t let him in again. I’m not a key acquisition for Dante Tieri’s relationship portfolio!
He dissolved the diatribe with his next words, given in a low, sincere tone. “One hour.” He slid his grip down to her hands. “Celina. Cara. Sixty minutes is all this will take. After that”—he nodded toward Eve and Reiley—“you’ll call your friends, if you want to.”
“What do you mean, if I want to?” She snapped another glare as Eve stepped back to the elevator. “Would you two stop laughing?”
Reiley tossed her hair over one shoulder and waved with her fingertips. “Mr. Tieri? If she turns down the request, I’m available.”
Eve high-fived her for that, but Dante acknowledged it with only half a smile. The focus of his gaze and the pressure of his grip never veered from Celina. Both intensified as he stated, “It’s not a request.”
* * * *
What the hell was this place?
She’d wondered it at least twelve times as Dante guided her, one hand at her back, out of the lobby and down an equally plush hallway. The lighting on the corridor had been even more evocative than the entry, broken only by little spotlights that illuminated graphic prints on the wall. Each picture depicted a pair of hands joined together—simple, right?—only the photographer had captured a passion in the clasps that was captivating, arousing.
Terrifying.
She struggled to shove the word out of her head as they entered a small sitting room populated with a soft black leather couch, a huge matching easy chair, and a kitchenette area. There was another door on the opposite wall, next to the chair. No hands tangling on the walls here. The large print hanging over the couch went straight for a close-up of locked thighs. One set was smooth, the other muscled and rough. And the positioning made her think of—
Things she couldn’t be thinking of in a room alone with him.
“Your sixty minutes is now fifty.” She lowered to the couch, purposely getting the wall print behind her.
Dante went for the big chair. Without a break in his movement, he pulled her across, then down into his lap. “Fifty-six, actually.” He showed her the timer on his watch. “I’m a man of my word, stellina mia.”
She winced. “You need to stop calling me that.”
“Why? ‘My little star.’ It fits.”
“Really? And how many other women have you made it ‘fit’?”
Though that strange smile hadn’t left his lips, his gaze gained a velvet thickness. “Only you.”
She drew breath to push out a scoff. He silenced it with two fingers on her lips.
“When I first saw you, I thought you looked like a goddess from one of my grandfather’s mythology books.” His fingers drifted across her cheek, trailing soft heat across her skin. “Then when I learned your name…Celina…” He gave it an Italian twist that was entirely too sexy, accenting the first syllable like cheh. “Well, it’s perfect. She was one of the daughters of Atlas, you know. She was transformed into a star of the Pleiades by Zeus.”
“Uh-huh.” Celina murmured it gently, but managed to get her brows into mocking arches. “Right after they killed themselves.”
“Okay, there was that.” He moved his touch from her cheek to the skin in front of her ear. “Proving the axiom that death can, in rare instances, be a turn for the good.”
She spit out a laugh. What alternative had he given her? “Dear God. And I thought Greek men were morbid!”
“Death is just a transformation, Celina. Change. And change is often good for you.” He delved his hand to her nape now, tightening his fingers to her scalp, a physical command for her full attention. “Sometimes very good.”
Breathing. It was supposed to be involuntary, right? Then why did she have to cue her lungs to the act as he pulled her even closer, making her take in the glittering heat in his gaze and the determined set of his Roman lips? Do it. Take in air. Stay alive so you don’t die like this, in the arms of a billionaire player who doesn’t really care about you, who only wants the conquest of you.
“Y-you kidnapped me to tell me this?”
He didn’t blink. As he spoke again, his lips barely moved. “What we shared on Friday night changed me, Celina. And I’ll bet you’ve thinking about a few new things too.”
She closed her eyes. It was her only recourse against the consuming nearness of him. His arms were so steady, so sure. His breath had a hint of brandy to it. She wondered if his lips tasted just as delicious…
“Dante, please. It—Friday—was nice. But—”
“Nice.” He deepened the touch at her waist. “What part of it was nice?
She swallowed. Like that helped. “You seriously want a debrief?”
“Stop evading.” Both his grips twisted hard now, and her pulse doubled. “Answer me.” He shifted, nearly becoming a dark shell around her. “Have you ever let a man do that to you before? Put his hand on your ass and spank it into that beautiful shade of red?”
She sighed as his breath fanned her neck, as her mind slipped deeper into the tunnel of his presence, his power. She couldn’t do this. She shouldn’t be here. He was everything she didn’t need, everything that screamed wrong.
But everything that felt so right.
“N-no.” It spilled out in a whisper. “You were the first.”
When he smiled like she’d given him a precious gift, her body flooded with warmth. She longed for him to kiss her, but he looked like he had more to say. A lot more.
“I’ve never done that before either.”
She blinked past the flash bomb of shock. “Excuse me? You’re kidding, right?”
He let out a heavy sigh. “We’ll get into your strange preconceptions of me later. For now, you need to roll with that as the truth.”
He dipped his head toward her again, turning his body into a cavern of sheer possession. “I liked spanking you, Celina. I liked it a lot. And I know you liked it too.”
She felt him leaning her back a little more, easing her neck against the chair’s wide arm. The erotic print on the wall teased from her peripheral. “Y-yes,” she admitted. “I liked it.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He started trailing soft caresses between her hip and rib cage. “And I thought I was going out of my mind at first. I thought I’d become some kind of abusive freak. But remembering how you reacted to me, how you came alive with it—it felt significant for both of us. Then I’d swing back the other way, assuming you couldn’t possibly be on that same seesaw…and terrified of what you likely were thinking instead.”
She had to remind herself to breathe again. “You were really scared?”
“You mean the stalker calls and texts didn’t clue you in?” His touch became a gentle massage at the side of her breast. His stare gained a hundred more fathoms of dark indigo intensity. “Fortunately, a friend caught me before I resorted to camping on your doorstep. He set me straight about a number of things, actually. Turns out I’m not a freak after all.” He dipped even closer, nearly grazing her lips with his. “I’m a Dominant.”
The way he spoke that last word, like wanting to try it on her for size, zapped Celina’s nervous system with a swarm of impulses. Run. Stay. Slap him. Hold him. Get out of the rabbit hole. Now.
“Congratulations,” she muttered. “S-so what does that make me?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
“Excuse me?” Her new version of the phrase came spiked with a little amazement and a lot of alarm. She lifted her head, taking in the surroundings with fresh understanding. The lighting. The music. The artwork. Most of all, the focused purpose he hadn’t let up on since she got here.
I’m a Dominant.
It wasn’t like she’d never heard the word before, even as a noun. She had three brothers, for freak’s sake. Three big, horny, slightly more than passionate brothers. She’d gotten good at translating their “guy code” over the years. So she knew “Dominant” and even “submissive.” But those words—and places like this that went along with them—belonged in the world of Dylan, Nik, and Cameron, not her. Not to the point that she’d sleep with said Dominant again. Not the point that she’d willingly stand in a room with him a second longer.
“No way.” She shoved from him and bolted to her feet. “No, Dante. This isn’t going to happen, okay?”
He rose with the grace of a damn devil lord from one of her teenage romance novels. Just as smoothly, he glanced at his watch. “You still owe me forty-two minutes.”
“So we’re going to use the time constructively, is that it? I’ll bet that door leads to a nice little kink den where you’ve got rope and a row of paddles waiting. You got me here to ‘illuminate’ me about my submissiveness, right?”
The devil lord exterior hid the reflexes of a fox. Within seconds, he regained the space between them and coiled a python grip around her arm. “At this point, I wish I really could take you anywhere and paddle you. Would you open your mind for one damn minute?” He hauled her close, nearly against his chest. “I’ve been through a little bit more of life than you, Celina. Maybe that doesn’t take precedence in a bunch of the tidy little categories in your code book of the world, but it does here.” He grabbed her other arm. “What we have, what we’ve found in each other, it doesn’t fall off the universe’s tree every day, cara. And yes, that scared the shit out of me at first. I thought I’d taken this connection to you, something I hadn’t had with a woman in so damn long, then severed it by unleashing some strange, horrific animal.”
He wasn’t joking. Not a bit. The realization pulled her hands up to his chest. “You’re not an animal. Well, not a horrific one.”
“But you reacted the same way too.” He gently lifted her chin. “Didn’t you?”
Celina wet her lips. “It doesn’t matter, okay? It happened, and now it’s over—”
“And you’re lying.” He thumbed away the two tears that seeped and betrayed her. Oh, hell. This was such a bad idea. She’d practically seen the quiver of emotional arrows he carried from the second he’d appeared in the lobby, each of them dipped in the vat of memories from Friday, acting like acid on the bricks of her willpower. “It still matters to you as much as it matters to me. And you want to know that you’re not a freak either.” He dipped his face and kissed the rest of the moistness off her cheek. “You’re not, stellina. Not ever with me.” He took her lips too, brushing them in a sweet caress. “What you gave me on Friday, stripping off your goddess, giving yourself to me as the pure woman you are… It was beautiful. Amazing.”
She felt her walls starting to dissolve beneath the onslaught of his seduction. A ragged sigh spilled from her. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you…”
She tipped her face up, craving for him to kiss her more deeply, but he left her drowning in that desire, pulling back with an intent set to his jaw. “Come.” He tugged on both her hands, leading her toward the room’s second door. “There’s something in here that we both need to see, to discover. Together.”
Celina resisted. “Dante, I don’t think—”
“I don’t want you to think.” He stopped, turned, and lifted one hand to her sternum. “Not right now. I’m not asking for anything from you in here than your openness. To observe. To absorb. To feel with all the reaches of your heart. I’m asking for your courage, stellina, and your trust. Can you commit those to me just for forty-two more minutes?”
She dragged in a hard breath. Another. She was certain he could feel her trepidation, pounding like a Chippewa tribe on the warpath, right through her skin. But she was also certain, as their stares met and locked, that he saw the answer brimming on her lips. The word she’d been so determined not to give him. Damn it, the rabbit hole was already rising up and sucking her down to an end that would collapse like a house of cards and a voice—her own—screaming “off with her head!”
Still, she swayed toward him. She looked at every perfect demon-god line of his face, fixed on her with a potency she’d never experienced before, pulling her like every beautiful Lucifer that Dylan had warned her about when she’d hit puberty. She’d been so good about resisting “those” kind of men, until now. Until a hurricane hit to her senses, named Dante Tieri. Dylan had never prepared her for someone like him.
And she had no will left to fight.
“Yes.” She gave it to him in a clear, sure voice. “All right. You’re right. I owe you at least forty-two minutes.”
“Us,” he clarified. “You owe it to us, Celina.”
She showed him her opinion of that with a massive eye roll.
Then let him turn and open the door—into a room that made her stare do anything but roll.
Holy shit. What had she gotten herself into?
Chapter Nine
Dante had seen the playroom when he first got here, when Mark gave him a tour of the club—but the sight of the space now, with the lights lowered and the equipment in place, put it into new perspective even for him. The black walls had subtle lighting aimed at them in flesh-colored tones. The only other light came from a few pin spotlights in the ceiling, gelled in red and purple. Those lights were aimed at several pieces of furniture: a double-level bench, a large-frame truss lined with hooks, and a leather swing hanging from another truss that resembled the skeleton for a tepee. Mounted along one wall was a large black steel rack, which had been empty during the tour but now displayed an array of long paddles, leather floggers, and other implements of sensual promise. Dante concluded those must be the contents of the bag Mark had brought with him, then had dropped in front of the rack during the tour.
As he expected, Celina took two steps in—then gasped and froze.
As he also expected, everything between his hips ignited. His cock was the burning branch that led the way.<
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He had to ignore both those factors right now. Fuck.
Celina wrenched her hands from him and whirled for the door. He was ready for that too, and snatched her back by one wrist.
She practically hissed back like a soaked cat. “Damn it, I said this wasn’t happening!”
He kept his reply regulated. “And I didn’t argue. I’m a man of my word, stellina.”
She rocked back on one foot. “Really, now?”
“None of this is for you.”
He watched her reaction carefully. Though she covered it fast, there was a flash of surprise, then disappointment. That masquerade took so much effort, she forgot to avert the open stare she gave everything in the room…more than once. Dante took a deep breath to keep his own features schooled and his hard-on in check. The first was simple, the second sheer hell. Okay, she was curious. That was encouraging, but a long way from wanting to rush in and try everything. He still had to be prepared for what she might do at the evening’s next turn of events.
Like his thought had summoned the event, the door on the far side of the playroom opened. Mark filled the doorway, then entered on a confident stride. He was dressed identical to Dante from the waist down, though his torso was encased differently. He wore a simple gray fitted tank, and black leather gauntlets encased his muscled arms from wrist to elbow. His gaze glittered like the gold of King Tut’s tomb, and an equally pagan grin parted his gold beard.
In short, he dripped with the essence of an entirely different person than the guy Dante usually knew as his best friend.
“Shit.” His stunned mutter was due to more than just the wardrobe change, even more than the “Master Mark” who’d unveiled himself during their conversation at Delilah’s on Thursday. Dante still couldn’t believe where that casual meeting had gone. He’d learned more about his friend in one hour than he had in the previous three years. Amazing, eye-opening stuff that had helped him learn and accept a huge part of himself in the process. He’d heard about Mark’s own discovery of his Dominant side, followed by the blessing of meeting and marrying Heather. He’d also watched his friend get out the difficult truth of how it had felt after she’d died, how he hadn’t even tried seeking a new submissive, for he’d basically concluded such a miracle was impossible. Then he’d watched new life burst onto Mark’s face when he began talking about Rose.