by BETH KERY
“I have enough money set aside to get me through the stage. If you pay me a salary until my training begins, I can stretch what I have to make it work.”
He gave her a droll glance, his gaze sticking on the vision of her reddened cheeks and lips. No, it was not his lustful imagination. Little Elise Martin had been aroused by her punishment. Very aroused. It was going to be such a pleasure, training her to his hand. His cock throbbed next to his thigh, as if in protest at being ignored. It only added to the boiling brew of emotion he experienced. He turned away from the intoxicating sight of her, worried that if he inhaled in such close proximity, he might catch her scent. He would snap then, for certain.
“Your papa would not see you starve,” he said sardonically, moving around his desk.
“No. But I would starve myself before slithering back to him for another handout.”
He lowered to his chair, glad the desk blocked his still primed arousal. He found her quiet conviction appealing. Elise had what it took to make a success of whatever she attempted. It was her doubt in her strength, determination, and perseverance—in herself—that was her demon. Whether she could conquer that demon or not, Lucien was unsure.
He forced his mind to the practicalities at hand.
“I’ll have Sharon bring you a job application. I’ll have a contract drawn up for you as an interim chef. Saturday is market day,” he said, picking up an invoice and studying it. “Since you’re so adroit at driving a race car, I assume you can drive a four-wheel-drive truck?”
He glanced up when she didn’t immediately reply. “You might have heard how much I value locally grown food in my restaurants. I want the freshest, most pristine, locally grown ingredients. It’s one of my chef’s duties to shop for the items he or she needs for the week at a farmers’ market. There is more to being a chef than just cooking, Elise,” he added when she continued to look amazed.
“Of course. I know how important marketing is,” she said defensively.
He nodded. “But being new in town—in the country, for that matter—I’m sure you’ll need some guidance through the process. Usually Javier or Evan will go with you to assist, but this Saturday, I will. We should get there early to get the best produce. Can you be ready by six?”
“Yes.”
He studied her through a narrowed gaze, sensing her bewilderment. Good. She’d been throwing him off balance since her arrival last night. It was about time she looked a little tongue-tied. “I’ll need your address in order to pick you up.”
“I’ll just meet you near the market if you tell me where,” she said breathlessly.
He designated an intersection in the Gold Coast neighborhood for them to meet.
“I will set up medical exams for both of us tomorrow,” he said.
“Medical exams?”
“Yes,” he said calmly. “We should both know we are safe for sexual interaction. I know that I am, but I want to assure you of the same. Are you on birth control?” he asked levelly.
She nodded.
“Good. In the meantime . . .”
“Yes, darling?” she prodded when he faded off.
His gaze flashed to meet hers. Darling. The word sounded completely contrived, frequently practiced, and yet . . . undoubtedly alluring uttered from her flushed, ripe lips. Damn her. Always turning the tables. She waited, just a hint of amusement shining in her eyes.
“You are my employee. We’ll keep our distance from each other, for the time being.”
Her eyes widened in angry disbelief.
“You were the one who begged for the job,” he reminded her mildly.
“But that has nothing to do with—”
“It does,” he said sharply, shooting her a challenging look. “Remember? My rules? We’ll go at my pace, or you’ll feel a consequence.”
Her hand flickered to the side of her bottom, as if she’d suddenly re-experienced the sting of his hand. He scowled; his cock lurched.
“Elise?” he prompted, waiting for her agreement.
“Oh, fine,” she muttered, giving him a mutinous glance before she started for the door.
“One more thing.”
She turned her chin over her shoulder, meeting his stare.
“Don’t ever call me darling again,” he growled softly. “I’m not one of your panting, disposable boy toys. I’m not even remotely the same animal.”
He saw her throat convulse as she swallowed.
As he watched her scurry out of his office, his cock throbbing furiously, his emotional state raw, he wondered whether he’d just untied the first knot in his sack, or tied off and tightened the monster of them all.
Later that evening, Lucien stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his sixty-second-floor penthouse onto a gray, brooding Lake Michigan, holding a snifter of cognac in his hand. Originally, he hadn’t planned to be alone tonight. He’d had a date following his match. He’d planned to spend the evening as he traditionally spent time after a polo match.
But then today had occurred. Then Elise had happened. And here he was, alone with a mess of unfinished business, a headful of doubt, and a hard-on that would not remit, no matter how much he distracted himself.
They had won the match tonight, despite his fierce Argentinian-bred polo pony’s fouls. His teammates had joked that no one could handle Jax save Lucien, but it wasn’t his horse that had been an unruly beast this afternoon. It’d been Lucien. Jax had just caught his surly mood and become too aggressive in his defensive bumps of other players, incurring fouls.
His temper had been unregulated when he was a child and young man. He’d learned control beneath the hand of an older lover at the age of eighteen. Natalia had sensed his need to master his emotions and desires and had tutored him in BDSM sex, Natalia typically taking the role of master in the bedroom. It hadn’t taken long for Lucien’s dominant nature to assert itself, however, and the couple had decided to amicably part ways. Lucien would forever be thankful to Natalia for teaching him the value of control. At thirty-one, he didn’t consider himself to be a hard-core dominant, and didn’t require it in order to have satisfactory sex with casual lovers. When it came to Elise, however, he sensed the importance of immediately asserting his role as the sexual dominant. It would be such a pleasure to dominate her, but he intuited that it was important to Elise. She needed to learn the power of not only self-control but of relinquishing control to another.
She needed to learn to trust. He needed her to put his trust in him. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to ask it of her, given her history of fragile, impermanent connections, but he wanted it nonetheless.
How could he expect Elise to trust him when he harbored seeds of doubt about his very identity . . . about the fundamental rightness of his existence?
Don’t think about that. It will get you nowhere but the bottom of a black pit of despair, he told himself irritably. What he’d told Ian Noble earlier had been true. A man chose his fate of his own free will. Lucien understood that he was more secure in that knowledge than Ian.
Still . . . the taint lingered; it’s legacy a haunting self-doubt that Lucien absolutely refused to let overcome him.
He forced his brain back onto the memory of the match this afternoon. Despite his typical discipline, he had allowed his foul mood—not to mention his high and dry state—to get the better of him during the polo match, and that rankled at him.
He was as horny as a servicing bull. He’d been heavy and aching all afternoon—ever since he’d punished Elise. Pounding in the saddle during the match had only magnified the tight, uncomfortable pressure in his balls. The memory of Elise bending over his desk, of warming the satiny smooth skin of her bare ass with his slapping hand, plagued him.
He always got worked up after a match, granted. It’d become a tradition for him since he’d first started playing polo as a teenager to have sex after time spent in the saddle. The aggressive, intense game had always primed him for play with a woman.
But tonight was unprecedented
in his experience. He was coiled tight with sexual energy, but for once he had nowhere to spend his tension. He cupped his heavy balls through his pants and slid his hand along the rigid length of his shaft.
Lust rode him ruthlessly in that moment. The memory of Elise did. With an inevitable sense of resignation, he set down the snifter and walked to his bedroom suite. His fingers moved fleetly over his shirt buttons. Instead of removing the garment all the way, he merely opened the sides wide, baring his chest and belly. In the bedside drawer, he found a bottle of lubricant. He unfastened and lowered his pants, scooping his erection out from the confines of his boxer briefs, shoving the elasticized band beneath his heavy balls.
God he ached.
Hastily, he poured some of the lubrication into his hand and rubbed the silky liquid onto his straining cock. He clamped his eyelids closed at the friction against overly sensitive flesh. He let go of restraint, and the floodgates of fantasy opened. Parting his legs and finding a stable stance, he gave in to primal lust, jacking his cock with a combination of precision and forceful, savage abandon.
What would it be like, to see Elise’s dark pink, lush lips stretched around his girth, to see his straining cock plunging into her tight, humid depths while she looked up at him, the rebellion in her eyes trumped by desire, her gaze giving him permission to use and debauch her a little. Sweet, beautiful Elise . . .
Her eyes had always slain him.
He stood there before the floor-to-ceiling window and pounded the staff of his cock. His eyelids flickered open. The golden glow from the lamp provided a blurry reflection of his image. His chest and abdomen muscles flexed tight and hard, his cock looking enormous in his pumping hand.
But he was alone.
The image of Elise’s shining, sapphire eyes as she’d turned and reached for his pants earlier in his office rose to haunt him.
He paused, prickly and edgy with unsatisfied lust. His hand wasn’t what he wanted, but it was all he had. He would not jump into the flames with Elise immediately and wholesale. She would burn him to a husk.
He resumed jacking himself, groaning in undeniable pleasure. Masturbation, when all he wanted was to fuck Elise without mercy until he felt her shudders of pleasure and submission vibrate into his flesh.
Damn those bright eyes, the pink lips, the tight, lush curves that fit his hand perfectly. She lit up a room when she walked into it. She was so small, but so perfect. Her pussy would fit him like a second skin. To restrain her would be so satisfying. He would punish her for weakening him and then take her relentlessly, spend himself . . . empty himself of this tight, ball-aching, plaguing desire.
Leap into her flame and gloriously burn.
He grunted gutturally as warm semen spurted onto his lower chest, his climax so sharp it verged on pain. He pumped without mercy, milking every drop, ruthless in ridding himself of this unbearable tension.
His body shuddered one final time, his fist slowing on the shaft of his pulsing cock. Still panting, he cracked open his eyelids. From the reflection in the floor-to-ceiling window, he saw that his chest and belly glistened from his abundant emissions.
He wished he could have given it all to her.
Impossibly, desire tickled at his balls and moist shaft.
“Damn you, Elise,” he muttered thickly, annoyed by his insatiable lust.
A heavy sense of the inevitable settled upon him as he used several tissues to mop himself dry. He stood next to the windows and stared out at the descending night.
It was not an option, for him to be at her mercy. She was too skilled at playing a man, too perfectly suited to Lucien’s lust. She was an unacceptable risk. An infuriating temptation. An undeniable delight.
No. He wouldn’t deny himself. Not this time.
The sun was just rising over the lake when Elise got off the bus on inner Lake Shore Drive and started walking west on Division Street. The slow ascent of the fiery orb seemed to match the inevitable rise of her anxiety as she neared State and Division . . . and Lucien. She’d seen little of him over the past few days as she was absorbed with her duties, and was nervous at the idea of spending one on one time with him. If only he’d suggested she go with Evan or Javier, she might have been able to disguise her relative ignorance on the topic of marketing. As things stood, she was bound to make a fool of herself in front of Lucien.
She sensed him watching her from where he stood beneath a storefront awning, sipping a cup of coffee.
“Good morning,” he said when she approached. His gray eyes looked especially light in the shadow of the awning. They lowered over her appreciatively.
“Hello,” she returned, feeling a little shy beneath his warm stare. He looked very sexy in a pair of well-fitted jeans and a dark red T-shirt that showed off a lean, muscular torso and powerful arms to eye-catching effect. The casual apparel had the effect of making him seem a tad more approachable but every bit as appealing, reminding Elise of a sexy rock star instead of his typical businessman persona.
His T-shirt was partially tucked in to his jeans in the front, revealing a thick black leather belt with silver buckle that rode low on his lean hips. She belatedly realized he was handing her a cup of coffee. Her cheeks heated. She’d been caught in the act of staring at his thighs and the way his jeans cupped his sex.
“Thank you,” she murmured, grateful for the coffee at such an early hour. She immediately took a drink. Her eyes widened in pleasure.
“Café crème,” she said, grinning. “You even remembered how I take it.”
His smile made something hitch in her chest. “I remembered that you took it practically with equal parts coffee, cream, and sugar as a girl. Do you really still like it that sweet?” he teased.
She took another sip, her sigh of satisfaction his answer. He chuckled and put his hand on her elbow, urging her to walk.
“Did the cab drop you off in the wrong place?” he asked as they made their way toward the bustling outdoor market.
“What? Oh, no,” she said, realizing he’d probably seen her walking toward him from blocks away. “I took the bus.”
He blinked. “The bus?”
She dug into the pocket of her small backpack and pulled out a card. “My CTA pass. Do you have any idea how convenient these things are? Between buses and the L, I can go anywhere in Chicago,” she said, the amazement in her voice genuine. Learning to navigate around had been an oddly liberating experience for her, invigorating, to jump onto a vehicle and blend anonymously with the vibrant flow of humanity, to become a single cell in the lifeblood of the city.
His eyes gleamed in amusement. “You hold it up like it’s a badge of honor.”
“It is.”
“Étoile would make quite the headline out of that,” he murmured, referring to the French tabloid she hated with a white-hot passion for sensationalizing her life and using it as fodder to sell papers. “Fair-Haired Heiress Caught Slumming It,” he quoted an imagined headline.
“Screw Étoile,” she said succinctly. She hitched her chin at the crowd of people bustling around them, intent on their marketing in the early morning light. “I’m willing to bet they don’t even know what Étoile is, and nor would they care. They could care less about who my father is. They’ve never gobbled up the slop about my supposed love life. Most of them wouldn’t remember my mother’s movies—”
“Or have ever heard of my father’s name, let alone his crimes.”
She came to a halt, startled that he’d mentioned his father. He paused as well and touched her cheek, as if to erase her amazed expression. Her breath caught at the unexpected, tender caress. His fingertips lingered, warm and firm against her skin.
“We are both fugitives here, I think,” he murmured.
“I prefer to think of myself as an adventurer,” she replied in a hushed tone. His flashing smile was like an injection of adrenaline straight into one of her veins.
“You look beautiful,” he murmured, his gaze lowering over the floral sundress she’d donn
ed for the warm summer day.
“Thank you, but I’d rather just look like a chef.”
“An adventuresome chef?” he asked, looking amused and . . . warm. She smiled, fully enthralled.
The delicate, charmed moment fractured when he begun to dig in his jeans pocket, the motion distracting her. He withdrew a wad of bills and handed them to her. “Just get a receipt for whatever you purchase, please.”
She nodded, eyeing the money with an appreciation she hadn’t possessed for most of her life. It took not having something to really get the value of it. She’d learned that much in the past year.
She tucked the money carefully away in her backpack and they continued walking, Elise staring with interest at the colorful vegetables and fruits and smiling at the vendors, suddenly feeling like a kid in a candy store. The smell of wild onion entered her nose, then a delectable, sweet fragrance that she inhaled deeply. A farmer had sliced one of his melons. Her mouth watered as they passed his booth.
You can do this, she told herself.
She’d been marketing with her fellow students and an instructor while at school, hadn’t she? Of course this was different. Lucien was affording her the status of chef. She was in charge, she thought with a thrill of excitement.
“Do you have your list?” he asked.
Her eyes widened in panic as she stared at some brilliantly green Granny Smith apples. She was the chef. She should have made a list.
“I don’t need a list. I’ve memorized the menu,” she said honestly. “And I’ll pick whatever is nicest and freshest for the special next week.”
“All right,” he said. She sighed in relief that he seemed to have accepted her reply. She wanted to convince him of her expertise at all costs. “We usually buy from Jim Goddard over there.” He pointed to a booth with a thickset, gray-haired man sitting behind a table. “He’s got a way with heirloom lettuce and arugula, and his peppers are usually good. If you trust me to do it, I’ll pick up the avocado and snow peas from Mort Sanger over there. I’ll rent a cart and bring it over when I’m finished.”