Exposed

by Jasinda Wilder

"Of course not. I would never do anything to actually hurt you."

  And then he withdraws his finger and smears it over my clitoris again, and I can't help but moan, muffling it against his throat. Again, finger sliding in, pulling out, rubbing over me. Again and again and again, until I'm aching with need for him to do more, touch me more.

  "Logan," I whimper, "please . . ."

  "I know, baby. Soon." Two fingers now, and I am breathing heavily against his throat, clutching his hair, his head, his shoulders.

  My hips drive, seeking more.

  Despite his promise of "soon," it is not soon. He draws it out. Explores me, scissors his fingers, thrusts them in, exploring my depth. Drawing out, testing the sensitivity of my clitoris, slipping it between his fingers, rubbing it, flicking it, pressing against it, touching me and touching me and touching me, but not enough that I can find release.

  The more he touches me, the wilder my hips become. I bury my face in his flesh and moan ceaselessly, muffling the sound in him. At some point, the aimless thrash of my hips becomes a grinding, and god, finally, he fills me with three fingers and I grind against them, ride them.

  Wantonly, I seek my release on his hand.

  "Oh god, Logan . . ." I moan, and it is not a quiet sound.

  "Sssshhhhh, baby. Hush. Bite me if you need to."

  My teeth find the round part of his shoulder and sink in, and I taste salt flesh and flick my tongue across it, and the taste of him, the feel of his flesh and muscle under my mouth drives me even more wild. My entire body is rocking downward, pushing my core onto his fingers, driving the building tsunami of my orgasm to manic threshold.

  I whimper, teeth locked onto Logan, and grind hard and fast around his fingers, which he thrusts into me.

  And then, as I am close to losing it, he pulls them out and smashes them against my clit and I involuntarily arch my back, biting down on my scream so hard my molars ache. Logan's mouth finds mine, his tongue parts my lips, and he swallows my moans as I come apart. Heat blasts though me, lightning strikes my core and sizzles up throughout my body, curling my toes and causing my stomach to tense and my thighs to quiver, and I can only ride his touch with everything I possess, screaming into his breath, trying to quiet myself and failing.

  "God, Isabel, baby, you come so beautifully," Logan murmurs. "I can't wait to watch you writhe like this naked for me, I can't wait to make you scream out loud."

  His voice is catalytic, and I don't know if I come again, or if it's another wave of the first, but I am seized anew and his fingers are whirling faster than thought around my clitoris.

  Finally, I am seeing stars, the orgasm fades, and I am left limp and wrung out, gasping. "Logan, my god Logan." The way I say that, it is ambiguous. It could mean that Logan is my god, that he has consumed my world and my belief, or it could just be a rushed-together colloquialism.

  I am fully clothed, and so is he, and I've just come harder than ever before, harder than I thought possible.

  Logan grabs the back of my knees and tugs them tight against his body, pulls me closer, and then rocks up and forward so I am flipped to land on my back. His eyes are hot, blazing, fierce, wild. His chest heaves, as if his control is hanging by the thinnest thread. He leans over me, his hair coming loose from the ponytail, blond curls and waves hanging over his shoulder. He dips down, kisses me. Deeply, thoroughly, so I am left utterly breathless and in no doubt as to his intentions.

  Leaning back on his knees, he lifts his fingers to his mouth. I can only stare in amazement and confusion and crazed heated desire as he fits his index finger--the one that was just inside me--into his mouth and sucks my juices off. He repeats this with each finger that was inside me, his eyes never leaving mine.

  "Really, Logan?"

  He grins. "Really, Isabel. You taste amazing. I can't wait to have my mouth all over you."

  I exhale shakily. "What do I taste like?" I hear myself ask, and it's a question I've long wondered but never had the courage to ask.

  In previous encounters, questions and talking in general were . . . discouraged. My voice was heard only when I was commanded to raise it.

  Logan doesn't answer, at least not in words. He pulls aside my underwear, slides a finger into me, smears my essence, and then brings that digit to my mouth. I smell musk, a sharp smell with a tang to it. And his finger moves between my lips, mirroring the way he just touched me down below. I taste his skin faintly and myself strongly.

  "That's what you taste like," he says, then rises to his feet. His hands grasp mine and he hauls me upright. "Time to go."

  "Where are we going?" I ask, even though I know.

  "My place."

  I can't help but glance down at the front of his jeans, which are visibly tented. I move toward him, wrap my arms around his neck, and then let a palm trail down his chest to the waist of his jeans. "Let me help you, first."

  He grabs my wrist, gently but firmly, and pulls my hand away. "I don't think so, Isabel." He tugs me sharply so I land flush against his chest. "All I care about is making you feel good. I could, and nearly did, come in my pants just watching you. When I've got you naked in my bed, I'll get mine, trust me."

  "Doesn't that ache? To stay hard like that?"

  He shrugs. "A little. It'll fade, and I'll be none the worse for wear."

  "I want you to feel good too, Logan."

  His lips touch my throat, under my jaw, the corner of my mouth. "I will." He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers. "I want you so bad, Isabel, so bad it hurts. But I also value our privacy enough that I'll wait until I've got you alone at my house to let this go any further. If you touch me, any remaining vestige of control I might have will be gone."

  I'm frustrated, because my need for him is spiraling out of control. I want his flesh, I want to touch his hardness, taste him, feel him. I want him more than I've ever wanted anything. Nothing matters but him.

  Nothing matters but us.

  This is about us, too. Not just him, not just me, but the both of us as a single entity, and that fact in itself is drunk-making.

  He takes my hand, threads his fingers through mine. Leads me out of the conference room. It's night, but what time I don't know. The lights are dimmed low so the TVs provide most of the light in the office space. Pretty much everyone is still present, although all of them except three people are asleep on couches and curled up in beanbags. The three left awake glance at us as we exit the conference room hand in hand, and all three keep their expressions carefully blank and return a bit too studiously to the documents they're poring over.

  I lean closer to Logan. "I think they heard us," I whisper.

  He chuckles and squeezes my hand. "Actually, honey, I think they heard you."

  I blush furiously. "I'm sorry, Logan. I tried to be quiet."

  "No worries," he says as we exit the building and he leads me down Forty-fifth to his vehicle. "They'll be adults about it or they'll find another job."

  "I don't want to cost anyone their jobs," I say. "It's my fault I was loud."

  "It's my company, my conference room. And also, I'm pretty sure I heard Beth and Isaac in there yesterday. Either that, or they were watching porn together instead of working."

  "You let your employees have sex and watch porn while working?"

  "Hell no." His truck, a big silver box on wheels I've been in once before, is parallel parked half a block away. It's a Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG, I note. I wonder how much it cost; a lot, is my guess. "The computers and other devices provided by the company are for work use only, and I carefully monitor that. Porn is how you get wicked viruses, for one thing, and I don't mean of the STD variety. As for sex, as long as they're discreet and it doesn't affect their working relationship, I don't give a flying fuck what they do, or where they do it."

  "You're a good boss," I say, buckling in.

  "I try. Basically, I remember how shit ran in the army, and I try to be exactly the opposite." He laughs, although I don't quite get the joke. "That's only parti
ally true. I learned lots of valuable skills in the army, including how to run a tight-knit group of people. You give them a small number of hard-and-fast rules that cannot be broken, and leave everything else up to them. In the atmosphere I've created up there, I can use a small space and a relatively small group of employees to get a ridiculously massive amount of work done. I pay them a fuckload of money, keep the mood loose and relaxed, let them work on their own time and at their own pace, sitting, standing, lying down, buzzed, whatever, as long as the quality of their work remains consistent."

  "Must be nice for them."

  "I hope so," he says, checking oncoming traffic and pulling out into the street. "That's the point. I want them to want to come to work. I require long, crazy hours, which usually entails sleeping at the office during sixty-hour marathon sessions like this one, but I pay triple overtime and huge bonuses at the end of projects like this. What you saw is my entire company, the core of it. I've got a couple other subsidiary offices in the city, and some others in L.A. and London, but those are all totally self-sufficient and don't require any input from me. Those kids up there, they're my business. All the subsidiaries, all the offshoots and spin-off branches, they run it all."

  "They must work nonstop." I don't even try to follow the series of turns Logan takes to get home. I just enjoy the fact that as soon as he finishes a turn, his hand takes mine again and threads our fingers together.

  His hand feels natural in mine, and that makes my heart hammer.

  "They do. Sixty hours a week is standard fare, eighty or more common. And when we have a huge project like this acquisition, we basically live at the office until it's done, but then we take a few days off. Or rather, I give them a few days off."

  "You don't take days off?"

  He shrugs. "Not really. I'm not really a workaholic, but I like what I do, so I do it a lot. I stay home Sundays, for the most part."

  "What do you do for fun?"

  He eyes me. "Work out, Krav Maga, run, watch movies."

  "You don't have a girlfriend?"

  A shrug, eyes returning to the road. "No. I did, for a while, but it wasn't really serious. When she made it clear she needed to either get serious or move on, we broke up. It was amicable, and I was honest. I wasn't going to string her along or lie about not wanting anything super serious."

  "Why didn't you want anything serious?" I ask.

  We're on his street, which I recognize. It's a long, quiet, tree-lined avenue of walk-up town houses, lovely, expensive, and serene, an insular little world away from the bustle of midtown Manhattan.

  He sighs. "I just didn't. She was a great girl, sweet, smart, beautiful, easy to hang out with. But it just wasn't there with her, for me, long-term speaking. I don't know. I don't really have any emotional hang-ups, you know? I'm just not going to tie myself down long-term unless I'm really sure about it. It's not fair to me, or to her, or the idea of an 'us.' A long-term relationship is only as valuable as the effort both people are willing to put in. You both have to be totally invested or it doesn't work. I was in a relationship for a while, right after I got out of the hospital, and I was all in, right? Like, gone for the girl. She was fucking it for me, but I was needy, I guess. Too needy for her. She wasn't feeling it. So after like, a year and a half, she broke up with me via the super awesome tactic of sleeping with my business-partner-slash-house-flipping-mentor, and then telling me about it. I was still pretty fucked up about how I got injured, you know, the guilt and confusion and everything. I'm not gonna toss out PTSD, because it's not that. I know guys who have that, and it's not pretty. I was normal fucked up. Real-deal clinical PTSD is ugly fucked up."

  "And now?"

  "Now I'm okay. You never completely get away from the bad dreams and occasional flashbacks, but you gotta expect that, seeing and doing the kind of shit we did over there." He pulls the big SUV into a parking spot outside his door, exits, and circles around to open my door for me. "When I said I don't have any emotional hang-ups, that was a little bit of a lie. I do, sort of, because of how Leanne ended things. I don't trust easily. But that wasn't the reason why I didn't want anything long-term with Billie. I trusted her all right, I just didn't feel strongly enough to move in together or propose, I guess, and that's exactly what she wanted. I was cool with just dating, having fun, spending the night together here and there."

  He unlocks the front door of his house, disables his alarm, and closes the door behind us. At this point his dog, Cocoa, a massive chocolate lab, is going crazy, barking fit to burst.

  "I'm gonna let Cocoa out now, okay? You ready?"

  I nod and take a breath, grinning in anticipation. "As ready as I'll ever be, I think."

  He goes down a short hallway and opens a bedroom door, and the sound of claws scrabbling on hardwood echoes loudly, accompanied by overjoyed barking, and then finally a bear-sized brown blur hurtles toward me. I'm braced for impact, though, and Cocoa's saucer-sized paws land on my shoulders and her tongue is slapping me in the face and digging up my nose and trying to do an examination of my uvula. I duck my face to escape her tongue, but she follows me, leaning down to lick and lick and lick, until finally I have to shove her off. She leaps back up and actually hugs me, her paws going over my shoulder, her nose wet in my ear. I can't help but laugh and feel happy about such an exuberant welcome.

  The affectionate joy of a happy dog is balm for a troubled soul, I decide.

  Logan slaps his thigh. "Cocoa! Wanna go outside?"

  The dog's attention is snatched by that, and she barks once, a short sharp yip, and hauls across the house for the back door. He lets her out, watches her do her business, and then lets her back in, and she lies down on the floor in the middle of the kitchen near the stove, watching us with her big brown eyes.

  He glances at me. "You hungry? I've got some leftover shawarma, and half a pizza." He opens a drawer in the island at the center of the kitchen and withdraws a stack of carryout menus. "Or I could get some takeout. Up to you."

  "What's shawarma?" I ask.

  "Middle Eastern food. Garlic sauce, chicken, rice. It's amazing."

  I hate to admit that my diet has always been somewhat . . . limited. "Either is fine." Mostly because I've never had either, and I don't want Logan to leave, and I don't want to have to leave this house again any time soon.

  He lifts an eyebrow. "How about I heat up both, and you can try them and pick. I'll take whichever you don't want."

  He rummages in the refrigerator and comes out with a plastic container and a big white square cardboard box. Dumping the contents of the container onto a paper plate, he puts it in the microwave and warms it up, and then transfers the contents of the larger box onto another plate. As the shawarma heats up, the smell begins to permeate the kitchen, and my stomach rumbles. I don't remember the last time I ate, and suddenly I'm ravenous. The microwave beeps, and he slides the plate to me across the island, setting a fork on it as he does so.

  "Give that a try," he says, and sets the pizza to heating.

  The shawarma is possibly the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Spicy, flavorful, tangy, garlicky. I moan as I take the first bite, and then the second. And then the third.

  "So you like shawarma," Logan says, grinning. He pulls a piece of the pizza off the plate and carefully hands it to me, a string of cheese stretching between us.

  The pizza is also delicious.

  "I'm not sure I can choose," I admit. "They're both so good."

  There's a stool under an overhanging part of the island, and I pull it out and sit down. Logan takes the stool beside me, setting down two sweating green glass bottles with white labels near the top.

  "So we'll share," he says, and steals the fork out of my hands to take a bite of the shawarma. I watch him eat, because he's gorgeous even doing that.

  "What's in the bottles?" I ask, eager to try something else new.

  "Beer. Stella Artois, to be exact. Try it." He hands me one of the bottles, and I gingerly try the first sip.
<
br />   I'm not convinced at first. It's bitter, and a little sour. But there's an aftertaste that hits my taste buds in a pleasant way, and I try a second, longer sip, which goes down easier. Before I know it, I've drunk almost half of the bottle, and my head is feeling a little loose and a little fuzzy.

  Logan laughs. "Whoa, okay. I guess you like Stella. But then, how can you not?" He gestures at the pizza. "Try the pizza, and wash it down with the beer. You'll never look at cuisine the same way, I promise."

  "I already don't," I say. "I've always been on an all-organic, super healthy diet."

  "Vegan?"

  "What's that?"

  "No meat, no animal products of any kind. Like eggs, milk, cheese, if it came from an animal, vegans don't consume it."

  "Why?" I ask. "That's kind of weird."

  "Protesting animal cruelty in the food industry. I don't know. Good for them if that's what they believe, but I like meat."

  "Me too. So no, I eat meat, just usually salmon and free-range chicken and turkey, along with salads and fruit. Mostly vegetarian, I suppose. Not a lot of red meat."

  "I'd go easy on the pizza then. If your body is used to cleaner foods, the grease in that might sit heavy in your stomach."

  This is so weird. Bizarre. Surreal. Just sitting in Logan's kitchen, drinking beer and eating normal food.

  I have a normal name.

  I'm not Madame X anymore.

  I'm not with Caleb anymore.

  My heart twists at that last thought, and I shut that line of thought down. I will not go there, not now.

  Except Logan speaks up, casually, not looking at me, through a bite of shawarma. "What happened, Isabel? With Caleb? What made you leave, finally?"

  I sigh. "He--we . . ."

  Logan interrupts before I can work out what I'm going to say. "I don't want to pry, and I'll respect your privacy if you don't want to talk about it. But it seemed to have messed you up."

  I finish a slice of pizza and wash it down with a swallow of the beer. And Logan is right, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat my normal fare again without thinking of this meal. Indulgent, unhealthy in the extreme, but so, so good. I take a bite of shawarma, trying to formulate what to say.

  "He brought me back to his place. The penthouse? It's the entire upper floor of the building. Anyway, he brought me up there, and at first it was . . . fine. But not normal. He kissed me, which he doesn't usually do. That was a little strange. And then . . ." I sigh again, closing my eyes. Just say it. Just put it into words. "But then he pushed me down to my knees. He put . . . himself--into my mouth." It's so hard to say it out loud. Why? It feels as if saying it makes it more real. More than real. "At the end, he finished on--on my face. And then cleaned me up with his tie, kissed me as if nothing had happened, and just . . . left."