Ashton didn’t seem to understand that though. “Well, once we kiss and make up, you’re going to be singing a different tune.” He laughed again, even more confidently this time. “Yeah. I’ll take that bet. I will. I totally will take that bet with you on this. Fine… but add another zero on there. Make it interesting. Make it hurt when you lose, because I am that good.”
Oh no. Revolting. Was he making a bet that he could get Isabelle to fuck him? The paws I was wearing did not lend themselves to becoming fists, but I tried.
Oblivious, Ashton simpered into his phone. He was playing with his hair now in the mirror, smoothing it down and examining it from different angles. Preening. “I’ll get that video for you. Once you see me plowing into that thick ass of hers while she moans my name—” another little laugh. “Sure. Write it down. Since you’re a bookie and not an artist like me, I’ll even direct this shit for you. She’s going to take me from behind like the little cum slut she is, on her hands and knees like a dog. Then when I’m almost done, I’m going to flip her over and tell her that I’m going to come on her tits. But I’m going to come on her pretty little face instead. It’s no good unless it’s a surprise either. You gotta’ get that surprised but also humiliated face, right? Mess up her hair. You got that all written down? Fantastic. I’ll have that video for you by Christmas.”
If Isabelle could hear this, she’d be throwing up again for sure. I was feeling intensely nauseated myself.
Radley laughed again, secure in his delusion that Isabelle would ever go along with his dumbass sex tape.
“I’ve just written the world’s hottest porno,” he announced to his friend (whoever was on the other end of that call was not an agent).
And he’d just written the world’s every porno. But what was far, far more important, was that he’d just done it in front of me.
I was going to absolutely ruin Ashton Radley. I wasn’t sure how yet. And I wasn’t sure when. But it was going to happen. I couldn’t risk him finding out who I was, and physical assault wasn’t really my style anyway, but he was toast.
And Isabelle? I was going to have her. In every way and as soon as humanly possible. It had finally just percolated through all my werewolf makeup and thick skull. I was in love with her.
It may have taken Ashton Radley’s sick fantasy to convince me of the truth of it, and it was going to be his funeral, but at least now I had clarity. She was going to be mine. She was already mine. She just didn’t know it yet.
32
Isabelle
The Date
“So, how was your day?” Connor asked in the car that night as we drove back to the LA house. “Did the nausea clear up?”
“Eventually it did,” I told him. “I’m glad I made it to the bathroom in time after that whiff of Chinese food though. We just ate Chinese food, remember? I was totally fine. No problem. But today, yikes. It was not a good reaction.”
“You seem normal enough now,” he said, stealing glances at me as if to confirm.
“I am.” I smiled at him to keep him from worrying. I did not need his overprotective side to come out again. “I’m one hundred percent fine now. It was just the baby reminding me she’s there, right? It’s a good sign.”
Connor was stopped at a red light. He smiled at the thought and I smiled back. Something in my heart pulsed and grew. It tightened until I could barely maintain eye contact. I looked away first, feeling foolish. This connection that I thought I was feeling? It was all in my head. I was better off ignoring it. The bond between us seemed to be strengthening every day. I knew, rationally, that it was just the baby manipulating my hormones. But it felt real. It felt like… It felt just like love.
“Did you like being back at work?” he asked. The light changed and he pulled out carefully. The movement seemed to diffuse the tension of the moment.
I nodded, trying to stay focused. Connor was just a business partner. “Good. Yeah.” I stretched. I was tired, but it genuinely felt good to be useful again. I was grateful for the excuse to talk about work instead of feelings. “I definitely forgot how much work it was to go to work,” I admitted. “But I’m still glad I’m doing it. It feels really nice to be doing my thing again.”
Connor smiled at me. “I’m really glad you’re happier.”
“I really am too,” I told him. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be in charge, either. It’s crazy and new and weird, but I like it. I just hope I’m up to it.”
I’d always chafed at being under someone else. I’d always thought I’d be better as the one in the driver’s seat. And now, one way or another, I was going to find out if it was true. Maybe it was going to go great. Maybe I was going to crash and burn. But either way, I was going to find out something really valuable about myself and what I was capable of.
“You’re going to do fine,” Connor told me. “I saw you running around here and there. You looked like you knew what you were doing.”
I smiled. He was probably only being polite, but it was still nice to hear. I’d been insecure about not having my dad next to me at first, but this was good. I was glad he was working on another production now and I was on my own. I was being forced to trust my own decision making.
“You looked like you knew what you were doing too,” I told Connor. “Look, I’m really sorry for being so weird about your fire thing. After I threw up for twenty minutes and then dry heaved for another five, I realized that I was being irrational. You can obviously do whatever you want. I’ve got no right to tell you any differently.”
Connor was a business partner. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“You were just looking out for the baby,” he said, shrugging his shoulders casually. “That’s part of your job.”
My job. The job of gestating his child. That’s what I’d been doing.
“Right, of course,” I mumbled. I would never need to look out for Connor. He wasn’t mine.
I’m not sure when this change in me occurred, but I now felt as possessive of Connor as he used to be of me. I hated the idea of someone, especially Ashton-fucking-Radley, lighting him on fire. Hated it. It made my blood boil and my heart race.
“If it makes you feel any better, I never did get set on fire,” Connor said. He was driving carefully around the sharp turns and steep curves of the hills. I wondered if he always drove this cautiously or if it was just the presence of his baby in the car that had him hesitating at every stop sign. “The rest of the day was pretty much a wash.”
I nodded. “I hear Ashton had some trouble with his lines?” I laughed uncharitably. Why was I not surprised to hear that? “Color me shocked. He’s such a moron. Well, at least it gave me the time I needed to repaint my werewolves. I can’t believe Rocco let them get all wet,” I was still furious about this fact, “but at least I’ve really developed a lot of skill now on painting werewolf snouts. You never know when that’ll come in handy, right?”
“Isabelle, I think we should go on a date.”
I froze. What kind of a non sequitur was that? Who goes from werewolf snouts to dates?
“Sorry? What?” I stuttered.
“I know we had dinner before,” Connor told me. He was staring straight out the windshield like we were just making regular conversation. “But that wasn’t really a date, was it?”
I felt like I still must have misheard him. But the question was simple enough. “No,” I said hesitantly. “No, it wasn’t. It was just a dinner. Not a date.”
Albeit a dinner where I wore a dress. My date night dress. The dress I’d worn previously on other dates with other men I liked a hell of a lot less than Connor. It wasn’t anything particularly special as dresses go, just a blue A-line dress with little white stars printed on it. But it felt significant. Like just the presence of the date dress meant something. Although, of course, it didn’t.
“So, what do you say?” Connor asked. We were up at the house now. The remaining couple of minutes left in the drive seemed to have gone by on fast forward.
>
“Say?” I repeated. I was having trouble thinking. The afternoon light was streaming into the car window in a way that lit Connor’s face and illuminated his eyes in a way that almost made them glow. It was hypnotic.
“Do you want to go on a date with me?” Connor repeated. He sounded totally confident and normal and it was unfair. “I was thinking it might be nice. I mean, I like you. I think you like me too, at least a little bit. And—”
“But the contract—” I interrupted.
Not so long ago, the contract mattered more than anything to Connor. But today, he just smirked. What contract?
“This isn’t about the contract,” Connor said to me. He was still talking to me like this was a regular conversation and not a huge fucking deal. “This is just two people who like each other going out to see if there’s anything more there.”
“More?” I turned the word over in my mouth like I’d never heard it before in my life. I certainly didn’t have any comprehension of what it meant. Not in this moment. Not in this context.
“You know what more means, Isabelle.”
I gulped. His eyes said it meant sex, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around more. Because what could be more than having the man’s baby? What could be more than the fact that I was living in his house? I mean the only thing that separated us from people already in a relationship and having a baby was the fact that we weren’t sharing a bed.
“Yes,” I was already saying. My mouth was ahead of my brain again. It seemed to be happening so often lately.
Connor blinked those incredibly blue eyes of his. “Yes?” For whatever reason, I almost thought he seemed surprised. But he shouldn’t be. I was crazy for him.
I nodded eagerly. “Yes.” I was being impulsive again. I knew it. But I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to share his bed, if that was an option. And his days, and his nights, and his afternoons. I wanted more. “I want to go on a date with you, Connor.”
Part of me realized that this was a terrible idea. Terrible. It was mixing the two things that should never be mixed, personal and business. Even though I was drawn almost magnetically to the man these days, going on a date with him was not like going on a date with anyone else in the world. Because I was carrying his baby, the stakes were not just high, they were astronomical.
“If it doesn’t work out,” I asked Connor before we got out of the car, “what then?”
What would happen if the date went badly? Would we just decide to go back to the way things were before? Was that a thing I could even do? I kind of doubted it. Some things can’t be undone. Feelings can’t be unfelt. If we started down this path and it didn’t work out, I could only imagine I’d regret it for the next eight months.
He shrugged. “Honestly? I have no idea.”
“What if it does work out?” I questioned. Maybe it was dumb to ask these questions, but I couldn’t resist it. Just like I couldn’t resist him.
What if the date went well? That was even scarier, almost. It would mean that our relationship would continue to change. To get deeper. To be more intense and that I’d only think of him more and more as someone that I wanted a future with. Even though I signed a contract that guaranteed a very specific, very clear future for us. The kind that sent us on our separate ways.
His blue eyes stared into mine with so much unspoken intensity that I felt like I already had my reply. But then he smiled and answered. “I don’t know about that either,” he told me. “But we’ll figure it out. Together.”
33
Connor
The Dress
Isabelle showered and changed out of her paint-splattered overalls when we got home. She came down the stairs two hours later dressed in a low cut, bright red velvet dress. I stared, awestruck.
The scarlet dress hugged her body in all the right places, accentuating her curves and making her look tiny in the middle. It was like something out of a movie from the forties. Her curls had also been straightened out somehow, and her hair was much longer than I’d realized. It went almost all the way down to her butt. She looked pretty and polished, but all I could think about as she walked was that I wanted to get her messy and dirty again. Enough that her curls came back. I wanted to fuck the curls right back into her hair.
“Is this okay?” she’d asked me, looking at me hesitantly. She was wearing heels, I realized as she drifted closer. She was up to my chin instead of my shoulder. “I didn’t know how dressy was too dressy. Is it too much?”
“It’s great. Perfect. But I changed my mind,” I said, pulling her up closer to me and smiling when she let me. I settled my arms around her waist and stared down at her, making up my mind in an instant. “The date is cancelled.”
I kissed her.
This was not my ordinary MO. Although my ordinary MO was pretty well fucked at this point anyway. None of this was in the plan. Not moving to LA. Not having Isabelle work on Night Stalker. Definitely not asking her on a date. And most definitely not then cancelling our date because I couldn’t even share Isabelle with a single other person tonight. But I was unable to stop myself from doing any of this. I was not in control.
She let me kiss her and, after a beat of surprised hesitance, she moved her hands up to around my neck. She tasted like toothpaste, minty and clean, and smelled like soap. She was all dolled up for me tonight. Just for me. And there was certainly no reason in the world that I could think of that would compel me to share her.
I explored her mouth, claiming it and realizing distantly that I’d been wanting this from the very beginning. How had I waited this long to kiss her lips and taste her tongue on mine? And why?
At this moment, there was no reason in the world why I should do anything but go on kissing Isabelle like my life depended on it. For all I knew, it did. Because I felt like I would die unless I got more of her oxygen. I stole her breath from her, and it brought me back to life.
I pinned her back against the wall, maneuvering her backward and me forward so I’d have a solid surface to work with. I kissed her for what felt like ages, feeling my cock stiffen in my pants and strain uncomfortably against the fabric.
My hands took the slow, full tour of Isabelle’s body, skimming her hips, her shoulders, her back, her ass. I cupped her soft, round tits from below and kneaded her, enjoying the little noises she made into my mouth to urge me on. Like I needed much encouragement. I’d been dying to do this for weeks. She smiled at me when we broke apart, staring up at me with soft, dark eyes and pouting red lips.
“No date?” she purred while I searched her body for the zipper that I knew had to be hidden somewhere on her dress. “Why not?” She was just teasing me now.
I was the only one going to be doing the teasing momentarily.
“No time,” I answered, finally finding it hidden in the seam on her right side. I tugged it down and she let the dress fall off her shoulders to pool in a little red puddle at her feet.
In the dress, she was gorgeous. Out of the dress, standing in just her lingerie and heels, she was magnificent. I got down on my knees in front of her, pulling her panties down inch by inch. She was pink and wet between her legs, and her little pussy felt like silk under my fingers.
I lifted her left knee up on my right shoulder and stared up her.
I devoured her. There’s something about going down on a woman that’s always been my favorite part of sex. I loved the noises Isabelle made while I worked on her, and the feeling of her hands tightening in my hair when I found the right intensity, the right spot, the right rhythm. I loved the way her leg shook on my shoulder, and the warmth of her body, and the taste of her need and excitement. But most of all I loved looking up at her and knowing that she was mine. Her excitement was mine. And the orgasm that I gave her which left her shaking, and panting, and clawing at the back of my head only to collapse into my arms? That was especially mine.
And we were only getting warmed up.
34
Isabelle
The Confession
Before I could get my bearings or come down from whatever altered state that orgasm had pushed me into, I was being lifted up in Connor’s arms and carried over to the couch. I didn’t resist or even squirm. I was elsewhere.
What year was it? What century? I felt like I’d been knocked off my axis and into a place beyond space and time. The orgasm twilight zone.
But when Connor stared down at me, looking just as hungry for whatever came next, I snapped out of my trance. It was my turn. I reached for his belt and he let me unbuckle it for him. I licked my lips and stared up at him.
No one had ever made me come like that before. My previous, awkward encounters with oral sex had been let downs. But this was on a whole different level. I’d have to seriously up my cock sucking game if I wanted to compare. Then his dick sprang free and the size of it had me blinking.
For real?
I’d been expecting the six-inch sub. Not the damn footlong. It had felt perfectly sizeable pressed against me, but now that I saw it… I needed to satisfy my immediate hunger with the thing, not feed an entire village for a week. Okay, fine. It wasn’t literally a foot long. Not scary big. That’d just be gross. But it was big. Much bigger than my jaw was expecting.
Connor, however, didn’t seem all that interested in my mouth or the fact that I was slack jawed and staring at his endowment. When his cock sprang free and I got my hands on it, he was smoothly maneuvering me underneath him. His weight on me felt exciting. Intimidating, but also exciting.
I guess I wasn’t going to be returning the favor just yet. Because he had a look in his eyes that said he was going to do me. Right fucking now.
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