Torn (Lords of the City #1)

by Alice Ward

  “It’s probably my dress for the gala,” I stammered, hoping his reference to the gift wasn’t a covert way of telling me he knew what was going on between Noah and me. “I mean, that’s the only reason he’d be giving me anything.”

  You’d make such a great spy.

  Peter smiled. “Would you like me to help you open it?”

  “No, I’ll take care of it later.”

  He was visibly relieved. “Then will you excuse me? The nanorobotics crew is waiting for me to bring them tea.”

  “Tea? Really? You’re not British.”

  “But some of them are.”

  I waved him on. “Go, boy genius. Use your superpowers for good.”

  He bowed in true British fashion and went to the door.

  “Peter, wait!” I called. “Guess what I had for lunch today.”

  “What?”

  “Nano your business.”

  “That’s a terrible joke,” he claimed, but he grinned, aligning his freckles in a row. “Thanks. It’ll help me get through the day.”

  After he was gone, I left the box unopened on the couch and returned to my work. With a to-do list that was a mile long, I couldn’t afford the distraction. Preparations for the convention were a lot to handle on my own. I’d wondered more than once if it was possible to hire a personal assistant for a personal assistant, but I wouldn’t risk falling out of the rotation so soon.

  By the time I remembered the box, the sun was close to setting. In my bare feet, still forbidden to wear anything other than heels, I went to the couch. Embossed on the top of the box was the label of a very expensive designer. Using my nails to get around the tape, I pried it open. Inside was a dress, but it wasn’t for the gala. Short and low cut, it wasn’t the type of garment I could wear out of the building, let alone to a fancy ball.

  On top of the dress was a lotus blossom and a note:

  Meet me on the rooftop at eight. Wear the dress. Put the flower in your hair. Don’t be late.

  Alone, I stripped off my work clothes and slid the dress over my head. By design, slashes in the fabric exposed my skin, one across the stomach, another down the back. I looked like I just survived the zombie apocalypse, if the zombie apocalypse was comprised of angry kittens, but the dress was sexy. I had to give Noah that. In it, I was charged, ready for whatever lesson Noah wanted to teach me. Aroused at the possibilities, I took the lotus blossom and ran it up my leg and across my neck, reliving his touch behind the curtain at the club before tucking the flower behind my ear.

  Ten minutes before eight, I left the office and climbed the short flight of stairs to the rooftop. I’d never been on the rooftop of a building before, but I imagined them to be grimy and full of rodents, a haven the lab rats fled to when they escaped their cages. There was nothing filthy about the rooftop of Stafford Scientific. Like the front of the building, it was lined with fiber optic cherry blossom trees that lit up as I passed by, glowing in the night. They guided me to a helicopter launch pad where Peter waited with a bottle of non-alcoholic sparkling cider, which he poured into a glass for me.

  I was mortified. “So you do know.”

  “I know nothing,” he said impassively, revealing no judgement. “It’s nano my business.”

  A laugh barked out of me, and I could feel each muscle relax. “You’re a good friend,” I said and knocked the cider back, wishing it was made of something a lot stronger.

  “Mr. Stafford predicted you’d be barefoot, so he also instructed me to give you these.” From his tuxedo jacket, he pulled out a pair of black fuzzy slippers.

  “Hallelujah!” I exclaimed and stuck them on. “It’s freezing up here.”

  “You’ll be warm soon. The helicopter is approaching. Until then, would you like my jacket?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll manage.” I looked out across the other rooftops. They were like giant stepping stones. “I’ve never been in a helicopter before. Have you?”

  “Many times. I find them quite enjoyable, but if you get scared, take comfort in the knowledge that it’ll be a brief flight. You’re not going far.”

  “Where am I going?”

  Peter shook his finger. “That would ruin the surprise. Here, stand back. It’s landing.”

  A few seconds later, with the stealth of a hawk, the helicopter appeared from the dark, completely silent. I ducked my head as it landed, only to realize there were no blades anywhere on it.

  “It belongs to the company,” Peter explained. “The military wants it, but it’s not on the market yet, not until Mr. Stafford is certain it won’t be exploited to hurt innocent civilians in countries where he has no reach.”

  “He’s good like that,” I said. “He pretends to be ice, but he’s actually fire.”

  A door on the side lifted upward, and Noah stepped out, looking divine in a dark gray suit that was like coal, fueling the power of his bright green eyes, which he fixed on me, full of burning sins that stopped my breath and made my knees weak.

  He offered me his hand. “Watch your step,” he cautioned. “It’s steep.”

  I hopped up, and he steadied me, our bodies pressed together, ready to fly within the lovely darkness.

  “Your scent is intoxicating,” he whispered provocatively so only I could hear.

  “I’m not wearing perfume. It’s forbidden.”

  He ran his fingers through my hair. “I know. I prefer your natural scent, all of it.”

  Once we were settled in the helicopter, facing each other, the pilot took off. Around us, spotlights flashed in the sky, beckoning those by land, those by sea, and those by air to experience the sweat and fetishes of the city. I tried to take it all in, but we soon landed, our flight as short as Peter had predicted.

  “Is this the roof of your penthouse?” I asked, gathering my bearings based on the buildings around us. There were no fiber optic trees, but there were fairy lights strung from actual trees, narrow saplings potted around the concrete. In the distance, I spotted a hot tub, and off to the side, a table had been set up.

  “It is,” Noah said, lifting me away from the helicopter so that it could leave.

  “We could have walked,” I reckoned.

  As he sat me down, he kept his body close to mine. “Tonight isn’t about sensibility. It’s about sensuality,” he murmured, drawing me in with the silk of his voice. It put me in a trance that made my thighs wet, ready to spread for him.

  Remembering the table and the two waiters who stood next to it, I broke away from his hold, shy with an audience watching us. “Are we having dinner?”

  “Dinner. And a lesson.”

  By the smolder of his eyes, I knew it was a lesson I’d greatly enjoy. “I look forward to it,” I said and sauntered to the table in my slippers.

  Dressed with a white tablecloth, that table contained shiny gold cutlery that reflected the flames of several candles. Strewn around the candles were a ponds worth of lotus blossoms.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said to Noah. “Thank you for this. And thank you for the dress.”

  “The dress is entirely for my pleasure,” he said, pulling my chair out for me. “The rest of the evening will be for yours.”

  As soon as we were seated, the waiters, both men in red dinner jackets, served a green rocket salad with strawberries and a chocolate vinaigrette dressing. Starved, I shoved a forkful into my mouth. I’d skipped lunch, buried in my work.

  “Slow down,” Noah ordered me sternly, less the man I knew from the night of the storm and more the man I knew every day at the office. “Savor the sweetness of the strawberries, the bitterness of the chocolate. Enjoy your food. Be mindful of every small flavor that lingers on your tongue.”

  Closing my eyes, I obeyed. As if I were wine tasting, I searched for notes within the food I otherwise would have missed. Doing so, I experienced a hint of walnut in the vinaigrette, and that the rocket salad had coated the strawberries with a smoky flavor that rounded out their sweetness. “Wow,” I murmured in my indulgence.

 
; Watching me as if I were a strawberry he’d like to savor, Noah leaned back in his seat. “I want to know more about you, Imogen. The parts of you that you aren’t willing to share.”

  I nearly choked. “You mean like my fantasies?”

  He grinned hedonistically, his teeth brilliantly white. “We’ll get there, but I mean something much more personal. I want to know more about your family. Let’s start with your mother.”

  Grateful I had food in my mouth, I took my time to answer, preparing what to say. “There’s not much to tell. As I’ve said before, I have no clue where she is. She’s off the grid. Maybe she remarried, maybe I have brothers and sisters, or maybe she abandons everyone she meets. That’s my guess. She can’t be found because she doesn’t want to be. How else can you explain abandoning both your mother and your daughter?”

  “So you’ve looked for her?” he deduced.

  Dejected, I put my head in my hand and stabbed continuously at a piece of salad with my fork. “Not me, but my grandma did. She never stopped looking.”

  “Sit up,” he ordered, and I did, meeting his inquisitive stare. “You’re angry, and you should be, but tell me more about her past, before she disappeared.”

  “She didn’t disappear. She left. And I was a baby when she did. There’s nothing to report.”

  He persisted. “There must be photos and remnants from her past around. Your grandmother likely spoke about her. Did she travel? Was she as adventurous as you? Or did she stay home and watch soap operas, dreaming of becoming a housewife? How old was she when she had you?”

  My head spun with all his questions. “Is this part of your lesson?” I asked, hoping we would move on to the more enticing part of the night, where he ripped off my clothes, and we replayed our night entangled within the storm.

  “A part of a lesson, but not this one,” he said. “Stop stroking your fork up and down like that. It’s distracting me.”

  Not realizing I had been, I dropped it onto my plate. “Fine. My mother was living with my grandma when she became pregnant with me. She was twenty-years-old, young but old enough to know better. Even while she was pregnant with me, she went to biker bars. She was a wild child, preferring the suburbs where the danger in the bars was real. She wasn’t adventurous. She was careless. That’s what my grandma always told me, anyway.”

  Frustrated, I shook my head. “My grandma was very honest about the type of woman my mother was, the good and the bad. She didn’t keep anything from me. I’m glad my grandma raised me. I’m glad my mother left.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Noah said. “If you did, you wouldn’t be so hurt. You said your grandma told you the good and the bad. What was the good?”

  I sighed. “She had a thing for birds. If she ever found a bird with a broken wing, she would nurse it back to health.”

  “Interesting,” he said contemplatively. “Abandoning you was horrendous, but did you ever think that perhaps she thought she was doing what was best for you?”

  “Don’t do that,” I protested. “Don’t make her out to be some sort of unsung martyr. If she cared at all, she would have come back at some point. She never came back. She never wrote. She never made any contact. Never. I’m lucky my grandma was full of enough love to make up for both my parents.”

  “And what of your father? Do you know who he is?”

  “Not a clue. Any time my grandma asked, my mother claimed she didn’t know.”

  To my relief, Noah finally backed off. “I wish I could have met your grandma. She sounds like she was a wonderful woman, a real classy lady.”

  I laughed. “Maybe not classy, but she had her virtues. I wish you could have met her too.” I choked out the sentiment, suddenly emotional.

  “Is it too much?” he asked, reaching across the table to take my hand. It was warm, a hearth that comforted me from the woes of my past.

  “No,” I said, sniffing the tears away. “I like talking about my grandma. She makes me happy. I would much rather talk about her than anyone else in my family.”

  “How did she pass?”

  “Typical old age. She had a stroke. I found her in the house after a camping trip I’d taken with my friends. She was still alive, but she died a few days later in the hospital. Up to that point, she had a lot of medical problems. It wasn’t her first stroke. After suffering from her first, she was paralyzed and spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair.”

  “So you cared for her?”

  “I tried, but I was also going to class and working. I had a lot of help from the community, especially the senior center. Milwaukee is a great place for that.”

  “Peter told me how you opened your grandma’s house up to them during the storm. Clearly, you’ve adopted her virtues. You are honorable, Imogen. Usually, I choose my personal assistants from the hundreds of applications sent to me each year. Not you. You were handed to me by fate. When people do good deeds, they should be rewarded.” His voice dropped. “I’m going to reward you, Imogen.”

  “I don’t need to be rewarded. That’s what friends do.”

  Leaning forward, his hand moved up my arm, and he lightly caressed my cheek. “I’m going to reward you,” he said with his usual intensity.

  Now I understood. The air around us changed, becoming much more in tune with the night. “How?” I asked, enjoying the way the pulse in his neck throbbed.

  “I plan to awaken you,” he said, the control he emitted more mouthwatering than the food before us. “With a precise set of lessons, your body will experience a revelation. These lessons are based on levels. First, you must let go of your inhibitions. It’s the most basic level there is.”

  I was entranced. “My inhibitions?”

  “That’s what tonight is for. Only by letting go, by surrendering to higher forces, can you fully experience gratification.”

  “Higher powers? Like church?” With his touch sending sparks across my cheek, I was reduced to short sentences, my mind melting.

  He chuckled. “I like to think of it as a form of worship.”

  Summoned by a snap of his fingers, a waiter came and set a small platter in front of me. At its center was a red chili pepper, long and smooth with a thick green stem.

  “The chili is mild,” Noah assured me. “I would never hurt you. Before we go any further with any of our lessons, remember that. Everything I do, I do for your benefit.”

  “I trust you,” I said. And I did trust him. Not with my heart, but with my body.

  He traced the plumpness of my lips. “Take the chili and slowly put it in your mouth, but don’t chew. Let the flavor linger on your tongue. Allow your senses to take over. Don’t speak. Just feel.”

  Blushing, I looked around at the empty rooftop. “Are the waiters gone?”

  “They were instructed to leave after serving this last plate. It’s just the two of us, but that shouldn’t matter. Don’t let your insecurities hold you back from experiencing great pleasure.”

  Gingerly, I picked the chili up and licked its tip, testing its mildness. Satisfied, I stuck it in my mouth and wrapped my lips firmly around it. A glaze of honey coated it, filling my mouth with a sweet joy, but the spice dominated. It heated my body, from lips to my breasts, down to my core. Closing my eyes, I felt the breeze slightly lift the hair off my neck.

  “Imogen, you make it very difficult to get through this lesson. Watching you like that, I want to rip your clothes off.” He stood from the table. “Come with me.”

  Bordering the rooftop was a tall guardrail. Noah pinned me against it and kissed me, licking the flavors of the night off my tongue as his hands crept up my thighs, stroking the area inches lower than where I needed him to stroke. More than anything, I wanted to feel his fingers inside me once again, caressing the pink flesh of my pussy, but I was acutely aware that the guardrail was made of glass.

  “People can see,” I objected, but it didn’t stop him. His fingers inched closer to my folds.

  “That’s the point. Toss aside your inhibitions
. Let me show the world the beauty that’s in it. Let me show it you.”

  Mesmerized by his raw manliness, I gave in, sodden as he played with the hairs of my manicured curls. “Teach me, sir.”

  Harshly, he spun me around so that I was pressed against the glass, and he pulled my backside towards him, forcing me to arch my back. “This dress stays on,” he said huskily, “but these come off.” Going to his knees, he pulled down my panties and rubbed his nose next to my pussy. He licked my thigh, his tongue firm and warm against my skin as he drank in my juices, ripening me. “Your scent is splendid; your taste is ambrosial.”

  An ache rolled across my stomach, sharpening my breath. It freaked me out how intimately he was acquainting himself with my body, but it was also utterly euphoric. I pressed my backside out further, giving him access to all of me. He could have me any way he wanted. As the spotlights of the city continued to roam the skies, I didn’t care if the whole damned world watched.

  As he lapped at the wetness on my thighs, he pushed the hem of my dress over my hips and rubbed the cheeks of my ass, stimulating me fully. I longed for him to move his tongue to my pink flesh, to sip from my cup, but finished with his appetizer, he stood. Throbbing for more, I heard the shuffle of fabric and the sound of a wrapper being opened.

  “Surrender,” he ordered and grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled my head back. Holding onto it like a rope, he circled his free hand around my hips and plunged into me, filling me with his hard warmth, which augmented as he crashed his hips into my backside, stretching and rubbing my flesh in endless bliss.

  Panting, my breath left steam against the glass of the guardrail, which rocked from his glorious siege. Feeling whole with his cock inside of me, the happiness I knew when I was with Noah overwhelmed me. As if he sensed this, he ran his palm down my spine. Jolts of electricity shot across my body, and I moaned loudly and freely, letting the night hear my cries of pleasure as I opened my eyes to watch the city sparkle below me.

  Giving back, I clenched my pussy around his cock, tightening for him. “Imogen, you she-devil,” he breathed and slowed his pace, escalating my pleasure, which I swallowed back, allowing it to build deep within me. First, my skin tingled from the build-up, and then it went numb, my release close.