Anthology - Behind the Mask

by Joey W Hill, Lacey Alexander

  “You really do love me.”

  His hand reached out, smoothed her hair from her temple, tilted her chin so she had to look up at him, into his unsmiling, devastatingly handsome countenance.

  “And you love me, sweetheart. I’ll wait for you to know it, the way I do.”

  It was such a reflection of her own thoughts, she had to stifle tears. “We don’t…we haven’t even gone out on a date. I’m not counting tonight, Matthew.”

  “I beg to differ.” He caressed her hand, playing idle finger games with her, a wonderfully intimate pastime that fascinated her. “Over the past two years, we have had over thirty-eight dates. We’ve played the same fencing games that dating couples play. We’ve even spent the entire night together, several times. We’ve ordered food.”

  Her mouth turned up into a shy smile. “Matt, you’re as dysfunctional as I am. Those are meetings, not dates. Next thing you’ll say is that the video we saw on the new line of hydraulic nailers was the same as going to a movie.”

  “I laid an arm over the back of your chair. I would have tried to cop a feel, but figured you’d chew my arm off at the shoulder.”

  She laughed then, and it wasn’t as hopeless a sound as she expected it to be.

  He removed his hand from hers, began to loosen his tie.

  “What…what are you doing?” Her throat had gone dry, knowing exactly what he was doing. The trembling in her thighs increased, and all the passion stroked to life but unfulfilled by Peter and Ben flared as if there had never been a lull. Every cell of her body begged.

  “You know what I’m doing. You’re mine. And notions of twentieth-century promiscuity be damned, we both know the way I intend to stake my claim on you, make you mine forever.”

  Chapter Six

  “Have you thought of just asking?” she asked softly, stilling him in the act of unbuttoning the third button of his shirt, exposing the fine dark hair of his chest that her fingers longed to stroke, tangle in, clutch when his body slid into hers.

  “You know the rules of negotiation. Never give them a chance to say no.”

  A full smile curved her lips this time, and she watched his eyes settle on her mouth with erotic intent. “Be brave, Matthew.”

  Matt seemed to weigh her words, every aspect of the moment, down to the ticking of the clock and the hum of the lighting.

  “Don’t calculate the risk, Matt,” she said, the silence driving away her tentative assurance, making her eyes prick with the threat of tears. “This is so hard for me. Please, just…believe…”

  In something larger than us both.

  His eyes softened, and the crucial moment of connection was made, a moment of such impact she almost heard the click. “You’re right.” He dropped to one knee beside her. “I am very much in love with you, Savannah. I’ve wanted you from the very first moment I saw you. Since the moment we met, you’ve stirred me up, made me think thoughts so fantastic you’d laugh at them.”

  “Like what?” She touched his face, grateful that he stayed still, letting her fill with wonder at the simple pleasure of feeling his jaw beneath her fingers, knowing from his expression he wanted her hand there. It was a miracle to be wanted. She wondered if he could possibly understand that.

  “You’re crying,” he said softly, and she nodded.

  “You haven’t told me an example of fantastic thoughts.”

  “Forever thoughts. A house. A dog. A shared portfolio.”

  She laughed then, a quick hitch into a sob. His gaze on hers, he stayed on one knee beside her, but finished unbuttoning his shirt, drawing her attention down to his hands. Her body’s urgent hum increased, disrupting her emotional focus. She had never felt so many different things at once. Her fingers trailed down his neck, followed the opening in his shirt to feel a man’s chest, again for the first time. A shudder ran through his body. A new miracle. She lifted amazed eyes to him.

  “You’ve brought me to a place I’ve never been tonight, Matt,” she admitted. “And I’ve no idea where to go at this point but to lead with my feelings, even knowing that I’m giving you every opportunity to cut me to ribbons. I want you. Please. Just don’t…” It took every ounce of courage to say the words, and she was proud they came out, not as a trembling plea, but a quiet, steady request. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  She wasn’t talking about the act. She knew he understood that. She’d never asked anyone for protection or defense. Instead, she’d become a master at preventing people from hurting her. She’d crafted herself into a knight forever trapped in her mail, the metal becoming her true skin while everything inside withered away from lack of sunlight, stimulation…touch. He’d broken her out of the mail, and she was shivering, naked, completely vulnerable. Completely alive.

  “Never.” His voice was rough with emotion, and he came close, held her face cradled in his hands as he pressed his forehead to hers, touched her lips with his mouth. She cupped her hands over his strong, warm ones. “I’ve wanted you to say that to me for so long,” he murmured against her mouth. “To hear that you trust me enough to ask it. Never, sweet Savannah. I’ll destroy anyone who causes you a moment of pain.”

  The totally male, totally unrealistic promise nevertheless squeezed her heart into her throat, stopping her breath as much as when he straightened and slid out of the shirt, his tanned skin a golden gleam beneath the room’s dim light. He had beautiful musculature under the fine layer of male fur, and she could not help following the sleek lines of him down to the waistband of his slacks.

  “Do you want more?” he asked quietly, his hand at the fastener.

  A tiny smile curved her lips. “My specialty is production. What do you think?”

  He chuckled, but she did raise one hand, holding them just a moment. “Just…go slow. You’re kind of overwhelming. Actually, this whole night’s been a bit overwhelming.”

  “I know,” he said, a trace of regret in his voice. “If I were any kind of gentleman, I’d wait, but Savannah… God, it’s like a vampire thing. I have to make you mine by dawn or I’m afraid I’ll lose you, that I’ll see you tomorrow and you’ll be back behind your armor, convincing yourself it didn’t mean what it meant, any of it.” His heated gaze traveled up her bare body, spreading fire. “But if you feel the soreness, the stickiness of my come drying between your legs, the smell of me on your skin, see a red blush on your jaw in the mirror tomorrow from the rasp of my beard, you won’t.”

  “It’s a signed deal, then,” she whispered. She lifted her arms. “Will you come and just…lie on me a few minutes, before you take everything off?”

  He had bought a man’s couch for his boardroom, so it was a good seven feet long and nearly three and a half feet wide. He tossed the small cushions scattered on it, except for one, which he adjusted under her head and shoulders, making her comfortable, before he stretched out upon her as she had requested. His finger trailed along her thigh with gentle pressure so she widened their span to accommodate his hips and long legs between them. She liked how he adjusted the pillow beneath her, scooping his arm under her shoulders, holding her face close to his chest, his chin brushing the top of her head as he saw to her comfort. What would it be to get used to that, someone caring how she felt, not because she was responsible for thousands of people’s livelihoods, not because she was a legacy, but because he cared? And what would it be to care for him the same way, hold his hand at a movie, stroke his brow after a trying day, see him laugh at something on television, see that toe poke out of the end of its sock?

  “How’s that?” he asked in that sensual, bedroom-hushed voice. “Am I too heavy?”

  The pressure of him on her was like the pressure of too much happiness on her heart, something so unfamiliar it was almost painful. It was a feeling close to heaven. His arms curled on either side of her head, her vision totally dominated by his handsome face, the dark eyes, that incredible mouth. Daring, she lifted her chin, reaching, and like a miraculous telepathy, he came down to meet her, with a soft, gen
tle kiss that was perfect. She parted her lips, shyly tasted him with her tongue, touching his lips, then his tongue, and felt the new sensation of his body tightening in response to the provocation. The friction of him against the juncture of her thighs, separated only by the trousers, pressed insistently, male power and strength held back only by his caring toward her. She closed her eyes as the kiss deepened, and a hundred things flashed through that darkness, things that had always been there, that she had refused to see. A hundred ways he had supported her, contributed to her reputation, respected her. She had focused on the battles, never allowing herself to see what else was there.

  A million kindnesses. She remembered now, in stark detail, tiny things. Him reaching toward the center of the table, filling her water glass when it was almost empty, though his was full, underscoring that he was doing it as a courtesy to her. Silly, but now it seemed full of meaning. The many times he’d called her during the week, to discuss this or that detail on their mutual business interests, but in some subtle way he’d lifted her spirits by making a dry joke or witticism about something they both understood. The fact that he’d sent her flowers every Friday since her father’s death.

  She loved roses. She supposed he’d found that out from her office assistant. He’d sent her the first bouquet right after her father’s death. She’d thanked him for it, assuming it was the usual condolence gesture. Then they’d kept coming, every Friday for the past two years. She hadn’t acknowledged those bouquets at first, figuring if she ignored them he would stop sending them. He didn’t. In all those two years, he’d never sent her the same shade, and never a dyed flower. Always beautiful palettes of hybrids from gardens all over the country. One bouquet had even been shipped from England. At some point she’d started saving one bloom from each delivery, getting them pressed and preserved, and added them to a dried bouquet she kept in her bedroom. Often, it was what she studied as she lay down at night, somehow not feeling so alone by the simple act of gazing at them.

  “You’ve always been there for me, since we first met.” She accepted it. Said it out loud.

  “Not as often as I should have been. I should have done something like this a long time ago.” He bent his head, put his lips beneath her ear and cruised down her neck. She arched, pulling on her bottom lip with her teeth as the movement rubbed her body against his, the soft skin of her inner thighs sliding against the outside of his, instinctively pushing her aching center against his hardness. She was amazed at her own wantonness, unleashing itself now that she…

  He raised his head as if he felt her reaction to her own thoughts. “Savannah?”

  “I trust you, Matt. I’ve never trusted anyone, not in my entire life. I think that’s why tonight was…possible. I kept asking myself why I wasn’t screaming and fighting you, why I wasn’t dialing 911 when I got free, and this was it. You knew, didn’t you? Since that day on the desk, like you said.”

  He nodded, his heart and his desire for her in his gaze. “I knew.”

  “And that I would…” She suspected “enjoy” wasn’t the proper word. “…respond to this type of thing?” She wasn’t worldly about sex. She just knew it felt good, that she craved more.

  “Yes.” He kissed her nose, lingering so she closed her eyes, savored. “I knew you were mine the first time I saw you, and I knew you’d be willing to be submissive to the right man, the man you could trust to take care of you when you have to be in control of everything else.

  “You’re a strong, strong woman. The most basic way to prove that to you, the way the predator in you would understand, was to take you down the way another predator would. Make you expose your throat and concede my dominance over you.” He tilted her head back with a thumb to her chin, and set his teeth lightly to her jugular, flicking it with his tongue. “As your mate. The one who cares for you and needs you the most. Who would never hurt you.”

  The words were offensive, but the truth behind them was so primal, so intuitive and beyond the realm of political correctness, her pulse leaped, not in anger, but in response, and her thighs relaxed, accommodating him further, sending exactly the message he had said he would pull from her. Total submission.

  “I…I don’t want to be free to choose any longer, Matt.” She got out the words, and she meant them so deeply, it was hard to form them. “I want to belong to you.”

  With an almost feral growl of need, he lifted up from her, just enough for there to be a space. “Open my slacks.”

  With trembling fingers, she found the hook fastener, slipped it, took down the zipper, her wrists brushing the hard heat beneath. He reached back, pushed them off his hips.

  “Matt,” she said softly, not daring to look him in the eye. “Will you…can I feel all of you at once? Will you be…”

  “Naked?” His eyes smiled at her, though his jaw was tight with his desire for her. “Anything for you. Anything you ask, I’ll give you.”

  He lifted off her, meliorating her immediate sense of loss by taking her hand as he rose, kissing her knuckles in a gallant gesture that ran electricity down her arm, tightening her breasts and the wet folds of her sex.

  Then he took off his shoes, one by one, pulled off the black dress socks, making her smile when he put his hand in one to show her the hole in the toe. His slacks were open during the process and her eyes were drawn to the play of his well-defined stomach muscles just above the band of his underwear, the black soft jersey boxers. He slid the slacks off, tossed them over one of the conference room chairs, then removed the boxers as well. He saved his watch for last, and she was able to watch the play of muscles in his arms and chest as he bent his elbows to perform the removal task, and look her fill at his bare body. He made no move to adjust his stance, keeping his blatant arousal, his whole body, open to a thorough appraisal.

  She was shy about him watching, and he must have noticed. “Look all you want,” he said gently. “There’s no shame in wanting to look, and the way you’re looking at me just makes me want you more. This is as much your body to look at as yours is mine. I’m all yours, sweetheart.”

  The heavy sac of his testicles rested against his thighs, the long, stiff cock jutting from a nest of soft, dark curls, midnight like those on his head. The outline of his hip suggested he had as fine an ass as she’d always suspected from surreptitious study of it when he was clothed.

  “Did you know that I looked, sometimes?” She couldn’t take her gaze away, and in a spontaneous gesture, she wet her lips.

  He groaned, gave her a half laugh. “Yeah, I did. A lot of times I caught you eyeing my ass. Once I caught you studying my crotch.” Her gaze shot up, sparking, and he laughed outright. “Well, you did. It was the airline contract.”

  “Well, those were very tedious negotiations,” she defended herself. She was getting cold. She wanted him here, on her again, to feel that comfortable, solid weight pressing her into the couch. “You don’t have to remove the watch.”

  “Yes, I do. It can catch a nipple or a hair unexpectedly, and I don’t want to cause you a moment more of discomfort than I have to. Savannah, have you ever used anything inside of yourself? A vibrator?”

  At her confused look, he explained, in a husky voice. “I need to know how tight you’ll be, honey. So I don’t hurt you.”

  She shook her head, flushing. “Of course not. Good grief, Matt, I have a houseful of domestic staff. What would they think if they heard it or…found it?”

  He smiled, propped an arm on the couch and came back down on her with an animal-like deftness that took her breath. He used his knee to nudge her a little further apart, and then put the other hand between them, stroking through her labia, finding her slick and warm. Savannah gasped on a moan, and his eyes darkened.

  “What will they think the first time I take you to bed there, make you scream and tear the wallpaper because I have your wrists cuffed between the slats of the headboard? Ah, sweet Christ, your pussy just rippled against my touch. Feel me, baby.” And he slid his fingers into h
er, slow, pressing upward so she felt the flesh of his palm against her clit as he explored her pussy.

  “Matt.” She gripped his biceps, holding on, her neck straining, her head against his shoulder as her body struggled beneath him.

  “Beg your Master to take you, Savannah. Tell me you belong to me again.”

  A lifetime of distrust somehow had no ability to withstand the flood of emotion that his words evoked, the overwhelming lust gripping her body, a different intensity than even what she had experienced with his men. That had been physical, she realized. This was more, a longing for fulfillment on all levels.

  Now she understood what Jon had meant, the pleasure that would be ten times greater than anything else that had occurred tonight, if she recognized and accepted it. Surrender. Love. Full submission to the man she loved, an intense emotional and physical pleasure like she’d never known swamping her at the simple verbal declaration.

  But she had one last holdout, one last need to be met, and she would ask it, because she knew now she could trust his answer.

  She managed to get her hands from his arms up to his neck, caressing his jaw, so their eyes were locked in a moment that was simple, mutual absorption.

  “If I tell you that, will you keep me, forever and ever? Never leave me? Never leave me in any way, never stop loving me?”

  Please don’t be my father. Don’t live in the same house and let your heart not be there.

  He took his fingers from her, making her shudder, and closed his hand on one of hers, laying it to his heart. “I will never leave you, not in any way, Savannah,” he said, his voice laden with emotion. “From today forward, for all eternity. You’re marrying me this weekend. I’m never going to let you know loneliness again. There’s a diamond ring in the pocket of my slacks, and it’s going on your finger before you leave this office tonight. That was my gift.”