Dirty Little Virgin: A Submissives’ Secrets Novel

by Michelle Love

  Phoenix looked pitiful, and it had Cait’s ire bubbling. “Mother, people use ketchup all the time. Don’t give Phoenix a hard time about it.”

  When Phoenix smiled at Cait, it took her breath away. And he found himself feeling more for Cait then he had before. She’d stand up for him! It wasn’t a thing anyone had done for him before.

  Phoenix hadn’t had it easy growing up. Tall from the start, he was made fun of plenty in his school days. Being poor was also a thing that had made him stand out as a loser. When his mother was sent to prison for selling drugs, he was labeled a bad person by the only people he’d known his entire life.

  Cait took the chair next to him again, handing the ketchup to him. “Thank you,” he said as he took the bottle from her.

  “Not a problem,” she said with a smile. “As a matter of fact, put some on mine too, please.”

  As he poured the ketchup on her plate, he began to feel the slightest twinge of something. Was that guilt he felt?

  The smell of over-ripened fruit hit Kel’s nostrils as she entered the old grocery store on the edge of town. For most things, she’d go to the new supermarkets, but for steaks, she always went to the tried and true, Old Buck’s Pantry. Her family trusted the butcher who’d been there forever and a day.

  “Hi, Kel,” her Aunt Stella called out to her as she came around the corner with a basketful of white wrapped meat.

  “Whoa,” Kel said as she looked at the basket. “Did you leave any meat for anyone else, Aunt Stella?”

  The old woman laughed. “I have men to feed, and I thought some fresh breakfast sausages and steaks to go with the fried eggs they love so much would get them to stick around a bit longer. And you’re welcome for that, my dear niece.”

  “And what does that mean, Aunt Stella?” Kel asked with a clueless expression.

  “Your men are staying at our bed and breakfast, of course. Didn’t they tell you girls that?” Stella looked confused and put her hand on her hip as Kel shook her head. “Well, I wonder why that is.”

  “Did the guys ask you things about us?” Kel asked her aunt. “Because they all took us on exceptional dates yesterday and we all thought they were a bit on the psychic side.”

  “Oh, yes!” Stella said with a grin. “They asked your uncle and me about things you girls like. So, they made a good impression then?”

  “Great ones, actually,” Kel said. “But it’s kind of not that great now that I know you told them what we like.”

  Stella threw her arms up as she said, “That doesn’t matter one bit. They took the time to ask questions and find things out. Now, that’s what’s important. They made the plans, and they made the effort. Not many men do that nowadays. I hope you consider yourselves lucky they want to know that much about you and make you happy!”

  Kel didn’t want to tell her elderly aunt why the men would go to all that trouble, so she nodded. “And how long did they say they’d be staying at your inn?”

  “They didn’t. I’m not sure how long we’ll have them there. All I know is that they were going to go have lunch at Peterson’s Grill. They said they’d be out for the night. I supposed they’d made plans with you and your sisters.”

  Kel shook her head. “No, they haven’t. But I expect a call soon. They can’t seem to leave us alone.”

  “And how lucky you should feel about that!” Stella said. “Those men are some handsome devils, I tell you what!”

  “That they are,” Kel agreed. “Thanks for the intel, Aunt Stella. I need to pick up steaks for dinner.”

  Leaving her aunt’s company, Kel suddenly didn’t want to cook steaks anymore. She opted to leave the store and call her sisters. If the men were all out eating, then maybe they could show up and surprise them.

  She made the call that had her sisters heading to the little café where Stella said the men were. And with any luck, they’d catch them in the middle of talking shop about their bet.

  Nestled in a corner booth, Kel spotted the three men who’d made a bet on her and her sisters. The waitress who greeted them was an old friend of hers. “Peggy, my sisters and I are going to do a bit of eavesdropping on those men in that booth over there. Do you mind leaving us to that?”

  With a wink, Peggy nodded. “Sure thing, Kel. You just wave at me if you need anything.”

  Kel, Cait, and Jess slipped around the edge of the dining room, staying out of the men’s sights. They took the booth just behind them and settled in to listen to what the scoundrels were up to.

  Ethan was boasting about something, and when Kel heard the name, Julia Loveless, she froze as he said, “That Julia Loveless could really show a man a good time.”

  “Tell me, Ethan,” Phoenix said. “Did you ever get her special kiss?”

  When all three men laughed, all three sister’s faces went red with anger. Kel and her sisters exchanged looks as they gritted their teeth to keep quiet.

  Griffin added, “I never had anyone give me a rim job before. And I haven’t since her, either.”

  Jess mouthed, ‘Gross!’

  Phoenix chuckled. “Can you imagine asking one of our girls for something like that?”

  When they all laughed a hearty laugh, the girls were livid. Kel made the sign of slitting her throat as a reference as to what she was going to do to Ethan.

  Ethan said, “Kel is much too classy to do something like that. No, I think I would never even ask her to do such a thing. She’s a good girl. A very good girl.”

  “Jess is too,” Griffin said. “How about Cait?”

  “Oh, she’s good too,” Phoenix said. “But to tell the truth, I think if it weren’t for her sisters being involved, she’d have given in to me.”

  Cait smiled and nodded, prompting Kel to punch her in the arm and mouth, ‘Tramp!’

  Cait shrugged as Phoenix went on, “Want to know the truth?”

  “Sure,” Ethan said.

  “Julia was sexy, hot, damn great in the sack, but I think Cait will make me forget I ever knew Julia and her erotic ways,” Phoenix said, making Cait’s heart speed up.

  “You think so?” Griffin asked. “I mean, Julia knew her way around a man’s cock, that’s for sure. Jess is young. Inexperienced. I’m not sure she’d make me forget all that Julia could do.”

  “You could teach her, Griff,” Ethan joked. “Not that we’ll be around long enough for you to teach her too much.”

  “Yeah, we have to get this bet over with,” Griff said, making Jess frown.

  “You need to get back to work, Griff?” Phoenix asked.

  When all three of the men laughed again, the women were puzzled. But they knew then that they were only going to be notches on the guy’s bedposts and nothing more than that. They’d all been lied to.

  “I’m not going to lie,” Ethan said. “I’ll miss Kel. But I’ll have at least one night of pure pleasure to remember her by.”

  ‘The hell he will!’ Kel mouthed to her sisters who nodded in agreement.

  “I’ll miss Jess too,” Griffin said.

  Phoenix echoed him, “Yeah, I’m gonna miss, Cait.”

  The women sat and waited for the guys to say anything else, but all that came was silence followed by the sound of heavy mugs being sat down.

  “We could keep in touch with them, I suppose,” Griff said.

  “The explaining would be too hard,” Ethan said. “Can you imagine if one of us accidently told our girl about the bet and they told the others? Well, it’d end up with the others being dumped. Left with broken hearts and none of us need that mess in our lives.”

  “I think Ethan’s right,” Phoenix agreed. “Cait would put my balls in a vice, I can almost feel it now.”

  The men laughed again then Ethan said, “Those ladies are marrying material.”

  “I know,” Griffin agreed.

  “I’m sure they’re already talking amongst themselves about how to get us all into holy matrimony with them,” Phoenix said.

  “I wonder if Kel is coaching them on it,”
Ethan said. “It’s not beyond her to do such a thing. You know, telling them to hold out until they get a ring on it.”

  “Oh, hell!” Phoenix gasped. “What if that’s true? What if they plan on holding out until that happens? Do women really wait until the wedding night?”

  “Some do,” Griffin said. “But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I mean, our girls don’t seem to be that religious or that manipulating.”

  “How much longer are we going to give them?” Phoenix asked.

  “We have nothing but time,” Ethan reminded him. “But we should put a limit on it, shouldn’t we?”

  “Hey, what if we made them jealous with other chicks?” Griff asked.

  Jess smacked her fist in her hand as she thought about Griff’s hands on another woman. Cait looked at her and put her finger to her lips.

  “That might work,” Phoenix agreed.

  “Or it might backfire, and they might shut us out for good,” Ethan said. “I do believe if Kel saw me with another woman she’d cut me out without a second thought.”

  More silence followed by the sound of glasses being sat back down, let the girls know the men were stumped by what to do to win their bet and get the girls into their beds.

  So Kel decided it was time to make themselves known but not entirely. She leaned up and whispered, “Just go along with me, sisters, I think I have an idea.”

  With their nods of agreement, Kel got up, and the others followed her. She went to the waitress and got her to seat them at the same table but this time she wanted the men to notice them. But they’d act like they didn’t see them.

  It was time to make a little deal of their own.

  If you liked this preview, you get the complete story here:

  Billionaire Games (A Billionaire Bad Boys Contemporary Romance Novel)

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y6DCQ9S

  The Midnight Club

  Maceo Bartoli. Alex Milland. Lisander Duarte. Benoit Vaux. Seth Cantor. They are five of the most eligible billionaires on the planet—and they share a strange coincidence. All five were born at midnight on the same day in the same year. Friends and playboys all, they call themselves The Midnight Club and they have only one rule: to never let a woman come between them. But as they grow older, this rule becomes harder and harder to keep. And when they meet the women who could change their lives forever, they realize that it’s time for the Club to mature.

  Despite the recent murder of Viola, Alex’s fiancée, the friends don’t know that any woman they meet from now on could also be in terrible danger. Because someone wants to keep The Midnight Club exclusive and will stop at nothing to do it. Does the threat come from outside, or is one of The Midnight Club a vicious and merciless killer?

  Chapter 1: DUSK

  Venice, Italy, March 14, a year previously…

  Alex Milland was the first to arrive in The Floating City Galleria and immediately he went to find Maceo. The art gallery may have been small, but its position overlooking the lagoon afforded wonderful views across the city. One whole wall was glass; the rest of the walls were painted a stark white. The effect was to make the works of art hanging on them stand out. It worked.

  Alex nodded to himself approvingly. He smiled to himself as he noticed a few harassed-looking but very attractive assistants scuttling around. He wondered how many of them Maceo was fucking. Dumb question, he said to himself. Maceo would have screwed them all at their first interview.

  Maceo himself was in his office on the third floor. Alex knocked on the door and didn’t wait for an answer. Maceo looked up and grinned.

  “Alex, how good to see you.” He got up and the two men bear hugged. Maceo, his green eyes a contrast to his dark curls and swarthy skin, studied his friend. “How are you? Really?’

  Alex sighed inwardly. He would be getting this question a lot today. “I’m fine, Maceo. It’s been months since Viola died and, not that I will ever get over it, but I have to try and function. So I need this. I need to celebrate something good. The place looks incredible.’

  Maceo nodded, grinning. Humility wasn’t in Maceo’s playbook. “Thanks, Alex. I admit, it does look spectacular. And you should see who we have exhibiting at the moment.” He rattled off a few names, and Alex was impressed. Some of the biggest names in modern art—he had to admire Maceo’s work ethic. He doubted anyone said no to the young man in front of him.

  Young man. Alex shook his head, smiling. He and Maceo were the exact same age; Alex just felt like the grandad of their group. The club. The Midnight Club. In truth, he had always considered himself the oldest of them—except for maybe Seth. But then again, he and Seth were as close as twins. Maceo was the young puppy of the group— passionate, confident, a visionary.

  Maceo gathered up a pile of papers and yelled, “Lucia!” A gorgeous blonde girl walked in and Alex smiled at her. She nodded back, friendly but professional.

  “You have an intercom, Maceo. Don’t scream at me,” she snapped at Maceo, who grinned unrepentantly. She took the papers from him and, as she was walking away, she looked back over her shoulder. “I have to duck out for a couple of hours. Personal errand. Your other friends are waiting downstairs.”

  Maceo hooted his delight. “Good! Come, Alex, let’s go see them.” And he bore his friend away back down the main gallery.

  Orianthi Roy stood outside the airport arrivals, feeling lost. Lucia was late, and Ori wondered if she should hail a cab. Italy was new to her, and the flight had tired her out. Now she felt discombobulated as people pushed passed her, meeting their loved ones, loudly talking, and yelling everywhere.

  “This was meant to be a break. A quiet break,” she muttered to herself, then felt a flood of relief as she saw Lucia waving at her. Her friend hugged her.

  “God, I’m sorry, Ori. The traffic was insane. Is that your case? Come on, I’ll get you settled at home.”

  Lucia drove them back into the city. Ori was surprised. “I thought it was all canals?”

  Lucia grinned. “Not yet. We’re still on the mainland. Listen, I have to tell you, my boss is having his grand gallery opening tonight and so I have to work. But I have arranged for you to be on the guest list—don’t worry, it’s an invite-only thing and won’t go too late. But I would really like you to come.”

  Damn it, Ori thought, but kept a smile on her face. “Love to, Luce. Listen, I can’t thank you enough for letting me stay. I just needed to get away from all the craziness back home.”

  Lucia looked at her with sympathy. “I knew it was bad, Ori, but I have to tell you, you scared me when you called me the other night. What has Janek done now?”

  Ori felt sick at the mere mention of his name—Tyson Janek III, congressman and her stepfather. Recently outed by the mainstream press as screwing a lot of his colleagues’ wives, he had been forced to step down, but even now was working to retake his position. The fact that he was doing it by calling in favors from people who were less than respectable didn’t matter to Tyson Janek. He didn’t care who he stepped on or who he destroyed. When he had married Ori’s mother, Ori had been ten years old and in deep mourning for the father she had lost. Ori’s mother, Kathryn, after being disinherited from her father’s newspaper fortune , had married the charming and handsome Tyson and had given birth to Ori’s younger half-brother, AJ soon after. AJ was the best and only good thing about the marriage, as far as Ori was concerned.

  Almost as soon as Tyson had married her mother, he started to abuse Ori. At first, it was insidious—the odd touch here and there that could be explained away. But on the night of her twelfth birthday, her mother was asleep when Tyson came into Ori’s room. That night he raped her for the first time. That night he threatened the life of her mother, her baby brother, and Ori herself for the first time. It didn’t stop until Ori left for college. She never returned home. Tyson persuaded her mother to write Ori out of her will, leaving her penniless.

  Determined not to take a penny from Tyson or touch the small amount of m
oney her mother had left AJ, Ori worked in retail stores, bars, restaurants, diners, all to make enough to pay her rent and keep food on the table. At college, she excelled and graduated from her arts program with honors. It was only when she started to be offered places in graduate programs that Tyson started to interfere again. Suddenly Ori would be turned down or rejected for places she had initially been offered unconditionally. Tyson broke into her apartment one night and told her that she would never be free of him, that she belonged to him. When her mother died five years ago, Ori had taken the still-teenage AJ and moved away from New York, hiding out in Arizona, and putting AJ through state school.

  Tyson had found them within weeks and, threatening Ori with arrest, had taken his son back to New York. Unwilling to leave AJ, Ori had reluctantly followed, knowing that as long as AJ was underage, Tyson had them.

  He raped her again on her twenty-fifth birthday, and this time, he beat her too. Leaving her bleeding and bruised, he got dressed and grabbed her by the throat. “Try and leave me, Ori. Just try. They won’t be able to identify your body for weeks.”

  But living in a world of terror can make the strongest person break. Ori quit her job and stayed at home for three months, not speaking to anyone. In the end, it took a concerned ex-co-worker to come find her and pull her out of the mire. Lucia had been over from Italy to see her parents, Italian immigrants to New York, and had been horrified to see Ori so depressed. She had told her then to come to Italy, to escape.

  Three years after that final rape, when Tyson’s scandal erupted and the press was all over their family, AJ checked himself into a facility for depression, and Ori called Lucia. It had been her one chance to escape Tyson. Now that she knew AJ was okay and that he was safe where he was …it was time for her to look out herself.

  “Hey, penny for them. We’re here.” Lucia nudged her, smiling.

  Lucia’s apartment was huge. Her guest bedroom looked out over a canal and had a little balcony where Ori could sit and sketch or just sit and watch the day. She looked around the bedroom. Huge bed, vanity, en-suite bathroom. A small table and chair for her to work at. Ori smiled at Lucia gratefully.