by Violet Blaze
My body stretches to accommodate him and for a full second there, I find it hard to breathe. Lion Man waits for me to adjust, his body fully propped up, giving me some room to catch my breath. But I can't. I feel so full, my tummy muscles tightening and my thighs pressing up against the sweaty, muscular sides of this man's body.
I don't know his name, but when he starts to move inside of me, I wish I did.
That electrifying trickle between us intensifies into a blinding ache, each place that he touches me alive with energy and life, need, want, desperation. I groan and bury my face into the hollow of his shoulder, breathing deep with each thrust. His pelvis presses into my clitoris, grinding it in just the right way to get me off.
My hips feel stretched but I spread my thighs wider anyway, encourage Lion Man to press his warm, hard body into mine. His golden skin covers my paleness, drapes across me as he thrusts, each movement drawing his belly muscles up tight and then releasing them again.
My orgasm builds more quickly than I want it to; I don't want this moment to end.
We kiss again, mouths tangling as his movements get less practiced, more animalistic, more frantic. Our moans are lost in the music as we join together in a wild coupling, pleasure spiraling up through my spine and into my head. My mouth drops open as I raise my hips and cry out, coming around this mystery guy like he belongs to me, like I'll never let him go.
I'm still thrashing and panting when he grabs hold of my right hip and drives himself into me, so hard that I feel like I'm being ground into the mattress. The pleasure is so intense that I can't seem to make a single sound, a second orgasm wrapping over me as he comes in a violent, splendorous frenzy.
When he pulls back and slides out of me, I feel empty and stretched and satisfied all at the same time. Lion Man rolls over next to me and slides his arm under my waist, pulling me tight against him as the music changes again, mellows out a little.
I try to think of something clever to say, but no words will come out.
I must be feeling pretty good because before I know it, the sex and the alcohol and the warmth of this man's body come together until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open.
I fall asleep in the arms of a stranger.
My cheek is pressed into an unfamiliar pillow. When I try to raise my head, it feels like it weighs a million pounds. At first I think it's because I'm suffering from a major hangover, but then I realize that I'm still wearing my lioness mask.
“Ouch.” The heavy jeweled mask has been digging into my skin for hours, leaving deep grooves in the side of my face that feel tender when I press my fingers to them—and that's not the only part of my body that feels tender.
I curl my legs up to my chest and lean against the headboard, dropping the mask onto the pillow next to me, right next to the maned lion.
“Oh shit,” I say as the gravity of last night sweeps over me. I danced with a stranger; I had a one-night stand with a stranger. My tummy and hips feel sore, like I've been stretched, but in a good way. I feel satiated and womanly and possessive.
And I don't even know the guy.
That, and it looks like he split at first light. I sit up and notice a small piece of paper sitting on the nightstand next to me.
Good-bye, My Beautiful Lioness, it says and I smile. There's no number or name or anything attached to it, but then, that wasn't what last night was all about, was it? I sit up with a moan, the tender ache between my legs warring for attention with the soreness of the hickeys on my neck. I slap a hand against them and groan.
Guess it's turtlenecks for the next however many days.
Forcing my body up, I gather my clothes from the floor and tiptoe to the attached bathroom, giving myself a quick rinse before I get dressed, grab the masks, and head out the door. Disturbingly enough, I emerge at about the same time as Hal.
“I'll call you,” she whispers as she blows a kiss and closes a door behind her. Poor guy. Whoever's in there has no idea; Hal never calls. “Della,” she gasps when she turns around and sees me standing there in last night's clothes. “What are you … did you just come to pick me up?” Her head tilts to the side like she can't make sense of the situation, like there's no way I could actually be a normal, sexual human being.
“Let's go, Hal,” I say because I definitely don't want to get into the dirty details of whatever it was she did last night. I shiver as I remember the hot touch of Lion Man's hands on my hips, trailing down my belly, the shape of his mouth as he leaned down to press it to mine. My hand lifts unconsciously to my tummy. God, that felt good. “Where's Ariana?” I ask, suddenly ashamed of myself. I abandoned my soon-to-be-married friend to have sex with some dude whose face I never even saw.
“She left right after you disappeared, had Scottie pick her up.”
I cringe.
“Was she upset?” I ask as we head towards the front door and past a security guard who nods his chin at us. I try to hand him back the masks but he just shakes his head at me and mumbles, “keep 'em.”
“No,” Hal says, gesturing at the lion masks in my hand. Her rainbow mask is nowhere to be seen. “She was just happy she got to keep the mask.” I smile. Sounds like Ariana.
I hand the valet the ticket I pinned to the inside of my dress and wait for him to bring my car around.
“So … what are you doing here?” Hal asks again, studying me like she can see the after sex glow etched into the half-smile on my face. “Did you … hook up with somebody last night?” I pretend not to hear her as my Range Rover pulls up in front of us.
Hal at least has the decency to climb in before she starts grilling me, shoving perfectly shiny and tangle-free blond hair over her shoulder. Despite all the effort I just put into combing mine with the disposable black comb I found with the toiletries, mine looks like a tangled bird's nest, the reddish-brown curls twisting and bouncing in a single mass.
“Della?” Hal croons, grabbing my wrist as I reach to turn on some music. “You have to tell me what happened last night. Did you cheat on Walter?”
“I didn't … I can't cheat on someone I'm not with,” I say, but it sounds kind of lame even to me. I did say … sure last night, didn't I? Does that mean he thinks we're together? It must if he gave me that zillion dollar ring, huh? I moan and snatch a pair of sunglasses from a compartment on the roof, jamming them onto my face.
I feel awful.
But yet … the way that man's hands felt as they roamed my body, the way we melted together when he slid into me, I don't think I've ever felt anything so right before.
“Am I really a cheater?”
“Nah,” Hal says, but her words don't really comfort me. Hal is … let's just say she has very different ideas on monogamy and relationships than I do. “You've never screwed him, right?”
“Hal,” I warn, but she waves away my words as I squint through the early morning sunshine. Even with the sunglasses on, it is blinding.
“You're still a bachelorette in my opinion. After the wedding, if you guys haven't talked about exploring and open relationships and all that, then yeah, I'd say you were cheating.”
“I'm a cheater,” I repeat, but it's hard to actually feel like that's true. Walter doesn't feel like my fiancé or even my boyfriend. He's definitely not my lover. Not like Lion Man. God. I could've sworn that I belonged in that man's arms, that I really was the lioness to his lion. Oh well. It's probably best he skipped out of there before I was awake. It would've just been another awkward morning after to be suffered in half-sentences and silence. Best to remember it as the magical experience that's now ingrained in my mind.
“Don't think too hard about it,” Hal says as she takes off her seat belt and climbs into the back seat, giving me heart palpitations. When I hear the zipper on the duffel she stashed in here last night, I know she's changing to hide what happened last night from my stepmom. “Can you tell Mom that we went out to breakfast or something?”
I sigh and merge onto the highway, heading towards my dad's place. May
be if I hurry, I can drop Hal off without anyone noticing me?
Best I start praying for a miracle.
I let Hal out around the corner and wish her luck, heading straight home for a proper change of clothes and what's certain to be a brutal fight with my hairbrush. When I get there, I immediately spot Walter's slick black Ferrari in the visitor parking.
Shit.
I park in my usual spot and grab my purse, digging frantically into the zippered pouch for the ring. Without stopping to analyze what I'm doing, I tug the diamond studded loop down my finger and crawl out of the car.
“Your fiancé is here,” the security guard, Marquis, says with a small grin as I walk in the front door. “Congratulations. I let him up to your apartment.”
“Oh, thanks, Marq,” I say, resisting the urge to curse him out. Walter. In my apartment. It feels like an invasion of my space and I don't like it. Makes me want to growl like Lion Man did last night, get fierce and protective, mark my territory.
I take the elevator up and find Walt waiting on my couch.
“Della,” he says in a slow, sensual voice, checking me out as I let myself in and close the door behind me. His eyes take me in appreciatively, scanning the curves of my bare legs with a shiny eagerness that makes me squirm. “I take it your friend's alright?”
“What?” I ask as I blink at him. And then … ooooooh. “Yeah, yeah, she's fine. Just a little neck thing and … Ariana's a big baby.” Which is a lie that couldn't be further from the truth. But then, Walter wouldn't know that because he doesn't really know me at all. I set my purse on the counter and smile at him. “What are you doing here?” I try to make it sound cheerful, but I'm not sure if that's how it really comes out.
“Well,” he says as he saunters toward me in his expensive navy blue suit, his dark hair smooth and perfect, his face groomed and smooth as a baby's today. The manicured five o'clock shadow is gone and I find that I like this look even less. Walt's still handsome, but … his urban slickness doesn't match up to Lion Man's fierce, wild animal nature. “I have a little surprise for you.”
I stand still as he comes up to me and takes one of my hands in his. Oh God, I think as he stares down at me. He can probably smell the bourbon-oak-vanilla scent of Lion Man. I know I still can. I feel like I'm drenched in it, marked by it. I felt like … it's silly, but I feel like he was claiming me last night. In his arms, I felt good, warm, safe, not at all like I was betraying anyone. When Walt pulls my hand to his mouth for a cold kiss, that's when I start to feel like I'm cheating on someone.
How silly is that? Masked No-Name Stranger? Or the guy I have to marry to save my family's business? Their home? Their lifestyle? My lifestyle?
“Yeah?” I ask, hoping I sound cheerful. Walt steps back from me and gestures to a bottle of champagne on the counter.
“Do you know what this is?” he asks slyly, lifting his dark brows up as he moves over to wrap his hands around the bottle's neck.
“Um, booze?” I joke, but he doesn't laugh.
“This is a bottle of Armand de Brignac's Nebuchadnezzar. I'd love to share a glass with you.”
I try not to let my mouth hang open as I let the name of the champagne swirl around in my head. That stuff is thirty-five grand a bottle?! Suddenly, I feel like I might hate Walter a little bit. Thirty-five grand for a few glasses of bubbly alcohol? That money could change lives.
“Do you have glasses?” he asks and it takes me a second to realize I'm spacing out.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say quickly, turning to the off-white cabinets behind me. Inside one of the glass fronted doors I can see a pair of champagne flutes that I usually use for Ariana and me. “Here we go,” I say, presenting the crystal on the granite countertop with a flourish. I feel like I'm overacting here, but I don't know how else to act.
Last night should've meant nothing, but somehow it feels like everything.
You're letting a random hookup get to you, I scold. See? This is why I don't do one-night stands. They just never turn out well.
“What are we celebrating?” I ask and then realize how stupid I'm being. I hold up my left hand and wiggle my fingers. “Besides the engagement I mean.”
Walter laughs, his blue eyes oddly similar to my father's. Not dark and mysterious and coated in chocolate …
“I've got you an engagement present,” he says, opening the champagne with a pop and pouring a frothy gold glass for each of us. “Toast?” I lift my flute and raise my eyebrow as he smiles over at me with his too thin, too wide mouth.
“To …” I start and Walter's weird smile gets even wider. He looks like a shark or a gator or a piranha or something. Sunlight filters in the wall of floor to ceiling windows in the living room, flooding the place with gold fingers of warmth.
“To … the Arcata Adders,” he says, and I get a strange chill in the bottom of my stomach. Oh. That's right. I won a date with Rhoden Richards. I'd forgotten about that completely in last night's frenzy. Hmm. “May they win the Super Bowl this year.”
“May they,” I say with an actual smile. Football. I can talk football all day long, especially about the Adders. “Richards might be a … well, a Big Dick, but if he keeps his head in the game, we shouldn't have any problem riding to victory.”
“Good,” Walter says as he tips his glass to his lips. “Because I don't want to think I've just purchased a losing team.”
My stomach bottoms out and I feel woozy all of a sudden.
“What?”
“I know how much the team means to you so I convinced your father to sell the Adders to me. To us. As an engagement present.” Walter beams and I stand there stunned, my glass still full and bubbling in my hand. “What do you think?” he asks eagerly.
I know I'm supposed to be happy. Thrilled.
I feel like I'm going to be sick.
“That's … wonderful,” I say as I tilt my head back and down the entire flute of champagne, just to keep from having to say anything else. I knew my dad was tossing around the idea of selling the team. After all, we're technically going broke here. But … I didn't think he'd actually do it.
I feel betrayed.
“I took the day off work,” Walter says as he comes around the kitchen island and puts a hand on my hip. “I thought we could spend some alone time together.” My body tenses up as he traces a circle on my hip.
Alone time equals sex time.
I can see it written all over his face, but I just smile and giggle and spin away, praying for a miracle. Seeing as how I'm not all that lucky when it comes to these sorts of things, I make something up until I can decide what to do about … all of this. The party last night helped me forget, but it didn't help me come up with a solution.
“I'd loooove to, but I have an appointment today with …” My brain spins uselessly. “My gynecologist.”
Ouch.
That did not come out how I was expecting; Walter looks terrified.
“It's routine, yearly maintenance type stuff,” I say which sounds ridiculous, but which Walter has no interest in delving into. Thank God. “In fact, I'm actually running late. I just stopped in to check on the rabbit.”
My bunny sits in the corner, her black fur glossy and rippling, as I move over and pretend to check her cage. It's clean, water bottle's full, and she's got plenty of food. But Walter doesn't know anything about rabbits.
“I hate to run out on you,” I say, but I can see he's already on his phone, a slight frown creasing his mouth. “Dad says Walt's eager to get married to prove to his stockholders what a responsible family man he is.” My sister's words echo loudly in my head. “Maybe we could … have dinner or something?”
“I have a board meeting. It'll run late.” Walter moves down the step into the living room and wrinkles his nose at the bunny before pressing a lifeless kiss to my cheek. “I'll see you on Monday though? At the game?”
I nod, but suddenly I'm overwhelmed with flashes of a future life where Walter's always at board meetings and I'm sitting alon
e with nothing to look forward to but cold kisses from his baby smooth face.
He starts to turn away and then pauses, glancing over his shoulder at me.
“By the way, when do you go on that charity date thing?”
“Charity thing?” I ask and then realize he's talking about the Rhoden Richards date. “I'm not sure actually.” Which is true. “I'll find out today.”
“Wonderful,” Walt says as he smiles at me, his expression a little warmer. “That'll be great publicity for both of us. Let me know when you want to release the news about our engagement and I'll get in touch with the media, make sure we spread the announcement before the event.”
With that, Walter hops the step up to the kitchen/entryway area and disappears out the front door.
I glance down at Wisdom the Rabbit and decide that at this point, I think I'd rather marry the bunny.
Just what the hell am I supposed to do about that?
“Supposedly Rhoden Richards was at that party last night,” Ariana tells me as I sit on her couch and check my blog for comments. There's a good two thousand of them, half of them spam. This Win a Date with an NFL Player thing is really cranking up my views. I start scanning through and approving the good half of the comments. “It was all over the news this morning, pictures of him coming out of that house with no shirt.”
I pause and look up at her with pinched brows.
“No shirt?” I start to think about last night, if I'd seen the man anywhere in the crowd. But then, everyone was wearing masks and I'm not sure I'd even recognize him if I did see him. Ariana is the Big Dick fangirl, not me. But then … “Can I see those pictures?”
“Google them, girl. It takes all of five seconds.”
I sigh and decide to finish my blog comments first, pausing to smile up at Scottie as he walks in the door with two loaded bags of groceries.
“Oh, hey Della,” he says as he takes his shoes off at the door and carries the food into the kitchen. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“No, just stopping by to see if Ariana wants to go on that Rhoden Richards date for me.”