by Maren Smith
I fall back against the wall as soon as I’m inside, my heart battering wildly, my own ragged breaths suffocating me, so appalled and alarmed and, God, even aroused, that I can barely recognize myself.
“What is this?” I demand, and yet the very warble of my voice is at once strangled and lustful and incredulous. “No way did my sister come down here with you!”
Aleron does not move closer, but never have I been more aware of a man in my life.
“She did,” he states, and I know he’s not lying. Not because he confirms his dubious promise to tell me only the truth, but because I can see it. The nakedness of a body exactly like mine, drawn up by the manacles on her wrist, her bare pale breasts filling up Aleron’s kneading hands, as they squeeze, pluck and lightly tweak to make the budding nipples stand for him. Ache for him.
Unlike the man out there, he’s fully clothed, the dark of his expensive jacket contrasting sharply with the white of her skin as he pulls on his gloves. They rake me from breasts to belly and hips to thighs, the needle-studded leather dragging across my skin as if it were actually happening to me.
I shake my head, feeling the slip of those imaginary fingers stealing in between my wildly trembling thighs as the real Aleron slips a single step closer. His actual hand, bare, void of the prickling spikes scraping my clit in my mind, braces on the wall beside my head.
“Buy me a drink, she asked me,” Aleron says, soft as a lover. I can smell the tequila on the breath that kisses my cheek. I can smell the spice of his cologne. It’s faint, neither cloying nor overpowering. It plays with my senses every bit as wildly as the visions in my head. I can smell his cologne there too. It’s the same dizzying formula of spices. He’s wearing the same coat too.
The gloves… My vision tells me where they are, tucked together in a neat fold inside an inner jacket pocket.
“So, I did. Strawberry vodka lemonade, she loved them.”
She did, too. I’ve never understood why. The damn things taste horrible to me. A watery suffocation of tears rise up in the back of my throat. My eyes pick the stupidest things to cry over.
“I held it out to her,” Aleron gently says, and in the dark of this falsely private room, I can find nothing in his expression that says he’s lying. “I said, what will you do for it? Her reply was open flirtation. What do you want me to do?”
In my mind I can hear him saying, Anything is a broad promise, followed by Jez’s throaty laugh. Don’t worry about me. I’m a big girl. I know what I’m doing.
“Anything is what she assured me,” Aleron says. “So, I lay the drink upon the table and said that she may have it, plus anything else she wanted for the duration of the night for the price of one hour of her time in which she did whatever I asked. I played with her, my darling Merris, and then I let her go. She was here perhaps three or four hours afterward, then she went home. Quite intoxicated, but none the worse for all the yummy things I did to her.”
“You drugged her,” I accuse, “and you took advantage of her.”
His jaw clenches and for the first time, a nuance of his amusement dies. A vague shade of anger takes its place. “I did not,” he replies, dangerously soft. “I have no need of drugs, and my cock did not leave my trousers the entire time I played with her. That was not what I wanted her for.”
“You fucked her,” I insist.
Again, he keeps his smile, but the aura of his amusement diminishes and anger rises a notch higher. He keeps a tight rein on it, though. Swallowing it back, no hint of the emotion shows in his voice as he counters, “Would you like a play by play of exactly what I did?”
My pussy clenches wildly. No, I do not. But I do want to know. I have to know. I need proof and to fill in the holes my visions tease me with.
Mine are the best of intentions.
What is it they say about the road to hell?
Chapter 3
Merris
“You’ll show me,” I specify, not moving. “You’ll tell me exactly what you did.”
“You give me deed for deed, I’ll pay you word by word,” he promises. “If we’re going to do it, however, we need to get started. What I want takes time, the employees will start shooing people out soon, and all private parties must be completed by 4:00 a.m.”
“And I just walk out of here when we’re done?”
“Exactly as she did, yes.”
“Unharmed?”
“Mm.” His is an alluring smile, one full of challenge, secrets and, reluctant though I am to admit it, seduction. It pulls at me. “More or less.”
I don’t trust him. I can’t afford to, but not knowing is eating me alive. When he holds out his hand, I take it, but his request for consent is little more than symbolic, and my granting of it leaves me shaking. He only draws me two steps from the wall before allowing my hand to drop. Hugging my arms, I watch as he takes off his coat. His shoulders seem so much broader without it. His shirt is tailor-made, the bright whiteness of it a ghostly pallor that cuts the shadows in this dimly lit place.
That he can see so much better in the dark is obvious. I can’t even see where he drew that chair from. I can barely make out the black lines of it as he sets it in the middle of our semi-private room and sits, unbuttoning and rolling up his shirt cuffs to his elbows.
Unmoving, I watch him. The red of the ceiling lights is definitely creating a mood in here too. I blame them for what’s happening to me—the tightening in my belly, the tensing of my thighs growing tighter while I watch turn after neat turn of his shirt sleeves reveal inch after hard, muscular inch of his forearms. He is far more muscular than any man that slender should be. Who is this guy? Model… movie star… body builder… fucking American Ninja Warrior? I’ve no idea, but what he does shouldn’t be as important as what he has done. He killed my sister. I hold on to that belief with both hands. My visions have never been wrong before, but while they never actually showed me her moment of death, I know he was with her. I know it.
He beckons me to him with a crook of his finger.
I stare at him, sitting in that chair. If he’s expecting a lap dance, he’s shit out of luck. They tried to teach me to jitterbug in the sixth grade for a school play once. They ended up putting me with the band on a triangle instead. I’m not sexy. I’m not graceful. I barely even qualify as a girl, and it’s all I can do just to walk straight in these heels.
“Come,” he coaxes, then adds the one thing he knows I can’t make myself refuse. “You want to know, don’t you?”
I go to him, but my body is so tense and I can’t stop myself from shaking. A few steps is all I manage, but it’s enough to bring me within his reach. My knee is just inches from his. I try hard not to stare at his lap or the paleness of his hands in the dark of this room, or, God help me, the bulge in the crotch of his pants not far from where his hand now rests upon his thigh.
“I told her to bend across my knee,” he says, his shadowy eyes watching me. “She laughed, but that was the price of my drink. She called me kinky”—a quick twist of a smile flashes pale teeth, but it’s there and gone again just as quickly—“but she did it. Upstairs. In the middle of the lounge, surrounded by people laughing, talking, drinking… flirting every bit as much as we were. I think I intrigued her, but then, as I already said, Jez was an adventurous soul.”
She was, too. I swallow hard when he pats his thigh. I look at it, and then at him, and slowly it dawns on me what he expects of me. It’s not a lap dance.
“You want to spank me?” I saw no visions of him doing anything like that to Jez.
“You do for me what she did, and I will tell you what I know.”
That was the deal, he’s right. But somewhere along the way, it took a decidedly kinky turn.
I feel absolutely ridiculous as I edge in on his right, eyeing his hands and his lap and feeling my bottom inexplicably crawling. It’s the strangest sensation—prickly with something I can only liken to anticipation, although that has to be wrong. It has to be. Every bit as wrong as t
he flood of wet heat that spills down through my secret folds as I reluctantly lower myself into place. He helps guide me down over thighs that are so much harder beneath my stomach and my hand than I expected. This is so alien to me. I cup his knee, but I don’t know how or where to touch him.
He doesn’t have that same problem with me. Without a word, he reaches under the skirt of my short dress. His hand is surprisingly cool when he cups the inside of my thigh. His arm wraps my waist and in a short, lift-pull motion, he heaves me further over his lap. My feet leave the floor, but only my quick-bracing slap with both hands keeps my nose from bumping into it on the other side.
This is insane.
His arm stays around my waist, holding me in place. His other hand raises my skirt all the way up to my hips, baring the fabric of my underwear.
They weren’t my sexiest pair. Why would they be? I hadn’t come to the club tonight planning to show my butt to anyone and certainly not Aleron.
“Relax,” he soothes, letting his fingers trace a wandering pattern over my vulnerably exposed backside.
That’s easy for him to say. He’s not the one letting a killer eyeball his powder-blue boyshorts. For the first time all night, I’m grateful the boxers I normally like messed with the lines of the dress.
“This is interesting,” he says, one finger lightly tracing along the elastic leg seam of my shorts. “If I hadn’t already known you weren’t your twin, this would have told me. I never saw your sister in anything but a thong.”
He raised his hand and I braced to be struck. My second surprise comes a half second later, when his fingers tap lightly down in a gentle pat upon the center of my left buttock. Pulling my skirt down, he promptly draws me up to sit upon his knee.
“I spanked her upstairs,” he says. “She was not a fan, but she was delightfully determined to withstand whatever I chose to do and that appealed to me. So, I set her bottom on fire and only when I was sure I had her right on the edge of crying out her safeword, did I stop.”
My visions had shown me none of that. Maybe I should be glad, because as it was, my imagination is having no trouble at all conjuring how that might have played out. Only, it isn’t my sister I can see squirming and writhing under the steady assault of his open palm. It’s me, my bottom that he paints red one sharp slap at a time until I can’t make myself stay quiet or hold still.
My breasts ache. My nipples swell with such need, that it’s all I can do to keep the huskiness of my arousal from telling in my voice. “What do you mean, safeword?”
“A safeword is any chosen word that you can use at any time, and I will immediately stop what I am doing.”
I scoff, hardly able to imagine it. He had to think me stupid.
There his eyes go again, sparking with amusement and issuing challenges. “Would you like one?”
As if he’d honor it.
I already know he won’t. Because, of course he won’t. That was beyond ridiculous. Whoever heard of a word stopping a killer? It’s insane!
Isn’t it?
“Pick one,” he dares me. “Something unusual. Something you wouldn’t ordinarily cry out in, say, the throes of an orgasm.”
Heat burns up through my belly and into my face. I try to get up off his knee, to put at least a few inches of distance between us again. Ashamed though I am to admit it, I can imagine only too well how it might feel to have him bring me to orgasm.
I don’t like this. I can’t think when I’m sitting in his lap, feeling his chest against my side and his arm around my waist with the light press of his relaxed hand cupping my hip. Instead of moving, however, I surprise myself by saying, “Fine. Um…” I try to think of a word, but I’m not very good at these sorts of games. “Rumpelstiltskin.”
He’s trying not to laugh at me. “Rumpelstiltskin,” he agrees with a nod. “This is how it works. If at any point you find yourself unable to continue while I do to you what I did to her, use that word.”
“And you’ll stop.” I don’t know if I can believe it when he nods, but I grudgingly agree. “All right.”
“I finish spanking her and tell her to stand.” Aleron looks at me expectantly.
It takes a minute for me to figure out that he’s waiting for me to comply. I’m only too happy to get off his lap.
“I tell her to remove her panties.” Leaning back in his chair, he folds his strong arms and waits.
I’d love to say I can’t imagine Jez putting on a panty strip-show for anyone in the middle of a nightclub, but unfortunately, I can. Reaching under my skirt, I shuck my underwear with little patience for mind games. If he thinks I’m going to hand them over as some kind of trophy of the night, he’s out of his mind.
“She hands them to me,” he says, lazily rolling out his hand, palm up, and waits again.
Asshole.
I slap my underwear into his palm and watch as he drops them on the floor beside his chair. I am insanely more bothered by them lying there than I’d have been had he stuffed them in his pocket. A tiny spot between my shoulder blades itches with my growing discomfort, and yet there’s this horrible, anticipatory tingling in my breasts, my belly… my hands that longs for me to leap at him, snatch my underwear up off the floor and quickly tuck them out of sight. I feel so scandalously embarrassed not to be wearing them right now, in front of him, while all the while he knows all he had to do to get me out of them had been a subtle word on his part.
And the lack of a certain word on mine.
“I told her to sit upon my knee.”
My jaw hurts from the force with which I clench my teeth. Coming to him, I lower myself as primly as possible onto his lap.
“She straddled me, actually.” He smiles as he corrects me. “I didn’t ask her to. She did that all on her own.”
Snapping up off him, I scrub my sweaty palms down the front of my skirt. My legs are shaking too hard to walk away. My heart feels both caged and wild, but I’ve come too far to just leave, especially over something as reluctantly titillating as being made to straddle his thighs.
My dress skirt is too tight. I have to hike it up to the tops of my thighs in order to straddle him. His shoulder is solid and strong, and cool to the touch when I settled my hand upon him for balance and gingerly lower myself to sit.
He doesn’t touch me with his hands. He doesn’t have to. I feel positively molested by all the places of him that inadvertently brush against me. With every breath, my breasts caress his chest. I can’t feel the beating of his heart beneath the barrier of both our clothes, but I feel mine and it’s savage. Pounding so hard. So hot. Making me burn in a fire that feels like more than embarrassment. It may center in my chest, but it doesn’t stay there. Already the heat is wending its way through me, filling my womb, spilling down into my empty sex until the trickling moisture weeps from me. I can still feel the phantom pat he swatted me with, right before he stole my panties. My bottom cheek is pulsing. Like the heat inside me, it throbs until this dull aching is all I feel.
And I don’t want to. God, how I don’t want to. Not for this man.
“By this time, we were down here,” Aleron says. Watching my reaction closely, he raises a hand to my cheek to brush a stray wisp of hair from my eyes with the back of his finger. “I tell her to turn around. I want her back to my chest, and we shall play a game.”
“What kind of game?” My voice trembles as badly as the rest of me. I sound breathless, and he can’t help but hear it.
He smiles again, that lazy smile that says nothing, as he simply waits until I obey him.
My legs shake, but up I stand. There are a thousand reasons why I should not turn my back to him, but this is a public place, I remind myself. There are people down here. He wouldn’t dare hurt me where he can so easily be caught.
Backing up, I lower myself again to straddle his lap, this time facing away from him. His muscular thighs beneath me are breathtakingly hard. I lean back slowly until I am pressed against his chest. I’m afraid I’ll feel it, but there i
s no bulging erection pushing up against my ass. I am as oddly disappointed as I’m relieved.
“Our game will be simple,” Aleron says. “Using nothing but my hands, I am going to make you come. Using nothing but your will, you are going to resist me. If you succeed, you will have done better than your sister. If I succeed, then I get a prize.”
“What prize?” I doubt I need to ask. I’m almost certain I know exactly what form his ‘prize’ will take.
“A kiss,” he says simply, surprising me. “Right here.” His cool lips press briefly to the side of my neck where he can’t help but feel the pulsing thump of my wanton heart fluttering at his touch.
“That’s it?” I ask, highly doubtful. “You kissed my sister?”
“She lost the game in less than eleven minutes.”
I crane my head to stare at him.
“Did I fail to mention the time limit?” he asked, amused. “Bad Aleron. Yes, there’s a time constraint. If I can’t bring you to come within twenty, then first and foremost, no one can, and second, you win the game.”
“What do I get if I win?”
“A complete lack of gratification. I understand it’s quite maddening.”
I frown. “I’m being serious.”
He huffs a soft sigh over my lack of humor. “How about I stop all further attempts to draw this out, tell you everything I know, introduce you to everyone your sister played down here with, and send you on your happy way. Deal?”
“Who’s going to keep the time?”
Holding out his right arm, he shows me his wristwatch. “Cunning invention. It even has an alarm.”
“All right, all right,” I grumble, almost rolling my eyes. He really is an asshole.
“Is that agreement?”
Dropping his arms, his hands come to rest on my thighs. It’s a light touch, completely impersonal, except it feels anything but to me. He doesn’t stroke or caress me, but I still feel the flutter of my pulse at how just a shift of his fingers could—and would, if I agree to this—have him touching other places.