by Jordan Bell
Obsessive Friend After Benefits - Parfait d’amour, Grenadine, Amaretto, Sprite. Served in a completely inappropriate wedding champagne flute.
Things were different.
I paced.
Now I knew his secret. Easy going, handsome, slightly unkempt Josh masqueraded as a respected Dom in the BDSM community. I didn’t even know we had a BDSM community until I Googled the damn thing. Josh was trained in rope bondage and, in his own words, liked to dominate the young women he slept with.
Young women like me.
I closed my eyes and imagined him, broad and tall, his big hands holding me still, palming my breasts as he tied me up in front of a room full of strangers. I imagined his racing pulse, his panting breath, his prominent erection. I could almost remember what it felt like when he held me against his chest to calm my erratic breathing.
I’d been more powerful and more vulnerable in that one moment when I’d turned Josh from brother to lover than I had been in my entire life.
When I opened my eyes, my hands were shaking. That settled it. Certainly he must have been as worked up over what had happened last night as I was and neither of us were going to get any sleep until we knew we were ok. Until we knew that the sun would rise and life would go on and we would still have each other no matter what happened.
Because he’d promised. He’d promised I’d never have to know what it would be like without him.
He promised.
I grabbed my hoodie and headed out into the quiet street. Until midnight South River Boulevard was noisy with cars and music, voices and high heels on concrete. The morning hours belonged to the rest of us, so quiet and so still the buildings could have been fake Hollywood props – doors and windows leading nowhere.
I slipped around the pink convertible, dug out my key and let myself into the building. Steps led up to the second floor where Josh’s office and apartment lived.
Tan and brown patterned carpet muffled my footsteps up the two flights of stairs. The fluorescents did little against the dark, fake wood paneled walls. It still smelled faintly of the 70s, musty and green. Frosted glass hid the dark interior of his office and though he was the only apartment in the whole building, he’d stenciled his apartment number outside the door beneath a faint, swampy hall light. More than once I’d pretended Josh was a detective in a hardboiled crime noir and I was some damsel with a missing lover and a suitcase full of secrets.
Beneath the apartment number was a paper decoration, the Superman logo, but instead of an S it was a J. I touched the faded construction paper, rough beneath my fingertips, and smiled. Brian had the poor judgment to let me decorate Josh’s twenty-fifth birthday party so I’d thrown him a superhero party, complete with paper masks and capes. Two years and he still had this thing hanging up. Something in my chest stirred - how could I bring the two different memories of Josh together? The guy who’d helped me grow up or the guy whose name I came screaming last night?
With a deep breath, I knocked on the door.
It took an excruciating few minutes before I heard noise on the other side. His voice, his footsteps on the hardwood floor, a light switch flicking on in the hallway. I knew his apartment as well as I knew my own. I felt him on the other side of the door, his weight creaking the wood, his presence too near, too big, too warm. I touched the smooth lacquer beneath the peep hole and imagined him doing the same.
The chain slid out of place, the dead bolt knocked back, and finally he opened the door.
Josh met my gaze and all my rehearsed words turned to gibberish. God, he was so handsome. I’d always known but I’d never known. Never felt it in my chest or between my legs. Standing there wearing nothing but his loose jeans and I felt the enormity of my attraction to him hit me right beneath the breastbone. Shirtless, his skin took on a golden hue beneath the hall light, long shadows marking out all the best places I wanted to kiss and touch him. Like a treasure map.
This had been a mistake. We weren’t ready to face each other yet. What had I been thinking?
I flicked my gaze from his naked stomach back up to his blue eyes.
Whatever he was thinking, whatever emotions he might have been feeling were completely shuttered to me. I might as well have been a stranger selling Girl Scout cookies at five in the morning.
I knew in that one clouded look that he was going to break my heart all over his doorstep. A clean break down the middle then shattered beneath his boot.
We stood still and quiet gazing at each other, motionless, wordless. If he said anything I’d come apart in a million different pieces no one would ever be able to put back together again. His approval meant the world to me and for the first time in my life I realized I didn’t have it.
Even if he didn’t want me want me, I needed him to take my hand and pull me into his kitchen and start chocolate chip pancakes or Saturday morning cartoons. Something normal and so us that we could cling to even if everything else had become such a mess.
“Hey Josh,” I said, softer than I’d meant, as fragile as my heart felt. His lips parted and I watched a shiver run down the length of his biceps until he hid his trembling hands in the pockets of his jeans.
Before he could answer, a soft, feminine voice echoed back to me from inside.
“I’m ready. Sir.”
He closed his eyes.
For a thousand million billion seconds I didn’t breathe or blink and my heart didn’t beat. I gazed past his naked chest through the sliver of doorway he didn’t protect to the shape of a girl standing in his living room archway. Her ginger hair fell long and very straight down her bare shoulders to her elbows, as soft and fine as silk. She was tiny, a slip of a woman and so unfairly pretty. While her hips were nothing at all, her breasts more than made up for her tiny frame. She in her jeans and lacy, ribboned bra, one arm tucked obediently behind the small of her back, the other gripping a white silk cami she’s clearly just taken off. She was perfect. Fuck. Of course she was.
Her eyes widened a fraction as she saw me seeing her.
For an awful moment the three of us stood frozen.
Thisisn’thappening. Thisisn’thappening. Thisisn’thappening.
There was nothing either of us needed to say. No explanation or excuse or reason that would make any of this better for any of us.
I turned and went back home alone.
Other Steamy Reads by Jordan Bell
The Fortune Teller’s Daughter
The Curvy Sister
Her Secret Pleasure (Secrets #1)
Her Secret Betrayal (Secrets #2)
Coming Soon: Her Secret Power (Secrets #3)
The Billionaire’s Son: Distracting Jonah Silver
Taming London: The Submission of London Mackenzie
Billionaire Bait: Breakfast with Mia, Ménage for Dessert
The Curvy Submissive #1: Going too Far
Coming Soon: The Curvy Submissive #2: Girl in Pieces
Coming Soon: The Curvy Submissive #3: Wanting it All
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About the Author
My name is Jordan Bell and I am a bestselling author of steamy romance. I love writing about strong, curvy women, dashing heroes, and terrible villains!
I'm a midwest girl, grew up in the country before moving to the city. I'm still in love with small town living but I could never give up my white chocolate mocha lattes and easy access to wi-fi hotspots. A girl's gotta have priorities!
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My website & blog: www.jordanbellbooks.com
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Loved THE CURVY SUBMISSIVE?
Then don’t miss my erotic romance trilogy SECRETS about old lovers reunited years after they were sure they’d never see each other again. Old passions die hard, but can Kara and Sean pick up where they left off after so much time and heartache?
Short excerpt from HER SECRE
T PLEASURE, Secrets #1:
"Up," he whispered as he placed his hands on my hips. I slid up onto the edge of the counter top, a secret part of me stirring with pleasure at being given a command from this man it could happily obey.
He moved his hands down to my bare knees to just above my socks and parted my legs slowly. The memory of this felt so acutely real it took my breath away and started my heart hammering despite my exhaustion. He was so close, his hot breath on my face, the warmth radiating through his fingertips on my bare skin. It all felt so deliciously familiar. I gazed up at his face, but he watched my knees where his hands touched. His eyes glassed over and I thought I could detect a hitching change in his breathing, too.
When Sean pulled his hands away, they were shaking.
He grabbed a handful of paper towels, ran one under the faucet, and then moved expertly between my parted legs to get as close as possible. He touched a fingertip under my chin, raised my gaze to meet his, and lightly guided my face to turn so that my wounded cheek was facing him, every touch given with frightening intimacy.
He held me still with his thumb on my chin and index finger beneath it. Very gently he touched the wet paper towel to the dry edges of my scratch. I flinched, tried to yank away from him, but he held me steady.
"Shhh," he whispered. "I've got you."
The ghost of a smile caught the corners of his mouth and I considered what the consequences might be if I pressed my mouth against that smile.
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Erika Masten is one of my favorite authors of steamy stories. If you like THE CURVY SUBMISSIVE, you’ll enjoy her series, ART OF DOMINATION: MODEL RELEASE. Check it out!
ART OF DOMINATION: MODEL RELEASE
Reformed wild girl Iva Moreau is doing a passable job of convincing herself that leaving behind the artist lifestyle for the safety of suburbia and the respectability of academia is the mature decision. She suffers her job as an Art Department secretary at Vandergriff University, belittled by her supervisor and pursued by lecherous professors, as willing penance for her former life on the art scene and all the damage it ultimately did not only to Iva but to her family. But she can’t maintain that distance when her baby sister, Cheri, starts down a path all too familiar to Iva.
Unrepentant bad boy Nolan Beal is the up-and-coming rock star of the photography world with a seven-figure salary snapping shots for glossy fashion magazines and his own nouveau noir erotic exhibition at the gallery in town for controversial and provocative art. His work is all about power and the hypocrisy behind sex… and the masks people use to hide their true natures and desires even from themselves. Themes of domination and submission run as rife through his life and his liaisons with beautiful woman as they do through his photographs.
When Iva shows up at Nolan’s studio to demand that the photographer stop using her younger sister as a model for his erotic exhibition, an instant attraction between them causes the very different masks they wear to slip. And they strike a deal. In exchange for Iva submitting to one modeling session for Beal, he will give her Cheri’s signed model release and relinquish the right to use the photographs forever.
As life begins to imitate art, however, and the steamy photo shoot sets off sparks, neither are prepared for the passions released by the first meagre glimpses of the true Nolan and Iva behind the masks.
SAMPLE
“We should talk upstairs,” I lied and tried to tame down the dark exhilaration I felt creeping into my best gentlemanly smile as I held this woman’s gaze. There was no way she should have followed me upstairs, along the white brick steps lined with Mapplethorpe’s and Newton’s few people would have recognized as originals. No way she should have felt safe being led by a stranger, a shirtless man wielding a bottle of overpriced rum and two days’ worth of stubble growth at half past ten in the morning. Two strange men, even, as Stan took it upon himself to bring up the rear.
For her part, my reluctant guest maintained her cool air of condemnation, in the stiffness of her spine and the little downward curl of a pout on her lips. She glided smoothly and aloofly as she walked, with practiced and conscious composure obvious in the way she measured her pace. Her gaze focused inward as much as outward. Her thick, curly ponytail hardly swayed. What she didn’t seem to realize was how tantalizingly that posture shifted her shoulders back and her perfect, round breasts forward. I could have made her arch that gracefully curved spine much harder.
My brow perked without my conscious cooperation as I glanced repeatedly at her over my shoulder, a dozen images flashing through my head to suggest how she might have looked as one of my models…. With a feminine, flowing wisp of a couture gown dressing that fair golden skin as she knelt on cold bare marble, the neckline jerked askew to reveal one full, flushed breast with a gleaming metal clamp pinching her hardened nipple. With equal parts distress and desire on her face as I posed her bent naked over a velvet chaise with clover clamps tormenting those rosy nipples, a heavy teardrop weight pulling at the chain between the pincers and increasing the pressure. With the angry pink glow of rushing blood below the surface of her skin as the tab at the tip of a stiff riding crop warmed her tits. How could a man resist the chance to capture—and forever preserve—that exquisite moment when the irritation of that sharp, repeated nip and the hot sting of pain-pleasure pushed her past her boundaries into a climax that bowed her lips and throbbed in her clitoris?
No, no way she should have been following a man who was getting hard at the thought of photographing her as a high-fashion sex slave. A man like me.