by Cox, Chloe
“We would only have to be married on paper?” she finally said.
“No, I am afraid not. It would have to be…convincing.”
“Convincing.”
“Lola, please,” he said, reaching out.
He touched her cheek, and everything stopped. She felt hot under his touch, and suddenly he wanted to touch her more, so much more, everywhere. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched her. Not even for a hug, a small gesture of affection between people who’d known each other for so long. No normal contact. It had become too difficult to keep such contact innocent.
Roman couldn’t think of anything besides the feel of her skin.
She was the one to pull away. She took a step back, and wrapped her arms around herself. She looked so small and hurt, and once again Roman wanted nothing more than to fold her in his arms, but something told him that that would be a terrible idea.
There was something very wrong. Something he was ignorant of. He did not like being ignorant.
“Lola, tell me what is wrong.”
“You’re asking a lot of me.”
“No, Volare is. We need you.”
She laughed bitterly. “I have to think about this, all right? I just need some time to think.”
Roman frowned. What on earth was there to think about?
“Unfortunately, we do not have much time,” he said. “I have a meeting scheduled with Ford tomorrow. We will have to make a decision then. You will allow me to explain my reasoning and then make your decision.”
“Fine,” she said, and reached for the doorknob without looking at him. He let her yank the door open. “Tomorrow.”
She left without another word.
Of all the many thoughts that swirled through Roman’s mind in the wake of that departure, the only one that stood out was this: her absence left him with a dull ache.
He could not imagine Volare without her.
He would make sure that he didn’t have to.
chapter 2
“Ok, so what’s the emergency, crazy lady?”
Thank God for Stella Spencer. Lola’s oldest friend, former Volare employee, and current fiancée to one Sheikh Bashir al Aziz bin Said stood in Lola’s doorway, holding a giant tub of ice cream. Lola smiled for the first time in hours.
“You are not going to believe this,” Lola said, shaking her head, and pulled her friend into her messy one-bedroom apartment.
“What I can’t believe is that you’re such a slob now,” Stella said, chuckling. In college Lola had been neat to the point of disturbance. Her spotless dorm room had given off a highly strung, very controlled sort of vibe, and Stella had been one of the few people to see that Lola’s anal retentiveness had more to do with what was going on in her life than who she was. As Lola’s father’s health worsened and the rest of Lola’s life deteriorated into a complete mess, her personal space had become cleaner and cleaner.
Now, it was the opposite: Lola exerted complete control in the rest of her life, and her apartment was a little bit of a disaster area. Or at least she had exerted complete control, before she’d discovered that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, had lied to her about sleeping with his ex-wife, and before Roman had lied to her and given an exclusive interview to Sizzle behind her back, outing himself to the world as the owner of Club Volare.
Just thinking about Roman’s lies made Lola angry all over again. At least Roman had managed to protect the identities of all the other Volare members, including herself. She refused to think about Ben at all.
“So are you going to tell me what the big deal is, or what?” Stella said, rummaging around Lola’s tiny kitchen for spoons.
Lola took a deep breath. “I have to marry Roman.”
Stella turned her head to look at Lola in slow motion. Her mouth was open.
“Go on,” she said.
“You know how we started getting all kinds of heat after that stupid article? Well, some of the heat is from a repressed little jerk who happens to be in the state senate, and is also some sort of freak historical legal scholar. No, I know, don’t even ask. Long story short, either I quit, or I marry Roman, or we lose a bunch of licenses. Plus fines.”
“Oh shit,” Stella said.
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean, just wow. Roman? The Roman? Master Roman? The guy you’ve been crazy for since forever?”
Lola groaned and confiscated the half-gallon of ice cream, prying off the lid. “Yeah. That Roman.”
Not one to be deprived of ice cream, Stella dove in and loaded up her spoon with vanilla fudge swirl. “So wait, is this like, just on paper, or…?”
“Honestly, I don’t really know. He said it had to be ‘convincing,’ but who knows what that means? Roman getting married at all is kind of a stretch, so…”
“Right, Mr. No Strings Attached. What is the deal with that, anyway?”
Lola winced. Roman was not a man who liked to talk about his past; he was, in his own way, ever a cypher. The untouchable Master. Lola only knew what she knew because of Roman’s involvement in her life when her dad died, and because her cousin Chance, Roman’s best friend, had taken pity on her when her college crush got too serious and told her why Roman would likely never love a woman ever again.
“His wife died,” Lola said.
She didn’t like to say it. Lola wasn’t normally one to betray secrets, but she needed Stella’s help to get through this. Stella was the only person who knew how she felt about Roman, how she really felt, that it wasn’t completely just a college thing, and that she was still very much attracted to the man, and she needed her friend’s support. She had to tell her the marriage would be fake. And she had to tell her why Roman was truly off-limits.
“Are you serious?” Stella asked, totally floored.
“Yeah. It was before I met him. It was sudden and totally unexpected, a congenital heart defect or something that no one ever knew about. He just…I don’t know. Chance told me he was done in that department.”
“And he’s always so remote,” Stella said. She was obviously lost in thought. Roman had taken an interest in Stella’s introduction to BDSM at the hands of her fiancé, Sheikh Bashir, more to make sure that Stella was happy than anything else. While Lola had set them up, Roman had been a presence, the man who seemed to know everything and look out for everyone. Stella had told Lola that Roman was the only guy she’d seen Bashir get weird around, in relation to his woman—the only one who could rile the sheikh. That hadn’t surprised Lola at all.
“Lola, that’s a really big deal. It explains so much of how aloof he is, even maybe why you guys never—”
“No, don’t even say it,” Lola said, flopping onto her couch. “I can’t afford to think about what ifs, you know? This is already making me crazy. First Ben turns out to be sleeping with his ex-wife—”
“Asshole,” Stella said fervently.
“Then Roman lies to me, too—which, honestly, I know not everyone thinks it’s a big deal, but he’s never taken me seriously. Never really respected me. That’s how it’s always felt, anyway, like I’m still some vulnerable kid to him. I’d thought that after running the club for the past five years, maybe he’d have a little respect—”
“Roman respects you.”
Lola shrugged. “You don’t lie to a partner you respect about letting an undercover reporter enter the club, and then about doing the Sizzle article all on your own, so that she’s totally blindsided when the club is exposed.”
“Ok, he did screw up.”
Stella offered the ice cream and Lola dug in just to keep from talking. The truth was, her issues actually felt bigger than what she’d said to Stella. Lola had been reeling since she’d discovered Ben’s lies, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d been relying on Roman until she’d discovered Roman’s lies. It was like in the wake of Ben’s betrayal she’d come to think of Roman as the last upright man, the last man she could trust. And then it turned out that she couldn’t.
That didn’t s
top her heart from fluttering every time she looked at him.
Stupid heart. She told herself it was purely a physical reaction. You couldn’t fight the physical.
“What are you going to do?” Stella asked.
“I can’t quit,” Lola said, frowning. She’d realized it about five minutes after she’d threatened to do it. Truth be told, Lola was a fighter, and what she wanted to do most was kick this Harold Jeels’s ass. And besides, Lola believed in protecting her family. And Volare was her family.
“Are you sure you can go through with this, though?”
Lola looked at her friend’s face and saw only compassion. Stella was a total bleeding heart, unable to turn away from anyone in any kind of pain. It was one of the things Lola admired about her friend, and one of the things she knew the sheikh had fallen for.
So it was pointless to try to hide from Stella what she was really feeling. In the twenty-four hours since Roman had dropped this bomb on her, Lola had relived everything about the past eight years, since the day she’d met Roman, and she had come to the conclusion that she’d never completely gotten over him. Sure, she’d gotten over her initial infatuation, the kind of thing that happens when you’re young and everything’s going wrong and you latch on to the one steady person in your life. But God, she wanted him.
Even when she was young, Lola wasn’t totally stupid. When Lola realized she was hopelessly infatuated with Roman and that nothing would ever come of it, she’d pulled away to protect herself. They’d pursued separate lives in the city, and a few years later neither of them had been prepared to run into each other at a BDSM club. Lola had been there checking out the scene, and Roman had been there checking out the competition.
In short order, Roman had her working for him at Volare.
It took only a few more months for Lola to realize that her original infatuation hadn’t ever quite gone away. But she wasn’t the scared, vulnerable young woman who’d just lost her remaining immediate family any longer, and so now she thought it was just that she wanted Roman.
Physically.
She wanted Roman Casta more than she’d ever wanted anything. Even just for one night. Even just a taste. Even while their relationship matured, even while they became close friends, even while they worked together every day.
But the man wouldn’t even look at her. It had been humiliating. Heartbreaking.
And she’d just had to get used to it.
And now the prospect of having to relive all of that, daily, while they pretended to be in love? While they pretended to be man and wife? While they pretended…
“Ugh,” Lola said, covering her face.
“You’ve had a really hard time since Ben,” Stella said, and nudged her friend with the cold ice cream tub.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
It was true—Lola had retreated into herself. It had been so humiliating: one of the few men she’d ever let dominate her turned out to have a thing with his ex-wife on the side, for months. She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone about it. She couldn’t face the vulnerability.
“Has there been anyone since?” Stella asked.
“No,” Lola said. “Not worth mentioning. I tried, but…”
Stella’s eyes widened. “Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Lola didn’t even tell her the worst part: she hadn’t even been able to orgasm with anyone since Ben. Mistress of a sex club who couldn’t come with a partner: ironic, and not in a good way. And she hadn’t even been able to think about submitting.
A terrible thought struck her. “Oh shit, I’ll have to pretend to be his submissive.”
“Well, yeah. Master Roman. He’s not a switch, is he?”
“No,” Lola said, laughing despite herself. “Most definitely not.”
“Ok, so in summary: the guy you’ve been crazy about for almost ten years is now going to pretend to be your Dom husband, and you have to play along while not losing your mind, or the club is screwed?”
“That’s about right, although I dispute the ‘crazy for’ label.”
“Whatever,” Stella rolled her eyes. “I should have brought you Valium instead of ice cream.”
Lola laughed softly, and wiped away a tear. Now that she was talking about it, all of her emotions were coming to the surface. She was really, truly scared. “Seriously, Stella, I don’t know if I can do this right now.”
“Look at it this way: if after all this you still feel like he doesn’t respect you, you can quit.”
Lola looked up, shocked.
“Look, I love Volare, but I love you more,” Stella said, digging into the ice cream. “And you can’t keep hanging around a guy who makes you this crazy, not right now, not after what happened with Ben. You have to eventually move on. So you save the club, and then…”
“I move on.”
It actually wasn’t the worst idea in the world. It made Lola unbelievably sad, but it gave her some relief, too.
“Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t come over last night when you left that message,” Stella said, blushing. “Bashir had something…planned.”
Lola looked at her friend and smiled. The change in Stella since Bashir had come into her life had been remarkable; she’d gone from having zero self-confidence in the wake of a brutal divorce to being so happy that she seemed in love with the entire world. Lola had wondered more than once what it felt like to have a man love you as much as Bashir loved Stella.
“When do you have to decide?” Stella asked. “Crazy fake marriage or…?”
Lola looked at her watch and cursed. There was no more time to feel scared or overwhelmed or anything else. “I’m supposed to meet Roman and Ford in like an hour.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Lola shot off the couch and began digging through her recently delivered dry cleaning for something acceptable. She didn’t want to show up to this meeting looking as disheveled as she felt. She wanted the upper hand in at least one way. Roman Casta had the upper hand in everything else. “What the hell am I going to wear?”
Stella’s grin was positively evil. “Oh, I know what. That white Dior suit, the one with the boobs.”
“White?”
“Definitely white. And definitely with boobs. There’s no reason to make it easy on him.”
Stella was a whiz with hair and make up, at least on other people, and in no time at all Lola looked like a million bucks. She got her favorite red purse—a splash of Roman’s favorite color, and the only red item she owned that somehow didn’t clash with her hair—grabbed some oversized dark glasses, and rode the elevator down, Stella in tow, finally feeling like she might be back in control.
Which was why she was taken completely by surprise when she opened the lobby door to find a scrum of reporters, all of them screaming her name.
“Lola! Lola! Is it true you secretly married Roman Casta?”
“Are you the mistress of Club Volare?”
“Who are the other members?”
A dozen flashes went off in Lola’s face at once, and she nearly toppled over. How could this happen? How could the press already know? How had they gotten her name?
Stella showed up at her side and helped her fight her way through the crowd to a cab that was stopped at the light. As they piled into the backseat and Lola shielded them from camera flashes with her bag, she had only one furious thought: Roman did this. Again.
chapter 3
Where the hell was she?
Roman paced the length of Ford Colson’s spacious office, only a few blocks from Club Volare and Roman’s own apartment. The club’s longtime lawyer, and Roman’s good friend, had wisely stayed silent, until now.
“She’s just running late,” Ford finally said.
“Obviously she is late,” Roman said.
“I meant that I’m sure she’s coming.”
Roman glared. “The alternative had not occurred to me.”
Now, of course, the possibility loomed large. Only a few days
ago he would have laughed at the suggestion that Lola Theroux would ever seriously consider leaving Club Volare. Ever since he’d brought her into the club she had been a natural fit, and eventually an essential fixture. She managed the place with singular grace, and was central to his plans to open up a second location, though she didn’t know it yet.
And yesterday she had seriously raised the possibility of quitting.
It was wrong. He had taken steps to make it right.
But that required that she in fact arrive.
Roman was almost never wrong, but Lola…Lola had surprised him when she’d suggested that she could simply leave. The last time Roman had been that surprised was when he’d discovered Lola in black leather at a now-defunct BDSM club in the East Village. That had been only a few years after Chance Dalton, Lola’s close cousin and Roman’s partner in the Club Volare ventures, had asked him to take care of Lola in the wake of her father’s death. Roman had accepted the responsibility without question and had rushed to Lola’s side, a stranger in place of family. He was glad to do it, but he had not expected Lola to be…Lola.
Gorgeous. Smarter than anyone else he knew. Fun. He suspected that Lola and his wife Samantha would have been great friends, if Samantha had lived. In truth, helping Lola helped him get through the most difficult time following his wife’s death. But his position as Chance’s best friend, his role as surrogate big brother during a vulnerable time—all of those things meant that Lola was, as Chance would have said, off-limits.
Fine. Roman was practiced at self-control, and he’d trained himself not to look at Lola that way. Not to think of her as the beautiful submissive he knew she was. Not to imagine her underneath him.
It was getting harder.
He heard the click of heels on hardwood floors approaching Ford’s office and spun towards the door, his whole body rippling with a singular awareness—it was her. He’d recognize the rhythm of her stride anywhere.
The door opened and she stepped in, her red hair framing her beautiful face and pink lips. Roman suppressed a rumbling in his chest. She was wearing a tight, white suit, some sort of designer item. Roman didn’t care about clothing; he cared about the curves underneath. He cared about the way her bottom lip begged to be bitten. He cared about the way her breasts demanded to be mauled.