by Cox, Chloe
“Lola wasn’t there,” Jake said. He was looking at the two of them now. “This was years ago. But I think—in my own humble opinion—that it is part of what made Roman the man for her now. Years ago, in a terrible, pretentious BDSM club that shall not be named, there was a woman who was in trouble. Her safewords were ignored. The Dom involved was popular, the regulars cowed, the place apparently devoid of ethics.”
The rest of the room watched Jake in near total silence. Lola watched Roman. What was it about this story that made it so personal?
“Everyone likes to think that, if confronted with such a situation, they would do the right thing,” Jake went on. “The truth is that most people do not act. Roman was there, however, as was Chance. They acted. They took action that night, and the next night, and so on, until that club was gone. And they took care of that sub. Roman took care of the sub. And then they built a place where that would never happen again.”
Jake paused, and Lola saw the ghost of something, something powerful, pass across Roman’s face.
Roman took care of the sub.
He had protected her. That should be a good memory, a proud memory, but Roman’s face…
Oh my God, it was Samantha. That’s how they met.
Lola fingers dug into Roman’s hands with the shock. It was one of those leaps, one of those jumps her mind sometimes made without sufficient evidence, and yet when she looked into Roman’s eyes as Jake talked about the nameless sub, she knew. She could read him and his grief and the all the years he’d carried it with him right then and there.
Roman had always been Samantha’s white knight.
And then, in the end, he felt that he hadn’t protected her from the thing he believed killed her.
It was stupid, and irrational, in exactly the way broken hearts are stupid and irrational, and it made Lola’s heart break for Roman all over again. And for herself, too, because right then she knew she could never replace a ghost—not so long as Roman carried that around with him.
Everyone else was watching Jake. Lola was watching Roman. She reached up to take his face in her hands, and was honest to God surprised when he turned to her all on his own, his eyes indescribably sad, as though he felt himself failing all over again.
“No,” Lola whispered. “Don’t grieve. You were always her protector, Roman. Every woman should be so lucky.”
And she kissed him so he wouldn’t see her tears.
The toasts got bawdier and bawdier, and the drinks kept flowing, and Lola could have kissed every single person who made Roman laugh and forget about his grief. She didn’t know why Jake would call that a story about the current bride and groom—in fact, she was pretty sure she’d have to find a way to kick his ass as soon as the wedding was over—but she was determined to make Roman forget all about it.
Roman didn’t have any family, in the strict sense, but it was clear as the night went on that his friends were his family—Volare had become his family. Which seemed, to Lola, perfectly right. With each story and each toast, she began to see, even more than she already had, how Roman had touched or changed the lives of almost everyone there.
Sneaky guy. He kept making everyone laugh, too. And when there was a lull or attention was directed elsewhere, he’d turn her head back and kiss her.
He knew she’d figured it out. He knew she knew, and he kept thanking her, over and over again.
Lola was just thinking how she could learn to live with the bittersweet realization that Samantha would always be around. That maybe she didn’t need all of Roman, if this, right here, being in Roman’s arms like this as he seemed to damn near read her mind, as he lightly stroked her skin, as he brushed his lips against her neck, if this was the best she could do?
Maybe she could learn to live with that. Maybe she could be happy with that.
She was thinking about all the ways to make that work when the one person who would never allow her to settle for anything waltzed right back into her life.
“Where’s my cousin?”
Chance Dalton strode right into the middle of the room, head whipping around like he couldn’t be bothered to wait for an answer. All six-foot-something of the broad-shouldered, military-trained man looked pissed off. Lola, still wrapped in Roman’s arms, froze.
She hadn’t told Chance anything.
She hadn’t been able to find Chance to tell him anything. His company just kept saying he was unreachable except for emergencies, and she figured he was off in some warzone somewhere. Besides, “phony engagement to your best friend—don’t worry, it’s fake—but kind of worry because we are having sex and I don’t know what that means” didn’t seem to rate as an emergency.
Roman didn’t stiffen, but she did hear him sigh.
Chance locked on them. Lola wished she could actually burrow into Roman’s chest and just let him deal with it.
“I hear there’s a fucking wedding?” Chance bellowed. The whole party had gone quiet.
Roman gently disentangled himself from Lola, kissing her cheek as he did so, and rose to face the music. Lola forced herself to look at Chance—and found him smiling.
“My best friend and my cousin,” he said, shaking his head. Then he wrapped Roman in a giant bear hug, winking at Lola over his shoulder. “About damn time. Get over here, dummy.”
Lola got up amidst the cheers and applause and let her cousin practically break her ribs with his hug, but her eye caught Roman’s, and he appeared to be wondering the same thing she was: did Chance know the ceremony was fake?
It still was, right?
chapter 20
It took quite a while for the party to settle down after Chance’s surprise arrival—if “settle down” was really the right phrase; the festivities and flirtations had been going on for a while, and by now the place was charged with so much sexual tension it was practically palpable. And Lola was finding that being with Roman in front of Chance was like trying to speak a foreign language. She hadn’t realized how accustomed she’d gotten to playing up her sexual role with Roman until she was faced with the prospect of doing it in front of her freaking cousin, which just broke her brain.
It wasn’t that Chance was one of those guys who couldn’t handle seeing their female relatives with a guy; he knew that Lola ran the sex club he partially owned, after all. Chance was what you call equal opportunity liberated, and he respected Lola as her own person, making her own decisions. If he hadn’t, she would have made sure that he learned to.
But seeing her with Roman?
Lola couldn’t put her finger on why, but that seemed different. And yet she just responded to Roman that way. She always had, but since this whole wedding fiasco had started, she’d discarded whatever mental filters she’d had in place with regard to Roman, and now she didn’t know how to get them back.
And, to add to it all, if she acted like that in front of Chance, would she be lying to him? She drew the line there. She did not want to lie to her only family.
So she was mostly sitting perfectly still and not speaking at all.
“You’re awfully quiet, Lo,” Chance said.
“Oh God, who told you?” she blurted out.
Roman laughed, choking on his wine, and Chance grinned.
“A lot on your mind, Lo?”
She smacked him in the arm. “Talk, Dalton. What do you know?”
Chance poured himself another big glass of wine, still grinning. “I called Ford when I got into town to check in on business. He brought me up to speed. This is like a Broadway production you got going on here.”
Lola turned to Roman, momentarily reminded of something that had bothered her earlier in the evening. “Roman, where is Ford? I thought we’d see him here.”
Roman seemed to think about it before answering. “He’s in Los Angeles on some business,” he said with finality.
“I have to admit, though, I kinda liked the idea of the two of you together for real,” Chance said, smiling. “Would simplify my holidays.”
Lo
la smiled back at him. Chance had apparently inherited the adventure gene from both of his parents—Marcy and Rob were currently in Mali with the Peace Corps. There weren’t many traditional Dalton family outings.
Lola watched Roman and Chance joke around, two guys she never would have guessed would end up as best friends, and decided she didn’t want to rock the boat just yet. Whatever she and Roman were, well, she could figure it out for herself before she talked to Chance. All in all, this was probably a good thing, right?
She could handle this.
She didn’t need a guy to be totally head over heels in love, with eyes only for her, to be happy.
So she was feeling cautiously optimistic as she looked down to check her phone.
It was a text from Ben.
BEN: Did you get my delivery?
Without even thinking about it, she texted back, “What delivery?”
BEN: To your apartment.
Lola paused, trying to think of the best way to handle this. A very big part of her did not love the way that Ben pursued a woman he believed to be in a relationship—it just reminded her of Ben’s own infidelity. But Ben in general felt like this big open door in her life, something she needed to close, if only because, for some unfathomable reason, the man still had some hold over her.
She replied to his text.
LOLA: I haven’t been to my apartment in weeks.
BEN: I should have known. I’m sorry.
LOLA: I don’t know what to say.
BEN: Say you’ll give me another shot.
Lola blinked. She hadn’t meant to give Ben an invitation or to encourage him or to lead him on, but she’d kind of done it anyway. Why? She wasn’t someone who did things like that. Yet here she was, sitting here with Roman—the man she unequivocally wanted and who she couldn’t say whether or not he wanted her back—while she was texting Ben—the man who had told her that he wanted her all the time, no matter how inappropriate.
Shit.
Lola had to be brutally honest with herself: Ben made her feel better because Ben was willing to say the things Roman wasn’t. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t ok, but it was true.
She picked up her phone with a sigh.
LOLA: Ben, I’m getting married. You can’t say things like that.
She waited, tense and hunched over her stupid phone, not totally clear on what she was so upset about. She had just lied to a man who had lied to her to get him to stop—what? Saying nice things to her? Her head was spinning.
Her phone buzzed.
BEN: You’re right, I’m sorry. I want to be friends even if that’s all we are. I love you.
Lola didn’t realize she was breathing heavily until she felt Roman’s hand on her arm. She jerked her head up.
“Are you all right?” Roman asked. Lola could see that Chance was now distracted by a new petite sub, and the party around Lola was quickly devolving as people snuck out in pairs or groups.
“I’m fine,” she lied. She looked down at her phone.
BEN: I’m always here, if you ever need me.
She quickly locked her phone.
Not even a month ago, Lola had promised herself she’d never need Ben again. It was wrong to gain comfort from this, and yet she did. She was ashamed. Talking to Ben to get some kind of reassurance was just too fucked up, and it wasn’t fair—both to her and to Ben.
She obviously did not have as good a grip on this situation as she thought.
“Lola.” Roman’s voice had become stern, a rough timbre with the suggestion of his Dom voice. Lola reacted to it automatically. Her abs tightened and whole body anticipated his touch.
Just his voice could rip her out of her pensive mood and remind her of where she was—and what he was.
My Dom.
“Jesus,” she muttered.
Roman smiled, reached his strong arms out, and pulled her back into his lap. She loved it there, just being close to him, his heat enveloping her, his scent all over her, his hands on her body. Things felt right so long as she was in Roman’s arms. It was when she had to leave that the problems started.
“Lola,” he whispered into her ear, “I have something to ask you.”
Lola could have sworn that her heart stopped beating entirely for one long, quiet moment. Then Roman stood up, cradling Lola in his arms, and threaded his way through the party in the direction of his private apartment, and her heart made up for it by beating double time.
What does he want?
~ * ~ * ~
Roman had controlled himself ever since Lola had turned and seen the grief he thought he felt privately, all through that rehearsal dinner, all through Chance’s sudden arrival.
Now he was done.
He held Lola in his arms, carried her as though she were weightless, felt proud that she threw her arms around his neck and clung to him, and all of it with one thing on his mind: he would show her what this meant to him.
He had never been more surprised at anything in his life. Lola had taken his face in her hands, looked him right in the eye, and let him know she knew. That she didn’t know the exact details didn’t matter; she was one of only a few people in that room who had any idea what he was feeling in that moment, and she was the only one to see without prior knowledge. To see, just on the basis of how she saw him.
And then, even with everything—even though his grief over Samantha was exactly the thing that had stood in the way of prior relationships, even though it was exactly the thing that prevented him and Lola from being real—she offered him only comfort. She saw that, and her reaction was to help him. To soothe him.
This woman.
This woman deserved…
He kicked open the door to his apartment, feeling like he was on fire. The woman in his arms deserved far more than he could give her, maybe than any man could give her, but he would give her as much as he could—tonight.
“Roman, are you ok?”
It was the first she’d spoken since he’d picked her up with the single-minded zeal of a barbarian. The truth was: no. He was not “ok.” In an ideal world, he would fuck this woman until she forgot her own name, and then again until they both passed out from pleasure, and they would wake up together, happy and content. But he knew that could not happen. He knew from experience that if he did that, he would wake up convinced, for one split second, that it was Samantha that he held in his arms, and then when he realized that it was not, when he remembered that Samantha was dead, the grief would be renewed, and it would poison everything he did have with Lola.
He could not allow that to happen.
He would settle for second best: he would give her orgasm after orgasm, until she lost her mind.
He kicked open the door to his bedroom, a room he hadn’t slept in himself in weeks, and threw Lola down on the bed in front of him.
“Lola, before we begin…”
He watched with some satisfaction as her eyes grew wide, and then heavy with lust. She knew exactly what he meant by “begin.”
“Before we begin, I would like to be clear: Harold Jeels will most likely no longer be an issue after our interview tomorrow, and after the coverage of the wedding. Our prenuptial agreement still stands. You can dissolve the marriage at any time and take your equity stake in Volare. You will not be bound to me. But I can tell you one thing now: I will still want you.”
Lola opened her mouth as though to say something, but no sound came out. Just as well; he was not done.
“I want this. I want you. I will always want you. I want you to be my sub, no matter what you choose to do.”
She drew herself up on her knees, her red hair falling over her shoulders, the tops of her garters—garters—visible just under the hem of the dress he’d hiked up while carrying her.
Damn it, did she know what she did to him?
“Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Take off those clothes,” he said.
~ * ~ * ~
Every time he told her to strip,
it sent tiny shivers down her spine and through to her core.
She looked him in the eye while she did it. She wanted this to be good for him. No, scratch that, she wanted to be the best for him. He’d just said what she’d been thinking: that they could keep doing this. That whatever it was that they were doing, they could find a way to work it out.
Her heart had soared.
She pulled the tight dress up over her head, leaving only her matching black bra, underwear, and, well, garters and stockings. She’d picked them especially for him, wondering if they’d get to play again after all that had happened earlier.
The look on his face told her she’d made a good decision.
He swallowed. “All of it,” he said. “Off.”
She was fumbling with her bra when he lost his patience. He pounced on the bed, pushing her down under him, tearing at her clothing. In no time at all she was completely naked, held under him.
He pinned her hands up above her head and bent down to kiss her, long and slow with his roving tongue. Lola felt the last of her reservations, her anxieties, all of it, just begin to drift away, the way they always did when she felt Roman on top of her. This was really all that mattered. This was what she was beginning to live for.
“Lola,” he said, rising up to look her in the eye, “I don’t know how to say some things. I will show them to you instead. Tonight you will come until think you can no longer take it. And then you will come again.”
And he hooked her ankles into restraints she hadn’t even known were there.
chapter 21
Lola took a deep breath. She’d been restrained by Roman before. She’d been emotionally leveled by Roman before.
But never both at the same time.