The Rose

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Now...” he said, “get your kit off. Meet you in bed in nine seconds.”

  August stood up. He took his jacket off and threw it over the back of his chair.

  “What? Right now?” she asked, suddenly panicking.

  “Why not? Can you think of a better way to seal the deal?”

  “You want to have sex with me right this second?”

  “You on my cock will take the sting out of the million pounds I’m paying you,” he said.

  “I need to prepare myself.”

  August shook his head. “I don’t care if you’re waxed or not.”

  If Lia had the Rose Kylix in her hands at that moment, she might have thrown it at him.

  “That is not what I was talking about.” Lia took a deep breath, tried to calm her rising panic. “I meant I needed to emotionally prepare myself. Mind-body connection, you know.”

  “I’m not going to put my cock in your brain,” he said. “Although in certain positions it can feel like that, I hear. Your ankles on my shoulders, for example. Can get very deep. Want to try it?”

  Lia tried not to picture that. She failed. August unbuckled his belt. So much for calming her wild breathing.

  “Please stop that,” she said.

  He took his hands off his belt and held them up like a suspect surrendering to the police.

  “It was your idea—and a very good idea at that. Why are you so scared?”

  “Haven’t done it in a long time. I barely know you. You’re older than I am. You’ve had sex with a cloud. Shall I go on?”

  “Yes, go on,” he said.

  “I thought we could wait until after we drank from the kylix. Saturday night when I came to it was like...if you’d been in my room, I might have done something illegal to your body. Possibly even lethal.”

  “Oh my.” His eyes went wide. He looked positively scandalized. “You realize if we’d made love after, we would have been doing it under the influence. I’d rather we make love the first time in our right minds.”

  This was a good point. Lia wished he would stop making good points.

  She paused, took a breath. “Despite my profession—and yes, I know how prissy that sounds—I don’t have a lot of confidence in this arena. I’ve been with a couple men but I never could, you know, get there.”

  “No orgasms?”

  “Not with someone. I mean, to do that you really have to trust someone, right? Let down your guard? I’m not good at that.”

  “And that’s why you’re hiring me, yes? To help you learn how to let your guard down?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I cried about anything,” Lia said. “You know, until Saturday night when you gave me my book. I’d started to think I couldn’t cry anymore. Maybe you can help with that other problem, too.”

  August gave her a long searching look. His strange stormy eyes were full of what appeared to be compassion. “He didn’t just cheat on you, did he? What did he do?”

  “Nothing I can talk about,” she said. “It was very bad. All you need to know.”

  He didn’t press, and she appreciated that.

  “You’ve been hurt,” he surmised. “The sooner you sleep with me, the sooner you’ll start to feel much, much better, I promise. I’m not being glib. I do this job for a reason, and that reason is I’m very good at making my patrons feel very good.”

  August touched her chin, gently, and tilted her face up to meet his gaze.

  “I changed my mind,” she said. “I’ll just sell the Rose Kylix to the highest bidder. Rule, Britannia.”

  She slapped the arms of her chair and stood up.

  “Or you can sit there and watch me take my clothes off,” he said.

  “Also a viable option.” She sat down again. She could always leave after he took his clothes off. And she would. But she ought to see what she was paying for first. Right?

  August pulled off his shirt, and she stared, as if hypnotized, as he tossed it onto his jacket. The jeans next. There were no underclothes to bother with.

  He stepped in front of her completely naked.

  He was magnificent. There existed no other word for him in any language. He had an athlete’s form and a boy’s beauty and a man’s cock. He held out both arms to his sides and slowly turned in a circle—displaying himself to her like goods on the auction block. And where was her bidding paddle when she needed it?

  Muscled arms etched with veins. Broad, long, smooth back. Narrow waist. A perfect arse. Endless legs with thighs corded with muscle. There was no comparing his skin to velvet or silk or stone or steel. He was smooth hard male flesh, all of him. His pulse beat at the base of his throat. She tried to meet his eyes, but her gaze wandered down to the tattoo of the three-petal rose on his lower stomach. The urge to press her tongue to it was almost overwhelming. Her stomach contracted, her breaths grew short and shallow, and her fingernails dug into the leather chair arm when she allowed herself the pleasure of looking at his cock.

  Beautiful cock, hard and erect, large enough to frighten her but not to frighten her away. She had thought she’d felt lust before, but that had been like a child dipping her toes into a wading pool. Now Lia threw herself, naked, into the deepest end of the ocean. August was not simply a beautiful man. August was a god.

  He met her eyes. “Shall we?” he asked.

  “All right,” Lia said, swallowing. “You talked me into it.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August said nothing as he stepped forward and stood in front of her, naked and lovely and waiting.

  She still sat on her leather club chair. Shaking and nervous, she lifted her eyes to his and found he was looking down at her with love. Love? Yes, she couldn’t call it anything else. The tenderness in his eyes, the kindness, the desire...it looked like she’d always imagined love would look in a man’s eyes.

  No wonder he made a fortune doing this.

  He reached out and stroked her burning face with his fingertips.

  “Touch me,” he said.

  “God,” she said, heaving a breath. “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Touch me anywhere and any way you like.”

  He was fully aroused. His cock was thick and red and inches from her face. Lia did want to touch him. She absolutely did. She wanted to touch every inch of him and she knew exactly which inch she wanted to start with...

  “Please, Lia,” August said softly.

  She heard true need in his voice. Well, if he wanted her to...

  Lia shook a little in her chair. She was so close to him she could feel the heat emanating from his body. His fingers were still stroking her cheek. She glanced up at him again and saw him watching her, waiting, eager for her to make the first move, to break the tension, to open Pandora’s box and see what flew out...

  Lia leaned forward and pressed her fingertips against the three-petal rose tattoo. They were thick lines, deep, like scars, not like ink. Like burns. Like a...

  With a gasp, she pulled her head back and met his eyes.

  “It’s a brand,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “You ever been branded? Of course it hurt.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I was branded after I was with my first patron,” August said. “First time in my life I felt truly alive, truly...human.”

  She touched the brand again, as gently as she could, tracing the lines of it, the beautiful wound...

  “Lia, Lia,” he whispered, “you are going to make my life very interesting this week.”

  She sat back and put some space between them.

  “Will I have to share you with other patrons?”

  He shook his head. “For you I’m clearing my whole calendar.”

  She smiled, though she tried not to let him see it.

 

“You’re so beautiful,” she said.

  “That’s kind of you to say.”

  “Credit where credit’s due,” she said, and cleared her throat.

  He slid his hand under her chin, lifted it.

  “I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do this week,” he said. “I don’t force. I seduce. But I will seduce you, and by the end of the week you will have done things with me you never dreamed you wanted to do. You understand?”

  She slowly nodded.

  “Let’s get into bed,” he said. “I want you on my cock.”

  She took another heaving breath. She might have squeaked.

  “You’re a grown woman, Lia. You’re allowed to have sex and enjoy it.”

  “It was so easy to be with you before.”

  “Because I was someone else?”

  “Because I was someone else,” she said. “I don’t know if I can...”

  “You can. You will. But we can go slowly. Bring the cup. I’ll fetch the wine.”

  Lia relaxed slightly when August stepped away from her. She busied herself opening her bag and taking out the kylix, which she’d wrapped up carefully in clean linen. She carried it over to the bed.

  August came up behind and pressed himself against her back. He took the cup from her hand and set it on the black square nightstand, next to an open bottle of red wine. He wrapped his arms around her stomach and kissed the side of her neck.

  The warmth of his body seeped through the fabric of her dress and into her skin. She stood still, too nervous to move, as he nibbled the pulse point in her neck and ran his hands slowly up and down her back. She liked it but didn’t know how to respond. And she wanted to respond. She wanted him to know she wanted him.

  “Relax,” he said into her ear, as if he’d read her thoughts. “Let me do my job. And let me show you why I love my work.”

  She smiled, nodded, still nervous but relieved she wouldn’t be expected to perform.

  “But first, let us bid adieu to your clothes.”

  “No,” she said, turning to face him. “No. No, no, no.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You do know how sex works, yes?”

  She held up her hand and pushed the air, demanding some room between them. He obliged and took one step back.

  Lia unzipped her dress, pulled it off and laid it over the back of a chair. Under it, she wore a simple ivory slip, one that had belonged to her grandmother in the ’60s.

  “Better.” He stepped forward and ran his hands over her back again and Lia shivered pleasantly as his skin warmed her through the silk. “This is very pretty. It will look even prettier on my floor...”

  “Give me time,” she said.

  “All the time you need,” he said, and kissed her neck again. “But we’re getting rid of the knickers right this second.”

  She made a sound halfway between a whimper and a squeak.

  They had a deal, she reminded herself.

  “All right.”

  August pulled her knickers down her legs and with a dainty lift of her feet she was out of them.

  “Not so bad, was it?” he asked after tossing her underwear all the way across the room.

  “I survived.”

  “Now would you be so kind as to bend over the bed?”

  “Why?”

  “It will make lubricating your vagina easier.”

  Another small sound came out of Lia’s throat, like air escaping a balloon.

  “Or you could lie on your back,” he suggested.

  He was trying to be helpful.

  “I’ll just...um...do the first one,” she said.

  With as much grace and dignity as she could muster under the circumstances—weird bed, weird bedroom, weird yet incredibly attractive naked male prostitute standing behind her with an erection—Lia bent over the bed.

  “I’m not going to spank your arse,” he said as he lifted the back of her slip.

  “Thank you.”

  “Unless you want me to.”

  “Let’s table that for now.”

  He didn’t say anything. That troubled her. Deeply.

  “You’re looking at my vagina, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She sighed.

  “It’s very pretty.” He touched the seam of her vulva and lightly stroked it with his fingertip. It parted at his touch and Lia’s fingers curled into the bedspread. “Beautiful cunt.”

  Lia grimaced. “Do you really have to call it that?”

  “Yes. You should, too. It’s sexy.”

  “It’s rude.”

  “Sexy.”

  “Crude.”

  “Prissiest madam ever, I swear to the gods.”

  Lia heard him opening a drawer and felt the first touch of warm liquid on her body.

  “I thought it would be cold,” she said.

  “I have a lube-warmer.”

  “Of course you do.”

  She tensed as he spread her labia open wider. He made a sound like “Hmm...”—the sound of an art critic judging a painting.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Your cunt looks like a rose,” he said.

  “Does not.”

  “Pink-red petals, dark little center, bit dewy.”

  Lia buried her burning face against the cool suede of his bedspread.

  August touched a tender spot inside her.

  Lia gasped as her vagina clenched around his fingers.

  August laughed. Wonderful laugh.

  “I’m falling in love with you already,” he said.

  “Well. Stop,” she said. “Please and thank you.”

  “Prude.”

  “Are you finished now?”

  “I am,” he said. “And you really didn’t need the lube. You were soaking wet before I got there.”

  He pulled his fingers out of her—bad—and Lia stood up—good.

  She turned to face August, who was using a little white towel to wipe his fingers clean.

  “Now what?” she asked. She was feeling quite...slippery.

  “I need to know what sexual fantasy you’d like to experience tonight.”

  “Don’t rush me,” she said. “This is my session, isn’t it?”

  He put his hands together in a prayer position. “I am all yours.”

  “Thank you. I thought so.”

  “What would you like to do, Lia?” he asked, the picture of submission.

  Damn him...he’d called her bluff.

  “Well... I’m open to suggestions,” she said. August managed not to laugh at her too loudly.

  “Probably a good idea to get started,” he said. “Before you lose your nerve.”

  Lia nodded. “Agreed.”

  He slipped into bed and propped himself against the tufted leather headboard. How was he so comfortable being naked while she was shaking in her slip?

  “Could you pass the condoms, please?” he asked.

  He’d put an entire box of them on the nightstand. Felt rude, like bragging. Surely they wouldn’t need more than one. She passed him one.

  One.

  “Lia? You’re there.” He pointed at the floor. “I require your presence here.” He patted his stomach. Lia slowly crawled onto the bed, wishing the entire time August had a much bigger bed.

  “Why is your bed so small?” she asked.

  “More intimate. You can hide from someone in a king-size. Not in this bed. No hiding places at all...”

  He reached for her and, with his hands on her waist, pulled her on top of him. She sat on his stomach and found herself very aware of her wet bare vulva pressing against his warm flesh. She was trying to ignore his cock, though it certainly wasn’t ignoring her.

  Lia was of two minds. One mind wanted to get her things and rush straight home and pretend she’d never had this terrible idea. The other mind wanted to press her entire body to August’s entire body and stay there a few millennia. August took her face in his hands, stroked her cheeks, her neck. Then he smiled at her.

  Might as well stay, she decided.

  “It won’t hurt,” he said.

  “I’m not a virgin.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” He brushed her hair over her shoulder and leaned in to kiss her. His lips met hers and Lia shivered. She clung awkwardly to his shoulders as she returned the kiss, tentatively at first but with growing confidence. August ran his fingertips up her arms and over her shoulders, across her back and down to her waist. The man kissed like he’d invented kissing, patented it and made a fortune off the patent. He nipped her bottom lip, dipped his tongue into her mouth and retreated, pushed and retreated, teasing her until there was nothing for her to do but put her own tongue in his mouth. That would show him.

  When her tongue met his, August moaned softly. He pulled her closer and Lia could almost swear he wanted her as much as she wanted him. Of course he didn’t. This was the job, and she knew how it worked. And that was fine. She wasn’t here to fall in love. She knew better than that, and even if she didn’t, she knew she couldn’t.

  But...she could enjoy herself while it lasted, right?

  “You’re a good kisser,” August whispered.

  “I was thinking the same about you.”

  He smiled again, and looked in her eyes again, making her blush again.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re insanely beautiful.”

  “Shut up. I have a gap in my two front teeth.”

  “Like Isabella Rossellini.”

  “Like David Letterman,” she retorted.

  “It’s a sign of a strong libido. Ask the Wife of Bath. And very, very sexy.”

  He kissed her again, before she could tell him all the ways he was wrong about that. And as he kissed her, he slowly and with the utmost care moved her so that she was on top of his cock.

  “Take your time,” he said.

  Lia pushed a lock of hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  “So...” she began. “Help?”

  He really had the most wonderful smile when he was trying not to laugh at her. Lia could get used to that smile—when she got over the urge to wipe it off his face.

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