A hint of that smile on his mouth. “Here’s an easy solve. If he thinks you’re a freak, don’t sleep with him.”
“And anyway, innocence is a whole different conversation. I never said I was innocent.”
If I’d looked around to discover that I’d tipped off the side of the world and had disappeared completely into Damon’s hot, unwavering gaze, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. But I didn’t look anywhere but at him.
“There’s a reason you’ve saved yourself.” He seemed a lot more sure of that than I was. “Fear. Longing. Hope. I don’t know. But you probably should before you do something you can’t take back.”
“You really don’t think that I should have a one night stand and just—get it over with? Project virgin, mission accomplished, boom. Just like that?” I swallowed, distantly aware that there was a lump in my throat. “Because that’s what I want.”
Damon reached across the charged, electric space between us and tucked a loose tendril of my hair behind my ear. I wore it piled into an efficient twist to work, the unruly chocolate brown waves tamed into submission as if that might help make me more successful, and I could feel his fingers against the side of my head, then against my jaw as he pulled away again.
The thought that this might be the only time he’d ever touch me ached in me like a fever. Like loss.
“Scottie.”
He didn’t say it as if he thought my name was ridiculous anymore.
He said it like a prayer.
I looked at him and I understood want. I understood need. And I understood that banging some stranger in a bar’s sad, dirty bathroom was not going to work for me. I could only think of one thing that would.
But he hadn’t offered himself, had he? I’d all but handed him an engraved invitation. And sure, it was maybe slightly unethical for a high and mighty seventh year associate to sleep with a first year, but it wasn’t like Damon Patrick was famous for respecting boundaries. Sexually or legally. His specialty was pushing them both.
He wasn’t pushing anything here. Which meant that as much as I might want him—and only him, all the too-hot parts of my body chanted at me the longer I spent in his presence—he didn’t feel the same. And I hardly knew this man. There was no reason at all I should find that… crushing.
“I think I’ll walk home,” I said after a stretch of time that could have been years. It felt like decades, hot and dark blue, and I wondered who I’d be grieving tonight when I cleared my head and slept alone. Alexander or Damon? “I could use the air.”
He shifted then, and smiled, and I felt as if everything had changed. As if the world had been shoved out of its usual orbit, even if I couldn’t see any difference. I felt that restlessness, edgy and needy, like a dull kind agony right beneath my skin.
“Or,” he said quietly, but with all that electric confidence that pooled deep in my belly and pulsed hard between my legs, “you could let me give you what you want.”
Chapter Four
‡
“This is not what I want at all,” I said a little while later. “This is pretty much the opposite of what I want. I can do this by myself.”
More accurately, I yelled it—directly into Damon’s ear in the somewhat vain hope he’d hear me over the pumping music of the hottest club in San Francisco as it geared up for its usual Friday night debaucheries.
Damon only slanted a very blue look down at me, then propelled me through the crowd with the same ease he’d used to get us through the door. Two words in a bouncer’s ear and we’d been waved past the ropes and the line that wound down one of the city’s famously steep hills into the thick dark beyond. Now he led me through the cavernous space, packed tight with scantily-clad bodies and the flicker of neon lights. It took me a moment or two to realize he obviously knew exactly where he was going.
It took me another moment to realize that didn’t surprise me at all. Of course he did.
Another quick conversation with one more bouncer, all wide shoulders and an aggressive neck, and we were through yet another rope and then into what was clearly the VIP area of the club. It sat up over the dance floor, with open balconies arranged almost like theater boxes, complete with private seating areas and in the case of the one Damon ushered me into, a private and open bar. All things I might have found pretty cool if I’d wanted to go clubbing. I didn’t. I had much bigger plans for the evening—or do I’d thought.
“What are we doing here?” I asked him. Possibly I was also frowning.
“You sound annoyed. How is that possible?” He, in contrast, was laughing. At me, clearly. “You’re supposed to be impressed at my ability to skirt all lines and ropes at a place like this. It’s supposed to make you shiver all over with lust and longing.”
“I’ve been waiting for twenty-six years to lose my virginity, Damon. I’m always shivering with lust and longing. It’s basically my natural state.”
His laughter edged into something hotter, and I didn’t understand why his hands weren’t on me already.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I scowled at the crowd. “When you said you were going to give me what I want, I didn’t think that meant a round of clubbing with a bunch of entrepreneurial douchebags who talk about their apps and their start ups the way street preachers talk about God.”
He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it on one of the low, sleek sofas, and he should have looked like one of those red-faced banker boys out for an evening of flashing credit cards around swanky venues, fitting right in with the Silicon Valley gazillionaires who clogged every part of the city these days. Instead, I found myself mesmerized by the play of the muscles that roped his arms and packed his chest and abdomen, far more visible when he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket.
And when I raised my too-wide eyes to his, it was clear he knew it.
I felt my cheeks explode into red.
“This is about getting you under someone, Scottie,” he said, still laughing at me, and still in that edgy way that made my mouth dry. “Preferably someone with an appreciation of the finer things in life. The first step is to loosen you up.”
“I’m loose.”
“You look like you’re here to tend to my taxes, or possibly my funeral.”
I may or may not have been standing there before him with my arms crossed over my chest, scowling like some kind of latter day schoolmarm. I tried to make my glare fiercer.
“I don’t understand how this leads to me losing my virginity.”
Damon sighed then. He moved toward me, and that was its own sort of snake-charmer thing. Beguiling and delicious, and I hardly knew what I felt about it—only that I couldn’t look away. The music crashed all around him and that body of his was a marvel and then he was too close, and he kept coming, and I didn’t realize he’d backed me all the way into the rail of our balcony until it hit me in the lower back.
Then he was right there too, caging me where I stood with a hand on either side of me. He left a breath of space between us. Just a little breath.
Which was good, I thought wildly, because I’d forgotten how to breathe altogether.
“Which one of us knows what he’s doing?” Damon asked, his voice dark and hot and close to my ear. “You or me?”
“I don’t know to answer that. You refused to confirm if the rumors I heard about you were true.”
A rumble of very male laughter. Then the scrape of his teeth against the side of my jaw. He’d nipped me. He’d nipped me. My entire body seemed to switch on, straight into a white hot, humming blaze of fire.
“They’re true.”
“You don’t know—” I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I ached and I needed and I wanted things I’d only ever read about before. And he was all around me and too close to me and my heart hurt, it hit against my ribs so hard—“You don’t have any idea what I’ve heard.”
Another nip. It was as electric as the first. It made every part of me seem to… sizzle.
“The
y’re all true.” Then he shifted back, his wicked mouth serious while his dark blue eyes gleamed. “Did you really doubt it?”
My head spun with all the different stories I’d heard about him. All the fables and fantasies and whispered friend of friend tales I’d gathered over the past months, without any expectation that I’d ever interact with the man himself. Without any passing daydream that he’d ever actually touch me. Me.
And not one of them was even remotely as hot or as dangerous to my equilibrium as Damon himself, right here in front of me.
There was something shaking me apart, hot and greedy and deep inside of me, and I didn’t know whether to fear it or throw myself straight into it.
“I don’t know that I doubted it,” I began, aware as I battled for coherence that my cheeks were likely scarlet, they flamed so red and bright, “so much as questioned whether any one man could have that much stamina. Consistently. And so often.”
Damon only smiled.
And I wasn’t really all that concerned about his stamina, it turned out.
“You don’t have to do this with me,” he told me then, though he didn’t back up at all. He didn’t move his hands, keeping me caged there between them against the balcony’s rail, a single deep breath away from plastered against his magnificent chest. “I brought you here so you can have your pick of anyone in San Francisco. I think we can both agree that if you’re going to lose your virginity tonight, you should have better options than a seedy dive bar bathroom.”
“So this is like a buffet. A tech millionaire, club kid buffet with a DJ and neon lights instead of delicious bacon and maybe a few churros.”
His mouth twitched. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
I smiled at him and everything felt tight and syrupy at once, stretched wide and silvery.
“And if I’m not all that into you, what then?” I tilted my head slightly to one side. “Has that ever happened?”
“You can pick someone you think is a better man for the job,” he said in a low voice, a gleam in his eyes that let me know, without question, that there was no better man for the job than him—and that no, no one had ever claimed otherwise. I could feel the echo of that certainty like a lick of heat, as if I’d pressed a vibrator directly against my clit as I stood there.
Damon smiled as if he could hear the buzzing. “I’ll help you.”
I had no intention of picking out some other man, no matter how tempting the one night stand club buffet laid out before me, but I thought his ego was big enough already. That it was probably entirely earned was beside the point. I frowned, and pretended to consider the idea.
“How exactly will you do that? Conduct depositions on the dance floor?”
He shifted back then. I realized I was about to reach out for him and stopped myself. Too greedy, too soon. Damon shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked unbelievably cocky and self-assured, and it made my entire body go liquid, then hot and tight.
“I could be your wingman.”
Damon Patrick, a wingman? I was surprised he even knew the word, given how unlikely it was he’d ever had to use one himself. Or had ever had the opportunity to act as one, for that matter.
“I think you’ll find that no one who looks like you is ever a wingman,” I said dryly. “And in this scenario? Trolling a crowded club for someone who looks like a good candidate for a very late deflowering? I’m pretty sure you’d be more of a cock block than anything else.”
“Only to the lesser, unworthy cocks,” he said, a small smile toying with his mouth. “I promise.”
I was talking about cocks with Damon Patrick.
I was talking about cocks with Damon Patrick.
Not to mention deflowering. My favorite word to describe the act I’d spent most of my life fantasizing about. Especially with a man who looked like he knew exactly what to do with an unexpected twenty-six year old… flower.
“What a conundrum,” I murmured after a moment, when the hysteria inside me subsided enough so I could speak without shrieking about flowers. I couldn’t tear my eyes from his. “How can I possibly choose?”
“There’s one more thing to consider as you make this decision.”
“I’m all ears.”
That smile of his changed, then. It got… sharper, somehow. Even edgier than before and somehow darker at the same time. It seemed to work its way through my entire body, a bone-deep shudder.
It made me think of wolves.
It made me want to catapult myself straight into him.
“If you choose me,” he said, as if he didn’t know as well as I did that there was only one possible outcome to this. That we’d been headed straight here since he’d asked me that question in the elevator this morning. “There are rules.”
“Rules?” I blinked. “Do you make your lovers sign non-disclosure agreements? Is that why it’s always only rumors with you—the threat of legal action?”
His head tilted slightly to one side. “Do you feel you need to sign something?”
“Not necessarily. That depends, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? Do you have a relationship with the tabloids I should know about?
“The only relationship I had was with a complete asshole.” I sounded ever-so-slightly bitter, I noted. I forced a smile. “And is over.”
Damon’s smile flashed brighter.
“There are only two rules,” he said, still with that tautness about him, as if he was as leashed as he was dangerous, and it would take so little to set him off. Why did that make need fist in me like that? Hard and swift, as if my body was no longer mine? “They’re very simple and they don’t require a notarized signature. Can you handle that?”
“I can’t really answer unless you tell me what they are.” I shrugged as if I had conversations like this all the time. With him, even.
“Most women just say yes, in case you wondered,” he said, that particular dark note in his voice snaking along my spine and making my hips feel loose and precarious. “Most women are desperate.”
I waved a hand at the heaving dance floor far below us. “Most women aren’t knee deep in a buffet of San Francisco’s richest and most drunk with nary a churro in sight. Not if they can help it, anyway.”
Appreciation flashed in his blue, blue gaze.
“Rule number one,” Damon said, very distinctly. “Do what I tell you to do.”
“Is this for the office or your bed? There appears to be some crossover, if I’m remembering today’s deposition correctly.”
He only grinned, though there was that wolf in his gaze and I could see it clearly, fangs and all. My nipples pulled tight. My pussy clenched hard. I wanted him to bite me again, and harder this time. I wanted.
Damon looked as if he knew exactly what I wanted. “And rule number two? When in doubt, do it anyway.”
Chapter Five
‡
“Okay,” I said.
Damon’s grin widened. “Okay?”
Whatever flashed in me then was brighter than the light show that danced over the crowd, louder than the music that filled the space to bursting and beyond.
I should have taken a moment and thought this through. I should have remembered who he was and who I was and all the thousands of reasons this was an absolutely terrible idea. But I’d been waiting my whole life and I’d never wanted anything or anyone the way I wanted this man. I’d spent the last six years longing for Alexander to be the man he pretended to be when convenient—but I’d already wanted Damon more over the course of one long day on into the evening than I’d ever wanted my ex-fiancé.
I didn’t really love that realization, but that didn’t make it any less true.
There didn’t seem to be any particular point to thinking about it any longer. I’d been waiting forever. I didn’t want to wait anymore.
“You’ll have to teach me everything,” I warned him, frowning. And maybe, I admitted as something that was not quite panic danced through me, I was a little bit nervous, too
. “Are you ready for that?” I took a breath that made my lungs hurt and then let it out, because why pretend? He probably already knew exactly how inexperienced I was. There was no point trying to hide it. “I’ve been buried in a giant lie for six years and while there were hands and some kissing, it was otherwise pretty lame. Getting rid of the albatross around my neck is the first step, but it’s really only a stepping stone toward the vast, unconquerable sea of things I should know by twenty-six but don’t.”
It occurred to me that I was babbling. Nervously babbling. I stopped.
“The fiancé was the albatross, Scottie,” Damon said calmly, in that sexy, confident way of his that made my knees feel like water even as the urge to obey him, agree with him, touch him hummed through me. “The virginity is a gift. Try to make that distinction.”
“I need you to be sure you’re prepared for that gift.” I narrowed my eyes at him, and pretended I didn’t see the smile he bit back, as if he was indulging me. “I don’t want you to back out halfway through, saying you didn’t know what you were signing up for.”
“I don’t turn down the gifts I’m given,” he said, and there was that fire again, blazing between us, hard and impossible and breathtaking in its intensity. I expected him to smile, to make that a fun and flirty throwaway remark and nothing more, but he didn’t. Instead, his blue eyes darkened. “That would be unpardonably rude.”
He took one of his hands from his pocket and reached over, fitting it to my cheek as if it belonged there. And I knew I should have been horrified that he could feel how much I wanted him in the red hot flush of my skin. But I wasn’t.
Some part of me wanted him to know. That I was red hot and so wet. That I ached for him, between my legs and everywhere else.
His palm against my cheek was better than anything else I’d ever felt, his skin against my skin like a revelation. I didn’t care what I had to do, as long as I could feel his hands all over me. As long as he kept touching me, however he liked.
As long as I could keep feeling like this, awake and alive, as if I’d been sound asleep all this time without knowing it.