A Million Dirty Secrets

  Noah cleared his throat. “Will you excuse us? I’d like to trip the light fantastic with my date.”

  “Yes, of course, sweetheart,” Vanessa said with an uncomfortable smile.

  Noah took the glass out of my hand and sat it on the table next to us. “Dance with me?” I caught the underlying tone. It was an order, not a request.

  “Why, Mr. Crawford, it would be my honor,” I said with my best southern belle impersonation.

  Noah said nothing more as he took my hand and led me out onto the dance floor. We faded into the crowd and he spun me around, pressing me tightly to his body before leaning down so that his warm breath was at my ear. Then we began to sway back and forth.

  “What the hell was that all about?”

  “What?” I asked, his scent invading my senses and making me forget what he was talking about.

  “You were being very rude to my uncle. If it weren’t for the fact that you were actually talking to his wife, I’m sure he’d think you were a mute.”

  He lightly pressed his lips to the spot below my ear. It was a good thing he was holding me so tightly, because my knees suddenly turned to Jell-O, and I was sure I would have fallen.

  “You told me not to talk to any men, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe your uncle is a man,” I answered breathlessly. “Either that or he’s a very convincing cross-dresser. Or—gasp!—is he a hermaphrodite?”

  “Very funny,” he said in a dry tone, and then he playfully bit my earlobe. “Do me a favor, and knock off the sarcastic shit.”

  “Yes, sir. Whatever you say, Mr. Crawford, sir.”

  Noah pulled back and looked at me, obviously not amused by my tone. “What’s your problem all of a sudden?”

  “Problem? No problem.” I shrugged. “Just being myself. The only one here with a problem is you.”

  He sighed. “Whatever. I should’ve known better than to bring you here. My fault.”

  “Why?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to pull out of his hold. “Because I’m just something you purchased? One who doesn’t quite fit into your social class?”

  Noah pulled back and looked into my eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?” When my expression didn’t waver, he leaned down and whispered into my ear. “You’re the most beautiful woman at the ball, Delaine.”

  It wasn’t true in the least, but it would have been easier to believe if it hadn’t been for that display I’d seen when I came out of the ladies’ room. And so, true to form, I let him know about it.

  “Yet you couldn’t keep your eyes off that other woman,” I mumbled. “Julie Frost, right? Your ex?”

  I felt his body go rigid against mine, every muscle coiling like a viper ready to strike. “Who told you?”

  “Does it matter? The point is that you didn’t. Maybe it’s because you still want her.”

  He pulled back again to look at me. At the same time, his hand moved further down my back until it was resting over my ass. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “Is that so?” I asked, meeting his gaze. My eyes immediately latched on to the sight of his tongue darting out to lick his luscious lips, and I struggled to keep my train of thought. “Because you went from not being able to get enough of me to not touching me at all. You’ve been sleeping in your clothes; you don’t talk or even yell at me. It’s beyond obvious that you don’t want me anymore. And I know I have no right to question any of this, but damn it, Noah, I don’t like feeling like … like I don’t matter.”

  He stopped moving and stared at me, his eyes shifting back and forth like he was looking for something. Then, without a word, he took my hand and started for one of the exit doors.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, quick-stepping to keep up.

  “Someplace more private,” he answered as he opened the door.

  I looked back at the crowded hall and noticed Julie and David huddled together under the chandelier, which was now shaking. Just as the wires broke loose and the ornate fixture began to fall, Noah jerked my arm, and me, out of my make-believe world again. Damn it all to hell.

  He looked from left to right until he finally chose to go right. We turned the corner into another hallway, and then another, until all I could hear of the music from the party was a dull bass thud. There was a darkened stairwell to the left of where we had ended up, and Noah punched open the door and pulled me inside.

  My back was pressed against the wall and Noah’s body was flush against mine within a heartbeat. Before I could say anything at all, his hands were on my hips and his soft lips were moving over mine in a sensual kiss that I absolutely answered with every bit as much tenderness. And then, as quickly as it had begun, he broke the kiss, his hands cupping my face.

  “What there is or isn’t between Julie Frost and me doesn’t matter. But you? You fucking matter, and don’t you ever forget it.” His voice was low and husky, seductively erotic. And he had a hard-on the size of … well, Texas.

  I pushed my hips forward to rub against him. “Is that for her?”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Delaine …”

  “Because if it is, it’s okay. Just let me be the one to take care of it for you. It’s what you paid me to do,” I rambled. “I mean, I know I’m not her, but—”

  “You could never be her,” he said angrily. He backed away from me until the opposite wall made it impossible for him to go any farther.

  No, I couldn’t be her, could I? He used to love her. Apparently he still did. I would never measure up. She was from money, practically a member of his family. And I was the whore he had bought to get over her.

  I slowly crossed the space between us. “No, I know that. And I would never try to fill her place,” I assured him as I knelt before him.

  “Delaine, don’t.” His voice was raspy, but he didn’t move to stop me as I undid his pants and pulled out his cock.

  “And I may not be the one you love, but I’m the one you’re with. So let me fulfill my purpose,” I said, nuzzling the head of his dick and then giving it a kiss.

  “No!” He pushed me away, quickly tucking his cock back in his pants.

  Never had I been so humiliated. I stood, my hands balled into fists at my sides. “Why?”

  “Because this isn’t what I want,” he said, motioning back and forth between the floor and himself. “This isn’t right.”

  “Well, fuck you, Noah! Maybe you forgot that you’re the one who purchased me!” I was furious, and hurt, and … furious. Yes, in signing that contract I had done a desperate thing at a very desperate time, but that didn’t make me any less of a person than Julie. What she had done was far worse than what I did. At least I wasn’t a cheater. “I may not be Julie, but I sure as hell would never let your best friend fuck me in the ass!”

  His head snapped up, and his stare was almost lethal. I guessed that was the proverbial slap across the face. I immediately regretted saying the words the second they left my mouth, but the bitch in me was rejoicing, simply because she needed to hurt and humiliate him the same way he had done to me.

  I loved him, even though I knew he could never love me, that he was already in love with someone else. And there I was, on my knees before him in an elegant dress, willing and able to help take his mind off what he didn’t have so that maybe he could focus on what was right in front of his stupid, beautiful face, and he’d pushed me away like I wasn’t good enough for him.

  Noah took his phone out of his pocket and dialed a number. After a moment he said, “Meet us on the south side, Samuel. We’re leaving.”

  He snapped his phone shut and took my hand. “Let’s go,” he said and then paused. “Shit!” He opened his phone back up and pressed another number. “Polly, Delaine and I are leaving. Grab her purse and tell anyone who asks that she wasn’t feeling well, so I took her home.”

  “I feel fine,” I mumbled as he tugged me along.

  “Funny, seems to me like you’ve lost your goddamn mind,” he barked.

  I didn’t argue,
because quite frankly, he was probably right. But I wasn’t done with him, either. He was pissed. I was pissed. And that was when he and I were at our best. We got angry and then we fucked and made up. That was how we did things.

  We made it through the labyrinth of halls without being noticed by any of the other partygoers, a miracle in and of itself, and then we were outside. I stopped short because it was storming like crazy—lightning, thunder, torrential downpour, the whole bit. Samuel was there with an umbrella to shield us from the rain and Noah dragged me into the back of the limo. The same limo, mind you, where he had fucked me as I looked on at all the other people living their mundane lives like they were the caged ones being gawked at by the one who was actually living freely. The same limo where he had told me that he was there for my pleasure, just as I was for his. The same limo where he had told me that he loved a woman who knew what she wanted.

  He sat opposite me and lit up another one of those pornographic cigarettes, and I’d had enough.

  “Look at me,” I said authoritatively. He ignored me.

  “I said, look at me!” I demanded. He exhaled a puff of smoke but never turned my way.

  I reached across, took the cigarette from between his lips, and threw the thing out the window. Then I lifted my skirts, straddled him and grabbed two handfuls of his hair, forcing him to look at me. “Don’t ignore me. I don’t like to be ignored.”

  “Then stop acting like a bitch,” he said with zero emotion. I should have smacked him, would have smacked him, except he was right. I was acting like a bitch. But again, that was how we did things.

  “Fuck me.”

  “No.”

  “Because I’m not her?”

  “No. Because I don’t want to fuck you anymore.”

  It felt like whatever had been holding my godforsaken heart in place had just let go and allowed it to fall into the pit of my stomach, like a thrill seeker taking the plunge over the Royal Gorge Bridge without a bungee cord to yank them back to safety. Only I wasn’t buying it.

  “Bullshit. I don’t believe you,” I said, and then I forced a kiss on him. I could taste the tobacco that he had just smoked seconds earlier and the champagne that he had drunk before everything had gotten so out of control. I wanted him to want me, not her. I wanted him to fuck me, not her. I wanted him to love me, not her.

  I … was delusional. And he … didn’t kiss me back.

  I pulled back to look at him, beyond confused because that wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “Get off me.” His voice was eerily calm, unruffled, like he’d given up and had no fight left in him.

  The car came to a stop and I kept looking at him. Then the door opened and Samuel was there with the umbrella again, getting soaked while he waited for us to make a move.

  “Are you going to get out or not?” Noah asked me.

  I finally got off his lap to step out, pushing past Samuel because I didn’t want the damn umbrella. I wanted to feel the rain against my skin, because at least then I’d be feeling something. I stalked toward the front door and barged inside the dark house with Noah following.

  I had one more card to play, a bona fide ace up my sleeve. And if it didn’t work, there was nothing left to do.

  “You might not want to fuck me,” I said, climbing the staircase in my ruined gown, “but there were at least a half dozen other men back at that party who did. In fact, one in particular springs to mind.”

  That was all it took.

  Noah’s hand shot forward in time with the clap of thunder that resonated through the night sky, and he grabbed me by the ankle, causing me to trip and lose my balance. He caught me before I could hit my head and laid me down on the stairs beneath him, hovering menacingly over my body. His face was hidden in shadow, the only light in the house coming from the lightning that spilled in through the massive windows.

  “You want to fuck?” His voice was cold and rough as he yanked my skirt up and around my waist. “I’ll fuck you.” It took half a second for his pants to be undone and his cock exposed, but I was too focused on the hard lines of his face to pay much attention. In one swift, unforgiving motion, he entered me.

  There was nothing gentle about what he did, nothing slow, nothing sensual. But it was everything I’d wanted because although there was no pleasure in it for me, he wasn’t ignoring me anymore.

  Noah pounded into me fast and furious, and I hung on for dear life, digging my nails into his back and taking anything he would give me because at least it was something. He buried his face against my shoulder and relentlessly pumped into me, not giving me the satisfaction of seeing his expression or the dignity of looking into my eyes. There was no way to know what he was thinking, but I knew whom I didn’t want to be on his mind.

  “Don’t think about her!” My voice cracked, but I held him to me. “Don’t you dare think about her while you’re inside me!”

  His reply was nothing more than an occasional grunt and heavy breathing. He fucked me hard and with savage anger. A bolt of lightning flashed outside the window, followed closely by a loud boom of thunder that rattled the glass. The brief flash of white light cast shadows of our entwined bodies across the walls, and I realized we were those shadows. Just as empty, merely creating the illusion of a happy couple who were passionately in love when nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

  That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted this to be real, a tangible thing I could touch, something that wouldn’t disappear when we were suddenly shrouded in darkness and out of the spotlight.

  Noah came, his whole body seizing up as he spilled his seed inside me with a strangled growl. I clung to him, not wanting to let him go because I knew I’d crossed the line and forced him to do something he hadn’t really wanted to do. All I felt in that moment was Noah’s heated body and his weight on top of me. It wasn’t the furious pulse of my blood, not the edges of the stairs digging into my back, and it most certainly was not the cold that had seeped its way into my heart and threatened to spring tears to my eyes.

  He was going to send me away. I was sure.

  When he was done, he broke free of my hold and then stood to put his clothes back in order. His movements were calculated and mechanical. I remained unmoving and numb, but I refused to take my eyes off him.

  “I can’t take back what I just did. I can’t take back any of it, for that matter. And it’s fucking killing me …” Noah’s voice trailed off until he sighed and looked at me. His face was twisted up in anguish, his hair wet and disheveled like his clothes, and I saw him clearly. He looked every bit as broken as I felt.

  He ran his hands over his face with a frustrated growl. “I know, Delaine. I know about your mother, and I know she’s the reason you did this. I didn’t want to fuck you, because it wasn’t right. I didn’t want to fuck you anymore, because … somewhere along the way, I did the unthinkable,” he said incredulously as he threw his hands up into the air. “Jesus, I fell in love with you. There. Are you happy? Now you know. And for the record, it was never about Julie. It was always about you.”

  He didn’t wait for me to respond. Truthfully, I don’t think I could have. It didn’t matter that he loved me, just like it didn’t matter that I loved him, too. We would never work. Maybe in another time, another life where we were equals, but that wasn’t now. In this life he would forever be Noah Crawford the successful millionaire, and I would forever be the whore he had bought for his sexual pleasure.

  He dropped his arms in exasperation, curled his shoulders in on himself, and walked up the stairs, cursing along the way. A rumble of thunder rolled across the sky like a solemn ovation for my enormous screw-up.

  What the hell had I done? And how was I supposed to fix it?

  15

  making love out of nothing at all

  Noah

  As I uttered the words that would forever change the dynamic between Delaine and me, I could hear my own voice breaking, the emotional turmoil on the inside seeping its way out. I tried to re
in it back in, but when I looked down at her, her gown still shoved up around her waist and her fragile body lying on the hard stairs—how could I have done that to her? I had vowed to never treat her that way again, but I guess my word didn’t mean anything, not even to myself.

  I ran my hands over my face with a frustrated growl. Not telling Delaine about everything that I knew was exactly what had forced her hand and led us to that moment. And I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I had to get it out. I had to purge the secret, because if I didn’t, I was going to cross that thin line between guilt and insanity, and things between us would only get worse.

  Fuck me, I’d done it. I’d told her everything.

  She just looked at me, stunned.

  And all I could do was sit and wait for the fallout, but not then, and not there. She would find me when she was ready, and I’d feel so much better about doing it in our room. At least within the relative safety of those four walls maybe she wouldn’t get the urge to push me down the fucking stairs.

  I dropped my arms in defeat and started the long trek up to the second floor. My legs felt heavy, my feet like cement blocks as I took one step at a time, willing myself to walk away. Everything inside me screamed to go the opposite direction, to sweep her up into my arms and run like a madman, carrying her away from everything to someplace where the outside world couldn’t interfere anymore.

  That was the dreamer in me. The realist, he knew we couldn’t hide from anything anymore.

  With every step I took down the corridor that led to our room, the distance to the door seemed to lengthen, but I finally made it. Leaden arms grasped the knob and gave it a turn, opening up to the place where we’d first consummated our relationship. Even I had to scoff at that. “Consummated”—the word sounded far too clean for what had actually happened there. More like I had damned it, doomed it to failure from the very fucking beginning.

  I shed my jacket, throwing it to the side like it was a dirty washcloth instead of the expensive tailor-made masterpiece that it was. I didn’t care. There was far more catastrophic shit going on in my life for me to worry about whether or not a jacket got a crease in it. Catastrophe number one: I owned a sex slave. Catastrophe number two: I’d fallen in love with said sex slave. Catastrophe number three: said sex slave had a dying mother whom I was keeping her away from. Catastrophe number four: I knew all of that and still fucked her like a goddamn animal on the stairs.