“Am I now?” I tease playfully. He makes me feel so beautiful and sexy, which I never would’ve thought of myself as before. But with him it’s like I’m the most perfect thing ever.
“Yes, your neck.” He places a soft kiss there.
“Your ears.” He grabs onto my earlobe with his teeth, giving it a little pull.
“Your nose,” he adds, kissing the tip of it.
“Your eyes.” I close them as he places a kiss on each eyelid.
“Your sassy mouth.” He places a soft kiss there too.
“I could do this all day,” I giggle in response.
I hear the sound of a cell phone. “You better get that,” I say, placing another kiss on his mouth.
“Fuck ’em,” he mutters before kissing me again.
“It’s probably Cupid. I kinda gave him the slip.” I try to say it in an innocent voice, like I didn’t really mean to escape.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the phone. “I got her,” he says when he answers.
After a second, he speaks again. “No. Hang on. Kitten, would you like something to eat?”
It wasn’t long ago he fed me breakfast, but the idea of him feeding me again has me ordering lunch.
“Cream barley? Maybe a bottle of champagne?”
He repeats the order to Cupid, and then drops his phone down on the desk with a clink.
“You’ll crack it,” I warn, snatching it up to see if he did. When I touch the screen, my face shows up as the screensaver. It looks like a picture of me from last night. I’m wearing the collar, my hair is spread out against the red sheets, his thumb is to my lips, as if he’s feeling the softness of them.
“You put a picture of me on your phone?”
“Never far from me.”
He picks me up and carries me over to the sofa, sitting me in his lap.
“How come when I worked here you treated me like I was dumb?” I find myself asking him.
“You thought I thought you were dumb?” he asks, sounding appalled at my question.
“You gave me the stupidest stuff to do and hovered over me! What was I supposed to think?”
“That if I gave you bigger projects you’d be away from me more—out in the casino, out of my reach. I wanted you close to me. I spent more time coming up with things for you to do around here,” he motions around in a circle, indicating his office, “than I did actual work.”
My bitterness at that falls away instantly. Seems a lot of things with him happen that way, and I can’t bring myself to question it. I question everything in my life and look at it from every angle. I’m just going to enjoy this.
“Well, why don’t you bring me as close as possible right now?” I move from sitting sideways on his lap to straddling him. I don’t want him to protest, so I take his mouth in a forceful kiss, the way he kisses me. Suddenly, a knock sounds at the door.
“Kitten. Do you remember about me eating you to four? Because you’re knocking on that door.”
I crawl off his lap and plop down on the couch, pretending to pout, but he just laughs as he goes to the door. He opens it a crack and takes a tray from someone, and then closes it again.
Setting the tray on the table in front of the couch, he pops the champagne, fills a glass and hands it to me. I take a drink, and then place it back down on the table. He removes the lid from the steaming dish and sits back down on the couch next to me.
“Straddle me again.”
I don’t hesitate. I crawl onto his lap. He slowly feeds my bite after bite, stopping to kiss me throughout, until the dish is empty. Everything has seemed so perfect that I just have to ask something that’s been playing on my mind. After all, he did say I could ask him anything.
“Did you have other submissives?” I know he said he’s never collared anyone, but jealousy is a nasty bitch. I’d grabbed on so quickly to how he is different with me. I want to keep a hold of it.
He hesitates for a second, making my heart drop. My face must show it, because he finally answers me. “Never. Not one.”
“You don’t have to say that to make me feel better,” I whisper, looking up at him through my lashes, not wanting to make eye contact.
He grabs my face to make me look at him. “I hesitated because I wasn’t sure how I should answer. Yes, I’ve played before, but it’s been years, and never here. Also, never more than once with the same person. I didn’t want to tell you because, well, I don’t want to hear about any partners you’ve had before me. That thought makes me want to dig a few more of those holes out in the desert. I didn’t want you to feel that; there’s no reason for you to. There hasn’t been anyone since I laid eyes on you, and there wasn’t for a long time before that.”
Shit. I feel myself tumbling over the edge of this man, and I’m just going to let myself go. I want to reassure him too. “There is no one but you,” I tell him, and he gives me one of his rare smiles. I don’t think he gets that he’s my first everything, unless you count one terrible kiss when I was seventeen. Which I don’t.
“What do you want to do, kitten? You can lie here on the sofa while I work, or I can take you up to the room. I did install an eBook app on your phone if you want to read.”
“Stay here.”
Lifting me off his lap, he sits me down on the sofa. He walks over to his desk, grabs my phone and brings it back to me.
“Be good, kitten.” He goes back to work while I drink my champagne and play on my phone, syncing it up and looking at the books that I had pre-ordered and that have come in. When he isn’t paying attention, I snap a pic of him and make it my screensaver. He asks me occasional questions about work, but the next thing I know, I’m being lifted into his arms.