Lies That Sinners Tell (The Klutch Duet 1)

The woman blinked at me a couple of times, as if she wasn’t expecting a compliment from someone she was ready to make her nemesis. “Yes, thank you, it is.”

“Stella’s a stylist,” Jay offered.

I looked up at him, loving the way my name came out of his mouth. Loving the way the words sounded, deep, masculine, like an auditory version of melted chocolate. He wasn’t saying it in a way that was meant to demean me in a room full of lawyers, doctors, famous people. He spoke like my job mattered.

“She’s very good at her job,” he continued. His hand moved behind me, trailing the lightest line from the nape of my neck down my back to where my dress began.

I had to struggle to keep my composure under the touch. So intimate. So knowing. Then there was the fact I wasn’t wearing any panties.

The woman flickered her gaze between the two of us. “I bet she is,” she murmured. Something else moved in her eyes as she looked to Jay. Sadness. Heartbreak.

She loved him.

She’d been with him.

And she’d never have him again.

I’d be her one day.

“I must go,” she continued. “It was nice to meet you, Stella.” She didn’t look at Jay before turning to leave.

“I never got your name,” I called out, suddenly felling a kinship with this woman.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly over her shoulder before she walked away.

I watched her move through the crowd in her designer dress, with many eyes trailing, observing her beauty. Her palpable sadness.

I didn’t get long to contemplate her or my future because someone else approached us. An overweight man in an expensive suit, a bad haircut and a booming voice.

Jay introduced me, but the man only bothered with an obligatory greeting and a glance to my breasts before returning his focus to Jay, talking about the markets and business deals, pretending I didn’t exist.

“That lipstick is going to look perfect marking my dick later,” Jay murmured in my ear before moving back and resuming his conversation with what’s his name standing beside him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The dinner lasted far too long. The food was exceptionally ordinary for costing ten thousand dollars a plate. Jay didn’t tell me that, of course. The overweight man in the expensive suit boomed about it at some point, since he was unfortunately seated at our table.

Jay had spent twenty thousand dollars on what equated to our first date. He had a lot of money, I’d known that. And as the night wore on, it became more and more obvious that he didn’t care about the cause, didn’t like anyone there and had attended purely because it was part of some kind of plan to do with me. Narcissistic, but it was true. He was setting the foundation for our arrangement. Making sure I knew that he called the shots.

It was infuriating, but I loved every second of it too. Sitting there, sitting beside Jay without underwear on, a pulsating need taking over my entire body.

By the time we’d got into the car, I resembled a sex starved animal more than a human woman. I really, really hoped that my desperation did not show on the surface. The problem was, every time Jay looked at me, I knew he wasn’t seeing the surface. It seemed like he could see my insides. The very core of me.

He’d barely spoken to me the entire night, which was fine with me since I was doing my best to pick up shreds of information about Jay while he spoke with various people. No one seemed overly familiar with the man, but everyone seemed to know him. Fear him. Beyond that fear was something else too. A desperation for his respect. His attention.

I was not the only one.

But I was the only one getting in the car and going home with him for an unknown amount of BDSM. For tonight, at least.

Although he hadn’t spoken to me since the lipstick comment, he’d been touching me all night. Not consistently. Not PDA. Small, torturous, barely there touches.

I was a sex starved maniac when we got into the car. And I’d barely eaten a bite because I’d been so nervous.

“Do you go to those kinds of things a lot?” I asked, trying to distract myself from the fear, trepidation and excitement swirling in my stomach.

“Do you mean will I require you to attend such functions regularly?” he responded. As always, there was no emotion on his face, but despite that, there was a visceral heat radiating between us.

I bit my lip, suppressing a moan. “No, I mean, do you go to them a lot? Is that a part of your ... job?”

Something moved in his eyes. “I thought I was clear about questions.”

Of course. No questions. No learning anything about this man that he did not deign to share himself.