“I can’t wait to have you inside of me,” I lie, flicking his earlobe with the tip of my tongue. “You’re not like the others. They don’t make me come as hard as you make me come. You’re special to me, baby.”
Lie.
Lie.
Lie.
Feed the ego. Feed the beast.
If these elite men ever compared notes about their hour with me, they’d realize I say the same thing to each and every one of them. Grand Haven’s first-class know they’re sleeping with the same escort, but beyond dropping a referral, they don’t talk about it openly. Doing so would open the floor for Benny to admit he likes my underwear in his mouth, and his fetish is tame compared to some of the others.
There’re a few who are plain, sugar-free vanilla, in need of companionship and human connection their busy schedules don’t allow. But that might be harder to admit than the ones who are into cock worshiping and ass play. Like Pier Muiris, the largest commercial building owner in the state, likes me to work his erection like a stick shift in a sports car before I drive him into my body. And Maynard Kemp, a judge on the California Supreme Court, who only gets off if the handle to his gavel is in his ass as I refer to him as Your Honor.
For a girl who was raised to believe sex outside a marriage is bad, nothing these men do shocks me anymore. We’re consenting adults, and I’m paid a lot of money to pay tribute to the attorney general’s dick.
“Are you going to make me wait?” He shouldn’t because we’re already twenty minutes into our appointment time.
Lifting me up by my hips, Benny lowers me over his length until he fills me all the way up. I hold on to his shoulders and drop my head back, letting out a slow and sensual hum, thankful for the goose bumps the cool air spreads up my arms. He lets me start the pace, slow and torturous, but I squeeze my thighs around his legs and dig my fingers into his skin, because in no time at all, Benny starts bucking like a raging bull with a flank strap on.
The chair can’t handle this type of punishment. I made it very clear the last time a chair broke, that if it happened again, I wasn’t coming back.
Cros carries me to his desk, where he continues to plow into me like a washing machine with a missing leg. My body does all the right things, and I make the faces and sounds one expects from their partner. But mentally, I’m kicking myself for not bringing an extra pair of underwear.
There’s not a chance in hell I’m putting the ones in Benny’s mouth back on.
Forty-five minutes later, Benny escorts me out of his office with a bruised pelvis and nothing underneath my skirt. He carries an empty file, throwing out words likeexhibit A,grounds for dismissal, andthe parties involvedas if our relationship is strictly professional. His assistant doesn’t give us more than a fleeting look, and I expect Cros to leave me at the elevator.
“I’ll see you in six weeks,” I say as a way of goodbye. The sooner he goes away, the sooner I can give up the act and hurry home to ice my vagina.
“Actually,” Benny says, motioning for me to enter the elevator first. “I’m meeting someone in the lobby.”
“Awesome.” My smile is as fake as his veneers.
Benny stands behind me and whispers dirty nonsense like I might want another ride on the mechanical bull. My patience is as short as the elevator ride, and I’m ready to remind him who the hell he’s talking to when the doors open.
And there’s no air.
There’s only Wilder.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” His smile is as real as the pounding in my heart.
A week and a half has passed since I saw him last, but it feels like forever standing before him now. Wilder’s allure crowds the elevator door, towering in a sharp, creased navy suit, prim and unpretentious. There’s no wondering why Benny Cros is only Grand Haven’s third favorite bachelor when Wilder Ridge is this dapper. It’s a side of him reserved for the elitists he does business with, but there’s a dangerous edge in the curve of his smirk.
That’s the side willing to kill for me.
“What are you doing here?” I step past him out of the elevator and away from other patrons, but he moves like I move. If Wilder doesn’t want space between us, then there won’t be space between us. But what he doesn’t know will hurt him this time.
“I’m meeting someone—”
“Just the man I wanted to see.” Benny tucks the empty file folder under his arm and juts his hand out. The handshake is unreciprocated, and to save face, he hides behind me and squeezes my shoulders. “Wilder, you know Megan, don’t you?”
The first time I heard my dad call a woman a whore was the last day we were allowed to have a television in the house. I was nine or ten years old, homeschooled while my brothers received a public education, and forbidden to join the kids who rode bicycles up and down the street until the streetlights turned on.
My only companions were the people on TV.
For an hour a day, after my schoolwork was done and before my brothers got off the bus, my mom let me watch PBS. She thought I was learning the difference between right and wrong from an oversized yellow bird that talked. But once she left me alone, using the uninterrupted time to start dinner, I changed the channel and discovered a whole new world outside my small life.
I absorbed it all, soon pretending I was in the studio audience cheering,Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.Other times, I was a police officer responding to a real-life emergency call, or getting real with seven strangers who were picked to live in a house.
