I gasped as Junior’s face pressed against my lower back. His hands gripped my thighs, fingers digging in. I’d told him to grovel, looking for an easy way out of this situation, expecting him to bolt, but instead, he’d fallen to the ground behind me.
I was half tempted to turn around just to see such a thing—I doubted Junior had ever supplicated himself for someone like this before—but it would put his face far too close to my pussy for my current state of mind. No, it was better to stay flattened against the cement wall, the chilly surface cooling my feverish skin, anchoring my last shred of sanity. And it had to be my last shred after the way I’d led him on a merry (more like horny) little chase to this back stairway.
What the hell was I thinking tonight? I was lucky my choices had ended with him on his knees behind me and not me cut up into pieces in a dumpster out back. Okay, maybe my more hysterical brain cells had formed that last thought, but my decision-making thus far had been questionable at best. Still, all wasn’t lost. There was time to turn this bus around and start making smart choices, and that was exactly what I planned to do as soon as I gathered the willpower. And by gathered the willpower, I meant muzzled my lust. I was so turned on right now that if I turned to leave, I’d probably end up humping his face instead.
It would be so easy; he was right there behind me.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, sounding like he actually meant it. “I’m so fucking sorry, Lauren, and I’ll do anything to make it up to you. Please, let me make it up to you.”
Oh, god. Why was the sound of a man debasing himself so fucking hot? It didn’t help that his voice had gone low and gravelly, his accent thickening, tone deliciously rough.
He rubbed his face against my dress and dragged his fingers down my thighs. My knees trembled. I was too turned on for this, didn’t trust myself to be the strong, independent woman I knew I was. There was a gorgeous man on the ground behind me, literally begging to make me feel good, and I could feel the feminism leaving my body as the urge to give in to him rose.
I must have been losing it. He had just confessed to ruining Kelly’s life and breaking nearly every bone in our principal’s body, and yet I was a split second away from rubbing my ass into him and telling him he could make it up to me by getting me off right here on this landing, where anyone could find us.
That thought sent my heart into a full gallop. I did like it when people watched . . .
“Please,” Junior repeated, his hands shifting direction, moving higher. “Please, Lo. I’ll do anything.”
His voice was raw, rough, like he might break if I told him no. I hadn’t felt this powerful in years, like I held his fate in my hands and all it would take was one word to either ruin or redeem him.
My breathing hitched as his hands slid beneath the hem of my dress, stroking up, up, all the way to my hips.
“Fuck,” he ground out. “Are you bare beneath this dress right now?”
“Yes,” I whispered into the concrete.
His forehead hit my low back, and he let out a pained sound. “That whole time you were sitting beside me with only this flimsy fabric covering you?”
I didn’t respond. The answer was obvious.
“Let me touch you, Lo,” he said, fingers sliding back down my waist. “Please let me touch you. I promise I’ll make you feel good.”
It felt like time slowed as I went to war with myself. This man had nearly ruined my life, had probably stalked me, definitely hurt people on my behalf, and done god knew what else to others. It would feel so good to say no. To ruin him like he had ruined me. But I was too soft-hearted for it, too fair. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Junior right now, not after the way he’d groveled. That couldn’t have been easy for a man like him, with so much pride and ego. And yet he’d done it.
For me.
Because I’d asked him to.
Praying I wasn’t about to make a huge mistake, I spread my legs. “Touch me.”
He groaned and sent both hands straight to my pussy. One set of fingers landed on my clit while two more from the other slipped just inside my entrance, and oh, fuck, who had taught him how to do this? Gone were the searching, experimental touches I remembered from my youth. Junior was a man now, with a man’s desires and a man’s knowledge, and I didn’t know if he was just that good at what he was doing or if the taboo nature of this encounter was what was pushing me toward the edge so quickly.
He shifted the angle of his hand, and a burst of heady pleasure rushed through my core. Oh, god. Oh, fuck. I was already clenching around him. Junior Trocci had his fingers knuckle-deep inside me, and I was about three seconds away from coming all over them.
My thighs trembled. I squeezed my eyes closed as a shudder wracked my body. The fingers stimulating my clit moved faster, the ones inside me pumped deeper, and before I knew what was happening, I was gasping, shaking, coming with such intensity that the noises I made were borderline feral.
Oh, god, oh, god¸ it felt good. Better than anything in recent memory, and I’d come a lot in that time. I almost felt betrayed by my own body, that Junior was the one to trigger such a strong reaction. It was unexpected, overwhelming, and it didn’t help that I’d never come so fast in my goddamn life.
My knees turned to liquid beneath me.
Junior guided me down into his lap with one hand, the fingers of his other one still buried in my pussy. “I want to feel every last quiver,” he said, doing something inside me that triggered a small aftershock of bliss.
I squirmed on him, grinding against his palm to drag the pleasure out. Holy shit.
“I still don’t forgive you,” I said, sounding far more breathy than I intended.
His lips dropped to my shoulder, and the bastard had the indecency to chuckle. “Then I guess I’ll have to keep apologizing.” The fingers inside me hooked forward, and his thumb went to my clit. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. His other hand lifted to my breasts, spread wide so he could rub both nipples simultaneously. “I’m sorry.”
I managed to hold still for all of two seconds before I arched into him, and . . . uh-oh. Why was I already spinning out again? Usually I needed a breather before I came a second time, but if Junior kept this up, I was going to—
The stairwell door flew open with a bang! I had just enough time to catch sight of two figures before Junior spun us away, pulling me close and blocking me from sight with his much larger body.
“Oh, uh . . . sorry?”
I recognized Ryan’s voice immediately.
“Guess she didn’t need rescuing after all,” Taylor chimed in, sounding smug.
“You good, Lauren?” Ryan asked.
“I’m good,” I told them.
“What about you, man-I’m-assuming–is-Junior?” Taylor asked. “You don’t need rescuing, do you?”
“I’m good,” he bit out.
“See?” Taylor said. “They’re fine. Just having a good ole consensual fingerbang.”
Oh, for the love of god.
Junior’s breath warmed my neck. “Want me to get rid of them?”
“They’re my roommates,” I said.
“That’s not a no.”
I made a low, contemplative sound. “Maybe just Taylor.”
“Hey!” she said, her outrage echoing through the stairwell.
Junior huffed a breath. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was close.
“Sylvia called a meeting,” Ryan said. “We came to find you.”
“Be there in a few,” I told them.
“Okay,” they said. “But don’t take too long. She looked stressed out.”
“Yeah,” Taylor chimed in. “About as stressed as you looked before you landed on stranger danger’s fingers.”
“Ryan,” I groaned.
“I got her,” they said.
The sound of a brief scuffle broke out.
“Ouch.”
“Fuck.”
“Goddamn it.”
“I swear to Christ, Taylor.”
The groaning of hinges announced the door opening.
“I told you she could take care of herself,” Taylor said, her voice retreating.
“It’s not her I was worried about,” Ryan argued before the door clicked shut behind them, stifling Taylor’s rebuttal.
My shoulders shook as I laughed. Leave it to them to both ruin a moment and somehow make it even better.
“Your roommates, huh?” Junior said as we untangled ourselves from each other and stood.
“Yup,” I said. “Best friends and protectors a girl could ask for.”
I turned to him to say more, warn him not to fuck with me or he’d have them to answer to, but his mask was pushed on top of his head, giving me an unobstructed view of his face. The words died on my tongue. Damn him for being so good-looking. It softened me to him even as I tried to resist, made me think of serial killers like Bundy and the Ken Doll Killer, men who’d gotten away with their crimes for so long because “No one that good-looking could do such terrible things.” Not that Junior was as bad as them. Or at least I hoped he wasn’t.
His eyes snared mine as he lifted the fingers that had just been inside me and slipped them into his mouth. I shivered at the look of hunger that swept over his face as he licked them clean. He’d openly confessed to framing a young woman and attacking a man. I should be pissed, terrified, but all I could think about was getting those fingers back inside my body as soon as possible.
“Here,” he said, undoing his shirt. “The front of your dress got dirty from the wall.”
I glanced down to see dark streaks smeared across the fabric over my breasts. “Tonight won’t be the first time I walk out of Velvet a little worse for wear.”
Junior’s expression darkened. “I want their names and addresses.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
His face remained stone-cold, and his stupid dry sense of humor made it impossible to tell if he was joking or truly the psycho I’d accused him of being.
I opened my mouth to tell him to relax, but of course that’s when he decided to shrug out of his shirt. Instead of a snarky remark, my mouth immediately turned drier than the Atacama, and all that came out of it was a dehydrated wheeze. Beneath the button-down, Junior wore a muscle top, and goddamn, he looked good in it. The white fabric made the dark tattoos sleeving his arms pop, and the way it was pulled taut across his broad chest had me wondering how much ink was hid—
“Are you bleeding?” I asked, staring at the red spot staining his side.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
I highly doubted that, but I held my response in check because I didn’t want to seem like I cared by pressing the issue, nor did I really want to know what had happened to him, because I worried it might implicate me after the fact in one of his crimes.
He lifted a hand, offering his shirt to me. Part of me wanted to say no, to put some much-needed space back between us. Another part of me wanted to wrap myself up in his scent and live out my high school fantasies of Junior publicly claiming me with clothing like a quarterback giving out his letterman jacket. Yet another, larger part of me was fricking freezing, so I took the damn shirt and tried to tell myself I was just being practical.
“Thank you,” I said, sliding my arms into the sleeves.
He settled it around my shoulders, and yup, this was a mistake. Because it was warm from his body heat and smelled divine, like his sinful cologne and a hint of masculine musk I’d always found oddly alluring.
I lifted the collar to my nose and took a deep breath. “Is that brimstone I detect?”
Instead of looking amused or firing something back at me, Junior hooked a finger beneath my chin and tilted my face up. Our gazes caught and held while a long, silent moment passed between us. I could see the thoughts swirling behind his eyes, but when he spoke, it was only to say, “Enjoy the rest of your night, Lo.”
“What do you mean, he’s raising the rent again?” Taylor asked.
She, Ryan, and I stood together amongst six other people in Sylvia’s third-floor office. Antique sconces lit the room, casting the space in warm light. A plush rug was spread beneath our feet, and while the velvet couches and chairs dotting it were soft and inviting, none of us were sitting.
“Just what I said,” Sylvia replied, the black fabric of her bodycon dress pulling tight as she paced on the other side of her desk. “The bastard knows we have nowhere else to go and is trying to milk us for all we’re worth.”
Behind her, the curtains were tied open to reveal the lights of the city. Their glow backlit her, casting her Brown skin in neon blues and fluorescent whites. I knew she was truly stressed, because she lifted a hand and rubbed it over her buzzed hair, a habit she’d picked up when she first cut her curls off and was still trying to break.
“How much does he want this time?” someone else asked.
Sylvia stopped pacing and turned to face us, bracing her knuckles on the desk. “He wants fifty dollars per square foot per year.”
I did some quick math in my head.
“We can’t afford that,” Ryan said. “Can we?”
Sylvia shook her head.
“I can cover us the first month at least,” I said.
“I’ll cover the next,” Taylor added.
“No,” Sylvia said. “I appreciate the offer, but if we capitulate too easily, he’ll try to milk us for even more. I think it’s smarter to make it look like we’re scrambling. Besides, if we end up staying, we need to find a way to make the rent sustainable in the long-term.”
We spent the next fifteen minutes brainstorming ways to come up with the extra cash, not just to cover rent for the next few months, but so we’d have some savings on hand if we were able to move and needed to make serious renovations. Expanding ownership was mentioned, as well as creating a Kickstarter, limiting how many floors we rented, and threatening our landlord with death and dismemberment (Taylor’s suggestion, though I was tempted to second it).
The trouble was, we were limited in our options. This city still had a handful of vice laws on the books, meant to govern the moral behavior of its citizens. Because of them, we were only allowed to operate by being a private, members-only club. We could never own property, and were instead forced to rent out buildings like the one currently housing Velvet. That way, we weren’t facilitating sex and therefore couldn’t be accused of prostitution; we were only facilitating the space for sex to maybe or maybe not take place in. We couldn’t even sell liquor. Instead, we had bartenders who were available to mix and pour whatever drinks our patrons brought in themselves.
Our asshole landlord, a shady, aging man named Patrick McKinney, knew all this and used it against us. This was the third rent spike we’d faced in less than a year, and it was so steep that I worried Sylvia was right, and it would only get worse. Fifty dollars per square foot was an astronomical price. It was as much as what the big buildings charged downtown, and way too costly for a space this size, especially given its location.
Was this McKinney’s way of forcing us out? It didn’t make sense from a business perspective. We were the only people willing to pay the current rent on this place, let alone what he was threatening to raise it to. This wasn’t exactly a nice part of town, and the only reason the interior looked as good as it did was because of our renovations. Once we were gone, the building would likely sit empty for god knew how long before McKinney finally came to his senses and dropped the rent back to a reasonable price.
Or was he just such a greedy bastard that he didn’t realize he’d finally pushed us far enough that we were ready to look elsewhere? I’d only met him once, but that had been enough to get a good read on the man: slimy, misogynistic, bigoted, and stingy. Those types of people didn’t tend to look at the big picture. They just took and took until there was nothing left or the people you preyed upon finally had enough and snapped (I really should have seconded Taylor’s suggestion).
We ended the meeting with a game plan going forward, each of us taking on our own tasks. Ryan, Taylor, and I had volunteered to scope out other venues, research current rental standards for large spaces, and see if there were other, more progressive landlords in the city willing to take a look at our books and realize there was cash to be made from play clubs like ours.
I’d stop at nothing until I found a new home for Velvet. I loved this place with my whole heart, and not just because I had a stake in it. Velvet was the only play club in the city, a place for people to safely explore their kinks, own their sexuality, and discover their true selves. And that meant almost as much to me as my advocacy work.
I’d do anything to save it, and no one—not even gross old Patrick McKinney—was going to take it away from us.
