ARROGANT PLAYBOY (69 page)

BELLAMY

“You have tens of thousands of
dollars to your name now and a wardrobe easily worth six figures.” Dane’s words
come out of nowhere as I climb into his bed Monday night wearing nothing but
his favorite velvet lingerie and an untied satin robe in a shade of deep
scarlet. His hands drag across my stomach, but he refuses to look at me. “I
suppose it’s only a matter of time before you’re done here.”

Is this his way of pushing me
away?

“You make it sound like I’ve
been using you,” I say, climbing under the covers and slinking up next to him.
Last night, I woke up from a bad dream to find his arm wrapped around my side.
I stayed paralyzed not wanting to move or wake him just so I could enjoy it a
bit longer.

“Isn’t that what we were
doing?” he asks. “Using each other?”

“I’d like to think it was
deeper than that,” I say.

“You just said
was
…” He rolls to his back, slipping his
hands behind his head and staring at the ceiling.

“It wasn’t intentional,” I say.
“I don’t want us to be a ‘was’ just yet. Unless you do…”

“I’m not quite ready to be done
with you yet. If I’m being honest.”

“I knew you were testing me.”

“Always.”

“Your honesty is noted and
appreciated.” I want to lean across the wide bed and kiss every part of him
from his deliciously curved jaw to the bow of his upper lip to his perfectly
straight nose.

Instead, I refrain from ruining
this moment by acting like some cutesy girlfriend, because the next thing I
know, he’d be calling Mathilde to pack my things and call me a cab.

“I’m still waiting on that
notebook,” he says. “Your deepest, darkest fantasy. I want to bring it to life
for you. You’ve done that for me already, but I’d like to return the favor.”

I bite my tongue, unsure of how
to tell him this.

“I threw the notebook away.” My
hands fly over my face.

“You did
what
?” The low tone of his voice and the storm brewing in his eyes
suggests he’s angry enough to punish me, and that hasn’t happened in a good,
long while. He rolls to his side, facing me, and props himself up on his elbow.

I sit up in his bed, peering at
him between my fingers. The day after we returned from Nashville I tossed it
out after having spent all weekend asking myself what my ultimate fantasy might
be and finally getting an answer.

“Why would you do that?” His
dark brows meet in the middle.

“Because what I want…what the
deepest part of me wants…” I draw in a long breath. “It’s not something you’re
capable of giving me.”

“I’m capable of giving you
anything you want.”

“Not this.”

“I find that extremely hard to
believe.”

“Believe it.”

“Tell me what it is. As your
master
, I’m ordering you.” His
expression darkens, and his hand slides between my inner thighs until it
reaches my sex where he rubs me through my lace panties. “Tell me, Bellamy.”

Just thinking about telling him
makes me cringe because I know how he’ll react. It won’t be good. And I don’t
want him to look at me like some silly schoolgirl.

“Please don’t make me say
this.” I clasp my hands together and playfully beg though my face is winced and
blushing.

His eyes drag from mine toward
the pillow between us, his hand motionless between my thighs now. “You don’t
feel like you can open up to me?”

“Not with this.”

Lingering silence consumes the
space between us, and Dane’s expression falls somber.

“I was raised FLDS. I grew up
at the Zion Ranch about fifty miles north of Claxon, Utah.” He clears his
throat, pulling his hand from me, his eyes still glued to the pillow. “My
father had eight wives and fifty-six children. I was the twenty-first son.
Beckham was the twenty-second. We were born six months apart to two different
mothers.”

I’m still as a statue, clinging
to his every word.

“When I was sixteen, my father
came for Beckham and me and walked us out to one of the compound’s Suburban’s,
which was already filled with five other young men, like myself.” He swallows.
“We were each given a sack lunch and a twenty-dollar bill and dropped off in
the middle of the country. Most of us had never set foot outside the compound
border.”

“Dane.” My hand flies to my
mouth. I want to hold him, comfort him.

“Some of the
lost boys
headed straight for Vegas.
Drugs. Prostitution. They did whatever they had to do.” He shakes his head,
keeping the far-off look in his eyes. “My brother and I got a job bussing
tables and mopping floors at some rat’s nest diner we came across on our walk
into a nearby town.”

He smirks.

“The owner of the diner, Leo
Fickbaum, was a spirited old bastard. I suppose he took pity on us, so he put
us up in this old 1955 Airstream he had sitting in his backyard. That’s where
we lived for a couple years. Working at the diner, living in a camper.”

Dane’s layers upon layers are
momentarily translucent, and my aching heart is replaced with nothing but
admiration.

“Uncle Leo, as we came to call
him, came into some money after a few years from some inheritance,” Dane
continues. “He was a humble man. Didn’t want much. Didn’t need much. He was an
old bachelor who never settled or had kids. Leo decided to give the money to
Beck and I, but only if we promised to invest it.”

I nod my head side to side.
“Makes sense.”

“Beck had all these grand
ideas,” he says. “But I suggested that we invest it in ourselves first. We got
our G.E.D.s and attended a local community college, studying alternative and
renewable energy. Within three years, we bought out a fledgling solar panel
company based out of Salt Lake City, expanded it, and renamed it Townsend
Energy Holdings.”

“And now here you are.” A smile
resides in my tone. I’m sure there’s more to his story, but he’s never opened
up to me like this before, so I won’t dare go prying just yet.

“I don’t enjoy discussing my
past,” he says. “It’s difficult at times, and I tend to give the condensed
version.”

“Understandable.”

“But now that I’ve opened up to
you,” he says. “Common courtesy would suggest you should return the favor.”

Wow.
All that just so he could get me to tell him my deep, dark secret.

“It’s not dark,” I say. I’m not
sure how I can listen to him pour his heart out about his younger years and
then deliver some silly fantasy of mine. It’s certainly not an equal exchange.

“Okay.” His fingers slip
between my thighs again, massaging me with quick, steady circles as he moves
closer to me. “Tell.”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“I promise I will
not
laugh.”

His hands slide around my hips,
grabbing a handful of flesh and rolling me over top of him where the girth of
his hardness presses through his satin pajama bottoms. He rocks my hips over
his, teasing me the way he does so well.

“What is it, Bellamy? What is
the one thing you desire more than anything in the world?”

My hips grind against him, and
I gather my hair at the nape of my neck, dragging it over my shoulder as our
eyes lock.

“Sex with love.”

He stops, his hands locked on
my outer thighs, and his jaw firming.

“See, I knew this would happen.
I knew you’d look at me like that.” My face burns. I try to climb off of him,
but he refuses to release me. “It’s not something you can give me. I know that.
I tried to tell you–”

“Look at me.”

I stop squirming and flick my
gaze his way, bracing myself for some speech about how he’s not capable of love
and how this was never supposed to be an emotional arrangement.

And he would be correct.

It wasn’t supposed to be an
emotional arrangement.

“I told you it’s not something
you could give me,” I say. “Because that’s not something you can just do for
someone. It has to happen naturally. And you may have given me everything I
could possibly ever dream of, but that’s the one thing you can’t.”

We’re locked in a gaze, and I
wish he’d say something.

“I’m okay with that,” I lie,
wishing this conversation had never happened.

“Are you? Or are you just
saying that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” he sits up, keeping me
in his lap. “It does matter.”

I wait, straddling him and
feeling his bulge between my legs. He should be tying me up now, flipping me
over, and plunging inside me until we collapse. That’s what we do. That’s what
he likes.

Dane says nothing as his
fingers drag beneath the waistband of my panties as he sits up and presses his
mouth onto mine. My eyes close, and I focus on the softness of his lips and the
slow, gentle exchange. He slides my robe off my shoulders and unfastens my bra,
taking his time. With his hands sliding down my bare back, he grabs my hips and
slides me underneath him.

Our lips fuse even still. Soft,
tender kisses I haven’t got the courage to question.

He reaches to his nightstand
and clicks off the lamp before pulling the drawer. I assume he’s reaching for a
toy or something, but instead, I heard the rustling of a foil packet in the
dark. He pulls his engorged cock out in one fluid movement then sheaths himself
before returning to cover me.

And that’s what he’s doing.

He’s covering me.

The cocoon between his arms
feels safe, protective, and warm. My legs spread, widening for him as he
readies himself at my entrance. He captures my bottom lip in his as he plunges
inside me, releasing a soft groan that reverberates through his chest and onto
mine. My hands slide up his back.

This is the first time I’ve
ever actually touched
him
during sex.
My hands are free, and he’s not scolding me. His skin is soft and smooth, and
his muscles ripple beneath my palms as his entire body moves in rhythm with
mine. Dane’s hands curl into fists, gripping the sheets behind my head as he
pushes himself deeper inside me.

I gasp, digging my fingers into
his back.

His lips leave my swollen mouth
and travel to my neck, and I brace myself for bites that never come. Instead,
he peppers soft kisses over every square inch until I’m covered in goose bumps.
When he returns to my open, waiting mouth, his hands slide down my arms until
he finds my fingers and interlaces his with mine, lifting them above my head.

I’m still safe in this cocoon,
but he has my hands, pinning them as he kisses and makes love to me.

That’s what he’s doing.

He’s making love to me.

This feels like love-sex.

I could stay here forever like this,
soaking in the heat of his body as it weighs me down. I’m not even concerned
with coming right now. My body craves his closeness, that elusive connection
with Dane that always felt as if it were within arm’s reach seconds before he’d
yank it away.

For an entire hour, Dane makes
love to me, and for an entire hour, nothing else matters.

We finish just as emotionally
spent as we are physically, and he lingers inside me for a moment longer than
usual before rolling off. He heads to the bathroom, and I turn over, covering
with sheets and sinking into a pile of pillows as my body shakily recovers.

Dane returns a few minutes
later and climbs under the blankets. I fully expect him to keep to the opposite
side and be out like a light within seconds, but the warmth of his hand on my
stomach sends me reeling. He pulls me into him, into his arms.

He doesn’t say a word.

I stir the next morning with my
face flush against his chest, waking to the sound of his beating heart against
my ear.

DANE

Bronson drives us to work
Tuesday morning. I typically use this time to reflect, maybe answer a few
emails, gather my thoughts, or admire the country landscape before it morphs
into a sea of buildings.

But today I’m taking in a
different view.

Bellamy glides her hand along
her skirt, picking off a stray piece of fuzz. Her long legs are crossed, and
she’s staring straight ahead. We haven’t spoken much this morning besides a few
pleasantries at breakfast while I read the news on my iPad, and she chatted with
her sister about which courses she would be taking come fall.

“I loved a woman once.”

Bellamy’s attention snaps in my
direction.

“Only once.”

She angles herself toward me.

“She was my sub,” I say,
squinting out the dark window at the cars we pass. “But then she became much
more than that.”

Her hands fidget in her lap.

“The woman destroyed me. I
played with fire, and I got burned. I promised myself I’d never do that again.”
My hand slides into my pocket, covering the red Cartier box I tucked away that morning.

“If this is about last
night…you don’t have to say anything…I know you just did that because–”

“Please. Let me continue.”

She buttons her full lips and
nods.

“I’m a powerful man, and love
is a powerful emotion. I don’t know that I’m quite ready yet to put myself out
there or to throw around a word that makes people do crazy stupid things.” I
slide the box out and set it across my lap. “The only thing I do know, is you
do something to me, Bellamy. Even when I’m dominating you on the outside, I’m submitting
to you on the inside. While I’m not quite sure what to make of that, I do know
one thing.”

I place the box in her lap.

“I’m not ready to let you go
yet. I’m not done with you yet.”

Bellamy cracks the box open and
pulls out the golden Cartier bangle. I lift the matching golden screwdriver.

“This bracelet,” I say.
“Symbolizes commitment. It sanctifies our inseparability.”

“Is it an item of ownership?”
She examines the sparkling, bezel-set diamonds.

“This is different.” I twist
the screwdriver in my fingers, the only device that can unlock that bracelet
from her wrist as soon as it’s fastened. “This is separate from
that
.”

“Fine,” she says. “I’m not done
with you yet either.”

She slips the bangle over her
wrist and holds it out for me to secure. I twist the flat screw and tighten it,
leaning over to steal a kiss the second I’m done.

We soar down the interstate in
the back of my limo, and I take her hand in mine, eyeing the gold bracelet as
the diamonds glint in the early morning light.

“I’ve never been in love
before,” she says, breaking our peaceful silence. “And I’m not saying that I
love you, Dane. But I think I very easily could fall in love with you...that
is, if you let me.”

I squeeze her hand.

“So all I’m asking,” she
continues, “is that you’re gentle with me.”

I press the top of her hand
against my lips, the corners of my mouth lifting. “You have my word.”