he Alpha Men's Secret Club 2: Desire Games (7 page)

12

“Kate!”

She swiveled. She was walking to
the cafeteria to meet Michaela for lunch. When she saw who it was, she walked
faster.

But he eventually caught up, as
she knew he would.

“Kate.” Carlo’s voice was urgent.
He grabbed her arm. “Please . . . talk to me.”

“What’s there to talk about,
Carlo?”

She stopped anyway. She felt
guilty about the whole thing. She felt like she owed Carlo for her shameless
behavior – for flaunting herself in front of him like that. For having
power over him.

“Please,” he said, his eyes
pleading, “let’s talk.”

*

She nursed her coffee, feeling
awkward.

“You’ve seen what he does to
people,” Carlo said. They were at Starbucks, away from the prying eyes of
campus. “He’s cruel, Kate.”

Only to you.

She shook her head. “Not really,
Carlo.”

“You don’t think he’s playing a
game?” Carlo’s eyes flashed fire.

“You’re a waiter. He was a customer.
You were doing your job, serving him.” She didn’t dare to use the word ‘us’.

“He could have asked for another
waiter.”

“You could have declined to serve
us.” She raised her eyes. “But you wanted to stay, didn’t you? You wanted to
see what he would do.”

Carlo swallowed.

“Yes, I’ll admit it,” he said. “I
wanted to stay to see how far his sick mind would go.”

“You call him sick . . . and yet
you fawn over him after class each time.”

“I wasn’t fawning. I’m a partial
scholarship student. I am genuinely interested in what I’m studying. I do that
in all classes.”

“Why do you like me, Carlo? Why
do you persist on doing – ” She waved her hand “ – this? Do you
want me that badly? I asked you this before. Do you want me only because he
wants me?”

Carlo hesitated. She stared at
him – at his handsome olive-skinned complexion. At the color rising in
his cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he confessed.
“Maybe it started out that way. But not anymore. I like you, Kate. I think
you’re beautiful.”

“Because you have seen all of me,
and I’ve seen all of you? A shared experience of nudism?” She should be
flattered, but she just felt sad.

“No.” He placed his hand over
hers. She did not move her hand away. “Because I’ve gotten to know you, and you
are good and powerful and strong on your own. You just don’t know it. You don’t
need some guy to make you feel like a woman. You can do it all on your own.”

“This isn’t about what he makes
me feel,” she argued. “It’s about what
I
feel about him.”

“And do you love him? You think
you love him? It’s only lust, Kate. What he’s feeling for you is probably just
lust as well.” Carlo squeezed her hand. “When it wears away, he will drop you
like a sack of potatoes. I know this guy, Kate.”

“Really?” This time, she withdrew
her hand and placed it on her lap, under the table. “Then tell me what you know
about him.”

Carlo paused.

Then he said, “I know that he
used to date a girl called Shamilar. He knew her from our circles.”

Shamilar. Why did the mention of
her name spear her heart so? Inwardly she flinched but steeled herself not to
show it.  

“‘Used to’,” she said. “We all
have pasts.”

“It’s what happened to Shamilar
that you should know about.”

“Is this hearsay or is it the
truth?”

“It’s the truth as our circles
know it. Shamilar got pregnant – ”

This time she cringed. She felt
her womb contract.

“ – and he made her lose
the baby. It was because she wasn’t a tiger shifter. He didn’t want
contamination between the shifter breeds. And he was furious with her. Furious
because she tried to trap him.”

Kate’s mouth went dry. Her
stomach turned with more dread than she could anticipate.

“Well, she shouldn’t have tried
to trap him,” she whispered.

“Yeah, she shouldn’t. But doesn’t
that tell you something about the kind of guy he is? He would abort his own
child if the genetics didn’t suit him.” Carlo’s tone was bitter.

She knew Carlo was trying to turn
her against Rust. But it wasn’t going to work. She was in too deep –
sexually, emotionally.

She loved Rust, no matter what
Carlo said about him. Whether or not he was damaged, or callous, or cruel.

“Carlo,” she said gently,
“whatever you say doesn’t matter. I’m not going to turn away from Rust.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I got the
sense of that.”

“You’re young. You’re
good-looking. You can have the pick of any girl you want. Any girl who isn’t
taken, that is.”

“Taken,” he said bitterly.
“That’s a good word for what he does to you. You have no idea how crazy you
drive me, Kate.”

“This is going around in
circles.” She got up and reached for her purse.

“No.” He got up too. “I’ll pay.”

But she had already fished out
her wallet and placed a ten dollar note on the table.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she
said.

She left before he could protest.
Her heart was beating fast.

She wondered if she was doing the
right thing.

13

Kate walked and walked blindly. She
found herself walking to the river once again, the scent of water guiding her
nostrils.

Once she reached the embankment,
she went to the railing and stared out into the river – at the boats and
barges trawling there, at the cafes and the pedestrians on the river walk down
below. A tourist boat was winding its way upriver, its tour guide speaking into
the blaring loudspeaker.

Her heart was palpitating so
severely that she thought it would burst.

Carlo’s voice sounded in her ears
like a warning bell.

And he made her lose the baby.
It was because she wasn’t a tiger shifter. He didn’t want contamination between
the shifter breeds. And he was furious with her. Furious because she tried to
trap him.

Kate gripped the railing. She
gazed out into the water, into the city beyond. Then she dipped into her tote
bag and took out the box.

It was a box of oral
contraceptives.

It was mostly full.

She had started out taking the
pills. She took three, and then her mind bended in different directions. Every
time she stared at those pills, she saw the murder of her baby. A baby that was
yet to be.

Rust only lusted after her body,
as strange as that might sound. He would soon tire of her and dump her by the
wayside. She didn’t know if she could take that. She was sure she might die of
heartbreak – of her actual heart ripping in two and bleeding, bleeding
all over her cardiac cavity.

And so, in a moment of
incoherence, she stopped taking the pills.

One day passed, and yet another.
Rust used a condom for the requisite month before the pills would have taken effect.

And then –

She remembered the pounding she
had received from his glorious, wonderful cock. The sperm flowing into her in a
tide, swimming into her womb and up into her Fallopian tubes. She wondered if
one of her eggs had been released into the tubes and was being impregnated by
his sperm even as she pondered about such things at the embankment.

Had she made a mistake? Okay,
that was beside the point. Of course she had made a mistake. She was making a
mistake either way. Any which way she chose, as long as that path involved Rust
O’Brien.

Trapping him.

Thinking that he would embrace
her after she declared, “I’m pregnant. There must have been some flaw with the
pills.”

How contrite. How stupid. How
childish she was, playing at adult games. She was not the first woman who had
tried to trap the man of her dreams in this manner, and she was not the first
woman who had tried to trap Rust O’Brien.

Except that he wasn’t any
ordinary male.

Their union would be an
experiment
.

God, what was she thinking?
Stupid,
stupid, stupid!

She wondered if it was too late
to amend it.

Hurriedly, she eased a blister
pack out of the box of oral contraceptives and took one pill out of it. Then
she stuffed it into her mouth.

She wondered if it was too late.

14

“You know, Fiona, you could be
attractive if you didn’t try so hard,” Carlo said.

He didn’t have a car, not on his
partial scholarship and what he was making as a ‘waiter’, good money though
that was. Most of it went into his college fund. And the rest of it went to his
mother back at home to pave the way for the rest of his siblings to go to
college. Not all shifters were rich like Rust O’Brien.

He was driving Fiona’s car
– a second hand Mustang. Fiona wasn’t exactly Rust O’Brien rich but she
was in a better position than he was.

Fiona’s hand was at his crotch,
and she was groping his cock and balls, squeezing them. She took her hand away
and pouted.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

They were driving to where he
deemed ‘a surprise’. It was easy enough to get Fiona to tag along. She was
always bored, looking for adventure.

He glanced at her quizzically.
“Were you always the class slut?”

“I take offense to that word,”
she said mildly.

“I reckon it isn’t the first time
you’ve heard it thrown in your face.”

She stared out of the window, her
expression somewhat wistful.

She said, “So many things you
don’t know about me, Carlo. You don’t know the things I had to do – ”

She trailed off. He knew what she
was going to say.
You don’t know the things I had to do . . . to make me
what I am.

“And there are so many things you
don’t know about me.”

“That makes us two of a kind.”

“Not really.”

“I hear you’re pretty much the
man slut himself. Only you don’t do campus girls. What – we’re not good
enough for you? Or do you prefer older women with the means to pay you for
fucking them?” She smiled.

He retorted, “You know, Fiona,
you don’t have to be such a prick.”

“I don’t have a prick. You do.
Where are you taking me . . . if not for fucking?”

He grimaced. “I know a place just
outside town.”

“So early in the morning?”

“I figured we’d get a fresh
start.”

*

It felt like a drive-by, only it
wasn’t a drive-by. If they were in a TV show, he reckoned he would have rolled
down the window, pulled out a gun and fired.

But as it was, this was just as
effective. In another way.

Carlo’s blood was boiling in his
veins. That was the trouble with being a shifter. You had a threshold, and when
you crossed that threshold, it became pure, blinding rage. You would not take
insults from another man. Or another shifter, for the matter.

There was only so much a wolf
could take.

“This is a really nice
neighborhood,” Fiona said. “Very far away from campus. Your sugar mommy lives
here?”

“If you weren’t so busy talking
out of your yap, you’d see what’s at three o’ clock.”

She turned her head. “But it’s
only eight thirty in the morning.”

“What’s better than a full
breakfast?”

The couple sat at the edge of the
café. They had probably ordered, but the food had not arrived. They were
nursing their coffee. They looked happy. In fact, Kate was positively glowing,
the way she never glowed when she was having coffee with him.

The Professor seemed relaxed.
More relaxed than Carlo had ever seen him, in fact. His hair was slightly
tousled, indicating that he had just rolled out of bed. And why not? His
penthouse was in the building just across the street in this ritzy
neighborhood.

They were both a beautiful
couple. More beautiful than anything he had ever seen, despite the gap between
their ages.

“Oh my God,” Fiona gasped.

It was too late to take it back
now.

“Yes. ‘Oh my God’ is right.”

He felt sick. And yet good. Sick
and good in a complex psychological way that he didn’t fully comprehend.

15

Fiona wasn’t always a slut.

But she did like sex. She liked
it when Tommy Garmond stuck his cock into her in ninth grade. She liked it so
much that she did it again and again. That didn’t make her a slut, right? She
only did it with Tommy, not his friends, who wanted to do her too.

But then, her stepfather, Jerry,
found out. She was afraid he would tell her mother, but he didn’t. In fact, he
had been looking at her kind of funny lately. She was one of those girls who
developed fast physically. Her boobs were already outgrowing any girly bra her
mother had bought her.

She had learned the power of
those boobs and that body.

“Let’s say you and me . . . we
cut a deal,” Jerry said to her.

“What deal?” she had asked
innocently.

Oh boy, she had been innocent
then.

Unfortunately, when Jerry held
her down and raped her, her beauty was a power she didn’t want to have.

He threatened to tell her mother
if she didn’t do what he wanted. And so she let him fuck her, Repeatedly. Until
she was well into the eleventh grade. It was amazing how she kept her grades in
school. But she had always been smart. She had a photographic memory. And a
pussy boys wanted to climb into in more ways than one.

After a while, it was just about
having sex and orgasms. Or maybe it was all about pain management. The orgasms
helped to keep the pain at bay – to keep her from slitting her wrists.

And then Jerry died of a heart
attack. It wasn’t even when he was fucking her. No. It happened when he was
walking the dog. Funny how he managed to keep the veneer of the friendly
neighborhood stepfather when their house was so full of secrets.

She was free.

Or was she really?

It didn’t matter, really, she
told herself. She was young, she was smart and she had the world at her feet.
Her beauty and body became weapons she honed to lure men in, especially when
she didn’t really care for any of them. They used her as a tool. So, fine. She
would use them as tools as well. She would let them fuck her until they could
fuck Jerry out of her system.

Somehow, they never did.

There was some part of her which
longed for closure. But there was a wound on her spirit that couldn’t be
healed, no matter how many men she had and how hard she fucked them.

So life went on.

So she survived. She was a
survivor. Wasn’t that what a psychologist like Rust O’Brien would have told
her?

Fiona never really had a guy she
couldn’t seduce. Even if she was damaged inside, at least she had her beauty
and the power of her body. Imagine being fat like Michaela and her blushing cow
of her best friend, Kate, the wallflower who could only make moon eyes in class
at the Professor. Kate was a non-entity, unlike Carlo – who was smart and
handsome and funny and someone to be reckoned with.

But Carlo wasn’t interested in
girls his age. Besides, she had her sights set on a bigger prize – the
Professor himself.

Rust O’Brien intrigued Fiona
enormously, as he did everyone else. He had a face a movie star would die for
and a body every bit as fit and trim as an athlete’s. And yet, he was a mystery
where everyone was concerned. He had no wife or girlfriend or boyfriend that
anyone knew about, and he didn’t speak about himself or hung photos of his
family in his office.

He was obviously brilliant. Rumors
abounded of old money, of him having a penthouse uptown. There were even rumors
of him having been a psychiatrist in Bellevue once, when he was starting out
– of having seen horrors no man had seen outside of an insane asylum.
There were rumors that what he saw and experienced there had changed him so
much that he was no longer the same man. And hence here was – aloof and
an enigma.

Undecipherable.

The Bellevue rumors always struck
a chord in Fiona. Maybe it was because she had come close to being criminally
insane once. Hence, Rust O’Brien – and the things he had seen –
always struck a chord with her.

So when she saw Rust O’Brien with
Kate Penney, she was stupefied.

At first, she blinked her eyes to
make sure she wasn’t seeing things. She had had a period of hallucination once
when she was in the eleventh grade. Hallucinations of her killing her
stepfather and her mother as well for being so fucking oblivious. But that
period passed, and she didn’t go mad. She survived, and here she was.

And then. when it became very
clear that was what Carlo drove her all this way to see, she went through the
emotions a scorned woman went through.

Incredulity.

Denial.

Jealousy.

Anger.

Coldness.

Seething acceptance.

“So what do you think?” Carlo
said.

Her throat locked. “What do you
think I should think? You brought me here to see this . . . obviously.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

Across the street, Rust lifted a
hand and tucked a tendril of hair behind Kate’s ear. The gesture was so loving,
so tender that Fiona’s heart hardened and became ice.

He chose this . . . this fat
cow over me?

The truth was Kate had always
been kind of pretty, even though she was overweight. And now she was positively
luscious. Kate had always hidden her body away in shapeless Target kind of
clothes – cheap and awful.

But now she was dressed in a
simple yellow sundress which showed off her deep cleavage. Fiona could see that
she had quite a body. Plump and curvy, like one of those Renoir Impressionist
paintings. Fiona could see how a man could be taken in by those curves. And
Rust – surprise, surprise – seemed to prefer the plump types, in
which case.

Envy, one of the deadliest of
Dante’s seven deadly sins, filled her chest and expanded it.

I can get any man.
But not
Rust O’Brien, it seemed.
Because he preferred milk cows like Kate
Penney.

She was beyond shocked. She
thought it was Rust’s principles which forbade him to have relations with his
students. That, and the principles and regulations of the university board
about the teaching staff fraternizing with the students.

But apparently Kate Penney had
her clutches into the Professor. Clutches which made him defy all rules and
throw caution to the wind.

He thought he was safe here,
ensconced in his rich little neighborhood ivory tower, far away from the
madding campus crowd.

But he wasn’t safe from her.

She would see to that.

They were all the same, she
thought sadly. Men. They only wanted one thing from women like Kate and herself.