Red Hot Obsessions (159 page)

“Good.” He took my hands in his, then leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. I was still in a daze, lost in the surrealism of the moment. “I have a lot to teach you, and it will be a while before you earn my collar, but I'm sure we'll both have a lot of fun getting there.”

I nodded, confused but happy. Damien Reed was mine.

“Do you want to hang out for a while?” he asked, sounding more casual.

“No. I think I'd rather go home. Sorry. I didn't mean to freak out on you. I've just . . . been harboring these feelings for a while, and it's really been tearing at me. All this time, I thought this was just sex to you.”

“Well, now you don't have to worry about that anymore.” He smiled warmly.

“I guess I don't.”

Slowly, the misery was fading away, being replaced by giddy happiness at the thought of all the lessons to come. Damien was a kinky freak and a sexual beast. I couldn't wait to see all the interesting new techniques he wanted to show me.

More than that though, I was relieved that I could finally let my guard down. My heart didn't need a wall of doubt built around it. I could open myself to Damien completely, and we could begin a beautiful new relationship together.

*

What’s next?

Try Sky’s HIS INDECENT TRAINING

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Sky Corgan lives in a little podunk town near San Antonio, Texas.

When she’s not typing away at the next steamy romance novel, she’s busy planning for future vacations.

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BID: RAE OMNIBUS EDITION © Malachite Publishing 2013

One wild quickie with a sexy stranger will change Rae’s life forever.

Rae Stone is majoring in psychology so that she can open a clinic for autistic kids, but when her scholarship is yanked because she failed an impossible statistics course, she thinks she’s out of luck and doomed to return to her repressive and poverty-stricken hometown. Because she has three weeks of college freedom left, she goes to an upscale party and has a wild quickie with a stranger, who turns out to be the sexy owner of the Devilhouse, a BDSM club. He offers her a job that scares the heck out her, so she screws her courage to the sticking place and becomes Lady Macbeth, Domme of the Devilhouse. She’s found the money to stay in college, but will the secretive Wulf turn out to be her Prince Charming or the Devil who tempts her to ruin?

Episode 1: Rae Falling

Sticking Together at the Frat Party

“I was raised Baptist,” Rae shouted over the beeping, thumping dance music at the yellow-haired frat guy named Ames. He looked like a guy from Ames, Iowa: corn-fed and corn mash barrel-chested. His yellow, even teeth lined up like a corncob.

She shouted, “So that means no drinking,” Ames refilled her red plastic cup with vodka and cold orange juice, “and no dancing,” she gestured with the cup at the sophomores gyrating between the pool tables and sloshed iced screwdriver on her knuckles, “and definitely no premarital sex.”

Rae raised her cup toward Lizzy and Georgie, her dorm suitemates, who toasted her back from across the room hazy with stinking cigarette and pot smoke. The three girls had planned to stick together at the frat party because the Delta Chi house had a bad reputation. The two white girls were standing next to a black Delta Chi guy, and the girls were laughing hard. The Delta Chi guy was not laughing. His eyes grew startled-huge, like they had just shocked the hell out of him.

Next to them, a frat guy and a coed were necking hard, and the guy’s hand groped under the woman’s tee shirt. A Golden Devil, the university’s mascot, was laminated on her shirt, and his fumbling made the Golden Devil look like it was popping and locking.

“You still Baptist?” Ames asked Rae.

“Hell, no. I am so through with all that ‘Thou shalt not’ shit. I so totally shalt do any shit that I want to.” She did, too. She drank, she had smoked a joint twice, she had danced naked on stage in the musical
Hair
last year, though her family sure as heck didn’t know about
that
, and she studied psychology even though Aunt TracyJo thought that Rae was going to Hell because psychology was just another Godless way to justify sin.

Not that it mattered now. Rae drank more of the screwdriver. The orange juice, fruity and bitter in her mouth, tasted like it was turning to garbage.

“That’s so cool!” Ames said, and Rae thought he might be even drunker than she was.

Right now, even talking about religion and psychology and sex seemed like a good idea, so she must have a serious drunk going on. Her previous screwdrivers had been strong, and this one was, too.

Good. Maybe she could forget why she had gone to a frat party on a Thursday night instead of studying, because studying didn’t matter anymore.

Her eyes stung and teared up. Dang it. She wasn’t going to think about all that. She was here to party away the night. She sure as hell wasn’t going to cry any more.

Rae swayed to the music, feeling the drums thump in her bones. “This is a great song.”

“Sure is. You feeling okay?” Ames peered at her face closely, and his eyes and nose swam in and out of view.

The people who were dancing wavered, and the couples making out around the edges of the room drifted like seaweed on the tide.

“Sure, I’m fine,” she said. “Just drunk. I’m gonna get drunk off my ass tonight.” Midterm reports were due out next week, and she had a bad feeling about her statistics class.

No, that wasn’t right. The dread wasn’t a random feeling. It was bad knowledge about a bad fact. Failing statistics meant she was going to be kicked out of college, and so she would go back to Pirtleville, and so died her chance for a degree, a chance for a better life, and her chance to build that secret dream of hers, the one that she only told people about when she was drunk.

The beer-stained walls wove up and down, up and down, up and down.

She watched the walls weave up and down.

“That’s good,” Ames said.

“You bet it’s good. S’good, it is. This screwdriver’s really strong.”

“You want to go lie down or something? There’s a bedroom down this way.” He pointed down the dark hallway.

“No. M’fine.” Rae felt fine. She didn’t care about anything anymore. Where were Lizzy and Georgie?

Her arm lifted into the air, like it was flying on its own.

“You look like you need to lie down,” Ames said.

The walls rolled backward past her, and Rae wondered where Georgie and Lizzy were.

“M’fine,” she said again. Rae knew that she should answer the frat guy’s question, but she couldn’t remember what he had asked.

She couldn’t even remember his name.

Lying down, Rae was lying down on something soft, and the bright light overhead was bright.

The bright light was really bright, and something tugged at her waist and hips, like pants being pulled off.

Bright.

Bright white light.

It was above her and it was bright and white.

“You okay there, Rae?” she heard that corn guy ask. “You’re not going to puke, right?”

“M’fine.” M’fine, m’fine m’fine.

Bright light in the sky.

Bright light went away.

And soft went on her face. Bad smell like sweaty sheets. She was lying on her tummy.

Her arms and legs were heavy and soft.

“Hope you like anal,” Corn Boy said.

Goopy stuff, on her butt.

Hard thing.

Nudged her butt.

Soft, still on her face.

Hands, too heavy to move.

Hard thing again.

Slam!

Something slammed.

“Yeeeeargh!”

Really loud scream.

Behind her.

Sounded like that Corn Boy.

Some girl said, “Wow. That Taser left a burn on his ass.”

Room spun.

Spun around her.

And bright light was back above her.

Bright light in the sky.

Georgie and Lizzy.

There they were.

They were looking down at her.

“Hi,” Rae said. “M’fine.”

“Rae!” Georgie said. “What’s the matter with you?”

Georgie’s brown hair reached out toward Rae like her hair was floating in water because she was a mermaid.

Mermaids were cool.

Lizzy said, “Looks like she got rufie’d.”

Georgie looked away from Rae, and Georgie’s long, brown hair swung and swung in the air.

Georgie said, “Rapist asshole. We should let The Dom have his ass. The Dom hates rapists.”

Lizzy said, “Hey! The rapist asshole is trying to stand up!”

“Tase him again. I’ll get her pants on, and we’ll get her out of here.”

Crickle, crackle, sound of electric tackle.

And Corn Boy screamed again.

~~~~~

The Wages of Sin Are About Two Hundred Bucks an Hour

The next morning, Rae had the supreme deity of all hangover migraines and no idea how lube got smeared all over her underwear. The dorm room spun around her pounding head and her twin bed. The posters of rock bands, Broadway shows, and some far-away beaches blurred into Rae’s roommate’s posters of Christian pop groups with images of crosses and thorns, doves, and scintillating rays of light.

Even drawings of light rays hurt Rae’s eyes and made her head throb.

Georgie and Lizzy sat on Rae’s bed, laughing at her and making her sip green sports drink, which tasted like ocean water and dead eels. Rae wanted to vomit, but puked green drink would be worse than it going down the first time, so she didn’t, barely.

Light hurt her eyes. The green stuff stung her sore tongue and scraped her throat. She peeked at Georgie and Lizzy through squinted eyelids.

Georgie and Lizzy were, unfortunately, in fine form.

Georgie said, “Your ass would be as sore as your brain if we hadn’t figured out where he took you.”

Good Lord, Rae was still mortified that she had been rufied, and she would get around to feeling that embarrassment as soon as the stabbing in her head subsided. It was all just her luck: the one night that she tried to go out and have a wild time, be a wild woman for one freaking night, she ended up getting rufied and dang near butt-raped. She was lucky she hadn’t ended up dead in the desert somewhere.

“I’ll bet Corn-Fed Asshole has a Taser migraine this morning.” Lizzy grinned big and fluffed her pixie-cut blonde hair. “And toasted nuts.”

“I cannot believe you tased him on the nuts, Lizzy.” Georgie grinned bigger.

“He
so
had it coming. I doubt he’ll be able to have kids. You were right, though. We should have called The Dom last night.”

Their voices pierced like ice picks in Rae’s ears and at the raw nerves that ran up the sides of her face, so she sipped the green seawater in her very small cup and prayed for the pain to stop.

“Yeah, we should have called him. Too late, now.”

“It’s never too late. Remember when that guy date-raped Sarah last year? The Dom lured him into the club with that special, private invitation and then worked on him for hours. I heard that guy still has a nervous tic on one side of his face.”

Too much light, too much noise, and too much pain. “Ladies?” Rae asked, and her voice hurt her throat and her own ears. “Can I have some privacy here?”

“Why? You gonna puke again?” Georgie asked.

“I just want to sleep this off.” Rae planned to sleep for a week if necessary. She had nothing better to do.

Georgie checked her phone. “Don’t you have class in an hour?”

“I’m not going to class.” Class was a waste of Rae’s valuable drinking time.

“You never miss class.”

She closed her eyes. “I don’t care.”

“Rae, what’s up with you?” Georgie asked.

“I have a hangover. A really bad one.” Her most recent of several self-inflicted painfests.

“What is
really
up with you?” Georgie pressed.

“Yeah, Rae,” Lizzy chimed in. “We’re your friends. You can tell us.”

She didn’t want to tell them. It was embarrassing and it sucked, and she wasn’t going to be around much longer, anyway. She opened her eyes enough to squint. “Nothing.”

They looked at each other like psychic twins who were deciding how to make Rae’s brain explode, but Rae’s brain was already exploding. She laid her arm over her eyes and hoped they would go away. Her arm heated her forehead, and her brain burned hotter.

She could still see the girls below her arm, and they stayed, darn it.

Georgie turned back to her and said, “No bullshit, Rae. What’s up with you?”

If she told them, maybe they would leave. “All right. I’m failing statistics.”

“So drop it and take it over next semester!” Lizzy said.

Rae admitted the bad, bad news through the metallic taste of disappointment in her mouth. “Drop-date is way past, and it’s a core class. If I fail stats, I lose my scholarship. My parents can’t and won’t pay for college. I’m done. I’m out. I’m just partying away my last couple of weeks before I go home at spring break, get a dead-end job, and probably marry some guy in the same circumstances and pop out a couple kids who won’t have a chance to do better, either.”

It sounded even worse out loud than when it went around and around in her head.

Rae’s second-to-her-worst fear was stalking her: that she would work long and hard hours and yet still live poor like her parents, and her someday-maybe-future kids would, too. When Rae was a kid, every time she had needed to go to a doctor or to buy something out of the budget, her mother had winced, and Rae watched her mentally add up what she and Rae’s father and brothers would have to do without.

Rae’s family, however, sent their hand-me-downs over to her Aunt Alana’s place. Alana’s fourth kid Daniel had turned out to be autistic, and his medical care busted their family from uncomfortable to impoverished. Aunt Alana had tried to do therapy with him, but she had had to quit her job to do it, and more bills and less money had destroyed them.

Lizzy said, “And you’re just going to lie down and let all that happen to you.”

“I had one chance, and I blew it.” Rae had blown it sky-high. Her nose stung with the sulfur fumes from her burning dreams. Or maybe it was the vodka and rape drugs.

Lizzy was right, though. Rae did just lie down and let things happen to her. She had only gotten the full-ride scholarship when her guidance counselor had insisted that she apply for it. She had kind of fallen into her double major of psychology and drama because she took a lot of those classes.

However, during her sophomore year, on October fifth, in a Developmental Psychology lecture, while Rae was sitting three rows back and two seats over from the middle-aged professor who was expounding about her research on delayed muscle response in the pincher grasp of autistic children in excruciating detail, a thought struck Rae like a train barreling through the classroom wall.

If Rae majored in psychology, if she got a counseling degree, she could help kids like Daniel.

She could make an enormous difference in their lives and independence. All she had to do was finish her degree and open a therapy clinic. She needed to figure out how to do all that business stuff, but first, she needed the degree.

If she worked hard, if she learned it all, she could change everything for them.

She had begun taking notes on the pincher grasp toward that end, not just for the test. Improving autistic kids’ pincher grasps might help neural connections form in their brains.

Since then, every note had been geared toward the children somewhere out there who would need Rae to understand how to guide them out of the darkness of autism. Her grades shot up to straight-A’s.

She even doodled buildings and signs for her secret dream clinic: A Ray of Light.

Losing that chance to make a difference in the world was her biggest fear. Sometimes when she was asleep, she had nightmares about Daniel and other kids slipping out of her hands and falling down a hole because she couldn’t catch all of them.

Rae was a passive shlump, and now she was going to passively go home after she failed out. She would probably take the first shop job that anyone offered her after she filled out applications at all the usual places.

Lizzy asked, “Can’t you get a tutor or something so you could ace the final?”

“Nope. Final’s only worth fifteen percent. Even if I aced it, I would still fail the class. I need at least a B in core classes to keep the scholarship, anyway.”

“Damn,” the girls both said, and then they looked at each other again.

Rae’s hangover marched through her brain wearing jackboots, and she was still half-stoned from the vodka-and-Rohypnol cocktail that Corn Boy had fed her last night, but even she could see that a silent debate was going on between those two girls. “What?”

Georgie said, “Your parents won’t help? You really don’t have any other way to stay in college?”

“Nope.” Rae just hadn’t understood statistics. When she had seen that Dr. Gonder was teaching stats this semester, she should have dropped it and waited until the next semester because Gonder was known to fail three-quarters of the students who started his class, but she hadn’t waited. NOVAs and ANOVAs and applied regression and multiple regression and variance analysis were all too hard for her to just pick up on her own, and Gonder’s lectures confused her more than they helped.

She had thought she was so smart, and now, how the mighty had fallen, as Aunt TracyJo would gloat when Rae slouched back into town after flunking out.

Lizzy asked, “No rich uncles who can lend you the money? Loans? Grants?”

Rae wanted to sigh, but the breath whistling through her head would hurt too much. Georgie and Lizzy never had money problems. They bought all kinds of the latest phones and clothes and went out all they wanted. Their parents were probably footing the tuition bill, the lucky ducks.

Rae wasn’t jealous because she knew that such luck was not her lot in life, and she accepted who and what she was: a working-class girl with no upwardly mobile connections. “No one in my family who I could ask for help is rich or even middle-class. It’s too late to apply for loans for next year, and the government has cut grants to the bone anyway. I can’t even go back to community college for a semester because I’m done with my general education credits.”

The front door in the study room slammed, rattling the thin walls and fluttering the posters. Rae’s roommate and cousin Hester walked into the dorm bedroom, home from Bible study. Hester glanced at Rae suffering on the bed, sniffed, and flounced into the bathroom. Her calf-length, eyelet-lace skirt flounced really well.

Rae groaned. “When you guys leave, she’s going to rag on me about this. That’s another reason I went to Delta Chi, to get out of this dorm room. Yesterday afternoon, she got all ‘The wages of sin are death,’ on me when I was trying to study for my abnormal psych test.”

“Actually,” Lizzy leaned down, and her fuzzy blonde hair touched Rae’s cheek. Lizzy whispered very softly, very near Rae’s ear, “the wages of sin are about two hundred bucks an hour.”

Such cash was impossible. “Yeah. Right.”

Over Rae’s chest, Georgie asked Lizzy, “Are you sure about this?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to see if things might work out for her.”

“Okay, then.” Georgie leaned down, pulled her long, brown braid behind her, and whispered in Rae’s other ear, “My parents don’t help me out with money, either. I work ten hours a week, and I pay my own way. Everything. Tuition. Dorm. Meal plan. Books. Plus extra money left over.”

Even statistics-challenged Rae could estimate that. Two hundred bucks an hour times ten hours added up fast. “That’s, like, two thousand dollars a week.”

Rae wasn’t sure what you had to do for two thousand dollars a week. She was not going to sell drugs. College was not worth that.

Lizzy whispered, “And the perks are fantastic. You should see some of the parties we go to. We only went to the frat with you last night because you seemed all nuts.”

“I was nuts.” Rae was still nuts.

Georgie’s soft voice was as seductive as whiskey, “Come with us to a party tonight. We want you to meet someone.”

Rae groaned. “I am in no condition to meet anyone.”

“You’ll be fine by tonight. Drink the green stuff.”

Rae winced at their stabbing voices and despaired of drinking any more of that vile green potion. The imaginary smoke steaming off the top of it smelled like fish sticks.

As the girls cut through the shared bathroom back to their own bedroom, shimmying past Hester, Lizzy asked Georgie, “Does she have anything to wear? She’s a lot taller than we are.”

“We can get her something from the costume racks. I’ll check her closet for her size.” Georgie called back to Rae, “Be ready at seven with your make-up and hair done like you’re going to a high society wedding.”

Sure. A high-society wedding.

Or a funeral.

Rae’s own funeral.

Her own funeral would be a relief.

The girls left Rae alone with a head full of whispering and pain.

Hester emerged from the bathroom and chanted in her shrill, high voice, “‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’ Proverbs, Chapter Twenty, Verse One.”

Rae pretended to be asleep and wished for death so that the pain in her head and Hester’s Bible verses would all go away.

~~~~~