Have Me (10 page)

As it turns out, it can be pretty damn decadent. The club caters to couples, who can either choose to share partners or not. We are definitely on the “or not” side of the equation, a fact which Damien makes clear to the couple who enter the club at the same time we do.

The hostess greets us in French, then switches seamlessly to English. She explains that she will take us to the dressing rooms where we will put our clothes and belongings in lockers. She makes a particular point to stress that my camera must be locked away, and I am fine with that. I don’t want to take pictures any more than I want someone taking pictures of me.

The club provides robes, sarongs, and towels. We can choose what to wear, or wear nothing at all. She continues to explain the rules, which are basically nonexistent. Anything goes. Anything, anywhere. Except for the hot tub, where actual intercourse isn’t allowed, a statement that drives home that it is allowed anywhere else.

“Are there private rooms?” I ask.

“There are. But you do not have to be concerned about your privacy no matter what you do or where you do it.” She flashes a bright smile, then nods to Damien. “Our members understand discretion.” It is the first time that I realize she knows who we are. And that Damien has been here before.

I glance sideways at him, but he only shrugs. If I want answers, I’m going to have to wait, because we are already on the move and we are following our hostess to the dressing room, women on the left of the plush joint sitting area, men on the right.

She smiles, nods, then leaves.

“I was wondering how you found this place,” I say. “But I guess a member would know where it is.”

“Renewed member,” he says, not at all perturbed by the green fire of jealousy that has crept into my voice. “It’s been years since I’ve been here, but I called yesterday and reinstated my membership.”

“Oh.” I tell myself I’m not going to ask, but then I completely ignore my own sound advice. “Who did you come with?”

“Carmela,” he says, referring to the bitch of an Italian supermodel he dated many years ago.

“Oh.” I swallow. “And about that couples thing. Did you, um, share?”

“I did,” he says. He takes two long steps to end up right in front of me. Gently, he cups my chin, then kisses me so sweetly it almost makes me cry. “Why wouldn’t I? She wasn’t mine.”

His words soothe me more than I want to admit. “I don’t like thinking that there were other women before me,” I admit, though I know it is a foolish thought because Damien Stark is about the furthest thing from a monk on the planet.

“There weren’t,” he says. “There may have been women—they may have even shared my bed—but there was no one before you.”

I nod, still feeling foolish, but also incredibly happy. I wipe a tear away with the edge of my thumb.

He tells me to go change—“not naked; I don’t intend to share even the sight of you”—and to meet him back in this sitting room.

I do, returning in a sarong, and more than happy to find him with a towel wrapped around his waist, the bulge at his crotch making it more than evident that he is ready for whatever delights are on the agenda.

He leads me through a space with couches and chairs and people in various states of undress, all touching and stroking and teasing. I’m not sure what the etiquette is here, but I can’t stop looking. Damien sees me, and pulls me back into an alcove, one of many in this room, and clearly set back for this very purpose. There is, in fact, a small curtain that can be pulled across the opening, turning it into a small but private space, almost like a little dressing room.

“Have you ever watched other people make love?” Damien asks.

I shake my head. “No. I mean, yes. Some porn, but that’s different.”

“It is,” he says. He stands behind me, so that we are in the shadows and I am looking out over the room. Hands stroking. Lips meeting. I don’t know why, but watching these strangers makes my own temperature rise.

“I don’t want them,” I say, as Damien cups my breasts through the thin material of the sarong. “I don’t want anyone’s touch but yours.”

“But it turns you on,” he whispers, and I nod.

“Why?” I ask.

“They’re a mirror. You see passion on their faces and you want it. You see the burn of heat on their skin, and you want to feel it. You hear them cry out when they come, and you want to go there, too.”

“Yes,” I moan, as the truth of what he says washes over me. I’ve never thought I had any voyeuristic tendencies, but watching these people—their hands stroking slick skin, their mouths meeting—is like kindling to the fire already growing inside me. “God, yes.”

I lean back against Damien, feeling the press of his erection against my rear. His fingers tighten on my nipples and I cry out, the cry shifting to a desperate moan as his other hand snakes down to my crotch. “Please,” I say. “Touch me.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, and I hear the hard edge of want in his voice.

I nod. I do not want to be the one being watched, but I so desperately want to feel. “The shadows,” I say. “And the sarong is open at the side.” No one will be able to see, I tell myself. But the truth is, I’m not sure I care anymore if they do.

The slit in the sarong is over my hip, but Damien turns it so that it is over my thigh, just barely covering my sex. He slips his hand under the material and strokes me. I bite down on my lower lip to keep from crying out. I am so hot, so sensitive, that I fear I will explode right there in his hand.

“Nikki, oh, god, baby.” He uses the hand that was on my breast to pull my sarong up from the back.

I know I should protest—but I don’t want to. I want the thrill. I want Damien. I want him to fuck me in this dark corner with this cornucopia of sex spread out in front of us. I want the wildness.

I want it all.

“Yes,” I say, and lean forward so that I can hold on to the edge of the alcove. I yank the curtain partly closed—a nod to privacy—but I do not want to block our view.

I am still wearing the sarong, and Damien is behind me, so I know that we have some privacy, but when Damien grips my hips and thrusts himself inside me—when I cry out from the delicious intensity of taking him in and having him pound hard inside me—I know that anyone who looks toward us must know exactly what we are doing.

I don’t care.

All I want is Damien.

All I want is to feel, and I reach around, taking his hand off my hip and easing it into the sarong, silently demanding that he stroke my clit even as he fucks me from behind.

“Don’t close your eyes,” Damien demands, and I don’t. Instead I watch. Passion watching passion. Heat locked onto heat.

He teases my clit as his cock fills and strokes me. He is working me into a frenzy, and his touch combined with the surroundings pushes me over the edge so hard and so fast that I am certain that without Damien to hold me up, I will tumble and fall to my knees.

As the orgasm blasts through me, my body milks him, muscles clenching in a desperate need that takes him the rest of the way, and he explodes into me, his hands closing tight on my shoulders as he cries my name.

He closes the curtain then, and I turn in his arms, then melt into his touch, into his kisses.

“I love you,” he says.

“I know,” I say, then snuggle closer. I am content. And right at the moment, I’m not feeling domestic at all.

We stay a bit longer, enjoying the sauna and the hot tub. Making love slowly in a pirate-themed private room where I let Damien take me captive and then ravage me. It is late when we leave, and I am feeling well-used and wonderful.

“How did you know?” I ask as we exit onto the sidewalk. “How did you know I would like it?”

“How do you think?”

I stay silent; we both know the answer. Because Damien knows me as well as I know myself. And as far as I am concerned, that is a glorious feeling.

I take his hand and pull him to a stop, then lift myself up to kiss him, planning a soft buss, and then laughing as he captures me long and slow and deep.

A bright light flashes, turning the world inside out, and it takes me a second to realize that the light came from the flash of a camera. It is followed in quick succession by a lightning storm of flashes, and I stumble backward, realizing only after the fact that Damien has pushed me aside.

Damien is in the street, and his fist slams hard into the photographer’s face even as I process the words that have been hanging over my head like a cartoon bubble since the first flash went off—“Fucking A. Stark pays for her, then he shares her.”

The accent is heavily British, and when I see the multiple cameras around the guy’s neck as he stumbles backward, his nose a bloody mess, I realize that he is a celebrity chaser from one of Britain’s tabloids.

I don’t even have time to feel sick before I see Damien lunge for the guy.

“Damien, no!” I shout, but my words come too late. Damien grabs the guy by the shirt front and pulls him back. He seems to hesitate, and then instead of breaking the guy’s face, he grabs one of the cameras and breaks that instead.

“Get the fuck out of here.” His words are low and very, very dangerous, and it’s obvious that the photographer knows that. He turns, then breaks into a run. I grab hold of Damien’s shirt, afraid that he will run after him.

“It’s over,” I say, breathing hard and starting to shake. “Just stop. It’s over.”

But even as I say the words, I know that it is a long, long way from over.

“I’m sorry,” Damien says in the taxi on the way back to the Hôtel Margaritte.

“For not stopping? For breaking his camera?” I make a face. “It’s okay, really. I don’t give a fuck about him. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Not for that,” Damien says. “For bringing you here.”

It takes me a moment to understand what he’s talking about. “You mean to Paris? To the club?” I tighten my grip on his hand. “Damien, that’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?” His words are tight. Clipped. “I almost canceled this entire trip after I saw your face in Mexico. How much you enjoyed the beach, the solitude.”

I remember the shadows I had seen on his face when we had talked about leaving the resort, and everything falls into place.

“And then to bring you to a city crawling with press—to put you back in that spotlight,” he continues. “And worse, to take you to that club. It was like opening a damn door for every lowlife asshole—”

“No.” I press a finger over his lips. “I love Paris,” I said. “And dear god, Damien, I loved going to À la Lune with you.” I remember the way he’d touched me, the over-the-top eroticism of feeling Damien inside me while we watched those strangers and knowing that we were just as exposed. “And there was no way you could predict that some asshole with a camera—”

“Couldn’t I? There’s always some asshole with a camera, Nikki. It’s part of the package. The cameras and all the shit in my past. It’s all there, and I’m so goddamn sorry that it’s part of your life now.”

“Damien, it’s okay,” I say fiercely. “I don’t want to be cloistered, and I don’t need to be. You take me places—in the world, inside myself—and I don’t want you to stop.”

I see something that looks like hope on his face, but then it fades, replaced by both anger and regret. “At the very least I should be able to give you a respite on our honeymoon.”

“No.” My voice is hard. Firm. “Dammit, Damien, don’t you get it? I don’t want to escape your life. I love you. All of that shit, it’s just part of the man you became.”

“Fertilizer?”

I roll my eyes. “I’m serious. You’re a whole package, Damien. And maybe I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings for the paparazzi, but I do love you. And that makes it easier to put up with them. You know that,” I add, feeling just a little panicked, because he
does
know that. “I’ve told you that over and over. Don’t you know I mean it?”

Damien, however, doesn’t answer, and my throat is thick with tears as I look into his eyes. This is about more than the paparazzi, I realize. I may not like them, but I’m getting used to them, and Damien damn well knows it.

I frown at him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He is silent for a moment, and when he does speak, my chest is so tight that I am certain I have forgotten how to breathe.

“Sofia,” he says. “She’s the one behind the bullshit lawsuit.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“My lawyers managed to trace it back. That’s what Sylvia texted to tell me earlier. I was going to tell you later. I didn’t want to spoil Paris.” He makes a rough sound in the back of his throat. “So much for that.”

He runs his fingers through his hair. “At any rate, it’s been shut down, and her attorney knows how he was duped. But she started it. She’s behind it. Because she wanted to fuck with you.”

I’m still trying to take it all in. “I—I don’t understand.”

“WiseApp? Try WiseAss.” There’s anger and hurt in his voice. “God
damn
her.”

“She’s messed up,” I say, though the words are hard to choke out. I can’t help but remember what she said to me—that Damien didn’t love me, that I should give him up and turn to a blade to ease my pain.

I force myself to bite back the fury. It’s useless now. Because she is sick, and all her antics are doing is hurting Damien now. Damien, and me.

I rest my hand on his leg. “It’s not your fault.”

“She should be in a facility that doesn’t allow her access to the internet or telephones. She’s got someone pulling strings for her. She’s too damn smart; too damn manipulative.”

“It was only a nuisance,” I say, though it was a hell of a lot more than that. “You’ve put an end to that bullshit lawsuit before it could get really bad.”

He turns to face me square on. “And how bad is too bad, Nikki? Everywhere we turn, my past is reaching out to hurt you.” He twines his fingers in my hair, and I wince, remembering when I took the scissors and violently chopped it off. He slides his hand down to cup my thigh, and I force myself not to cry as I think of the scars—of the times when the paparazzi, the shit with Sofia, and all the other crap has brought me so close to cutting. I shiver, but I shake my head.