My Control (2 page)

“I left my shoes at the door,” she answers, drawing my gaze upward, over her black silk blouse and long blond hair. The only blonde that I’ve wanted in ten years. “My dad made us do it when I was growing up. It’s a habit.” She holds up the key that I’d left for her at the front desk with a note to meet me in my room after she settled in hers. “So the press is stalking you pretty badly?”

“That’s an understatement.” But it’s not why I’m here. It’s the memories, not the reporters, that I wish I could avoid. “I had to have some covert help to rent me the room next door in an effort to stay low profile until I leave for New York on, I hope, Monday.” I tap the folder that I have sitting on the coffee table. “I need to go over the gallery business affairs with you tonight. I can’t risk being unavailable and you being unprepared.” I glance at the TV, and the news is still playing the same scene, as if it’s locked on a repeating loop that gives me nothing when I crave something.

Anything. I’ll take anything.

“Anything new?” Crystal asks, and somehow she’s crossed the room to claim the seat beside me without my realizing it. It rattles me that I’m this disoriented and unaware. So does the damn floral scent that she’s wearing.

Inhaling, I force myself to concentrate on her question. Any news? No, there is not any fucking news. “I’ve been told to expect arrests by Monday.” A detail that I both dread and wish for. I need this to be over. No. I need it to be over with Rebecca alive—and I know that’s not going to happen.

“Oh,” she says softly, sounding a bit awkward as she adds, “Then they’ve found something for sure.”

“Yes,” I agree, finishing off the scotch in my glass. “They’ve found something.”

I don’t look at her. I didn’t want to bring her here tonight. Not when I’m so unlike my normal self—-and yet, somehow, I needed her here.

“I’m glad you took me up on my offer to run the gallery so you can be with your family,” she says as I reach for the bottle of scotch. “Your mother is going to be happy.”

I pause mid-pour and set down the bottle to look at her. “She’s dying. She’s not happy.”

Her hand comes down on my arm, and I feel the kick in my blood, the burn under my skin. “She’s not going to die,” she vows vehemently, her fingers digging into my arm. She adds in a hissed whisper, “Don’t say she’s going to die.”

I don’t remove her hand, even though I let no one touch me without permission. “You really care about my mother.”

“Yes,” she whispers, her hand loosening and falling away. “Sorry. I just—I don’t—she can’t and . . . I can’t think any other way.”

I feel the absence like a cold blast in the warm spot it had once been, and I want it back. I hand her my glass. “Have a drink.”

She ignores the glass and glances at the bottle I’ve managed to do substantial damage to in the hour that I’ve been waiting for her. “Was that bottle full when you started?”

My cock throbs with the soft rasp of her voice and how much that I want her when I have a long list of reasons not to touch her, most important among them her attachment to my mother. I consume my scotch before I answer with, “Yes. It was full. I don’t make a habit of drinking, but tonight’s an exception.” I refill my glass and offer it to her again. “Your turn.”

She crosses her arms in front of what I know to be gorgeous, high, full breasts with perky little pink nipples that I shouldn’t be thinking about having in my mouth, but I am. “I don’t think drinking with you is a good idea, Mark.”

My lips quirk. “You’re thinking too much. Scotch will set you free.”

“So the answer’s losing control?”

I set the drink on her knee, my gaze sweeping the exposed area where her skirt has risen a few inches up her thigh. “Isn’t that what you told me at the club?” I ask, my eyes lifting to hers.

“Yes, but that was me—not something I expect uttered from your lips. Who are you? That doesn’t sound like the Mark Compton I know.”

She’s right, which drives home how wrong everything in my life is tonight. “I don’t have a fucking clue right now.” And it’s as terrifying as her visibly blanching and looking as stunned as I feel by the admission that I didn’t mean to make.

Two beats, maybe three pass, and I hear them in the speeding up of my heart before she reaches down and closes her hand over my hand and the glass. Touching me in a way that I let no one touch me; no one but her. What is it about this woman? It has to be the timing—the things I’m involved with and her intimate knowledge that no one else has of those matters.

She downs the drink and sets the glass on the table, and somehow I know that she’s made the choice to level the playing field. Ironic, since everything I do as a Master is to always have an upper hand. But not her. She’s volunteered to be vulnerable, when she’s refused to be submissive.

She turns back to me, her fingers curling on my cheek, evoking primal need, and I don’t try to hide it from her. I don’t try to hide anything from her, when I usually pride myself on being unreadable. Not now. Now I am on the edge of some high cliff and I’m about to dive into piranha-infested waters. And for reasons I can’t begin to understand, she’s all that stands between it and me.

“Guilt,” she whispers. “You feel guilty over everything. Not being there for your mother. Not saving Rebecca. I don’t know what else. And guilt is normal—but if you let it, it’ll destroy you.”

The words expose more than my internal battles. They expose the hint of heartache in the depths of her blue eyes, the touch of regret in her voice.

“What do you know of guilt?”

Her expression goes blank, a method of control to shield herself from what she doesn’t want seen. She tries to pull her hand back but I grab it, holding it to me. “What do you know of guilt?” I demand again softly.

“Enough to know it when I see it in someone else.” Her voice holds the slightest tremble. “And it’s bleeding from every pore of you.”

I turn away from her, my hand sliding through my hair, an open sign of frustration that isn’t who I am. I reach for the booze and my gaze lands on the television, where the screen flashes yet again with a view of police vehicles in front of a Muir Beach sign. How many fucking times are they going to show that scene? I refill the glass, wishing I could go to the beach myself and get answers, even though my attorney forbids it.

Crystal scoots to the edge of the sofa beside me, bringing our knees together, and we both freeze.

My hand closes over her knee and I hold it there, telling myself not to go further. She doesn’t deserve to be in the firestorm inside my head right now. Yet my hand is telling her not to move away. She’s in the middle of this hell, close to my family. Close to me in some way that I can’t get my head around. In a way I’d been on the verge of allowing Rebecca to get.

That thought delivers a punch of guilt and I let go of her leg, my head swimming in booze and piranhas, the emotions I’ve denied scraping away at my heart and soul, one right after the other.

I swallow the booze and refill the glass. Crystal takes it from me and drinks a small portion before handing it back to me, her fingers brushing mine. I grind my teeth, fighting my need to rip her clothes away and bury myself inside of her. Sex is how I deal with things, but sex has to be my way—and right now, nothing I do is my way.

“She was my submissive,” I say, needing her to understand just how deep the waters are that she’s treading.

“I pieced that together after I was at the club.”

The club, where we’d ended up naked and I’d wanted her to the point of being wild with need, out of control. It defies reason how she manages to be here every time the axis tips for me. How and why that happens is as gray as everything else in my mind, the weight of the booze weaving through my thoughts, clouding my judgment.

This wasn’t smart. Drinking and bringing her here. It’s as if I invited her to see me in the most screwed up of ways. My jaw clenches, muscles tense. My mind might be numb, but my body is one big live nerve ending. I’m coming out of my skin. I’m going insane. I did this. I created the monster that is Ava and now I want to torment Crystal by using her to deal with the guilt.

I need to move. I need something before I lose my mind, and I try to push to my feet. Crystal’s hand closes over my arm, stilling me.

Concern is etched in her eyes, and I hunger for her in this moment in a way I have never hungered for anyone before. My hand tangles in her hair and I drag her mouth to mine. “I am bad for you,” I say. “I’m—”

“Wrong for me. Using me. I know—and I don’t care. But use me to deal with the guilt—not to create more.”

“Why would you willingly do this?” I need to know that she’s in the right place, that I’m not going to hurt her, too.

Her hand settles on my chest, over my heart that I know is thundering. “Because,” she says, her voice even, confident, “sometimes what someone is going through speaks to you on a level you can’t ignore. And because of that, people who’re completely wrong for each other are completely right in a certain moment in time. Like us right now.”

I’m kissing her before she finishes her last words, my mouth slanting over hers, my tongue licking against hers in a hot stroke, followed by another. Turning her onto the couch, I lay her down, resting on top of her, and I’m no longer thinking about all the reasons this is wrong or the way it’s nothing like what I normally want or need. But I do need. I need this woman here, now, and with the kind of abandon I rarely allow myself. No amount of booze will stop how deep the burn runs. How intense the rush of desire.

This moment. This woman. It’s what I need. She is what I need.

Mark

I all but tear off Crystal’s blouse, ready to have her naked, to be inside her. Impatiently, I shove down her bra, exposing her pretty pink nipples, stroking them with my thumbs. She moans and I feel that sound in the thickening of my cock, the heating of my blood. I caress her skirt up and over the lace of her thigh-highs, spreading her legs and ripping away her panties.

She gasps, her hands pressing to my shoulders with a reprimand. “I liked that pair, damn it. That’s twice you’ve done that to me. Stop it.”

“I’ll buy you a new pair,” I promise, settling my hips snugly between her thighs, my tongue lapping at her nipple, teasing it to a stiff peak. “I’ll buy you a hundred pairs.” I reach beneath her and work to free the clasp to her bra at her back, ready to be rid of anything that stands between her body and mine. I pull it down and away from her, cupping her breasts in my hands.

She, in turn, cups my face in her hands, leveling me in a stare. “I’ll buy my own,” she says, and the message in that declaration is clearly not about her panties. It’s about independence, about her unwillingness to belong to me. While I should revel in the freedom this gives me, some part of me rebels.

I answer her with a kiss, a hot, possessive claiming that says she is mine, right here, in “our moment” as she’d called it, and there is nothing else. She knows, too. I feel the way she stiffens, the way her fingers lift from my shoulders, but her palms stay. As if she can’t force her hands away from me, but her mind is screaming she should. Her resistance is fleeting, and with a low moan, she wraps her arms around my neck and clings to me. Her fingers find my hair, a soft touch that is enticing and erotic and when her leg wraps mine, hips lifting, pelvis pressing into my thick erection, the rise of desire in me is swift and intense. Everything else fades but her, and how she tastes and feels. I’m suddenly hotter, harder, out of my mind with need for this woman the same way I had been the night we were together in the club. This is not who I am, but I don’t care. This is exactly what she’d said—a moment in time when what’s normally wrong is right.

It’s all I can do to tear my mouth from hers to undress, and I intend to stand but only make it to my knees and she follows me, rising to hers as well. I pause, my gaze raking over her high, full breasts, fingers tugging on her nipples. She moans, biting her lip, and damn, I want to bite it, too. Tentatively, her delicate little fingers find my tie, and the very fact that I’m not grabbing it and using it to tie her up is a statement about where my head is, and that is nowhere familiar. She starts unbuttoning my shirt and I reach forward and unzip her skirt. A frenzied rush of movement follows as we both undress.