Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Especially if he turns into a beast, a voice whispered in my head, sending a shiver of mingled fear and need rocketing through my body.
Only if he turns into the firm-handed, arrogant, demanding beast a girl like you needs.
“Hi,” I said when I had walked, a little awkward in my heels, across the lobby to meet him. Christian hadn’t moved a muscle; he had just kept watching me.
“Hi, Rebel,” he replied, and then he put his hand behind my head, careful—it felt like—not to disturb the fragile chignon into which I had painstakingly arranged it, following instructions in a video someone on the forums had linked. He tilted my face and then held it still as my eyes went wide and my lips parted. Then he kissed me.
It probably won’t last very long, I tried to tell myself, but that kiss seemed to say something very different. Christian put his hand on my hip, his fingers curling down to take gentle but possessive hold of my left bottom cheek, and he moved his mouth softly on mine at first, and then more firmly. My whole body seemed to melt in his grasp, and his muscular frame seemed to respond, his hold on me tightening, his tongue penetrating further into my mouth as if he meant to teach me to receive him properly however he chose to enter me.
I whimpered up into his mouth, acknowledging my sponsor’s instruction. If he had bent me over there in the lobby, raised my dress, lowered my panties, and taken me along the shameful, narrow path he meant to claim tonight, I would have humbly grasped my ankles and murmured my submission even as I cried out my discomfort.
Instead, he broke the kiss, and took me to dinner.
CHAPTER 32
Leah
The kind of restaurant Christian took me to had existed in my world only as a fantasy, or a movie scene. The phrase tasting menu had seemed like a thing that even people who lived in LA and New York only experienced if they won the lottery. As I bit into something the waiter called an amuse-bouche (I looked it up later) and tasted mushroom and bacon that somehow turned into a cloud, I felt like I had done much better than winning the lottery.
I took a sip of the champagne Christian had ordered and looked down at the remaining half of the tiny thing in the tiny, elegant cup. I felt my lips turn down in a pout because only a single bite was left. I glanced over at the champagne and my frown deepened; for an expensive restaurant it seemed like they only poured a thimbleful of the delicious golden elixir.
Across the table, Christian chuckled.
“Pace yourself, Leah,” he said. “I promise you’ll be perfectly full when we leave.”
I looked up at him. The warmth flowed into my cheeks, and not because of the inexperience I couldn’t help showing or the looks we had gotten from several middle-aged couples as the maître-d’ had led us to our table though both those things had their role to play in this glamorous part of my shameful fairytale.
The expression on Christian’s face, though, brought on my blush much more urgently. I could see a deep contentment in his eyes, which made their hungry, burning quality even more striking. He knew he had me. He had purchased me as a prized possession, and he knew precisely how he meant to use me, tonight and for the foreseeable future.
The next course arrived, this one a morsel of a white fish so perfectly cut and browned in a buttery sauce that it seemed like a work of art. The piece was a little bigger than the mushroom bacon cloud thing, and it came with another thimbleful of wine, its color a pale yellow.
I looked across it at Christian, working up my courage to say something. That look in his eyes—the way it seemed to me to have something in it about days to come, an indefinite but perhaps not an endless state of sexual servitude to the man who had begun to keep me in luxury—brought hesitant words near to my lips, but at the same time it made them nearly impossible to say.
It probably won’t last very long.
“Sir,” I said quietly. I felt desperate to make sure Christian knew that I knew how to address him properly—but also the heat in my cheeks started to mount higher, prickling into my scalp. I glanced nervously at a table to our right, wondering if the haughty-looking woman there had heard me call an older man sir.
“Yes?” Christian asked, smiling warmly.
“I…” I started. The smile faded a little from my sponsor’s face, and his eyes narrowed. I felt the strange rapport that had seemed to exist between us from the beginning—maybe even before the beginning, I thought, feeling yet more blood rush into my face, when he had watched me play with myself for the camera.