Hidden Desires Read online

  I crawled in and got under the covers, which he pulled up and over me, until he noticed that I was damp.

  "You can't sleep like this. You'll catch your death."

  I snickered. "You soun' like my mother. And that is not a compliment."

  "I think that's the first time anyone has ever told me I sounded like their mother," he replied, and I knew he was laughing at me, but I didn't care because he was lifting me out of bed to put me on his lap—facing him, for once—as he divested me of my robe and the wet towel beneath it, then reached for the nightgown I kept on the end of my bed and dressed me in it as if I was a four-year-old.

  I tried to stop him, but my efforts were uncoordinated at best, so they were even more completely useless and ineffectual than usual against him, except for the one time my hand—which wasn't even aiming for him—managed to smack him across the face.

  He froze, and so did I, but then he simply continued tucking me into bed.

  As soon as I rolled onto my side, it slipped out of me without my even really thinking it. "You hurt me."

  I heard him draw in a breath, and he responded by bending over me, making me feel surrounded by him—his warmth, his body and strength, and even the love that I knew he didn't dare to voice to me.

  "I know. I guess I'll have to find a way to make it up to you, won't I?" He kissed my cheek and I childishly brushed it off. "Go to sleep."

  "You're not the boss of me," I sassed back, wanting to hurt him like he'd hurt me.

  The covers were stripped off me in one movement as he sat down next to my butt, putting his arm around my waist and using the other to haul my nightie up to expose my rear end. As soon as he did, that hand commenced to spanking me very thoroughly, and, as drunk as I was, I was entirely unable to keep from voicing my distress very vociferously.

  I was saved by the bell—or rather the knock. Not on the door, but on the ruined sash that should have contained it.

  He straightened my nightgown, smoothing it down over my calves, then pulled the covers back over me. His mouth at my ear growled, "I am the boss of you, even if my name was really Goldilocks, and you'd best never forget it, young lady."

  Then he made his way to the gentleman who had come with the door in the middle of the night. Wealth had its privileges, not that I was going to complain about it, considering it was his fault that it had gotten broken in the first place.

  Just as I was falling asleep, I heard him chatting with the guy, who commented something to the effect of, "Someone's in trouble, huh?"

  Oh, dear Lord. He heard me caterwauling as I was being spanked. Lovely.

  Quint—Dart—whoever the fuck he was—chuckled, and I hated that I loved that sound. "Yes, very."

  "It's good for a man to have the upper hand in a relationship with a woman."

  The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was him agreeing, "As long as he loves her, I couldn't agree more."

  I WOKE SLOWLY, feeling more refreshed than I should have, considering how much wine I'd had and how little food—chocolates notwithstanding. I peered around and there didn't seem to be any sign of him, so I chose to believe that he had decided to go elsewhere to lick his wounds. Timbuktu sounded nice.

  My bladder was harassing me, so I got up and made it to the bathroom without incident, but just as I was sitting down to do my business, guess who showed up in the doorway.

  Entirely my fault, of course. I had to learn to remember to close the damned doors, especially when there was a good chance I wasn't alone.

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Fantabulous. Now get the fuck out of my house."

  His eyebrow rose and I had already long since learned that was not a good sign in him.

  But I didn't have to worry about that any more, did I?

  Or did I? The butt I was sitting on wasn't pain free, by any means, and I remembered him spanking me last night.

  Well, that was it. That was the last time.

  He hadn't budged an inch, of course.

  "You heard me," I warned, pointing the way towards the front door much more steadily than I had the night before.

  Both eyebrows. A really, really not good sign.

  Sighing, I conceded defeat, for the moment. "At the very least, get out of the bathroom—I have to pee."

  He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the door jamb, back to one expressive eyebrow near his hairline.

  "You really are a son of a bitch, you know?" I said, rubbing my forehead.

  That got me a deep, throaty warning. "Watch what you call me, Tawna."

  "Fuck you, Dart Quinton Palmer McQueen, or whoever the fuck you are today." I was too tired to say it with much animosity, but that didn't seem to make a difference to him in the least.

  Oh, shit. The jaw tic.

  He shouldered away from the door and I thought—hoped—for the merest of seconds—that he was finally going to do as I told him to. But, instead, he began to walk towards me and it was then that I realized that I shouldn't have been poking the bear without having an escape route that didn't involve having to try to go through him. He hunkered down in front of me, reaching out to part my knees and boldly press his fingers against me.

  "I get that you're hurt; you have every right to be. I'm truly sorry to have hurt you; it was not my intention. However, if you think that this changes anything between us, you are going to be very sorely mistaken." Quin—Dart leaned towards me, his head next to mine, but he didn't try to kiss me. Instead, he whispered, "Very sorely mistaken indeed, because you are just as much mine as you were before."

  He squeezed my privates hard, then pulled his hand away and sat back on the floor of the bathroom, facing me.

  "Go away! I have to pee!" I whined.

  But he simply sat there and shook his head slowly back and forth. "If you need to go, you can go in front of me. A sub has no secrets from her dom."

  "Yeah, but a dom can have very important ones from his sub, huh?" I snarled, because I thought my bladder was going to burst.

  He didn't say anything, just leaned over a bit in the small room to turn on the faucet.

  "Turn it off, turn it off, please!"

  Tears were beginning to run down my cheeks because of how badly I needed to go, and he pried both of my hands away from my face to hold them in his. "It's important that you go when you need to, my darling." I rolled my eyes at his use of the endearment and got a deep rumble for my efforts. "And whether I'm here or not shouldn't make any difference to you. Now relax." He was using his most hypnotic voice. He had been able to help me through things with that voice, to bring me places I never expected to go.

  It was like magic, soothing me, reminding me that he would take care of me and that it was okay to let go and trust him to do so.

  And even though he'd shattered my trust into millions of pieces, I still responded to it in the way I had learned to over the past months—there wasn't anywhere I could go, nothing I could do to stop him, anyway—as always—and I did have an atrocious need.

  Holding his hands, looking into his eyes while I did something so elemental was very moving somehow—much more so than I wanted it to be.

  When I was finished, he got up and left, but he didn't close the door behind him.

  I took my time joining him in the kitchen, taking a quick shower, then getting fully dressed—granted in slobbish clothes, but then, I wasn't going to dress for him, was I?

  He didn't seem to notice in the least, anyway—he never really did. He complimented when I looked good, and he complimented me when I looked horrendous, damn him! Why couldn't he be a shallow idiot like most men?

  Well, he was a liar.

  I stood—awkwardly, in my own home—near the snack bar. He put a plate of toast down in front of the nearest chair and said, "Have some of that. You don't have to eat all of it, but it would do you good to have something on your tummy to sop up whatever remains of the alcohol in your system." He put a cup of coffee down—adulterated just the way he knew I l
iked it—next to it. "The caffeine'll help, too."

  "I'm not hungry," I said stubbornly, but when he took a step towards me—nothing more, not even saying anything—I skittered to the chair, pissed that he could still do that to me.

  He had a cup himself, watching me indulgently.

  As soon as I took a bite of the lightly buttered toast, my stomach began to feel better.

  I hated it when he was right, especially now, when he was so inherently, completely wrong.

  I finished a slice and a half of the toast, and he ate the rest. He was a big man, but his appetite always amazed me. He could eat me into the ground.

  In more ways than one.

  It was almost eerily quiet—which it never was with us, unless I was gagged, and even then, what he was doing to me was usually enough to make me squeal and moan and whimper, at the very least. But we were always talking and laughing—we had quickly found that we were very compatible on a lot of levels, and I'd always enjoyed spending time with him.

  Until now.

  "I'm feeling much better now. You can go." I kept my remarks calm and casual, as if he was a good friend who had come over to take care of me but whose services were no longer needed.

  He didn't just chuckle at that; he laughed. "Very nice try."

  Suddenly, I found myself in his arms, and he strode over to the couch to sit down with me on his lap, holding me tightly in case I should decide to bolt.

  I was certainly thinking about it, but what I was thinking about more was the fact that I could feel the bulge in his pants beneath my rear as it grew, simply because I was sitting on it. I responded to him like no other man ever in my life, but he also had few defenses against me, even when I definitely wasn't trying.

  "I want to apologize again for having deceived you. I grew up in this town, left home, made my fortune in computers, but money—and fame—was never what I wanted. For me, it's the challenge—trying to figure something out, solve the puzzle, conquer the problem. I was looking for a way to get out of the public eye, so when my parents died, I inherited the house, and—especially since I'd always been a kind of loner kid and I wasn't very popular—no one really knew me here anymore, so I became Quinton—which is my middle name—Palmer, which was my mother's maiden name. I keep to myself—I telecommute when I have to and travel only when I absolutely cannot avoid it. I live quietly and without ostentation, and I was pretty happy.

  "But alone. Until I met you."

  I sat quietly, listening to his story, until he mentioned me, at which point I began to struggle—which, as always, was quickly, ruthlessly subdued until I was completely immobile. He wasn't hurting me in the least, but I was completely immobile.

  "I occasionally have a drink at a bar, just because I live such a solitary life otherwise, sometimes it's nice to go watch a game with other folks, to just be around other people every once in a while." His voice lowered so that I could barely hear it. "And then I saw you. You were having so much fun with your friend—it was your laugh that drew me to you. I watched you for a little while, getting drunker and drunker, obviously not feeling in the least concerned about your safety, and I saw a man approach you and got worried someone might poach you, so I introduced myself—which I haven't done in a bar in decades—not since college—and it didn't go nearly as well then as it did this time, believe me."

  His fingers stroked slowly up and down my neck. "I got you away from Carla a bit and—the things you were saying to me had me blushing—"

  I cringed. "Dear God, please shut up."

  "They weren't really sexual—you were telling me how perfectly I fit your fantasy of a man."

  Instead of trying to get away from him, I surprised him by leaning into his neck so that my eyes were covered. I didn't want to see or hear anything else. "I'm never going to take another drink again as long as I live."

  "And then, on the way home—and at home, Lord knows—you were quite verbose about what your needs were."

  I remembered what he'd told me once he'd found me again, and it was embarrassing enough the first time around.

  "Stop, stop, stop—please!" I put my hand over his mouth.

  Wrong move.

  Very wrong move.

  He caught my hand and held it to his lips, kissing it with supreme gentleness. "You've said that I was perfect for you—well, you're perfect for me. You're literally everything I want in a woman. And anything I don't want, I can train out."

  "No, you cannot. You're not that man anymore. You're Dart McQueen, billionaire philanthropist, computer genius extraordinaire, who could date anyone—" I didn't like the way this was going, so I allowed myself to be distracted. "How'd you end up being named 'Dart', anyway? Was it supposed to be 'Bart' and someone made a typo?"

  "No, it was something much more mundane than that. My mom was a fan of darts, and she spent a reasonable amount of time in the same bar in which we met before she met my father. He loved her dearly and would have let her name me Mud if she had wanted to."

  "It sounds like part of a name—like D'Artagnan. Or Dartmouth."

  He groaned.

  "Or Darton Abbey."

  "Very, very bad."

  It was entirely too warm and comfortable in his arms. A girl could get used to it.

  I should get up and escort him to the door. I should, at the very least, get up.

  Long moments went by with me snuggled against his broad warmth.

  He seemed to hesitate a bit, but then said, "You mentioned my money."

  "Yeah. Don't most people?"

  He chuckled. "Yeah, that was part of the problem. When you're a rich nerd, people only see dollar signs when they look at you."

  I snorted. "You might be a nerd, and you might be rich, but you're also fucking gorgeous. You're an atypical nerd in that."

  He shrugged. "I never really see myself that way—I think I told you once before that I didn't attain my full height until very late—my early twenties. And I didn't really fill out until I got a personal trainer in my mid-twenties."

  Carefully keeping my hands to myself, I said, "Well, whenever it was, you did fill out nicely. Can't argue with that."

  Quint hesitated, which was very unlike him. "Is there anything you want? I can give you pretty much anything you want—cars, an island, a sports team."

  Astonished, I sat up and looked at him. "Are you trying to bribe me into continuing to see you?"

  I found myself instantly dropped—gently, so that my knees were on the carpet and I was held between his legs, up against that hardness that had burgeoned beneath me. "No, I figure I'm not going to allow you to push me away, anyway. But if there's something you really want, I'm feeling guilty enough that I'll get it for you." His smile turned devilish as he threaded his fingers through my hair to bring me to him for a long, deep kiss. "Even just considering the things I've done to you in our relatively short acquaintance, I owe you."

  "Lovely—now I'm a prostitute. Keep talking, asshole."

  My eyes were brought to his. "That's not what I meant and you know it. I'm serious. What do you want?"

  I stretched, arching into him and adoring it when his breath hissed loudly in through his clenched teeth. "I would give just about anything right now for another cup of coffee."

  His smile was more than reward enough, making him look almost boyish. He had already succeeded in worming his way into my good graces, but if there was a Lamborghini in the offing because he was feeling guilty, who was I to deny him the ability to do penance?

  When he handed me a fresh cup and took the same position he'd been in before, he reached out to stroke my hair. "I mean it. What do you want?"

  "World peace? And end to poverty?"

  He glared at me, but I was unfazed. "I have multiple foundations set up to work on both of those problems. But what do you want?"

  I shrugged. "Nothing, really. I'm quite comfortable and relatively happy. My needs are relatively simple."

  Dart kissed my fingertips with infinite care, keeping my ey
es on his. "What about love?"

  I opened my eyes wide. "You can buy love? I guess the Beatles were wrong—"

  Seconds later, I was beneath him. "Have I told you lately how much of a brat you are? And how much I'm going to enjoy correcting that behavior, each and every time it rears its ugly head?"

  CHAPTER 7

  I did allow him to make it up to me—but not by buying me anything. I think he would have preferred that. What I made him give me was much harder for him to do than if I'd been shallow enough to ask for that Lamborghini.

  I told him that, if he wanted me to forgive him—and I'd been ballsy enough to mention that it was nowhere near as much of a given as he would like to think it was—that I wanted something I knew wouldn't be easy for him to give me.

  He hadn't looked at all happy at that idea, but I was enjoying a rare position of power over him, and although I knew it wouldn't be prudent to push him too much, I did let it go to my head a bit, to my detriment.

  My extreme detriment.

  I couldn't quite look at him as I said it, so I looked at the thick column of his neck instead. "I want to extend the no sex rule."

  He'd gone stiff as a board, as if his entire body was rejecting the idea physically. I could feel him working his hips even further between my legs and felt that all too familiar part of him bearing down on me—stiffer, as it was, even, than the rest of him.

  "You can't be serious."

  My eyebrows rose, and I fought the urge to waggle them. "Oh, can't I?"

  "No sex at all? For how long?"

  I shrugged. "I don't think I can put a time limit on how much you hurt me." I might have been being a bit overly dramatic, but he definitely had hurt me. Hence the attempt to drown myself in bad chardonnay and cheap chocolate.

  He sighed heavily, then closed his eyes for a very long time and I wondered if he was going to sleep, although he was too tense for that. When he opened them again, I could see that his jaw was clenched fit to break and his words could barely make it through his teeth. "I agree."

  I couldn't believe my ears. I just couldn't. Perhaps I should go for no punishments, while I was at it?