7. Ivan

7

IVAN

I ’m so turned on that I can barely fucking think.

A part of me feels utterly insane for letting that woman leave without asking her to do anything to me. I could have asked for anything, and she would probably have done it; she was so drunk on pleasure after I went down on her. I’m pretty sure she was telling the truth about men having never made her come before. That orgasm—both of them—felt like a lifetime of pent-up desire flooding my tongue all at once.

It was one of the most erotic things I’ve ever felt. The way she gave herself over to it, not believing me when I told her what I could do to her, but willing to give it a chance anyway. The way she moved under me, the way she tasted, the sounds of her gasps and moans, and at the end?—

The way she fucking screamed for me.

I would have committed terrible crimes to see her on her knees, flushed from two orgasms, her lips swollen and wet, wrapped around my aching cock. I would do worse to hear what other sounds she might make while I fuck her. To find out what she feels like, hot and wet and tight, fluttering around my cock. Truthfully, I don’t know why I didn’t keep her here to find out. She was more than willing. And I’m not a self-sacrificing kind of person. I’m not even a good man. Not the kind of man who gives up his own pleasure for the sake of others.

But I meant what I said to her tonight. Something about her cut me to the bone, touched things inside of me that I thought were long cold and dead. She deserves what I gave her—a night of pleasure that was only about her, that demanded nothing in return. She deserves to know what that feels like, to be selfish about her own needs. To take without having to give anything back. She’s a woman who clearly has never gotten to be selfish in her life, especially in the bedroom.

Her comment about men always going soft after they went down on her made me see red—both because no man should ever be anything other than rock-fucking-hard after going down on a woman, particularly one like that—and also because the thought of any other man touching her sent a wave of possessiveness through me that I’ve never felt in my life before.

I’ve never felt that for a woman. My love life has been a string of casual girlfriends like Alice, one-night-stands, and the entirely anonymous encounters I’ve had here at Masquerade. I’ve never wanted to keep any of them. Never wanted to make anyone mine . But the thought of any other man teaching her all of the myriad ways that she can both receive and give pleasure that’s clearly beyond her wildest dreams makes me feel murderous.

Which is yet another reason why I’m not a good man—because my telling her to leave without reciprocating wasn’t entirely the altruistic gesture I made it out to be.

She won’t be reciprocating tonight, but she will in the future. Because I have every intention of finding out who she is.

And I’m going to make sure no other man touches her until I decide if she really is going to be mine.

My cock throbs painfully at that thought, reminding me of my frustrated desire, of how long I’ve been hard without relief. I reach down, undoing my belt with one swift motion and tugging down my zipper, and my cock springs free instantly, jutting up stiffly.

For a moment, I consider taking off my gloves. But the leather is still soaked with her arousal, the sweet scent of her on my hand, and I want her all over me. I want to jerk off with her wetness still soaked into my fingers.

I feel myself throb again at that, pre-cum spilling down my shaft, and I let out a sharp hiss of breath as I wrap my hand around my shaft, my own arousal enough that I don’t need to find where they keep the lube in this room. I’ve been dripping for what feels like hours now, soaking my boxer briefs the entire time that I was going down on my mystery woman.

Mine . The thought beats incessantly inside my head, again and again, a mantra as I slide my hand up and down my aching shaft. I close my eyes, leaning my head back as I surrender to the pleasure, to the feeling of slick leather against my hard cock, breathing in the scent of her mingled with my own arousal now.

I’m going to find her. I’m going to find out who she is outside of this place. She’s been neglected in every way, treated as disposable, but I’m going to change that. And once she wants me outside of this place, I’m going to show her how she should have been treated all along.

I’m going to teach her what she deserves from a man.

My palm slides over my swollen cockhead, and I hiss again with pleasure, my back arching as I thrust up into my hand. I let my imagination take over, picturing her kneeling between my legs, her mouth, the wet tightness encircling my cock. I imagine her in my lap, that velvet dress pushed up to her hips again, taking my length over and over. Grinding against me, coming on my cock. Screaming out my name.

I no longer want anonymity, when it comes to this woman. All I want is her.

The orgasm hits me hard, fast, and messy, my cock going taut and solid in my fist as the heat explodes at the base of my spine and rockets upwards, cum bursting over my fingers as I stroke myself through it. My mouth falls open, a hoarse groan filling the air as I fuck my fist hard, cupping my other palm over my cockhead as I thrust up into it, filling my hands.

Her wetness mingled with my cum, soaking my fingers. The thought sends one more burst of pleasure through me, a last jet of my release arcing into my palm, and I shudder, moaning as the feeling recedes.

I can’t wait to come inside her. Inside every part of her. I squeeze my cock, hips thrusting once more, and then I strip off my leather gloves, tossing them into the closed receptacle that’s in the room for such things. I have a spare pair tucked into my pocket, and I tug them on, still conscious of not wanting anyone else downstairs to see my tattoos. I don’t want to be identifiable here.

I realize that makes me a hypocrite, considering what I plan to do. But I don’t even want her to know that the man she’s going to meet is the one who made her come so hard tonight with his tongue.

I want no preconceived notions from her. No knowledge of me, until she’s already fallen.

Standing up, I tuck myself back into my trousers, my mind clearer. And that’s the most obvious sign that my plan is one that I need to follow through on. Because even now, in the wake of my own orgasm, my lust satisfied for the moment, I can’t get her out of my head.

—

I wait, for the entirety of my trip home, for that feeling to fade. For me to realize that those feelings of obsession, of possessiveness, were born of intense arousal and nothing more. But she’s still in my head when I park the car, when I unlock my front door, and when I slip into the secret house that I consider my real home. Not my family’s mansion, or the apartment I keep in the city.

The space that is only my own.

It feels like I won’t even be able to sleep until I know who she is. I leave the house dark, tossing my gloves onto the kitchen bar as I stalk to the door that leads down to the basement, able to find it easily, even in the darkness. I know every inch of this place intimately. I could walk through it in utter blackness, and never run into anything.

This is my lair. My place. The only thing I have that is entirely my own.

But soon, maybe, I’ll have something else, too. Something to follow what I’ve already won tonight.

I can still taste her on my lips. The thought has me half-hard as I walk down the stairs into the neon glow of my basement, settling down into the leather chair, and I reach down to adjust my rapidly swelling cock. I shrug off my suit jacket, draping it over a stack of boxes as I shove my sleeves up to my elbows, ignoring the steady throb of desire in my groin as I log onto one of my computers.

I was the first man to ever make her come like that. The thought makes me groan as I start the process of hacking into the Masquerade’s clientele list. At this rate, I’m going to need to get myself off again in order to be able to sleep tonight.

It’s not easy, hacking into it. Whoever built their system did an excellent job of making sure that anyone like me who wanted to find out information about the people who go there would have a difficult time of it. It would take someone exceedingly skilled to get in.

Fortunately, I’m exactly that.

Once I’m in, I give a cursory glance at the photos as I scroll by. All I need is to find her. I have no intention of violating anyone else’s privacy—my curiosity doesn’t extend that far. I don’t care who else avails themselves of the anonymous pleasures that Masquerade offers. All I care about is knowing who the woman with me tonight was.

Even though she was wearing a mask when I saw her, I recognize her bare face as soon as I see it in the picture. I recognize her mouth, her delicate chin, and the waves of dark hair falling around her face. Someone else, someone less trained in perception, might not pick her out. Might wonder if they had the right woman. But I know it’s her.

Charlotte Williams.

Even her name sounds elegant. Restrained. The kind of woman taught to keep her desires under wraps, to deny herself the things she wants, to expect perfection of herself but no one else.

But I want her unrestrained. Messy. Selfish. And tonight was the first twist of the combination that will eventually unlock her to me completely.

All I need is her name. From there, it’s painfully easy to uncover everything about her that I could possibly want to know. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to find a good deal of it just from a few quick Internet searches, but with my ability to hack into records and dig deeper, I can find out as much as I want.

She’s twenty-seven. Graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in computer sciences. She has a handful of advanced coding classes under her belt—not enough for her to be anywhere near the level of skill that I have with computers, but enough that I’ll need to be careful if I want to tamper with her devices in any way, or keep an eye on her electronically. She works at a major company in their IT department—a job that she’s definitely overqualified for. She could do much better for herself, if she wanted to. If she had the confidence.

Or maybe it’s that asshole ex of hers that was convincing her that she didn’t need to do better, so that he could feel like the bigger man in the relationship. I do a little digging on him, too. Nathaniel Lake, thirty-two, an up-and-coming lawyer for a big Chicago firm. Corporate law, nothing noble or high-minded. I find an active membership at one of the other sex clubs in the city, and my jaw tightens, anger heating my blood.

So she was telling the truth. Her ex is a cheating son-of-a-bitch who never gave her an orgasm while going out and doing all the “disrespectful” things he wanted in bed with other women. That anger fuels me, and I do something that I rarely do for personal reasons.

I start to dig deeper into Nathaniel Lake.

A hack into his cell phone provider gets me a string of recent texts, a lot of them from a woman named Valerie, as well as a few others, all of them filthy. Full of fantasies that I can tell just from having spent a couple of hours with Charlotte that he never told her about.

I’m willing to bet that she would have tried a lot of them, if he’d ever asked. But once again, I’m not a good man—because despite the obvious emotional damage that this has done, I’m glad he never asked her.

That means that I’m going to get to be the one to introduce her to all the things she wants but has never known to ask for. The one who is going to teach her what it means to come from my tongue on her until she truly can’t take any more. What it feels like to come on my cock while I fuck her in all the ways that she’s been told she shouldn’t be fucked. What it feels like to suck me off because she’s desperate to taste me, not because she’s been told she’s supposed to.

Just the thought has me rock-hard, throbbing painfully as if I didn’t already come once tonight. I reach for my zipper, drawing out my aching erection as I start to stroke myself in the neon glow of my screens.

And the whole time, I’m thinking of all the ways that I’m going to ruin Charlotte Williams for any other man.

—

Monday morning, I put my hastily assembled plan into action. The smarter thing to do would be to put off meeting her in person, giving myself time to meticulously plan out how I’m going to do this. But the truth is that I can’t wait. I spent the remainder of the weekend unable to get her out of my head, constantly at least half-aroused and frustrated as hell with the memories of her spread out on that velvet bed for me. I woke up this morning from dreams of her, couldn’t get out of bed until I’d made myself come again to thoughts of her, got hard in the shower just imagining her there with me. I need to see her again, with a near-desperation that’s beyond anything I’ve ever felt before.

It would be alarming, if I could keep my thoughts straight long enough to really let that sink in.

I already know where she works. Figuring out a way to ‘run into her’ was as easy as hacking into her bank records. Unsurprisingly, she has a tendency to frequent the same cafe for lunch a few times a week. I have no idea if she’ll be there today, but I’m prepared to stake it out every day until she is.

Hopefully, she’ll be alone.

The way I dress for the day is just a different kind of mask. When I’m left to my own devices, I prefer comfortable t-shirts and black jeans or cargo pants. When I go to the Masquerade, with my faux-British accent and all my defining features covered, I wear a tailored suit. On occasion, for family events that I can’t get out of, I do the same.

Today, I need to be the kind of man who could sit down to lunch with Charlotte Williams as she is day to day. Not the kind of man she met at the club last night, and definitely not who I really am.

I dig out a pair of dark brown chinos and a heathered, cream-colored henley shirt. Classy enough to look like a man of her social status out to lunch, not so overdressed that I might remind her of Nate—or of the man she met at the club last night. Despite all of my efforts to conceal my identity there, she has seen part of my face. I can’t discount the possibility that she might suspect me, if she saw me dressed the way I was there.

That’s not something I’m willing to risk.

Besides, I’m used to slipping into different identities. I do it online all of the time. Doing it in reality is only slightly uncomfortable. As I finish getting ready, making sure I’m clean-shaven, my hair styled neatly instead of the usual shaggy mess I leave it in, the man in the mirror has just become a different version of myself.

One that I think Charlotte will be attracted to. One that she could fall for. Someone different from her ex, but not so far outside of her comfort zone that she’ll be afraid of me.

That’s the goal, anyway.

The air outside is crisp and cool when I step out of the front door, fall coming in fast and hard now that it’s close to October. I breathe in a deep lungful of it, feeling myself relax a little at the sensation of it in my lungs, soothing me. Fall and winter are my favorite part of the year. I like that the air is colder, that the world feels more empty, that it gets dark earlier. It feels like a state of being that I’m more suited to. It makes me feel like I belong.

It’s the perfect day to drive my Mustang with the windows down, so much so that I don’t even mind the early-morning Chicago traffic, or the fact that I’m up this early at all. But the possibility of seeing Charlotte again was enough to make the latter part worthwhile, all on its own. I turn up my music, leaning back in the leather seat, all thoughts of my family and what I’m forced to do for them, the dangers that I’m dealing with, and my dealings with the feds all fleeing my mind. All I’m thinking about is her, and it feels like that cuts through all the stress and worry and noise, leaving me lighter and freer than I have been in months.

I park at a garage a few blocks from where she works, locking the car, and starting a brisk walk to where I should be able to get a glimpse of Charlotte walking into work. A half a block away, as I cut through the crowd of commuters, I see her walking down the sidewalk.

Her hair is up, leaving her gorgeous face and long, slim neck bare. She’s wearing dark jeans molded to her perfect body, a dark blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and a pair of black suede ankle boots. She pauses some yards away from the front of her building, and I watch her curiously from where I’ve stopped, leaning up against the corner of a nearby building within eyeshot as if I’m just waiting for a ride.

A car pulls up to the curb, and the other woman who was with her at the club gets out, giving Charlotte a quick hug before they both start walking towards the building. I’m not surprised—my research on Charlotte turned up the information that her friend also works with her, but in HR. I didn’t dig much further than that on Jasmine Bakir—she’s not the woman I’m interested in, and I had no desire to violate her privacy.

I’m not a monster or a stalker.

I just need to get to know Charlotte better. On a more even playing field. One where she’ll be comfortable.

I watch her until she disappears into the building, through the glass doors, until she’s gone from my sight. And then I push myself away from the wall, heading towards a coffee shop that I’m familiar with where I can wait until it’s time to go to her lunch spot.

—

I get to Cafe L’Rose an hour before most corporate lunchtimes start, not wanting to miss the window of time when Charlotte might come by. I settle down with a book—a recent mystery that I’ve been wanting to read—and my second cup of coffee for the day.

I’m not a superstitious man, or one who believes in coincidence, but even I find it ironic that the second time I meet Charlotte will be at a little French bistro, after meeting her for the first time in the Versailles-inspired luxury of Masquerade. And her safeword there— Paris . It’s another sign of how obsessed I’ve already become that I can’t help but think of it as a sign, when I know all of that is bullshit.

Just after noon, I look up to see Charlotte walking to one of the small, round iron tables out on the patio. My pulse instantly leaps into my throat, my senses all on alert—but I feel a sharp jab of disappointment when I see that Jaz is with her. The two women settle into seats on opposite sides of the table, saying something to their server that I can’t quite catch, and I wonder if I should call it a loss for today. Finish my chapter and my coffee, and go home to deal with all of the things that I should actually be doing today. Come back tomorrow, and the next day, and however many days after that it takes to get Charlotte alone.

That would be the smart way to handle this. With her friend as a buffer, it’s entirely possible that Charlotte might turn any advance I make down flat, completely shutting down the prospect of anything between us after my interruption of her lunch.

But I can’t make myself leave. It feels like a physical impossibility, like I can’t just get up and walk away. I watch as the server brings them water and takes their order, and I keep thinking again and again that I should just go, and try another day.

I can’t . I can’t walk away from her. That’s just another reason that I should, but when I get up from my table, I already know that the direction I’m going to go in is toward what I’ve come to want more than anything else in the world.

Fuck the consequences.

“Excuse me, miss.” My voice, when I stop a foot away from their table, is my own. Not the polished British accent that I use at Masquerade, that Charlotte heard last night, but my own second-generation Russian accent, the mixture of my family’s thicker accent that I’ve grown up with all my life and the Americans that I interact with daily. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help myself.”

It’s the truth. I couldn’t help myself. And when Charlotte looks at me, her head swiveling in surprise, the expression on her face is worth the chance I took.

This woman is going to be mine, no matter what I have to do.