Beau moved breakfast plates from the food cart to the hotel room’s dining table while Lola watched. He distributed silverware and poured them each orange juice. Seated with a napkin on his lap, he drizzled syrup onto his French toast. He cut four bite-sized squares with his fork and knife before looking up at Lola. “Lose your appetite ?”
“No.”
Earlier, on her way to the bathroom to change into a robe, she’d paused at the closet. Beau’s suit had been hung. It’d been done haphazardly, but it was on a hanger nonetheless. There’d barely even been a moment to do it. She’d been faced away from him when he’d taken it off—had he hung it then? It was turning out that the bedroom was the only place Beau could get dirty.
Lola tended toward tidy, but not at that level. She hadn’t forgotten Beau’s description of his daily routine and as he took a bite of his portioned food, she envisioned him eating that way every morning, alone in a spotless kitchen.
She picked up her French toast, loaded the plate with bacon and fruit and stuck a fork between her teeth. With her other hand, she put the syrup under her arm, picked up a bowl of powdered sugar, turned and walked away.
“Where are you going?” he called after her.
“Eating in bed,” she said between her teeth.
He followed her. “You’ll make a mess.”
She put everything down on the white comforter.
“You already got syrup on my robe,” he said, pointing at the sleeve.
“So what? Don’t you get maid service?”
“Well, yes. We aren’t finished with the bed, though.”
She forked an entire half of toast and tore off a bite with her teeth. “So we get a little sticky,” she said, chewing. “A little sugary. That so bad?”
He raised both eyebrows at her.
“You ever heard of breakfast in bed?” she asked.
“I don’t think this is what’s meant by it.”
She waved her hand. “Sure it is.”
Lola didn’t eat breakfast anywhere other than her kitchen, but Beau needed his boundaries pushed a little. She’d crawled on the floor for him—he could handle some unscheduled fun. She took another bite as they stared each other down. When he still hadn’t moved, she hopped up on the mattress.
“Lola, what—? Watch the syrup.”
“Does this bother you?” she asked, jumping once. The syrup tipped over.
He lunged forward and caught it before more than a few drops escaped. “I just don’t understand why—”
She grabbed the syrup from his hands and stuck a finger in it. She glossed some over her lips. “Ready for me?” she asked.
“What—”
She threw her arms around his neck. He caught her just as her legs went around his waist. She kissed him hard on the mouth, spreading syrup all over him.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asked.
He’d gotten into her. She wasn’t just testing him—she was actually giddy, experiencing a second wind for the night. She licked the sauce from his upper lip. “Hmm. Interesting. There’s syrup all over your face, my face, your robe, the bed. And yet, we’re still standing.”
“Well, I’m standing,” he said, grinning. “You’re just wrapped around me being silly.”
She nodded. “Is silly okay?”
“Silly is okay.”
“So then come have breakfast in bed with me.”
“If you insist, though I don’t really see the point.”
“There’s no point. This isn’t a negotiation or a board meeting where there needs to be an explanation for everything. There’s absolutely no fucking point at all, and that is the point.”
He shook his head. “Fine. We’ll eat in bed, but you’ll have to get down.”
“Take me with you.” She twisted to set the syrup back on the bed. “You might need extra hands.”
He laughed but adjusted her ass and walked them to the table. She took both glasses of orange juice while he supported her with one hand and carried his plate in the other.
When he lowered her onto the bed with one arm, the powdered sugar teetered. They looked at each other and smiled.
“I feel like a child,” Beau said once they were seated and eating. “Even more like a child than when I was a child.”
She smiled with her mouth shut as she chewed. “Me too,” she said when she’d swallowed.
He took a bite and glanced up. “Why are you looking at me that way?” His legs were crossed in front of him. His forehead wrinkled.
“I’m trying to picture you as a kid,” she said. “It’s hard. You have a very serious way about you.”
“Is serious okay?”
“Well…” She pretended to think. He tore off a piece of bacon and threw it at her. It felt like progress. “Serious is okay,” she relented, smiling. “But kids shouldn’t be too serious.”
“I was responsible,” he said. “My dad was not reliable, and he’d leave for periods of time. I kind of became the man of the house.”
“You said he was French? Did you ever live there?”
“For a summer when I was seventeen. He went there on one of his stints and God knows why, but I asked to go with him.”
Lola put down her fork. “I had the impression you grew up without much—like me.”
“I did. He was an artist, and he insisted he couldn’t work in America, so he’d go back to France when he could. My mom didn’t travel. She’d get on his case so he’d pick up a job for a few months, but he could never keep it. Basically we lived on her secretary’s salary.”
“He must’ve really loved you guys to keep coming back when he didn’t want to be here.”
Beau looked up from his plate. “I ask myself that a lot. Why he even bothered coming back.” He cleared his throat.
“He probably missed you,” Lola said, chewing. “It’s nice to be missed.” Her heart sank as she said it. She was probably being missed that very moment. She had to look away from Beau, who was the reason she hadn’t been missing Johnny as much as she’d thought she would.
“Have you been to Paris?” he asked, calling her back.
“No,” she said. “Vegas is the farthest I’ve been from here.”
“Perhaps a trip is in order.” He drank his orange juice, looking at her over the rim of the glass.
She shrugged. “Not right now. This is a chance for us to turn things around.”
“Us?” he asked, furrowing his brow. “Me?”
“No, me and Johnny. Owning our own business is a lot of responsibility, and I don’t want to mess it up. I—” She paused at the shadowy look in his eyes. “What?”
“I’ve already told you,” he said. “Tonight is about you and me only. If I were your boyfriend, would you keep bringing up your ex?”
“I just thought since we were—”
“The rules haven’t changed just because we screwed.”
Lola’s mouth fell open. It was as if a switch had been flipped from a few minutes earlier when they’d been as playful as two new lovers. “Do you realize how you sound?”
“Inform me,” he invited with a gesture of his fork. “Please.”
“Like I’m your puppet or something. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so controlling.”
He shrugged. “You didn’t seem to mind my control earlier. In fact…I think you said it was not repulsive.”
Lola stood from the bed and crossed her arms.
He looked up. “What?”
“Don’t throw my honesty in my face like that. Do you think that was easy for me to say? That I enjoy being with someone other than—”
“Don’t you dare say his name,” he said, setting down his silverware.
“I’m sorry, Master,” she said. She was pushing him, and from the look on his face, he didn’t like it. She was too worked up to care. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what I should say.”
“Is it too much to ask that you don’t talk about your boyfriend when you’re here with me?” His body locked up as his spine straightened.
“Fine. I won’t talk about him.” She instinctively took a step back. “Doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about him.”
“Now you’re deliberately testing me. I don’t want you talking about him, and I certainly don’t want you thinking about him while you’re in my bed.”
She pointed a finger at him. “You think money gives you the right to do anything. You pay me, and I’ll do whatever you say. You know what, though? You can’t control my thoughts.”
His face closed, just as she’d expected would happen if she threatened his control.
“How does that make you feel?” she prodded.
He got up from the bed. “Lola, I’m trying to be patient—”
“Muzzle me all you want,” she muttered, moving to walk around him, “but there’s nothing you can do to stop me from thinking about him when I’m with you.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need a minute.”
He blocked her with his entire body. “You don’t get minutes unless I give them to you. Understand?”
She bolted to the right, but he caught her waist from behind and lifted her. They struggled against each other until Beau had her front pinned up against the window. He grabbed at the lapels of her robe, pulling it open and pressing her bare breasts up to the shockingly cold glass. One hand went over her mouth. He pushed his pelvis into her so her hipbones met the window.
“Take it back,” he said in her ear.
Cityscape lights poked holes in the night. Her back was warm with Beau’s heat, but her nipples hardened with a chill. She whimpered, unable to speak.
“If I take my hand away, not another fucking mention of him unless I bring it up.”
She nodded. He released just her face.
“People might see us,” she said, ashamed by the obvious thrill in her voice.
“I don’t give a fuck.” He pushed up the fabric of her robe and entered her from behind.
She moaned, so completely filled with him.
He stilled. “Tell me the truth. Were you thinking of him earlier?”
She gritted her teeth. As if she could think of anything else when Beau had her where he wanted her.
He thrust once. She braced herself against the window with her palms. He grabbed her wrists and held them there as he slid in and out quickly, impatiently. “I’m going to bend you over and spank you so fucking hard if you don’t answer.” It was not an empty threat. Before she could even begin to formulate a response, he let go of one of her arms and slapped her ass.
“What are you doing?” she cried. It was a slap intended to punish her, and that made her thighs quiver outside her control. She was going to come already.
“Answer me, or I’ll turn that sweet, white ass flaming red, Lola. Tell me the truth.”
She sucked in a breath. The threat did nothing but make her wildly hot. “What do you want me to—? I-I love him—”
He smacked her again, harder this time, with a swift, delicious sting, right on the outside curve of her behind.
“I didn’t think of him,” she confessed in one heated gasp. “I couldn’t. When you’re inside me, there’s nothing else.”
“Good girl.” He seized her wrists again to brace both him and her. The glass rattled under her body as he took her. “You think that was controlling?” he asked between thrusts. “You don’t know the half of it. I want to lock you up in this room, feed you and fuck you on my schedule. Then you’d really be mine.” He wrapped his hand around her throat to keep her from looking anywhere but outside. “Give them a show, ma chatte. Don’t be shy.” He released her face to massage her clit.
She pressed her cheek against the window, fogging the glass. “Right there,” she said. Her fingers curled into fists. “I’m going to come.”
He pulled out and stepped back. “Not yet.”
“Please.” She dropped to her knees and put her hand between her legs.
“Don’t,” he said, looming over her. “Do not make yourself come.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m trying to stop it.”
“Stop it?” He looked incredulous.
“I want you to do it.”
“Ah.” He smiled and backed away. “You’re good. Very good.” He took a strawberry from the cart. “Will you come to me?”
She crawled along the floor, hobbling because of the persistent ache between her legs. She let him feed her the strawberry. He bent over and sucked the sweetness from her lips.
“Now lie on your back and bend your knees,” he whispered into her mouth.
It was a command that she obeyed without hesitation.
“Wider,” he said.
She bared herself to him.
“Reach up…”
She felt behind her head and grabbed the bedpost with both hands.
“That’s it,” he said. “Hold on to that.”
“You treat me like a dog,” she said, but even she heard her own panting.
“And your obedience deserves a reward. Don’t you want to know what it is?”
She salivated. There was nothing in her world except him, large and naked, hovering over her. “Yes, Beau.”
He squatted and trailed a finger down her stomach and over her pubic bone. His knuckles brushed the inside of her thigh as he traced the outline of her. “You’re trembling,” he said. “Ask for what you want.”
“Touch me,” she said softly.
“I already am.”
“Lower.”
He put his hand on her knee. “Here?”
“Higher.”
He slid his hand to the crease of her ass. “You mean here.”
“No,” she whispered. “Higher.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“My pussy,” she said.
He smiled. “I would love to touch your pussy.”
Lola’s chest rose with exaggerated breaths.
“What should I touch it with?” he asked.
Her eyelids fluttered. “What do you mean?”
He wet his finger and circled it around her opening while she strained to see. “This?” He waited until she looked up at him again. “Or something else?”
“That,” she said. “Your mouth.”
He ran his hands up her thighs to hold her knees, pushing them apart as wide as they’d go. He returned his hands between her legs, parting her lips with this thumbs. Her back arched, sending her breasts toward the ceiling.
“Perfect,” he said. “Just stay that way.”
He got on the floor with her. His arms curled around her hips to secure her to his face right as he sucked her into his mouth, thrusting his tongue inside her. Her spine felt as if it would snap in half if she bowed it any more.
“Now I know,” he said. “This is what I’ve been hungry for all along.”
She reached down to touch his hair, but he caught her wrist and pushed it back toward her. “Use your words, ma chatte. It makes me hard just hearing your voice.”
She gripped the bedpost again. “That,” she said when the tip of his tongue massaged her clit. “Keep doing that.”
He kept doing that, and when she was close, he moaned with his mouth buried in her. It felt like a crack in his shell, that sound, as it sent vibrations up her body.
“You’re right,” he spoke without moving away, “mouth is so much better.”
She came. His voice was always deep and solid, and it made the words themselves unexpectedly sensual. They had ways of destroying her control. He continued kissing between her legs until she’d finished.
“How’s that?” he asked, his lips running a gentle course along the inside of her thigh.
“Do you have to ask? I’m consumed.”
“So am I.” He took her waist in his wandering hands and squeezed her. “I could enjoy you for hours. Days. I think maybe we should get some rest, though.”
She released the post and got up on her elbows. “Rest?”
“We have a couple hours or so left. Don’t worry, I won’t oversleep.”
“It’s not that,” she said. As fast as he’d taken her against the window, he hadn’t finished. “Don’t you…?”
“Don’t I what?”
She looked away. What did she care if he was satisfied? It wasn’t a requirement of their deal. “Nothing,” she said. “Sleep is fine.”
“Good.” He got to his feet and helped her up. He piled all the dishes from their breakfast onto the food cart and tossed oversized pillows aside. They hadn’t even gotten to the sheets yet.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked tentatively. For a savvy businessman, he hadn’t used his hours very wisely. It was hard to believe after all the stress she’d endured making the decision that the night was almost over.
“The only thing I want more,” he said, getting into the bed without looking at her, “is to smash the alarm clock with my fist. But I can’t. Just let me have this.”
There was an empty ache where her heart should be. Should be, because only a heartless person could resist Beau in that moment. Should be, because her heart didn’t belong in this bed. She climbed right into his arms and curled up to his warmth.
He turned out the bedside lamp. “If I hadn’t worn you out, we could’ve used this time to talk some more,” he said. “I would’ve liked that.”
Her eyes were already closed and he said nothing else, so she gave in to the heady feeling of his arms around her and slept.
