Tied to the Tycoon (3 page)

He ripped them off, vaguely aware of how absurd that was, but not giving a damn. He felt powered by some inescapable force, his momentum almost unstoppable, so close to what he’d dreamed about for years. She moaned into his mouth and raised her leg tentatively against his and he pushed on, his mouth moving to her nipple. He felt her rise against him, and then, a moment later, felt her begin to shy away. He didn’t think; the most primal part of him felt her slipping away and reached out to catch her. He had her pinned against the window, and his hand was already at his belt when she pulled her hand free of his grip.

“Stop,” she said, choking on her own voice.

She brought her free hand to his chest, turned her face away. He was stunned.

“What’s wrong?” he said, his words pulled tight over his panting breath. His cock strained against his pant leg, and Ava…Ava…she looked so sad. Ashamed.

What had he done?

“You said it’s what I am.” Her own breath still came fast, and she wouldn’t look at him. “But I’ve never done it—not properly, not the right way. Any of it. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Jackson shook his head. “It’s been ten years since I was a total fuckwit, Ava. In all that time, you never told anyone else what you wanted?”

“No,” she said quietly.

If he’d known that was really the answer, he might not have been so incredulous. He might have been a bit more fucking thoughtful. Because in that one admission was a whole knotted, seething mass of deeper, sharper, more painful admissions, the most important of which was surely this: she’d never been that close to anyone ever again. She’d lived her life alone since then, never being fully herself.

It was worse than finding her married to someone else. It meant he’d hurt her more than he’d imagined.

She squirmed under him, trying to get free. He held her fast.

“Ava, wait,” he said. “Please. Just…ten fucking
years
.”

She stopped. They were still pressed tight together, her face hovering below him, blue light creeping across her saddened cheek. All he wanted to do was make her happy. He had always been the smartest guy in the room, but now he couldn’t figure out how to make the woman he’d always loved happy, even for a goddamn moment, even when he was trying. Some fucking genius.

“Is this who you are now?” she eventually said, smiling a little, trying to break the tension. “A guy who buys things? A rich guy who just…”

“I would pay to make you come,” he said, without hesitation.

Her eyes grew wide.

“What?” she said.

“You heard me.” He took her chin between his fingers and made sure she was looking into his eyes. “Of course, I don’t have to, now that I’ve won you.”

There was a beat before she burst out laughing, and he grinned. He could always make her laugh. He loved to make her laugh.

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

“I wasn’t kidding, though,
Frida
,” he said softly, and she looked back up at him, the laughter gone, but the memory of it still strong, a reminder that she was safe with him. “I wasn’t really kidding at all. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do…”

He touched his fingertips to her cheek and felt his own voice cracking.

“Stop,” she said. Now she struggled against him again. “Just…stop. I can’t just…after all this time…”

“You owe me,” he said.

There was a silence.

Finally, she said, “You can’t say things like that to a woman.”

“You can say it if it’s true. You
owe
me,” he said again, bringing her captured hand down to her side and pressing it to her lower back. With his other hand he held her face. She wasn’t going anywhere. He could feel how much she liked it. “You owe me a chance to show you how much I owe you. To make it up to you.”

She furrowed her brow in irritation or exhaustion, but which one, he couldn’t tell.

“What the hell are you talking about, Jackson?”

He didn’t answer her, not right away. Slowly he dragged his hand down her body, to the side of her right hip, where his fingers began to pull up her dress, inch by excruciating inch. He bent his head to hers, both of them quiet, waiting. The dress rose. Soon it was bunched in his hand, her leg bare.

He wanted to tell her,
you owe me because you’re mine, because you belong to me, because it’s only fair if I have to belong to you, because you made me what I am
. He wanted to claim her right there, make her his, the way she was supposed to be. Christ, he wanted her. And he could have her now, he knew it,
knew
he could drive her to the point where she screamed ‘yes’, where she would beg him to come inside her. And knew just the same that if he did it that way now, she’d wake up regretting it. She’d second-guess herself. And he didn’t want that. He wanted her to
know
.

She’d never know the self-control it took not to spread her leg and slam full into her against that bright, clear window, to hear her scream as he filled her, to feel her tighten and close around him.

Instead he let the dress fall back over his hand, smoothed his palm over her hip, ran his thumb over the ridge of bone that flared out from her pubis. He savored it. Then he slipped his hand between her legs, and heard her groan.

“I know what I am now, Ava,” he said, running his fingers along the length of her. She was already so wet, before he’d even parted her lips. “And I know what you are. I can show you what you are, if you’ll let me.”

She shook her head, but lifted her hips and slid her leg up his, hooking it around him. She had spread herself for him, but it was like she didn’t know how to feel about it.

“Jackson…”

“You don’t have to think about it,” he said gruffly, slowly circling the entrance of her vagina with his finger. “You don’t even have to think at all, if you don’t want to. This whole week, I’ll be in charge. I’m in control. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to think about what anyone else will think. No one else has to know…”

He realized he was pleading with her. He leaned his forehead into hers, silently begging, and drove two fingers deep into her. She gasped, and a little moan escaped her throat. She kept moaning, low and soft, and he suddenly needed to see her face while she did it. He reached back up, letting her hands free for the first time, and threaded his fingers through her expensive hairstyle. When he pulled her head back, her lips were parted and her eyes were wide, limpid pools that seemed to pulsate in time with his thrusts.

He curled his fingers then, stroking her from the inside. She quivered against him and her eyes half-closed.

“No,” he said, swirling his fingers and rubbing his palm into her clit. “Look at me.”

He jerked her head back again, gently, and said it again. “Look at me, Ava.”

She did. She looked desperate.

“Jacks, please…”

He almost hated to say it, but he had to. He had to make sure she knew. “You’re not the only one with regrets. You’re mine, Ava Barnett, whether you know it or not. I’m going to have you. You
will
come for me now, and you will come to me later, and you will submit.”

And then he curled his fingers around as far as they would go, his thumb rubbing her wet clit in fast, tight little circles, and twisted inside her until she came for him, quaking over his hand.

He kissed her again, and wished he could go on kissing her. Instead he waited until she was done shaking, until he was sure she could stand on her own two feet. Then he smoothed the hair on her head, kissed each closed eyelid once, and murmured, “One week, Ava. No strings.”

He gave her his card, and left.

chapter
3

Ava Barnett arrived home feeling like she didn’t know what. She had no frame of reference for something like this. Like she’d been in a boxing match, maybe? Twelve rounds or whatever it was. Maybe, but honestly, that seemed preferable right now to whatever this was. She felt drugged. Hypnotized.

Ensorcelled?

She couldn’t decide on a metaphor. First had been the avalanche of memory and emotion upon seeing Jackson Reed again, right when she’d been trying her hardest to forget him. It had been like one of those great seismic events that moves giant slabs of earth and grit and mud around to reveal something unexpected and terrible buried underground. Then he’d just plowed right through her and turned her inside out. Like someone had broken into her house and emptied every single one of her drawers, then gone outside and unearthed something awful on her lawn.

Except that didn’t make any sense either. She was totally disoriented. She didn’t have a house, or a lawn. She had a crappy apartment in Alphabet City of dubious safety, the only place close to work where she could afford space for her secret painting studio. She did, however, feel that something terrible and frightening had been irrevocably revealed.
That would be my stupid issues
, she thought grimly, tossing her keys on the dining room table and kicking her high heels clear across the room. That’s what the bastard had unearthed. Every damn thing she’d been working hard to bury for the past ten years.

She didn’t really mean to call him a bastard. When she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could still feel him on her. And she didn’t want to shower, even though she should, because she knew she’d smell him on her skin.

Ridiculous.

It wasn’t just that Jackson Reed had reappeared out of nowhere; it was that he’d reappeared out of nowhere exactly as she’d always wanted him to: as a strong, sexy Dom. And apparently a wealthy one, too. How often did that happen? How often did someone actually rise beyond one’s expectations and meet one’s hopes?

Well, let’s not get carried away
. If experience had taught Ava anything, it was not to trust people who were too good to be true.

She wished she could stop thinking about him. About what he’d said.
You will come to me. You will submit.

Ava called her voicemail and put her phone on speaker. Three new messages. She got excited for a second before she remembered she hadn’t given Jackson her phone number; he’d given her his card. With an address.

Right, because she was coming to him.

The annoying, vaguely British robot lady recording droned on about voicemail from her phone as Ava slipped out of her dress. There had been a moment, when he’d pressed her against the window, when she’d thought he would rip it clear off. And she’d wanted him to.

She stood still for a second, stark naked in her bedroom, and let the ghost of that orgasm rush through her once more. Just thinking about it, about his hands on her,
in
her, she could almost…

“Ava, it is I, your favorite.” Her boss’s nasal voice intruded on her thoughts. Damn, she’d told Alain about the engagement party. He’d been
very
interested in such an exclusive event. “I am a little disappointed you did not call tonight, but I am sure you did well and got many new contacts, yes? I am out late, call. Perhaps we meet up.”

Ava grimaced. She spent almost as much energy deflecting Alain’s creepy advances as she did doing her actual job. She was beginning to suspect that he was demanding that she land a big new advertising account before the end of the year mostly as an excuse to give her another option when she failed to meet that impossible deadline: sleep with him.

As disgusted as she was with her boss, the thought of sex immediately brought her back to Jackson Reed. And what he could do with just his hands and a thick glass window. She still thought about that night they’d shared together, just before graduation. The one night. It had given her a totally unrealistic expectation of sex; before Jackson, she’d only ever slept with two guys—one in high school, who she’d more or less shanghai’d into the experience just to get it over with, and then Peter, who had been a cheating jerk and who had been her big reason for transferring for her senior year. Jackson made her think she’d just had bad luck. Jackson made sex make…
sense
. He’d made it seem like vital necessity, like a basic human right.

Maybe she’d only convinced herself that there would be more like him because it made it easier to walk away from him.
Not walk
, she reminded herself.
Run. You ran away, and you hid
.

Not her proudest moment.

Don’t think about it
. She actually flinched, even though she was alone. It still made her feel ashamed, still made her feel small, all these years later.

“
Second message
,” the British robot lady voice intoned.

“Ava—”

Ava immediately recognized her mother’s voice and leapt across the room to grab at her phone. She pressed madly at buttons until her mother’s voice stopped.

“
Message erased
.”

Thank God.
If the memory of Jackson’s face could reliably make her feel ashamed, her mother’s voice could do a whole lot worse with a whole lot less. Her stress response was just instinctual. There was nothing to be done about it; she just had to stand there, waiting for it to filter through her system, waiting for the fear and anger to drain away.

Ava was so damn tired of being afraid. She’d been afraid of making the final leap into being submissive, and then Jackson had found her.

He’d said one week, no strings, he’d be in charge. He’d take control and show her everything. It sounded like a free pass to explore all the sexual stuff she’d never trusted anyone else with, but was it really free? The man had already broken her heart once. And as much as she’d tried to forget Jackson Reed, in her worst moments, when she felt most alone, the memory of him had been a comfort to her, late at night. Her friendship with Jackson was the closest she’d ever felt to being safe, and cherished, and treasured. The closest she’d ever been to anyone, ever. What if it had been an illusion? What if one week with Jackson revealed that she’d been wrong all along?

“Stop thinking about Jackson Reed!” she said to the empty room. Maybe if she said it out loud, it would actually take.