I pull her to me, her soft breasts press against me in the flimsy bra, under the thick cotton of the shirt. The soft squeeze presses against the hard ridges of my abs.

  I take her mouth with mine and we breathe together. Me into her, my strength finding her fluttering inside, like a forest at night, dancing with birds. She moves, twists, stretches in my arms, rising like an ocean storm, brewing far out at sea.

  Twice, we’re ready to break the kiss, and twice, we do. We pull apart then turn our heads, tilt to start it again.

  Hungry. Urgent. Almost desperate.

  Her soft curves press close to the form of my body.

  “Is it bad,” she breathes, “if I want to tease you?”

  I know what she wants. I feel her hips twitch. Roll against the muscle of my clenched thigh. Her eyes half close.

  I slap her ass. Hard. The crack of the slap echoes in the room. She squeals. Then I give her another as she holds me tighter.

  “Oh, God, Valentin. I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t let you do any of this. And I shouldn’t feel the way that I do.”

  “You should. All of what you feel is real.”

  I kiss her again. Every soft part of her moves tight against my body.

  Chapter 14

  Her

  I KNOW THAT I have to tell him. I can’t put it off for long.

  But I need this now. I need his mouth, I need his tongue. His hands.

  I stroke the fine, white cotton shirt. Feel the sheen of his loose, tailored pants.

  Now, with his body pressed hard against mine, I’m thinking about the other parts of him.

  His fingers, but even more, I want his hard, thick weight. I need to have him break me open. Drive up, hard inside me. Split me wide.

  When he slaps me again, the hot sting rushes around my ass and sends bolts of tingling up and down the insides of my thighs. On tiptoe, I stretch up, reaching for another kiss. My arms wrap around his huge, hard body and his kiss takes me, from inside.

  Against my aching clit, the pulse in his stiffening ridge sets off bursts of sensation through my core down my thighs and into my hardening nipples.

  The wet velvet brush of his tongue in my mouth, makes me jump and my legs wrap around him. Both my hands grab at the back of his head, pulling him tighter to me.

  Then my eager hands plunge down to grab the hard cheeks of his ass. As I squeeze my hips against him, the vibration from the friction sears and crackles out through my body.

  I scrape the wet, swollen ache of my pussy along the thick length of him.

  His lips slip down the side of my neck. He kisses and nibbles at the top of my quivering breast. Anxious, desperate, I pull my breast out, over the top of my bra, giving him the nipple to lick, to caress with his lips, and to suck.

  His free hand finds the hood of my clit. His fingers press and rub, either side. Circling. Tugging. Pressing, rhythmic. Pumping along with the beats.

  Through my thin, soaking panties, I’m drenching the front of his suit pants.

  I scrape my nails, claw and cling so hard through his soft, billowing white shirt, trying to feel his ribs and his rippling muscles, it feels like I’m going to rip the shirt apart.

  He carries me to the bedroom. Throws me, bouncing, back on the bed. As he undoes the lovely white shirt, I get shivers, seeing the huge, bronzed and sculpted body that emerges. How did I wind up with one of those?

  I know that he’s too big and hard and sexy for me. He’s going to find me out. He’ll see that, whatever it is that he thinks I am, that I’m not that at all, that I’m just me. But damn, I’ll take it for now. When he drops his silky-soft tailored suit pants, the sight of his powerful thighs makes my breath catch in my throat.

  But when he peels down his white cotton shorts, OMFG! He can’t put that in me! Not all of it. Not even the top part. Fuck. That’s ridiculous. He’s too huge.

  I’m crawling back, up the bed, on my heels and elbows, before I even realize it. Oh, that grin. I want to slap that off his face. He jumps on the bed. I’m backed against the wall. He comes after me.

  It’s reflex. I don’t mean to do it. But it happens. I slap him. Right across the face.

  “You can’t seriously be planning to put that in me.”

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “No it’s not.” I squeak, “That’s a battering ram. It’s huge.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Are you surprised? I’m terrified.”

  “It will be fine. You’ll love it.”

  “I’ll die.”

  “Maybe,” he actually almost grins, making him even more scary, “but you’ll still love it.”

  I slap him again. This time as hard as I can.

  “Are you ready?”

  “No,” I tell him, “I’m not ever going to be ready for that.” But my body is making a liar of me. His nostrils flare to show me that he’s aware of how much I’m drenching my panties and his nice sheets, and he’s seen how wide my thighs have spread.

  “Are you sure?” He knows. He knows damn well.

  “You’ll have to hold me,” I tell him.

  “Of course I’ll hold you.”

  “I mean, you’ll have to hold me down.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod. With emphasis. And at the same time, I discover how much my body thinks that is a great idea. If I thought I was gushing before, as he gently peels off my panties, I’m almost swooning at my own scents.

  He leans over me. The coal-black pupils in his watery blue eyes fix me as he takes hold of my wrists. “Still sure?”

  I nod, spreading my thighs as far apart as they will go.

  My hips jump and buck as he bangs that thing on my mound. Suddenly I’m hyper-sensitive. Oh, goody. I’ll be able to feel every rip and tear in detail as he wrecks and destroys me, from the core up and out.

  He rubs the great weight of it up against the underside of my buzzing clit. He scrapes and my legs wrap around him.

  “Come on,” I shout, “Don’t make me wait!”

  He grins. I want to slap him again. I remember how good that felt. But he has my wrists. I wriggle and struggle. He looks in my eye, the way I imagine a bear looks at a silvery salmon that he just plucked out of the air.

  His bulb locks into my weeping, swollen lips. Inside, my walls shudder, trembling at what I know is coming.

  “Ready?” His voice is evil.

  I shrug, as bravely as I can manage. then give him a quick nod.

  My thighs flatten, wide apart, and my pelvis stretches as far open as it will go. As his great ballistic missile slides into me, my back arches and twists, I’m open-mouthed and wide-eyed, with my head flung back and flipping from side to side. My fingers grasp and claw. My heels beat on his back.

  My walls are trying to hold his thick hardness, but they flutter, like they faint away at the effort of trying to contain him, then rouse to try and take a grip, and fall back again, defeated.

  I want to hold his ass, feel his muscles flex and roll under my fingers. I want to scrape my nails down his back. I want to tug in his hair.

  The feeling of being totally possessed by him and completely out of my own control is so liberating, like the pleasure I get from him instructing me and disciplining me. Having decisions taken and made by someone else is freeing, and I’m taken by surprise how that charges the whole experience.

  Since I have almost no control over anything else, I settle for taking long, deep, passionate kisses from him. I feast on his mouth, his breath, his lips and his tongue, all while he rocks me and hammer-drills up, high into me.

  He pins me down with his body, and he has my wrists held in a tight grip. All I can do is accept him. Lie back to receive his massive reaming and be gorged by his relentless shaft.

  I can tilt my pelvis. Tip it up higher and spread my thighs more, to take him in deeper. My breathing hardens and becomes more frantic as the waves and currents of shivers and tingles splash and slew through me. The rhythmic slap of his thighs against the soft cushions of my ass, rolls an impact through me, knocking my head back.

  I can’t control the rising waves of sensation, either. They sweep me away. Blast me by surprise. Every time he varies his angle, when he piles deeper into me, when the bone of his pelvis grinds below my clit, at the top of my opening, each time I’m filled and flushed, washed through and tossed on a breaking surf of feeling like a G-force. A fairground spin, or a theme-park blast.

  “You’re mine, Eva. You’re all mine now.”

  “Yes, Valentin. Yes.”

  His eyes widen. He hammers harder. His neck stretches and the muscles in his face and across his shoulder all harden and clench.

  Again, I’m spun and thrust up to a high plateau, hanging, shaking, waiting on the ledge. Then a brimming quake boils over to catapult me into a tumbling rush, a cascade of gushing crashes, a crashing set of waves, bursting into flood through me.

  He swells even bigger inside me and he shouts my name. I’m stretched and shaken as he throbs and he coats me inside with fountains of thick, hot, blasting jizz.

  I snuggle into his arms. His big body wraps around me like an armored cocoon. I feel safe and protected in his strong arms.

  He speaks quietly into my hair. “I really love how you dance. You have the most amazing, natural talent.”

  Now. Now would be the time to tell him. I steer toward it. “I could dance for you in the club.”

  “Certainly.” He squeezes, “I can have everyone cleared out. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”

  “Or, I could maybe learn a routine. I could dance in one of the features.”

  “No, silly,” he strokes my hair. “Not when other people are there. You have to keep all your dancing for me.” He kisses the top of my head.

  I know that I need to tell him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not now. Wrapped and enfolded, held in his arms, I slip and drift into sleep. I don’t think I ever felt so satisfied and contented, and I’m sure I’ve never been so conflicted.

  I have to tell him, I know. But it will ruin everything. As I’m drifting off to sleep, I’m deciding that I’ll tell him in the morning. Or maybe I’ll rouse and wake him and tell him now. No, I’ll wait and tell him tomorrow. Maybe another day.

  Some of the time, I even think I don’t have to tell him at all. But I know that’s not right.

  But then, sleeping with this older man who I really know almost nothing about—is that right? I know Daddy wouldn’t think so.

  I only know that I can’t tell him now.

  Chapter 15

  him

  AGAIN, I LEFT IN the morning and told her to stay. Again, when I returned in the afternoon, she was gone.

  I tried to call her, but she wouldn’t take my calls. I went to the economics class that Thursday. She wasn’t there. I asked the professor if he’d heard from her, and he was evasive. I had to restrain myself from forcing the information out of him. I could see in his face that he knew more. But what was the point?

  She wouldn’t see me, there was nothing I could do about it.

  Maybe I had been right all along. All those years that I kept my heart locked away, at least it was safe. Surely, nothing is worth going through this pain and grief.

  Armand started behaving oddly, too. All that week, some of this week, too.

  I thought it was something bad. Then I found out.

  Chapter 16

  Her

  PEOPLE WORK THEIR WHOLE lives, spend fortunes, take loans out on their houses, do anything to have a video go viral.

  I should have known, with my luck, the only video I would never want anyone to see, and it blows up. It’s a viral tsunami. It’s everywhere.

  I know that I’m going to have to call Valentin..

  I’m not looking forward to the call. The thought of his voice on the phone is scary enough. But I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. I decide to find him. Tell him in person.

  Armand warned me from the start, and I should have listened.

  When I approached him, the first thing he said was, “If Valentin ever finds out, you know he’ll string me up.”

  “But he won’t find out, right?”

  The set is part of a movie shoot that Armand had been working on. It’s like some trippy sci-fi thing with lights in neon colors, dry ice and a big black floor, shiny like liquid. The dance track would drive me wild anyway.

  Only Armand is in the studio with me. The set.

  The choreography he’s devised for me is a real challenge and so exciting, I’m exploding all the way through the sequences.

  But when he cuts and edits them together—I’m blown away.

  “Valentin can never know about this, you realize that?” Armand is serious. “It has to be our secret.”

  I’m not. “I’m really grateful to you for doing this, Armand. It’s been so liberating for me. I can’t believe it’s come out so well.”

  “That’s the one thing, I wanted to ask you,” Armand says, “do you mind if I put it up on the choreography blog page that I have? Its members only, and it’s only choreography pros who ever go there.”

  “Are you sure that no one else will see?” I’m nervous for him.

  “Nobody’s interested, to be honest. It’s a little cluster of blog pages. A little world of social media for choreographers. We chat and share tips and secrets.” He laughs. “It’s really like nine people in the whole world.”

  Chapter 17

  him

  I DON’T KNOW HOW she got in touch with him, but he made a video with her. Somehow it got out and it blew up on the internet. It was everywhere.

  Hundreds of thousands, millions of men, all over the world will have seen her hold her hands over her head and look back as she shakes her ass, rolls her hips. Pulls her hands up her thighs as she spread them. Watched her stamp the beat as she looks in the camera with her hair tumbling.

  They’ll have watched her time and time again. Showing herself like that. It was unbearable. Deep down, there was something fascinating and marvelous about the way that it made me feel. But I hated it. And I was furious.

  Armand was practically in tears when I fired him.

  I thought the entertainment—the dances, the songs, the choreography—in all of my clubs would hold up for at least a week or two while I found someone to replace him.

  Apparently not. It started to fall apart that very same day. Dancers were out of step in a routine. Fights broke out backstage. Before the end of the week, I’d lost half the troupe.

  I had no idea how much the dancers and musicians needed to be mothered and molly-coddled and fussed around. To be herded and managed. One thing I knew for certain was that I had no idea how to do any of it. Another thing was that I didn’t care.

  I tried promoting his assistant. Two days later I had no dancers at all. I thought about ways I could find somebody else to do the job, I even considered begging Armand to come back.