Casey's Choice Read online

  “Whose clothes are they?” She frowned, but picked up the mug, eager for the warmth and the promise of caffeine.

  “Some ex-subs left things, and since we use this apartment often for the club events, I keep the spare clothes on hand just in case any attendees need them. But other club members leave some nice things purposely.” He winked. “If you need a spare black suit, white shirt, or tie, I’ve got you covered.” But as his eyes met hers in the mirror, the moment felt more intense than before. “Sometimes in the heat of the moment, during play, dresses have been known to rip. Suits to tear. It only makes sense.”

  “All right. I’ll see.” She really didn’t want to wear her rumpled black dress and old panties.

  “Come find me when you’re ready. We’ll talk.” He pushed back the cloth of the robe and kissed her breast, and Casey flushed, noticing the marks there from his bites last night.

  “I marked you there,” he commented. He pulled the robe up to look at her ass, ignoring her squeak of protest, her half-hearted attempts to grab at it. “But your ass is clear. Look.”

  His tone was almost smug. He turned her gently by the shoulder to the side so she could see her body in the mirror, and as he’d promised, she saw that her skin was splotched bright pink in areas, with traces of red grain, but there were no bruises.

  “I see.” But she was looking at him instead, his strong muscled chest rising out of worn blue jeans that rode low on his hips. “I like what I see.” She leaned back into him, pushing her ass into his groin, and felt him harden against her. “Sofia,” he said, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

  “Hunter.” She kept looking. “I don’t need a shower yet. Or coffee.” She pushed into him again. “I need this. You.” She lowered her voice. “Are you ready for another round?”

  “Not now,” he replied. “Dress and come see me.” He held her shoulders and walked back a step, then raised one eyebrow and crossed his arms.

  Casey felt a mix of embarrassment and irritation. “Yes, Sir,” she replied in a voice that was nowhere close to compliant. “Anything you say, Sir.” She gave him a curt salute, scowling at him in the mirror.

  He lifted the robe again and cracked her hard on the ass, twice, making her squeak. “Don’t mouth off,” he warned, but a grin twitched at the side of his mouth. “It’s not because I don’t want you. It’s a busy morning and I want to talk to you before we both go back out into our lives.”

  * * *

  Later, dressed in a trendy pair of black pants and an off-the-shoulder white top that probably cost more than an entire week of groceries, Casey felt more glamorous than usual, despite her bare feet. The sky and the city streamed in through the kitchen windows—it seemed that every window here had a view—and Hunter took her hand across the table when she put down her toast.

  “I’m glad you stayed,” he began, his voice even. “Did you enjoy what we did?”

  Casey sipped her coffee with her free hand, and squeezed his fingers, feeling sparks. “I did.”

  “Are you sore today?”

  She wiggled experimentally. “A little bit. I thought it would be worse. I’m surprised, I guess, at how it faded so fast.”

  “When I spanked you, how did it make you feel?” His gaze was direct.

  She looked down, then met his eyes again. “I liked it. It was amazing.”

  “Did it meet your expectations?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, God, exceeded them. It was the hottest thing I ever did,” she said, flushing. “But it hurt, a lot, and I was relieved that you stopped when you did, because it was getting too much for me.” She hesitated. “Would you have liked it better if I wanted more?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “What I enjoy is taking a sub somewhere difficult, and that’s different for each person, each time.”

  “Hmmm.” She thought about this.

  “Would you do it again, with me?” He let go of her hand, watching.

  “Would you want to spank me that hard every time?”

  He shook his head. “Not every time. But I like to play hard, Sofia. I expect my subs to accept what I give them. And I will want to push your limits over time, with your permission.”

  “Oh.” She flushed.

  “But I always match the pain with pleasure. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She smiled, and her heart beat faster as he smiled back, a warm broad smile that lit up his eyes and made his dimple show.

  “I want you to be mine,” he said, and Casey spilled her coffee.

  “What?”

  Seeing her startled face, he pulled back and a variety of expressions crossed his—alarm, defensiveness, victory, and finally a predatory satisfaction.

  “Not a full-time sub. Not yet. But I’d like to have you again, like we did last night. More than once. God.” He took her hand and licked the coffee from her fingers, letting his lips move along her skin in a sensuous way that made her shiver. “I don’t know why or how I feel this way, but you drive me crazy. I want to whip you and pleasure you and teach you about the finer arts of BDSM, at least the ones you wish to experience. If you fuck a man at this club, I want it to be me.”

  “That’s sudden.” She didn’t know what to say.

  “I owe my success in life to going after what I want, when I want it. If you want it too, you’ll say yes.”

  “What if I say no?”

  He released her hand. “I respect your decision. You are welcome to come back here, to the club, Sofia, regardless of your choice. And I will never criticize you for choosing to stay free, or choosing to play with anyone else if you don’t choose me.” But something flashed in his eyes, a powerful spark of desire.

  She swallowed hard. “I don’t know how to be a submissive, Hunter. I don’t even know if I want to be one.”

  “If you like the things we did, and want to do them again, with me, then you already know how.” His voice was persuasive.

  “But I’m not the kind of person who takes orders, or wants to be commanded all the time.”

  “I don’t want to command you all the time,” he returned. “Only in the bedroom, at least for now. The rest of your life is yours alone, as mine is private to me.”

  “Oh.” That didn’t sit quite well, and a spark of foreboding ignited in her mind. “When you say private, you mean, what, exactly?”

  “We can make this as frequent or as infrequent as you like. You set the pace. And when we get together, it is for our personal pleasure. It won’t be about going out to parties, or family gatherings.”

  “Oh.” Thoughts snuffed out. Her quick mind had already created a sequence of images: Hunter in her gallery, admiring Casey’s own art on the wall (because in this scenario, she’d already gotten her boss’s approval and was developing quite a fandom of her own); Hunter at dinner with her and Echo and Echo’s date, all of them laughing about something and clinking wineglasses; Hunter swirling her around in a gauzy gown at some unnamed fancy ball. “I see.”

  “Sofia.”

  That word alone was enough to break her reverie. “Actually,” she told him, pushing back a surge of panic, “private and slow is perfect. If you invite me over, and I accept, and we happen to behave as a dom and sub in the bedroom, then that’s what we’ll do. But I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.”

  She rubbed her finger along the mug. Like everything else in his apartment, it was more than its fundamental purpose. This was no standard ceramic cup of function; it was overlaid with a delicate floral pattern and rimmed with gold. Whether the gold was real or not, she couldn’t say, but just this cup alone spoke to the wealth around her, and made her nervous. The mugs in her apartment, a collection of colors and slogans she loved, were purchased at the dollar store or from eclectic resale shops. Her favorite—one she’d found in Chinatown—had a clip-art picture of a cow and the text, “Sun in your heart come swimmingly.”

  She tried to imagine that mug here. It represented something about her, her humor, her passion for the strange recesses of li
fe. But in this condo it would stand out like a blister. She frowned.

  “Sofia?” He took her hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you sure we—match?” Her voice was small.

  “After our night together, how can you ask?” His smile was so warm that she felt something inside her melt. “I would say we do.”

  “I’m not,” and she swallowed, “anywhere close to living your lifestyle.” She waved her hand around. “And my apartment—”

  “Is not so far from me. You’re just a few blocks away,” he said. “Which will make it easy for us to get together, I assume.”

  “About that.”

  But his phone rang, and although he glanced and dismissed the call, he didn’t follow up on her comment. “Friday after the club meeting,” he suggested. “Will you agree to be mine again, for the night? Yes?”

  She nodded, blushed. “Then I should, I guess, give you my new cell phone number. The one that Kelsie—I have a different one.”

  “All right.” He entered her number, then smiled. “I’ll make sure Max and Alexa have it as well. And now I think we’re at the stage where I tell you that my name is Jax.”

  “But—Hunter?” She blinked at him.

  “Jax is my first name; Hunter’s my last. Friend and club members call me Hunter.”

  “Oh.” She tried it out. “Jax. I like it. I might just want to call you Hunter, though. That’s kind of how I see you, I guess. A powerful hunter.”

  He laughed. “That’s fine.”

  “So.” She traced a golden line around the mug. “Tell me a little more about you?”

  “I’m an investment analyst and an investor. I own several companies worldwide. I manage billions of dollars.” He watched her, and she wondered if he was assessing her reaction. “This apartment is not my primary home. I have the art here temporarily while I renovate my place. These pieces are my favorites.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She nodded, as if it were normal to find out that her bedmate was a billionaire. “You’re so trusting.” The words came as a surprise. “Those works are literally worth millions upon millions. And yet you display them here. And let people walk past them at your kinky parties. It’s incredible. No guards.”

  “Oh, I have state of the art security and anti-theft in this condo,” he corrected, but after a second he added with a slight frown, “but yes, I know what you meant. I suppose—” he took a sip of coffee, “—there is some risk in allowing people to view my art. But never once has anybody touched a painting, let alone put their limb through a canvas.” They both laughed. He continued. “It looks odd, paying a fortune for the works and then displaying them in a way that makes them vulnerable. But what is art worth if it’s not admired?”

  Casey tilted her head, thinking again of standing on display before the crowd, remembering how it felt to be admired, then frowned; this was different. “Oh, I agree. Hiding something away in a home seems selfish. Not that I’m accusing you of that,” she added. “It’s just that these are almost world treasures, you know? Things that are so famous and beautiful that it seems that they should be open to viewing by every person on Earth. A home isn’t nearly enough of a stage for them. The fact that gems of masters are hidden away in private mansions around the world? Sometimes I think it’s like a swamp rat burying the Hope Diamond in a mud patch. Waste.”

  His laugh was rich and warm. “Maybe that’s why I like to let people see them, at least some people, some of the time. It’s not the world, but it’s more than just me. Otherwise it’s just wallpaper. So here she is, Le Rêve, and my others. Soaking up your gazes.”

  “It’s strange. Think about Le Rêve, and how many gazes her inscrutable gaze herself had soaked up over the years. Or the Mona Lisa—millions and millions of gazes: soulful, scornful, wistful, star-shot, desperate, passionate. How could she possibly hold so much emotion in herself? Where does it all go?”

  “It doesn’t really go anywhere.” His voice sounded hard. Startled, Casey glanced at him, then again—he was looking past her, his hand gripping his mug. “It just disappears.”

  “I disagree. It goes into the viewer,” Casey suggested. “Or into our collective subconscious as a society,” she amended. “It forms our global opinion about how to value our art.”

  “So you think the Mona Lisa is swollen with human emotions.” He let go of his mug and looked at her again, and his mouth tugged into a small smile.

  She took a minute; imagined the Mona Lisa swelling to burst open with too much energy, splitting apart into nothingness, her every molecule flung with such force that it shot like a dagger into a billion different stars in space, puncturing them and sending stardust and light out for infinity and back into every person who’d ever seen her. “She’s an icon and a receptacle at the same time.”

  Hunter leaned forward, his eyes intense. “That’s a definition of a submissive, in its most vulgar form.”

  “How?”

  “Someone who lives to accept what another gives, and is at the same time worshipped by that person. That’s how I see my perfect submissive. She gives up her power and she takes your soul, and in doing so, demonstrates her own power.” His eyes burned and he touched her hand, squeezed it, and the grip made her catch her breath. The emotion in his face was so raw that she averted her gaze for a moment, scared to let him see how he affected her.

  “So the Mona Lisa is the poster girl for power exchange.” She laughed. “Someone notify the Louvre. They might need to put up a privacy curtain and charge a quarter at a time to view her.”

  His laugh was rich and it rolled over her, warming her from the inside. “I’ll notify Jean-Luc Martinez immediately. I’m sure they’ll get right on that. Sofia,” he murmured, taking her hand. “I love how you look at the world. Because lately, I’ve been thinking that my paintings mean nothing. They’re more like mirrors.” He looked at her. “Telling us what we want to see. They’re mimics and nothing more.”

  “But you can’t believe that,” she argued, “or you wouldn’t collect them. Prize them.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I don’t know what I think. I’ve been collecting art for so long that it’s become habit.” His face became distant. “An idle amusement for friends who don’t care what they’re seeing. An investment, above all else, bought and traded like stocks and options. Things I’ve seen so many times that I no longer see them when I walk by. It’s refreshing to be with someone who looks at my art with more than boredom or dollar signs in her eyes.”

  “I think owning Le Rêve is a privilege. To have that kind of power—it must be nice.”

  He laughed. “Nice. Yes, I suppose it is. Although nice,” and he leaned forward and touched her face, “is definitely a subjective assessment. Nice.” His hand moved down, lazily stroking along her jaw, her neck, her shoulder bone. “Very nice.”

  She breathed in. “Hunter. Jax.”

  “I like hearing you say it.” His voice lowered, and something in his eyes glinted, predatory. “It’s more… personal. Intimate. And God, Sofia, the things I want to do to you are going to be so far beyond intimate—” He broke off as his phone rang with a particular chime of bells, and he frowned. “Sofia, I’m so sorry. I need to take this. I’ve been waiting for this call. One of my partners, regarding an international client.” He touched her hand. “Give me a few minutes, please.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  While he strode to another room to talk, pieces of his conversation drifting over like tufts of dandelion in the wind, fragments of a whole she couldn’t see, she poured more coffee and walked to the plate glass windows to see the city below. It was light out, bright, but gray; the sun was hidden behind a thick swatch of heavy clouds that were so even and so perfectly done that they seemed painted by some heavenly hand. If you didn’t know there was a sun, she surmised, you’d never assume that the world above was anything other than a flat, mute canvas, still and monochrome for as far as the eye could see.

  The cars were small toys, frag
ile and silly. Looking down from above, she felt that all of her problems were the same—the gallery problems with her boss, the apartment with Echo, her pictures—from here, they’d be the size of a Saltine cracker.

  She imagined her hand reaching through a window, Alice in Wonderland style, carefully taking one of her pictures with a thumb and forefinger, and then tacking it to the wall in the gallery. So simple! So easily done. No fuss, no angst, no tears, no struggles. Surely there must be a way to make it happen like that in real life, if only she thought hard enough.

  “I won’t give up,” she promised, staring across the city. Which direction was her gallery? From here, the grid work of the city was like a gigantic pattern below, and she had no idea which of the boxes was hers.

  “Give up on what?” Hunter was behind her, slipping his phone into his pocket. He came to stand beside her and put one hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into his body.

  “On myself,” she said.

  “Was that an option?” His voice was surprised.

  She shook her head. “No. But sometimes I need a reminder, when things get hard.” Her voice sounded plaintive to her ears, and she tried to smile. “As does everyone, I suppose.”

  He nodded, but seemed distracted, and the phone chimed again, this time with a different ring. “If you want to leave your clothes here, my housekeeper will have them laundered. If you want to stay, my driver can take you back. But I need to leave soon for a meeting.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She set her coffee cup down on the windowsill. “Do you prefer that I leave at the same time you do?”

  “I trust you here.” His voice sounded surprised, then certain. “I trust you. But before I go, and before you do, we have one piece of unfinished business.” He raised his eyebrow, and the mood between them ratcheted up into something erotic and dangerous.

  “Oh? And what is that?” Her voice was sultry, and she ran a finger over his hand. “Do you need to fuck me again, Hunter?”