Alpha (11 page)

I struggled to go to sleep, and failed. There were no clocks in my rooms, so I could not tell the time. I had my phone somewhere in my purse, but the battery was dead, and honestly, I found myself not caring what time it was. Late, I knew that much. Harris had shown up at four in the afternoon. I’d just gotten home from a lunch shift at Outback, and had showered off the restaurant stench. A good four, almost five hours, had passed from the time Harris and I left my apartment to arriving here in this high-rise palace. Another hour from first meeting to dinner…it had to be past midnight, easily. Dinner had been long, slow, drawn-out affair. We’d lingered over each bite. There had been long silences between us, stretched-out moments devoid of empty conversation. Those silences, they should have been awkward, but they weren’t.
 

I wasn’t given to small talk, to idle chatter. I’d been on dozens of first dates in my life that had never gone anywhere, simply because I wasn’t interested in inane babble. I had no patience for men who rambled on and on. Shut up about the stupid football game. I couldn’t care less about fucking football. The Lions suck, they’ve always sucked and they will always suck. Shut up about stocks. I don’t care which stock rose ten points and which went down five. What does that even mean, and in what universe am I supposed to care? If the conversation doesn’t interest me, I’m out. Like, done, right now, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not finish the date. I’ve stood up in the middle of a meal and said, “Thanks for the effort, but this isn’t working out.” I’d rather eat alone and in silence than make idle small talk. And my mystery man, mister tall and blond, he seemed to be the same way. He didn’t speak unless he had something worthwhile to say, and I appreciated that about him.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep. My brain went in endless circles, flitting from thought to thought like a butterfly in a field of wildflowers.
 

I thought of that glimpse of him I’d gotten. He had to be at least six-four, maybe taller. Every time I’d been around him, he’d moved almost silently, his footsteps light and quick. As I’d watched him round the corner, he’d moved easily, despite his height. He’d looked lean and muscular, but not burly. I mean, this was just conjecture based on a single split-second glance, but that was my impression.
 

And that too worked for me. I wasn’t impressed by guys who had muscles on muscles, twenty-inch biceps and pectoral muscles bigger than my own tits—which weren’t small, by the way. If a guy was that beefed up, he’d obviously spent hours and hours in the gym. Staying in that kind of shape took dedication. Good for them, sure, great, go for it. But I wanted the guy I dated to have time for me. If he set aside three or four hours every day just to go to the gym, then that was three to four hours he didn’t have for me. Call me selfish, but I expected my boyfriends to be more dedicated to
me
than to their weight bench. Plus, why do you need to be that big? Do you go around lifting heavy things all day? Do you routinely need to lift a four-hundred-pound…thing? Um, probably not. What even weighs four hundred pounds that you’d come across in everyday life? I couldn’t think of a single thing.
 

No, give me a guy who’s in decent shape, who can hold an interesting conversation any day of the week. Give me a guy who can show me a good time without having to flex his muscles six times a minute, just to make sure they’re still there. I would want to say, Yes, buddy, you’ve still got your muscles. They didn’t go away in the last five minutes. And, no, I’m still not impressed by how much you can bench. Can you carry me to bed? Can you last long enough to make me come? Those are the important things. Get me to bed, get me off. If you can manage those things, I’ll be impressed.
 

This was why, at twenty-six, I was still single. Most guys didn’t pass the first-date test, much less the long-term test of holding my interest for more than a month.
SportsmoviesIworkOUTlookatmymusclesI’msobuff
. Shut up, I DO NOT CARE. Use the muscle in your skull, and then the one in your pants. Impress me with your vocabulary, and then your sexual attentiveness. See, that was the other thing. I didn’t really need a guy to be able to go for hours and hours. That got boring real fucking fast. Heh, that’s punny. No, for real, though. I’d rather come fast and come hard than be fucked for hours on end. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I
loved
sex. It was great. But hours of it? Probably not. Figure out what makes me moan, and do that until I come. I guarantee, if you did that, you’d come, too. That was just how it worked. Me, and probably most other women, I’d wager. Except, most guys didn’t seem to get that. They seemed to think harder, faster, and longer meant better when, in reality, that was very often not the case.
 

Mystery man?
 

Holy shit. He could turn me on with mere words. A whisper in my ear. A touch to my cheek. A kiss to my jaw. He had me squirming and wet and aching at dinner, and he only
kissed
me, fairly chaste kisses at that. No tongue, no heavy petting. My clothes stayed on, and in place. Shit, he turned me on more with a few kisses to my hand and arm than any other guy had managed in an entire night of full-on sex. It wasn’t hard to make me hot and horny, nor was it hard to make me come. I was…average, I’d think. I didn’t have a hair trigger, and I rarely came more than once. But if you paid attention to my signals, you could get me off pretty easily.
 

What happened at dinner?
 

Unreal. Just…totally unreal.
 

I got out of bed, dressed in a T-shirt and underwear, and paced the living room, my thoughts racing. I ached. Deep down, between my legs. He’d made me hot, and he’d left me hanging. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t in some kind of sexual frenzy, just…mildly frustrated. Left curious, wondering, needing more.

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I left my room and wandered toward the kitchens. I didn’t bother dressing, since only Eliza would be around to see me, assuming she was still awake. Mystery Man—God, I really needed to find out his name—had said he’d be in his private quarters.
 

Really? Private quarters? Who says that anymore? The dirty-minded teenager in me wanted to make a joke about it. When faced with situations that I had a hard time dealing with, my go-to reaction was humor, usually bawdy and inappropriate.
 

After a few wrong turns, I found the industrial kitchen, gaping and echoing and dark. An eight-burner Wolf gas range with an expansive, gleaming hood vent, double Wolf ovens, an unlit stone pizza oven with a long-handled paddle leaning against the wall, a wide island with a white cutting board running in front of a bank of closed, silver-topped, refrigerated containers. This was a restaurant kitchen, done in luxury-grade. There was a walk-in refrigerator, a walk-in freezer, and a six-foot-tall wine cooler stocked with bottle after bottle of what I assumed was thousands of dollars in chilled wine. There was another freestanding refrigerator dedicated to nothing but beer: Stella Artois, Newcastle, Smithwicks, Guinness, Harp, Yuengling, Duvel, Chimay…every kind of beer you could imagine except cheap domestic. No Bud Light or Coors here. I probably shouldn’t tell him I rarely drank anything but Bud Light. That was due more to budgetary restrictions than taste preference, but still.
 

I chose a Harp, rummaged through half a dozen drawers until I found a bottle opener. I wandered, beer in hand, until I found the breakfast nook. I stood with my nose near the glass, staring out at the still-bustling city.
 

I smelled him before I heard him. Honestly, I don’t think I ever really did hear him approach. I smelled his cologne, felt him behind me.

“Don’t turn around,” he murmured.

“I won’t.” The room behind us was dark, so there was no reflection of him in the window. An admission burbled up and out; I had to know what he would do. This was my test for him. “I peeked, earlier. You were going around the corner. You’re really tall, and you have blond hair.”

There was a long, significant hesitation before he responded. “Why did you tell me? I wouldn’t have ever known.”

I shrugged, swallowed a mouthful of beer. “I don’t know.” A lie, but I couldn’t very well tell
him
my real reason for spilling the truth.

“Hmmm.” I heard liquid
glug
in a bottle neck, and deduced he was drinking beer as well. “You shouldn’t have peeked, Kyrie.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Strangely, it was a genuine apology.
 

Why did it matter? I couldn’t answer that question, except to say that it did. There was no point in denying his effect on me, no point in denying that I wanted his approval, his trust. What was it about him that created this reaction in me?
 

He was standing far enough behind me that we weren’t touching, but close enough that I felt heat coming from him. I should have felt self-conscious about my attire—or lack thereof—but I wasn’t. Not with him. And again, why wasn’t I? I wasn’t a prude, nor was I shy. I could rock a bikini without feeling self-conscious, but I wasn’t a show-off, either. I didn’t flash more skin than I felt comfortable with. The T-shirt I was wearing just barely cleared the bottom of my ass, leaving almost my entire lower half on display for him. And this didn’t bother me in the slightest. I felt…at ease despite being half-naked around a man I’d known for less time than it had taken me to fly here from Detroit.
 

“I told you not to fail that test.”

“Yes, you did.”

“And yet you still peeked.”

“I’m a curious girl, what can I say?”

“You’re a bad girl.” His voice was low, dark, thick with promise.

“Yeah?” I heard the teasing rasp in my voice, and wondered who it was. Not me, surely. “What are you gonna do about it?” I swallowed hard, waiting for his response.

I felt his fingers pinch the cotton of my shirt, lifting it. He let it rest on the swell of my ass. The underwear I wore was somewhere between lingerie and basic briefs. It was the kind of lacy panty that was molded to my ass, cutting in tight between my ass cheeks. Light pink in color, comfy, sexy. Now I felt revealed, exposed. I wasn’t breathing; I didn’t dare. I’d been bad. Disobedient.

Even thinking in those terms made me squirm with discomfort. I wasn’t a child who worried about
disobeying
. But yet the feeling persisted, fear mixed with excitement.
 

Something warm and rough cupped my ass. I swayed, nearly dropping my beer. I tried to breathe. I was getting dizzy from having held my breath for so long. His hand caressed first one side, and then the other. He sucked in a short, sharp breath.

“Bloody hell, Kyrie. So damned perfect.” His words weren’t really meant for me, it seemed, stumbling out of his mouth in a barely audible mumble.
 

I was about to demur, to remind him I wasn’t perfect, when he spoke again. Louder, to me, this time.
 

“No more peeking, yes?”
 

Once again, I opened my mouth to speak when I was cut off. This time, by a quick yet stinging smack to my right ass cheek. It wasn’t hard; it didn’t hurt. It just…surprised me. I gasped at the unexpected contact, and then the gasp morphed into something else when his palm smoothed and gentled my stinging flesh.

“No more peeking, yes?” His tone was prompting, demanding an answer. I was too surprised and mixed-up to form words. I nodded, hoping that would do. Apparently not. The light, sharp slap came to the left side of my butt this time, once again followed immediately by a soothing circle of his warm hand. “No…more…peeking.
Yes
?”

“Yes…yes.” The answer flew from my lips, breathless, and then I sucked in a long breath, finally able to breathe.

“That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” His hand rested on the bell of my hip, casual, possessive.

Familiar. As if it belonged there.
 

“I thought…I thought you said you weren’t into that?”

“Did I hurt you?”
 

“No,” I admitted.

“It was a reminder. I expect answers when I ask questions. I would never, ever cause you pain. A bit of a sting, that’s all.” His breath stole over my neck, and his voice rumbled in my ear. God, I wanted
so badly
to turn around. “And you liked it, didn’t you?”

I knew I had to answer. “Yes.” My answer was barely a breath — it didn’t count as speech. It was a susurrus of mortification.
 

“If you truly don’t like something, if it causes you prolonged discomfort or pain, tell me. I should, under all circumstances, be able to read your responses to what I do, but if for some reason I miss something, just tell me. But please—for both our sakes—examine yourself before you ask me to stop. Find out if you
really
truly want me to stop. Or if you’re merely afraid of liking something new.”

I took a long pull off my beer and then, in an instinctual gesture that surprised me as much as him, I think, I leaned my head back until it met his chest. I kept my eyes closed, per our agreement.
 

“This is all so…much,” I heard myself admit. “So different. So strange. So scary. I don’t know what’s happening to me. You—you do something to me. Just by—I don’t even know—without trying. Like you know all my switches and buttons. But you couldn’t. You couldn’t possibly know what makes me tick this well. No amount of stalking, watching me from a distance, could tell you what turns me on.”

“Yes, you’re right.” His voice, coming from so close, from his chest, from above my head…was loud, pure energy and vibration. “I told you, Kyrie. I can read you like a book. You’re scared, but you
want
this. You hate the fact that I affect you so much, but you like it in equal measure. The fear makes it that much more exciting.”

Glass touched wood, and then he took my bottle and set it down as well on the table behind us. His hands slid down my arms. His body towered behind me. His breath blew on my neck.