Marrying the Master (5 page)

Lola
laughed softly, and wiped away a tear. Now that she was talking about it, all
of her emotions were coming to the surface. She was really, truly scared.
“Seriously, Stella, I don’t know if I can do this right now.”

“Look
at it this way: if after all this you still feel like he doesn’t respect you,
you can quit.”

Lola
looked up, shocked.

“Look,
I love Volare, but I love you more,” Stella said, digging into the ice cream.
“And you can’t keep hanging around a guy who makes you this crazy, not right
now, not after what happened with Ben. You have to eventually move on. So you
save the club, and then…”

“I
move on.”

It
actually wasn’t the worst idea in the world. It made Lola unbelievably sad, but
it gave her some relief, too.

“Hey,
I’m sorry I didn’t come over last night when you left that message,” Stella
said, blushing. “Bashir had something…planned.”

Lola
looked at her friend and smiled. The change in Stella since Bashir had come
into her life had been remarkable; she’d gone from having zero self-confidence
in the wake of a brutal divorce to being so happy that she seemed in love with
the entire world. Lola had wondered more than once what it felt like to have a
man love you as much as Bashir loved Stella.

“When
do you have to decide?” Stella asked. “Crazy fake marriage or…?”

Lola
looked at her watch and cursed. There was no more time to feel scared or
overwhelmed or anything else. “I’m supposed to meet Roman and Ford in like an
hour.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”
Lola shot off the couch and began digging through her recently delivered dry
cleaning for something acceptable. She didn’t want to show up to this meeting
looking as disheveled as she felt. She wanted the upper hand in at least one
way. Roman Casta had the upper hand in everything else. “What the hell am I
going to wear?”

Stella’s
grin was positively evil. “Oh, I know what. That white Dior suit, the one with
the boobs.”

“White?”

“
Definitely
white.
And
definitely with boobs.
There’s no reason to make it easy on him.”

Stella
was a whiz with hair and make up, at least on other people, and in no time at
all Lola looked like a million bucks. She got her favorite red purse—a
splash of Roman’s favorite color, and the only red item she owned that somehow
didn’t clash with her hair—grabbed some oversized dark glasses, and rode
the elevator down, Stella in tow, finally feeling like she might be back in
control.

Which
was why she was taken completely by surprise when she opened the lobby door to
find a scrum of reporters, all of them screaming her name.

“Lola!
Lola! Is it true you secretly married Roman Casta?”

“Are
you the mistress of Club Volare?”

“Who
are the other members?”

A
dozen flashes went off in Lola’s face at once, and she nearly toppled over. How
could this happen? How could the press already know? How had they gotten her
name?

Stella
showed up at her side and helped her fight her way through the crowd to a cab
that was stopped at the light. As they piled into the backseat and Lola
shielded them from camera flashes with her bag, she had only one furious
thought:
Roman did this. Again.

Where
the hell was she?

Roman
paced the length of Ford Colson’s spacious office, only a few blocks from Club
Volare and Roman’s own apartment. The club’s longtime lawyer, and Roman’s good
friend, had wisely stayed silent, until now.

“She’s
just running late,” Ford finally said.

“Obviously
she is late,” Roman said.

“I
meant that I’m sure she’s coming.”

Roman
glared. “The alternative had not occurred to me.”

Now,
of course, the possibility loomed large. Only a few days ago he would have
laughed at the suggestion that Lola Theroux would ever seriously consider
leaving Club Volare. Ever since he’d brought her into the club she had been a
natural fit, and eventually an essential fixture. She managed the place with
singular grace, and was central to his plans to open up a second location,
though she didn’t know it yet.

And
yesterday she had seriously raised the possibility of quitting.

It
was wrong. He had taken steps to make it right.

But
that required that she in fact arrive.

Roman
was almost never wrong, but Lola…Lola had surprised him when she’d suggested
that she could simply leave. The last time Roman had been that surprised was
when he’d discovered Lola in black leather at a now-defunct BDSM club in the
East Village. That had been only a few years after Chance Dalton, Lola’s close
cousin and Roman’s partner in the Club Volare ventures, had asked him to take
care of Lola in the wake of her father’s death. Roman had accepted the
responsibility without question and had rushed to Lola’s side, a stranger in
place of family. He was glad to do it, but he had not expected Lola to be…Lola.

Gorgeous.
Smarter than anyone else he knew. Fun. He suspected that Lola and his wife
Samantha would have been great friends, if Samantha had lived. In truth,
helping Lola helped him get through the most difficult time following his
wife’s death. But his position as Chance’s best friend, his role as surrogate
big brother during a vulnerable time—all of those things meant that Lola
was, as Chance would have said, off-limits.

Fine.
Roman was practiced at self-control, and he’d trained himself not to look at
Lola that way. Not to think of her as the beautiful submissive he knew she was.
Not to imagine her underneath him.

It
was getting harder.

He
heard the click of heels on hardwood floors approaching Ford’s office and spun
towards the door, his whole body rippling with a singular awareness—it
was
her
. He’d recognize the rhythm of her stride
anywhere.

The
door opened and she stepped in, her red hair framing her beautiful face and
pink lips. Roman suppressed a rumbling in his chest. She was wearing a tight,
white suit, some sort of designer item. Roman didn’t care about clothing; he
cared about the curves underneath. He cared about the way her bottom lip begged
to be bitten. He cared about the way her breasts demanded to be mauled.

His
cock twitched to life, but he refused to look away. He willed his body under
control, and just when he’d succeeded, he realized that Lola was furious.

“Well?
Are you going to explain?” she demanded. She took off her oversized sunglasses
and he saw her green eyes flash.

“There
are many things I could explain to you,” he said, his gaze trailing down to her
legs. “You will have to be more specific.”

Lola
glared at him, then walked over to a black leather couch and sat down. Slowly
she crossed those long legs, and Roman was mesmerized. When he finally looked
up and met her eye, she blushed.

“Excuse
me,” Ford said, and Roman frowned. He tried to remember that it wasn’t Ford’s
fault he was there. Ford cleared his throat. “I imagine that Lola has
encountered the press.”

“Explain,”
Roman said.

Roman
kept his eyes locked on Lola. She had dressed like this on purpose. In white,
the bridal color, her skin flushed and glowing.
Deliberately
provocative.

She
was playing the sub game with him, whether she realized it or not.

Did
she know she was playing with fire?

“There
were reporters outside my apartment building,” Lola said, her voice finally
beginning to falter under the weight of Roman’s stare. “They knew I ran Volare.
They asked if we were getting married. Actually, they asked if we already
were
married.”

Roman
cursed, startling them all. Roman had made the decision to deal with
Sizzle
, and with Catie’s deception and
eventual redemption, all on his own—had made the decision to be the public
face of Volare—precisely to avoid this situation. He would always protect
the identity of the club’s members, but he had wanted to protect Lola most of
all. It never occurred to him to ask her to take the risk of being outed for
her association with a sex club, and the idea of gossip rags discussing Lola’s
sex life made him furious, but now it was happening anyway.

And
he could never, ever explain why he had made that choice, the choice that so
infuriated her, without admitting that he wanted her. That he
had
wanted her, for years. And he
couldn’t do all of that for a very good reason: he would protect Lola from
anything, including himself.

“How?”
he barked.

“It
wasn’t you?” Lola asked, apparently genuinely confused.

Roman
was appalled. “I would never do that to you,” he said.

Lola’s
blush deepened, and she finally looked away.

What the hell is going on?

“It
was me,” Ford said from behind him. “I leaked it to the press this morning.”

Now
it was Roman’s turn to be outraged. He whirled around, his protective instincts
taking momentary control.

“
Explain
,” he seethed.

“I
don’t think either of you are fully aware of the political situation,” Ford
said calmly. “Obviously this law is total bullshit, and we could fight
everything and probably win—eventually. But this isn’t about what’s legal
or fair; it’s about politics and public perception. Harold Jeels is just useful
for people in Albany who want to run against the perv club down in the city. We
can’t give them any excuse. We have to fight this in the media, too, and that
means public coverage.”

“You
should have asked me first,” Roman said. “You had no right to do this to her.”

“I
can speak for myself,” Lola said quietly.

Roman
looked back at her, and his anger abated. She was standing now, a portrait of
elegance and poise, her long, luscious legs spread slightly and her hand on one
hip. Her ability to operate under pressure had always impressed him, and it did
so again now. Roman was, as he had been when she had discovered Ben’s cheating,
torn between pride in her evident strength and the desire to utterly destroy
whatever had hurt her.

He
took a deep breath and tried to remember that Ford was his friend.

“Of
course you can,” he said to Lola. “Forgive me.”

There
was a silence, and he could have sworn he saw her expression soften. She looked
down, the slightest hint of a frown marring her beautiful face.

“Ford,
you should have warned me,” Lola said.

“I
couldn’t get a hold of you,” Ford continued. “You weren’t answering your phone.
Look, there’s nothing pretty about any of this. This has to be a freaking
spectacle. We need to get you two officially married as soon as possible, and
then after that we need to make a wedding ceremony into a big media event while
somehow protecting members who don’t want their memberships exposed. Everyone
has to be convinced this is real. And in the meantime, there’s a possibility
that you might need to avoid process servers.”

“Process
servers?” Lola said weakly.

“That’s
why you suggested we meet here,” Roman said. He hadn’t realized this would
become such a media circus. “You think they know where Volare is?”

“Nobody
can hide from the taxman, and Harold Jeels knows plenty of people in the New
York State revenue service. Trust me—he definitely knows where Volare is
located.”

Roman
did not like this. Volare was located on the top floor of an exclusive hotel, a
decision Roman had made early on which was always designed to provide cover for
the club’s members. A wealthy kinkster need not telegraph his tastes; he could
just be staying at the hotel. Even so, Roman did not relish the idea of
reporters camped out, waiting for Lola.

His
brooding was interrupted by the tone in Lola’s voice: soft, vulnerable,
yielding.

“Roman,”
she said. “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”

 
He looked at her again, at the softness
of her skin, the warmth of her eyes, and was gripped with a sudden, ferocious
lust. She stood closer to him now, and was looking up at him through her long
lashes, her eyes wide open,
her
lips slightly parted.
He had seen her play the sub with her odious ex-boyfriend and knew that
he,
Roman, could bring out her true
submissiveness in a way that bastard Benjamin never had. Knew that she would
purr under his hand, that he could make her scream his name and beg. Knew that
she would come as many times as he demanded.

“Roman?”
she asked.

This
was the trouble: he wanted to fuck her until they both lost the ability to
speak, but that was all he could give her. He couldn’t protect her from his own
problems. He couldn’t protect her from his grief over Samantha.

“You
are here to sign a prenuptial agreement,” he said finally. He couldn’t take his
eyes off her moist lips. “A prenuptial agreement that awards you an equity
stake in Volare upon dissolution of the marriage, no matter the reason.”