SoloPlay (16 page)

If so, his interest was becoming more personal by the minute. He didn’t want any more distance between him and Alisa; he couldn’t imagine going back to an e-mail relationship with her. He had dozens of new designs for future SoloPlay products. Jesus, what if she tested toys with another lover and referenced it on a SoloPlay survey? Violence surged through him as he pulled out into downtown traffic.

He held his emotions in check, hoping that her anger proved that she cared for him, at least a little bit. He was banking on the possibility that her fury disguised a different emotion.

He had so many things he wanted to share with her. His business, his life, his heart. They were meant to be together. Now all he had to do was convince her.

Alisa burrowed into bed as soon as she got back to her apartment, only to toss and turn for what felt like an hour. Just as she began to slide into exhausted sleep, the telephone began to ring. Her heart slammed in her chest and she called herself every kind of moron for hoping it was Mark, but she hoped anyway.

It was her mother. Perfect.

“Hi, Mom.” She collapsed back into bed, too tired to keep the emotion out of her voice. Could the day get worse? No double mocha. No chocolate cheesecake. A ruined nap. And now her mother, probably about to launch into a tirade.

“You sound terrible! Have you been out partying so early, Alisa? Your father and I didn’t raise you to burn the candle at both ends, you know…”

Alisa squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself to accept the torrent of negativity pouring out of the telephone. Her head began to throb with an ache that made her feel like it was going to explode and then set off a chain reaction of explosions throughout the rest of her body. The image made her smile a little, and she remembered her vow of honesty.

She was becoming a new woman. A strong, risk-taking, loving woman. This was her chance to begin her journey. Alisa took a deep breath and cut into her mother’s stinging rant. “Mom, I’m having a crappy day and you’re making it worse. You don’t sound so great, either. Is there something that we can talk about that will make us both feel better?”

Her mother fell silent. That was a first, and a definite step in the right direction.
New woman
, Alisa chastised herself. “Are you upset about something, Mom?”

“What makes you think that? Did your father call you?” Suspicion tightened her mother’s voice.

“Of course not!” The thought made them both snort at the same time. Her father did not make phone calls. He had people for that.

“Everything okay?” Alisa asked gently.

Her mother’s reply was lost to renewed pounding. It took a second to figure out that it wasn’t her head. Or her heart. “Mom, there’s someone at the door. Would you like me to call you a little bit later?”

“No, dear, you go. It’s same old, same old around here.” Her mom sounded resigned, but no longer quite so miserable.

“I’ll call you this weekend, then. We need to set a date for your visit,” Alisa promised.

“Thank you, darling.” That was progress, and Alisa felt good about it, even when she looked through the peephole and saw Mark waiting in the hall.

“Go away,” she said loudly, clearly, firmly. She’d made enough progress for one day. To hell with her vow. Every rule had an exception, and Mark was hers. She was on a
new
journey, leaving him behind.

Alisa walked down the hall, ignoring the increasing din at the door.

She halted at the door of her bedroom when she saw three vibrators, clean and ready for duty, laid out on her bedside table. BodyVibe hung half-on, half-off the overstuffed chair in the corner. The Jungle Gym mocked her from the closet. She had nowhere to hide.

Down the length of the entire hall and through the door, she could hear Mark’s deep voice shouting, “Open up, Alisa. I brought you a new sex toy. It’s even more powerful than the one we tried last night—”

She bolted back down the hall, unlocked the door of her apartment and flung it open. “Be quiet! I have neighbors!” She dragged him inside, slamming the door behind him. He reached over and threw the bolt, as he had every night for the past month. Alisa cursed the heat that swept through her when she saw the look in his eyes. This had to stop. Now.

She grabbed a cardboard box from the hall closet and swept down the hall to her bedroom. If his damn DoublePlay toys were more important to him than people, he could have every single one of them back. She raked the vibrators into the box and emptied her bedside table drawer in on top of them.

“I don’t want any more sex toys, Mark. I want you to take them all back. I don’t need them anymore.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Not even the Screamer?”

“Oh shut up. You better be careful or I’ll hit you with that sexual harassment suit you were so worried about.”

“Actually, I think I’ve got a pretty strong harassment case against you.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Well, think about it. I needed your help with DoublePlay and you said you’d only give it to me if I had sex with you. Pretty cut-and-dried, I’d say.”

“You egotistical, insufferable—” she spluttered.

“It’s not my fault I couldn’t resist you.”

“You couldn’t resist the profit, you mean.” Alisa strode across the room to grab BodyVibe. She shoved it into the box, desperate to get him out of the bedroom before she gave in to the “one more for the road” urge that being in the same room with Mark and all those DoublePlay toys was giving her. “Why are you here Mark?”

“To ask you if you would reconsider accepting a position as head of product development. But that’s not the only reason—”

Alisa reached her limit. “No. I told you. I quit.”

“Let me explain, Alisa—”

“No,” she said again, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him. “Let
me
explain. There’s one thing I didn’t record on my precious DoublePlay surveys, and you might as well have all the information, since that’s what you hired me for. Playing with a partner changes everything. It isn’t just the size or the shape of the toy or even the battery power that provides the pleasure. It’s sharing it with someone else. Your pleasure became my pleasure. I know you were using me to get DoublePlay off the ground, but it wasn’t just a job to me.” Just like that, the dam broke, and it was harder to keep her emotions inside than it was to let them escape. “Last night when you so cheerfully told me we were finished with DoublePlay, I was devastated, and when you thanked me for working with you, you broke my fucking heart. So, yeah, as my last official act as a SoloPlay employee, I’d like to suggest that you design a warning label for the DoublePlay products—
handle with care
, or
hang on to your heart
or something like that.”

Mark grinned. “Thank God, I thought you were just using me for sex toys.” He took her hands and held them to his heart.

“I
was
using you,” she said bitterly, ignoring the warmth that began to curl inside her. “When Eric dumped me, he said I was frigid.” Now that the dam had broken, she couldn’t seem to stop the flow of words, especially since he seemed to want to hear them. “I went to Come Again to find a way to prove him wrong, and I did, but not in the way I was expecting. I found Crystal and she taught me that communication is the key to sexual pleasure. It was so easy, too easy, to be with her. She knew what I wanted, even when I couldn’t tell her.”

“Go on,” he said. His nostrils flared and he swallowed hard. Evidence of the effect of her words swelled between them.

Her body began to heat in response. She had to finish her story and get him out of here. Fast. “Crystal broke up with me because she thought it was time for me to try out my new communication skills with a man.” She paused. “Did she ever tell you she promised to send me a Prince Charming?”

Mark shook his head.

“Well, you were certainly charming.” She paused again, remembering the way he had begun seducing her, deep in the library stacks, the fantasies he had shared with her. “When you walked into the library looking for me, it seemed like fate. You wanted my help with DoublePlay and I wanted to try to have sex with a man again. It seemed like a perfect plan, but it backfired.” She pulled away from him and picked up the box on the bed. She jammed it into his hands. “You need to go.”

“Not until we’re done.” His eyes flashed.

“We
are
done,” Alisa said, gritting her teeth to make the words sound biting instead of breathless. “We were done last night.”

Mark shook his head and tossed the box onto the floor. A bright blue butt plug and a handful of cock rings bounced out of the box and landed at their feet. “DoublePlay was done last night. I still have plans for you.” He drew close, too close, and she couldn’t ignore the desire in his eyes or the heat in his hands as he took her arm. She didn’t resist as he pulled her down to sit beside him on the bed, but she fought the pleasure his nearness caused.

“At the coffee shop, you said you would have tested the DoublePlay products with me for free. If you weren’t doing it for the cash, why were you doing it?”

“I just told you. I wanted to learn how to have good sex with a man.” What the hell, might as well go for broke now that she’d made her damn vow. She took a deep breath. “At least, that’s what I thought I wanted. I know better now, thanks to DoublePlay.”
And you
, she thought wistfully.

Mark held her gaze. “What do you want now, Alisa?”

“A guy who wants to give me more than a job would be good for starters.”

His voice was a low, rough whisper. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

She looked into his hot-cold eyes and shook her head. “It’s too late, Mark. I just want you to leave me alone.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said softly.

The hairs on Alisa body stood on end, leaned toward him. Even as she tried to push him away, the space between them crackled with electric attraction. Mark bent his head to her neck, to where the pulse beat in her throat, and kissed it. Alisa trembled as his words feathered against her neck.

“If we quit now, you might feel like a failure,” he said. “We can’t have that. I’m just trying to be fair, sweetheart. It doesn’t sound like you got everything you wanted out of this experiment. Let’s do it one more time. Just once. Tell me what you want me to do.” He was giving her that look again, the devilish one, the one he usually had on his face right before he pulled some outlandish toy out of his briefcase, and she couldn’t help but respond.

Alisa’s mouth went dry. Her heart skipped a beat. “I think I’m all set, as you well know.”

Mark cupped her cheek with his wide palm. She couldn’t pull away. “I didn’t tell you how I felt about you because I thought you were only interested in DoublePlay. Initially, it was all about the money, but after that first night, everything changed. Sologirl was my dream girl. I think I might have dreamed up the whole DoublePlay idea just to have an excuse to find her. But when I found you, you were more beautiful and more magnificent than my wildest fantasies of Sologirl. I wanted you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone in my whole life. No other girl has ever come close.”

His words heated her, melted her. Alisa wanted to be furious with him, but it was hard to concentrate on anger over the sharp arousal pulsing between her thighs and the slow, grinding ache of her heart. Was it even remotely possible that Mark was looking for more from her than sex and surveys? Could he be looking for love too? Hope began to whisper inside her.

Mark continued, “I want to share more than just wild nights with you, Alisa—I want to share my life with you. Please, will you give me another chance?”

Mark’s eyes were pleading, and his lips were tender on her cheek. Alisa’s heart felt full. Everything made sense now. No wonder she hadn’t been able to respond to Eric. He was a selfish putz. Her affair with Crystal had taught her enough about her body to keep her from closing the door on sex, but it hadn’t taught her anything about love.

Alisa had been waiting for Mark.

“There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” Mark admitted. “Sologirl
has
no secrets from me. I know everything about her, and I was using all my secret knowledge to tie you to me with pleasure.” His grin was carnal and delicious. “However, in the interest of your personal growth, I’ll forget everything I know.” His hands slid intimately over her body, pausing in all her important places. “Tell me what you want. Tell me every single thing you want me to do to you. Talk slowly, and in great detail. You spin the fantasy for me this time.”

Mark held on to her shoulders and looked lovingly, laughingly, into her eyes. “I love you, Sologirl. I want to be your Prince Charming, and SoloPlay Enterprises wants you too—as the head of product development or anything else you’d like to be.” His warm eyes dared her, and his mouth curved in wicked promise. “How about it, Sologirl? Are you game?”

Heart soaring, Alisa nodded slowly. Mark might think he knew everything about Sologirl, but he didn’t know everything about Alisa Mane. “On one condition.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t call me Sologirl. I don’t think I’m going to be playing solo anymore.”

His smile thrilled her.

Alisa spotted the game die on the floor and stood to pick it up. She gave it a spin onto the bedside table.

Reveal.
Finally, she was ready.

“I love you too,” she said. Relief, then joy filled her as she bent to whisper, slowly and with great detail, into his ear.

About the Author

It makes me chuckle to think about all the romantic short stories I wrote in my rather too literary creative writing classes in college. If only one of my professors had steered me toward popular fiction! On the other hand, if I had discovered my calling back then, I wouldn’t have gone to culinary school, I wouldn’t have met my husband, we wouldn’t have had three children and I wouldn’t have turned to erotic romance to get my mojo back during all this hair-raising kid raising.

To learn more about me, please visit
www.mirandabaker.com
. Send an email to [email protected] if you want to chat about romance, writing, or recipes!