Submit and Surrender (2 page)

Adra pulled the box away just in time to dodge Thea’s hands. “One!” she said.

“Pfft, I’ll eat donuts if I damn well feel like it,” said Thea. She took a bite of a cream-filled concoction and moaned. “But really, take them away, because apparently there have been great advances in donut technology since I was your age. Jesus, that is good.”

“Better than sex?” Adra smiled.

“Hell no, and you know it.”

Adra’s smile faltered. It was her own fault. Thea was right; nothing on this planet compared to the last time Adra had had sex.

It had been with Ford.

“What’s wrong with you?” Thea asked. Adra tried to hide from that critical stare, but it was basically pointless. Thea didn’t really believe in beating around the bush. “If you’re over here taking care of me, you must really need to find a new lost soul to take under your wing the way that you do.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I don’t need taking care of, and you know it. You’re just distracting yourself.” Thea took another bite and closed her eyes. “You do buy a fantastic donut, though. Don’t tell me where.”

“I’m distracting myself?” Adra said. She almost demanded to know what she could possibly be distracting herself from when she caught Thea’s look.

Ford.

God dammit, did the whole club know? Even Thea? It was that obvious?

“I’m
not
distracting myself,” Adra said. “I’m just…”

And it was right then that her phone rang.

Funny. At the time, Adra was actually happy for a real distraction. And she was even happier when she realized who was calling.

“Lola?” she said, waving goodbye to Thea and starting back across the street to the Volare compound. “Why are you telling me to get back to the compound?”

“Because I’m at the compound,” Lola said.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Adra laughed. “How are you even allowed to fly?”

Lola ran the New York Club Volare with her husband, Roman, and she was also very, very pregnant. Adra had resigned herself to not seeing her friend for the next few months.

“I sneaked in just under the wire ages ago,” Lola said. “Roman and I got a little private time up in Sonoma, and the New York winter was killing my pregnant lady joints, so I made an executive decision an escaped to L.A. while I still could. Now get your ass back here. We have to talk.”

That sounded ominous, but Adra didn’t care. Lola was in town.

***

Well, she didn’t care right up until she realized what Lola was up to.

“So you’re having the baby in L.A.?” Adra asked, leaning over to gingerly hug the very pregnant redhead.

“Roman researched all the best OBGYNs, and we’re flying our New York guy out, and yada yada,” Lola said, waving her hand. “He’s running this show like he’s planning an invasion or something. I’m just getting out of his way until showtime.”

“You’re a pregnancy diva,” Adra said, grinning.

Lola sank slowly back into the comfiest couch in the Volare lounge and grinned back.

“Of course I am,” she said.

It still didn’t totally make sense to Adra, but who cared? She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t thrilled to have Lola around, especially considering how difficult she was finding it to run the club with Ford. The club itself was fine, but working with Ford was…

Every moment with him stretched into an eternity. She noticed every gesture, every movement, every hint of an emotion. Anything that might indicate that maybe he was beginning to thaw, that maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t screwed up the most important friendship in her life. And every time, he looked back at her with the cold, indifferent expression of a stranger, and every time she felt terrible.

Terrible, guilty, and somehow,
somehow
, still turned on. Because she couldn’t be around him now without thinking about that night.

It was bad enough before they’d ever touched each other, when she just had to deal with the fact that he was this movie-star gorgeous blond Dom with the kind of body you usually only saw on television or in ads for Diet Coke. When she could only wonder what his touch felt like, or how he kissed, or how he moved. But now? Now she
knew
.

He’d ruined sex with anyone else, ever again. No one else could live up to that.

And she had screwed everything up.

“So you seeing anyone?” Lola asked.

Adra sighed. Of course. She supposed she should have seen that one coming. Maybe Lola decided to spend the rest of her pregnancy in L.A. for health reasons, or comfort reasons, or whatever, but she was clearly going to put the time out in L.A. to good use. Good, meddlesome use.

“No,” Adra said truthfully.

“Uh-huh,” Lola said, eyes glittering. “And who was your last relationship?”

Adra stifled a laugh. The answer to that was definitely not what Lola expected, but Adra could tell she wouldn’t get away with evasive answers forever. Lola wanted to know about Ford. Volare was like a big family, and sometimes, like a family, everyone was up in everyone else’s business. Adra also knew she had pretty much zero right to complain, considering she was usually the one poking her nose in where it didn’t belong, setting people up, making sure people were happy.

Besides, Lola was kind of adorably bad at it.

“It was before I joined Volare,” Adra said.

“Seriously? That long ago?” Lola said. “Would I know him?”

Now Adra really did laugh. The whole country knew him. It kind of sucked when your actor ex’s career took off right after he’d dumped you for someone else and his picture ended up on every billboard in town, but it went with the business of being a talent agent. Adra had gotten used to it a long time ago, but other people usually freaked out when she told them, which is why she’d stopped divulging that little bit of her past.

“It’s not important,” Adra said. “We’re not in touch.”

“That bad?”

“That bad,” Adra said, her tone clipped. Actually, she couldn’t believe how much it still affected her. She’d learned a hard lesson with Derrick Duvall, and recently she’d spent a lot of time cursing the fact that she’d learned that lesson before she’d ever met Ford. It would have been…

No. It would have ended just as badly for her and Ford. And that would have been so, so much worse, because Ford was…well, Ford was Ford. There was no one else like him. And Adra already couldn’t take the fact that Ford looked at her like she was a stranger, like he’d seen a side of her that he just didn’t like. She couldn’t blame him, but if she felt that bad now, she couldn’t imagine what would have happened if she’d let it go on any further. She’d have been utterly destroyed when it ended badly, as it inevitably would have.

She shuddered.

“Yeah, well, you know that’s not what I’m really asking about,” Lola said.

“I know,” Adra said. “Believe me, I know. But it’s not my favorite subject at the moment. We’re working together, it’s not a big deal, it’s not—”

“That’s actually one of the reasons we came down from Sonoma,” Lola said softly. “We have something we need to talk to you two about.”

That shut Adra up for about a second. Then the words came tumbling out of her.

“Are you ok? Is the baby ok? Is Roman ok?”

Lola looked up, for once actually surprised. “What? We’re fine, you crazy lady. My God, who does the worrying when you’re not around?”

“I outsource.”

Lola smiled. “Here, help me up.”

“Where are we going?” Adra asked, pulling Lola out of the deep couch cushion. They managed to uncouch her on the second try.

“Remind me not to sit there,” Lola said. “Not safe for my dignity.”

“Please,” Adra said. “You could command armies while wearing a pink bunny suit. You can handle this couch.”

“Not if it swallows me whole,” Lola laughed and pulled Adra toward the stairs.

The stairs that led to Ford’s office.

Adra sighed. Well. They were supposed to work together.

“Lola, just give me a heads up,” she whispered as they came in sight of the door. “Am I going to hate this, whatever it is? Like, how bad are we talking here? Soul-crushing—like having to work with the guy you maybe almost had a thing with and still haven’t gotten over
and
his new girlfriend bad? Or just, you know, normal stressful for working with that guy you haven’t totally gotten over?”

Oh God. Adra hadn’t even thought about Ford getting a new girlfriend until she’d said the words out loud. The idea made her instantly nauseous.

Lola paused, her hand on the doorknob to Ford’s office, the door already open an inch.

“Honestly?” she said, her eyes soft. “It could go either way.”

“Fantastic,” Adra muttered.

Lola took Adra’s hand in her own and gave it a warm squeeze. “You’ll be fine,” she said.

Adra almost believed her. Until she heard Ford’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Of course it was a goddamn mistake,” Ford said to someone, presumably Roman. He sounded angry. Adra didn’t need to hear the rest to know what he was talking about, and it broke her heart a little bit all over again.

Lola cursed, and banged on the already open door.

“Gentlemen?” she said.

Adra forced herself through the door and into Ford’s office. There were three people already there: some guy in a Hollywood suit that Adra didn’t immediately know, though he looked kind of familiar; Roman Casta, the owner of the New York club; and Ford.

Jesus, Ford.

He was standing on the opposite side of his desk, leaning forward on those ridiculous arms, muscles wrapping around like steel cables. He was wearing sweatpants that hung low on his hips and a tank top, a hoodie draped over the back of his chair—he must have been on a run. This was one of the rare times Adra got to see him like this now that they didn’t spend weekends hanging out anymore. She had to remind herself not to drool. And for the first time in a long time, she saw an emotion on his face—surprise? Regret? Then frustration, and anger.

He was looking right at her.

She was the mistake.

It killed her to see what he thought of her now, but maybe that was good. Maybe it was good to kill all hope that they could recover their friendship. Maybe that’s what she needed to move on.

Adra decided not to ask what they were talking about. She was only slightly masochistic, something Ford already knew.

“Hi Roman,” she said, giving the big man a quick peck on the cheek. “You guys should have told me you were in California.”

“We did,” Roman smiled down at her. “Eventually.”

Adra looked back at Lola to find the woman actually blushing, and couldn’t help but laugh. Roman and Lola had been friends for years, but once they figured out they’d both been secretly in love with each other for nearly all of that time, they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off of each other. And now that Adra had firsthand experience in how much time and energy it took to run a sex club, she figured they’d probably been dying to have one last getaway before the baby came.

Even now, Roman looked at Lola like everything else in the world was just a shadow. What would that be like? To have the man you loved look at you like that?

Adra couldn’t help it. She looked at Ford.

He was still looking at her.

“Adra,” Ford said.

She may have blinked. She definitely caught her breath.

“Roman wants us to consult on a film,” Ford said. He was leaning on his fists, his knuckles white. He only did that when something was really bothering him.

Dazed, Adra said, “Wait, what?”

The man in the Hollywood suit stepped forward, his hand outstretched. “That’s my cue. We met at the Golden Globes last year, Adra. Roger Corvis.”

Oh God,
Adra thought. She recognized the name. It had been everywhere lately.

“You’re a producer,” she said weakly. His hand felt cold.

“Yes, I am,” Corvis grinned. “Working on a big one.”

Oh please, no.

“They want to film it here. At the club. Starting this week.” Ford was still looking directly at her. “I think it’s a mistake.”

Adra sat down heavily in one of Ford’s plush chairs. “They want to film it here?”

“And we want you and Ford to consult on production,” Roman added. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the film—
Submit and Surrender
?”

“Oh, yeah,” Adra said. She was feeling light headed. “Can’t miss it. Billboards everywhere.”

“Then you understand why it’s so important that we’re involved in the process,” Roman said, coolly confident. “We want to make sure the BDSM lifestyle is well represented. Roger’s agreed that you and Ford will be invaluable assets to the actors while they’re filming.”

“I think you know the lead actor already,” Corvis said. “Didn’t you used to date Derrick Duvall?”

Adra watched Ford stiffen, visible even from across the room, and closed her eyes.

“Yup,” she said. “Derrick's my ex.”

Her last relationship. Her first and only D/s romance. The guy who’d proved to her that romance wasn’t something she could have. And part of the reason she’d had to tell Ford she couldn’t be with him.