Three Hard Lessons (20 page)

“You don’t need to hurry back, right?” he said. “Another week.” His soft tongue teased and begged, and was more convincing when it wasn’t using words. “Stay.”

This was crossing into dangerous ground, but there was no other answer. “Yes.”

He exhaled loudly as his shoulders relaxed. “Holy fuck, come for me. Right now.”

My eyes slammed shut. The vise of the orgasm gripped me. His hands braced my hips against the wall while my body rocked and writhed with pulsing pleasure. My strangled cry was crushed under his lips, wet with my own taste. Another week with him.
Yes.

I was tingling and still in the floating, weightless place he took me to, when one hand abandoned my hip. It tugged his belt open. A zipper rang out. His pants slid down to his ankles when the condom wrapper was in his hands.

“Dominic,” I moaned. My hands dove under his boxers and lowered the waistband down over his cock, helping him get ready to take me. You’d think we’d gone a year without sex and not a single day from the desperation in me. I hooked one of my legs around him. “Fuck me. Fuck me now.”

He held his dick in his hand, positioning it against me, and when the angle was right, he slipped his hands under my ass and lifted so I could slide down on his thick, impossibly hard cock. I took all of him in deep, and he blew out a sharp breath right by my ear.

“You needed this, didn’t you?” he asked.

The rough voice . . . it pumped desire in my veins. “Yes. Oh my god, yes.”

“Is it all you can think about, like me?”

My arms crossed behind his neck and I held on as he began to fuck me against the side of the container. It escaped my lips. “Yes.”

His teeth skimmed the pulse pounding in my neck. The climb toward another orgasm began, tugging me upward, and this one threatened to be epic. I panted and moaned. My hands clutched at his suit jacket while Dominic drove into me.

What would we look like if one of his coworkers stumbled upon us? Dominic’s ass was only half covered by those boxers and my boots were locked at the ankles around his back. Would the man run off? Would he stay and watch? Fuck, the idea turned me on.

“Are you close?” Dominic asked.

I nodded. “I’m gonna come all over you.”

Abruptly his rhythm slowed and his voice was harsh. “No, you’re not.”

My eyes popped open in alarm. What just happened?

“You’ll come,” he said, “when I tell you to, and
only
when I tell you to.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit. I don’t know if I’d ever heard anything hotter in my whole life. My ass was cold in the briny ocean air as he thrust deep and hard, and I held my pleasure at bay for him. The quiet, repetitive thud of my backside thumping against the hollow metal container sounded vaguely like industrial work and not Dominic pounding into me and making me quiver at the edge.

His hands dug into my ass, tightening. Oh, he was getting close.

“Do you want to come?”

I sobbed my reply with a noise of twisted need. Then, panic. “It’ll be loud.”

He slammed into me, pinning me against the wall and my legs clamped around him to hold on. His rough hand slid across my mouth and covered it to silence my impending scream.

“Come for me,” he ordered. “Right now.”

I groaned against his palm while my whole body shuddered, my pussy clenching at his cock. The orgasm burned up from my legs until I was completely engulfed in flames.

“You,” he said on a broken breath, “are mine.”

Everything focused in on him and forced the orgasm to last a lifetime. I would have screamed, but he held his hand firm on me. Kept me quiet, all the way through his own orgasm. Inside me, he jerked again and again. Dominic was going to ruin me. No man would ever take me like this. Possess me as he did. And in this moment, I didn’t give a fuck.

His lips slipped over mine, pressing gently in a sultry kiss. My head spun. His effect over me strengthened every time we did this.

“I thought you were going to say no,” he whispered.

He helped me down off of him, but I had to take a moment to recover, leaning against the wall as my skirt fell back into place. Dominic hurried to do up his pants, dusted off his coat, and slipped an arm in the sleeve.

I felt out of control, but, happy. “Well, I haven’t been to the Imperial Palace yet.”

A smile broke out on his face. “Oh, of course.”

There was a rumble from beyond the wall of containers and Dominic’s face turned serious. He again glanced at his bare wrist, then dug his phone out of his pocket and checked the time.

“Hey . . .” His arms circled my waist.

I understood. “Let me guess, take your girlfriend to work day is over.”

His eyebrow notched up, like he was amused. “Unfortunately, it is. Do you remember which stop you need to get off at when you take the train back?”

“Yeah.”

His forehead was warm against mine. “Thank you.”

“For the fuck?” I teased. “No, thank you.” I didn’t want to talk about what he was really thanking me for. It was scary how quickly I’d agreed to stay.

The corner of his mouth lifted into a knowing smile. “I’ll walk you back, and then I’m going straight to my office to reschedule your ticket.”

I rode the train past the stop to his place, taking it all the way to Harajuku. I needed to walk to clear my head and get a fucking grip, and what better place to do it than Tokyo’s fashion district?

One more week, that’s it. We were both attached, obviously, and time was only going to make it harder to leave. I’d agreed to stay because I was a junkie and Dominic was my drug.

Harajuku was wall-to-wall shops and restaurants, and I strolled the streets along with other
Gaijins
and tourists, my eyes vacantly scanning the shop windows. I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing. I ended up standing in line outside of a storefront. Standing in line was so normal here, I didn’t notice for a long moment.

In front of and behind me was a seemingly endless line of young women. All beautiful, although I’d always thought Asian women were gorgeous. Their fair skin, glossy dark hair, and delicate frames. I totally got why a lot of men were crazy for Asian women.

I watched the line feed into the building and the women who came out were sometimes carrying a pink paper bag and folder. Free samples? I thought about getting out of the line and moving ahead to see what was going on, but I’d lose my place and eventually I’d get there. I could always step out when I got to the front.

At the door, the woman did a double-take. She said something that was probably a question, but I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.”

The woman waved that off and gestured for me to go inside. Okay. If she was cool with it, I guessed I was too. I was curious what was inside that had women lined up around the block.

The room was mostly empty. There was a long table with a group of people seated behind it, and a video camera on a tripod to one side. The talking at the table stopped when I stepped inside.

One of the women at the table stood and bowed, and said something that had to be directed at me. I returned the bow, trying to imitate hers and repeated that I didn’t speak Japanese.

There was discussion between them. It didn’t seem like anyone spoke English. The woman standing came to me and motioned for me to turn around. Like she wanted me to leave –

No. She wanted me to turn in place. That was when I noticed the pictures on the table before them. Headshots.

I turned in place so they could evaluate me. Then, the woman walked forward, pivoted and walked back to me. She wanted me to do a runway walk? God, I felt like an idiot. What the heck was I doing here? I put one foot in front of the other and strolled across the room, and turned back to return to my spot. This was going to make for a hilarious story tonight.

More discussion among the group of people. They asked me something, but I could only shrug.

“Thank you,” I said, backing up toward the exit. “I’m sorry for taking up your time.”

“
Tomaru,
” one of the men said. He reached behind him and plucked up one of the pink bags from the floor. And then he pulled out a pair of . . .

Underwear. Sexy, too. Baby pink with ruffles.

The man pointed from the underwear to me. I giggled, which was probably highly unprofessional, but this was so insane I couldn’t help it. Then, I finally got the bright idea on how to solve the language issue.

“Is everything okay?” That’s how Dominic answered the phone.

“Yeah, but I need your help,” I said, putting it on speaker. “Do you have a minute? Can you translate for me?”

“Translate what?”

The people behind the table stared, their mouths open. They probably couldn’t believe this rude American girl had the audacity to get on the phone right in the middle of a model casting call. But what the hell did I have to lose?

“Say, ‘Would you like me to try that on?’”

There was a pause, and then Japanese came from the phone I outstretched toward the table. The man holding the pink underwear dropped it back in the bag and said a long phrase.

“Where are you?” Dominic asked.

“You tell me. I think I’m auditioning to be an underwear model?”

“Uh . . . they need a Japanese model for today. But they have a swimsuit shoot on Friday where they’re looking for international girls. And, they like you.”

I smiled, kind of thrilled. “Okay, so how do we make that happen?”

Japanese came once again from the phone. We worked it out so I would strip and walk in my underwear and if they continued to like what they saw, they’d give me the address and time of the photo shoot on Friday.

“Payton,” Dominic’s voice was urgent. “You can’t do this.”

My neck began to get hot. Was he really so possessive of me that he didn’t want these casting people to see me in my underwear? Wasn’t he fucking aware of what I had done for a living?

“Oh my god, just because I’m yours doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do.”

It sounded like he fumbled with the phone. “I don’t have a problem with that, but you don’t have any underwear on. Remember?”

I blinked, and then chuckled. He was probably bright red on the other end of the line. “Don’t worry, they’ve got some stuff here for me to try on.”

“Oh.” He let out a sigh of relief. “Okay.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“No problem. I can’t wait to hear about this tonight.”

On Friday evening, he came home with carryout dinner and was eager to hear the story about the shoot.

“It was way less glamorous than it sounds,” I said with a mouthful of
kimchi
. “They sell swimsuits in catalogs, at least, that’s what the photographer told me.”

“But the fact remains, I’m now dating a swimsuit model.”

“You’re such a guy.” Meredith was right, he was going to rub it in. “The whole thing took, like, two hours.” It didn’t pay much, but it had been fun. “Oh, I got to keep the suits.”

“Bikinis?”

“A few, yeah.”

His bottle of beer clunked on the table. “You’ll have to model them for me.”