Fool Me Once: A Bad Girl Romance Read online

  Looking around at the opulent interior of his apartment, I decided to let that last comment's second meaning slip by. He really did have an amazing apartment. The floors were polished wood, and dark, gleaming Cherrywood bookshelves covered two of the walls – no IKEA stuff here! A third wall showed exposed brickwork around a fireplace that looked at least a century old, and custom-installed lamps and wall sconces with thick-filament Edison bulbs gave the entire place a cozy, warm feel. Most of the bookshelves were full of books – and not cheap paperbacks, either! Many of the volumes were bound in leather and looked both well-read and valuable.

  "So you like books?" I asked.

  He finished off his own glass of water, set it down on a marble-topped coffee table. "They're nice for relaxing at the end of the day. Take my mind off of things." His hand slipped around my waist, drawing me in towards him. "But right now, I'm thinking of a different distraction."

  A cheesy line, but I liked the warm glow in his eyes. I set my own water glass down beside his and turned to him, looping my arms up around his neck. "I bet you're pretty good at distractions," I murmured, rising up on my tiptoes to kiss him.

  Okay, the kiss back at his office hadn't been a fluke. He really was very good at that. His tongue brushed against mine, and I opened my lips to let it in. His grip around me tightened, drawing my body in tighter, and I let myself melt against him.

  "So," I said, a little breathless after we broke apart. "Is there a bedroom someplace in this apartment?"

  "Nope. I blew all my money on the library. I sleep on a mattress in the other room that I found in a dumpster." He grinned at me, even as his hands hungrily tugged me in the direction of the bedroom.

  I shrugged. "Wouldn't be the first time I'd slept on a dumpster mattress. Hopefully this one won't have as many needles in it. Makes it really uncomfortable, although at least now I don't have to worry about catching any more diseases. Can't get them twice, right?"

  My remarks didn't even faze him. He must already be getting accustomed to my sense of humor. "Oh good, then I don't need to tell you about my long list of sexual diseases," he answered, his hands still clinging to my backside as I sauntered away. They crawled up my dress, searching for the little zipper to undo it.

  In the doorway to his bedroom, I paused for a moment, looking around in pleased surprise. It gave him the chance to pull the zipper down, and I felt my dress suddenly grow less restrictive around me.

  "This is amazing," I said, looking at his huge white bed, the very light seafoam pastel walls, the matched end tables and their sea glass lamps. "Are you sure that you're not gay, and missing out on an incredible career in interior design?"

  Behind me, Dane moved in closer. He bent down and nibbled at my bare shoulder, even as his hands tugged my dress lower. Given its tightness, I'd been forced to wear a very thin bra, and his fingers popped its clasp in a heartbeat.

  "Why don't you tell me if I'm gay?" he murmured, pushing in against me as his hands strayed down to cup my breasts, running gently over their surfaces and making my skin pop up in goosebumps.

  I felt something very hard poking into my ass, something that twitched wonderfully when I wiggled my butt back against it. Definitely not gay. And from the way he was teasing me, exciting me, I guessed that he knew his way pretty well around a female body.

  Good. I wanted him to show me. I turned, meeting his mouth again with my own. But this time, I let my hands crawl down his shirt, popping open his buttons one by one.

  As soon as the shirt hung open, he shrugged his way out of it. Despite his tall and lean figure, Mister Aristocratic did have some great shoulders, muscled and strong. I gave another little shimmy, sending my dress the rest of the way down to the floor.

  "Goddamn," Dane breathed out, looking at my body, now fully on display.

  I turned in a little circle. "You like it?" Despite my best attempts, I couldn't quite keep a little waver of apprehension out of my voice. I knew that guys found me sexy, but I still sometimes felt awful about myself when I looked in the mirror. I had too many curves, would never be as stick-thin as some of the models that appeared in advertisements and on billboards and posters, or even my friend Kelsey.

  But the heat in Dane's eyes couldn't be a lie. "Most definitely," he answered, and then rushed forward to take me in his hands.

  Moving awkwardly together, we staggered back and tumbled down onto the fluffy softness of his bed, sinking deep into the sheets and comforters. Dane pushed me down, on his hands and knees above me. I reached down for his belt, unbuckling it and pulling it out and aside, but he stopped me before taking off his pants.

  "You first," he murmured, tracing kisses down from my collarbone to my breasts, circling around one nipple and making it pop up like a turkey timer. He kept on moving south, trailing kisses as he went, until his hands gently guided my thighs open.

  I felt another little surge of apprehension, but his touch quickly washed this away as well. "Relax," he said softly up to me as he got to work, and I forced myself to do precisely that.

  Soon, however, my muscles stiffened all on their own at his touch, and I shivered as I tried to hold on to control. I could feel myself wonderfully losing the battle, however, and knew that I wouldn't hold out for much longer. My hands tightened into his hair as he kept up his mouth machinations between my legs, bringing me closer and closer to-

  To-

  "Oh god!" I cried out as, in a powerful rush, I lost my last little modicum of control. White fire shot up from between my legs, burning its way through every single neuron as it overwhelmed my brain. My fingers twisted into his hair, probably hurting him, but he didn't stop, keeping at it as I rode out the burst of orgasmic ecstasy.

  It seemed to run on forever, but finally, almost mercifully, it eased off. I managed to pry my eyes open, looking down as he rose up, crawling back on top of me. He grinned, clearly very proud of himself.

  I needed to wipe that smirk off of his face. "Come here," I growled at him, pulling him up as my fingers worked their way down to his crotch. This time, he didn't push me away from his pants as I tugged them open – and even if he'd tried, I would have let him dissuade me!

  Once his pants came off, however, Dane was all business, moving in and on top of me. I eagerly pulled him down, and he didn't hesitate. I opened myself up to him, wrapping my legs around him, claiming him.

  To his credit, Dane performed admirably. His equipment was more than adequate for the task at hand, and by the time that he finally groaned and shuddered on top of me, I felt like I'd just finished a massage day at a spa... followed, perhaps, by a grueling ten mile run. My body felt exhausted, sweat soaking much of the sheets beneath me. Dane's sheets. Sorry I'm not sorry, Dane.

  "Not bad," Dane panted, collapsing down on the bed beside me.

  I opened my mouth, but just moaned senselessly as I waited for wards to come back to me. Not bad? The man could seek an alternate career as a male prostitute, should that dull desk job of his not work out! But telling him that, I knew, would only inflate his already over-swollen ego even further.

  So instead, I just turned over and patted him on one bare, excellently shaped buttock. "Nice job, Mister Aristocratic," I murmured, my eyelids already feeling rather heavy after all the energy I'd just finished expending.

  I dimly heard Dane get up and move around for a little bit. Probably using the bathroom, I figured – I heard a flush at one point. But soon, I felt the bed shift as he crawled back in beside me. A quick little tweak from my hand confirmed that, although he'd used the bathroom, he still hadn't bothered putting on pants.

  Very nice.

  I waited for a good twenty minutes longer, snoozing intermittently and listening to Dane's breath deepen. After I was certain that he'd finally fallen into a deep slumber, I sat up – and then bounced back down, moving in close to peer at his face in the darkness.

  It still had that air of smug confidence that I'd originally seen, that made me label him with the nickname of Mister Arist
ocratic. But now, after spending some time with him, I could see that honesty was starting to leave its mark. He looked a little less smug, a little more relaxed and happy in himself. It wasn't, I admitted to myself, such a bad face.

  It was, however, most definitely asleep.

  Perfect.

  Moving slowly but stealthily in the darkness, I slid out of bed and located my dress. Squeezing into the thing in the dark, after letting my body flop down and squish out of shape, proved even more difficult than it had been to shovel myself into the thing the first time around, but I somehow managed. Stage one complete.

  Next, I moved around the bed to Dane's side, where I located his discarded pants with my toe. I dropped down to my knees, checking his pockets.

  Success! My questing fingers closed on the bulky shape of his wallet, the same place I'd seen him stash a handful of the cash that he won from me earlier that night. I popped the wallet open, reaching inside to grab...

  ...a single object, made of some sort of heavy paper stock? That wasn't right.

  I frowned, and then carried the whole wallet out with me to his apartment's living room. I had to bite back a curse as my questing toes found the heavy weight of his coffee table, but I finally managed to locate and turn on a lamp. I yanked the single object out of his wallet, turning it over in my fingers.

  A playing card. The Queen of Hearts, to be precise.

  I searched the rest of the wallet, but I already knew that my search would turn up nothing. Sure enough, I found no sign of the money. Dane must have moved it, probably while I was still semi-conscious after those orgasms. I could search the apartment for it, of course, but that didn't guarantee me any luck.

  Hell, knowing Dane, I'd still turn up empty-handed. He acted so straight and honest, but he clearly had a mind like a corkscrew.

  Somehow, that didn't bother me as much as I expected.

  So instead, I located a pen and scrawled my phone number on the Queen of Hearts. I slipped back into the bedroom, intending to leave the card on my pillow – but paused, noticing a sheaf of bills on the bedside table next to where I'd first fallen asleep.

  I picked them up, brought them back out to the light, and leafed through them.

  It was exactly the amount that Dane had won off of me, to the dollar. He'd given them back.

  For some reason that I couldn't quite explain, that made me smile even wider, grinning like a damn idiot. I ducked out of the apartment, taking my cash with me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DANE

  *

  Two days later, I was back at work, sitting at my desk and gazing off into space.

  "Hey, buddy." I jumped as Marcus appeared behind me, smirking for some reason. What was up with him? "How are things going?"

  Attempting to drag my brain back to the present, I gestured around at the stacks of paper on my desk. "Oh, you know. The usual. Things are going. Why, what's up with you?"

  My attempt at deflection failed miserably. Marcus's grin grew wider as he stepped into my cubicle, reaching over to grab the spare chair that I kept off to one side and drag it around. He plopped down on the thing with the back facing me, his legs spread wide on either side. He looked like a middle school kid, I thought sourly.

  "What, you're not going to call her?" he asked, waggling his eyebrows like a puppeteer's marionette.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," I answered stiffly, making certain not to look down at my hands. Maybe he wouldn't notice-

  Fat chance. With surprising speed, Marcus shot forward, reaching for the card in my hands. I tried to yank it back, but fumbled and dropped it – right into his waiting fingers. Dammit. I really was getting sloppy.

  "What's this?" he asked, turning the card around. I made a grab for it, trying to snatch it back from him, but I knew even as I lunged forward that it was useless.

  Sure enough, Marcus saw me coming from a mile away, and easily leaned back to avoid my grasping fingers. He turned the card over, and whistled.

  "The Queen of Hearts? And she left you her number? There's some sort of message there, man?"

  "I was the one who chose the Queen of Hearts," I grumbled. "But yes, there's a message. Look, don't you have work to do? Give that back, and then you can get back to work instead of distracting me!"

  Marcus fixed me with a flat look, raising one eyebrow. "Come on, man. Don't try to lie to me, your best friend. I've walked past your cubicle half a dozen times today, and you've had exactly the same spreadsheet open on your computer every time."

  "It's a hard spreadsheet. And they all look the same, anyway, so what would you know?" I fought the urge to close the spreadsheet, knowing that doing so would be the equivalent of admitting my guilt.

  "I don't buy it. This whole day, you've just been sitting around and moping over this girl. This was what, the blonde one that you ran off with after you got out of that poker game? The one that called you out for cheating?"

  "To get you your money back!" I pointed out. "Come on, why is everyone ripping into me for cheating, when I was just setting things back to the way they were when we came in?"

  Marcus snorted. "Come on, you walked out of there with, like, double the cash that we started with."

  He did have a point, and I had a thick chunk of change hidden inside a hollow book on my bookshelf at home to prove it. Apparently, Ruby had been satisfied with just getting her money back, and hadn't chosen to ransack my place looking for extra bills. "That's not important," I said, wanting to change the topic. "But she's not the kind of girl that you date, and I shouldn't call her."

  "Shouldn't," Marcus echoed. "But that doesn't mean that you won't, does it?"

  "No comment." I turned back to the spreadsheet, pointedly tilting my back towards Marcus – but then remembered belatedly that he still had the playing card. "Look, just give me the card back and let me get back to work, okay?"

  He flicked the card. "You've got the number memorized already, don't you?"

  I totally did. "Of course I don't. That's why I don't want you to lose it or smear the ink or anything."

  "Even though you aren't going to call her."

  "I might call her," I said awkwardly, only realizing too late that I'd just switched sides against myself. "Look, it was a crazy weekend. Things definitely got a bit too out of control. Maybe I made some bad decisions, and I know that they were bad, even if certain parts of me want to do it again." I reached desperately for a metaphor. "It's like a drug addiction."

  "You're comparing this girl to cocaine or something?" Marcus glanced skeptically at the card in his hand. "Maybe I really should take this away from you. I don't want to be your enabler."

  "No, not like that." I stopped for a second. "Maybe. I don't know. But look, you can't make the decision for me. You have to let me make it for yourself. That's what happens, so just give it back."

  But Marcus still hesitated. "And what if you did see her again?" he asked.

  "Well, obviously, that would mean that I'd called her, so I'd probably be hoping that I could convince her not to drag me into anything illegal this time." I turned back around to face him, exasperated. "Is that what you want to hear?"

  He looked back at me uncertainly. "Well, originally I came in here to mock you, give you a couple high-fives for getting laid, and then point out a really weird coincidence to you. But now I'm thinking that maybe I ought to keep my trap shut."

  I started to open my mouth to snap back at him, but forced the harsh words back down with a sigh. Marcus didn't deserve my anger, even if he was the one who decided to poke me a bit when I was feeling down. I had really done this to myself, letting myself keep on thinking about Ruby.

  It had been a one night stand, that was all – nothing more. Clearly. Even though she left me her number, I couldn't see Ruby ever falling into a relationship, being the type of girl who sat around and wore sweatpants, who lazed on a couch with me and ate brunch with me the next morning. She'd be the kind of girl who cut a hole in her sweatpants so
that she could aggravate me when she sat on my lap, the kind of girl who'd vanish at the stroke of two AM so that she could enjoy some hair of the dog for brunch the next morning with her girlfriends, laughing about the latest guy that she'd seen and would never see again-

  She'd been a shooting star, passing briefly through my rather dull and humdrum life. Everything had lit up with strange colors and appearances in her present, but she was off, shooting far away across the solar system, and I needed to get back to everyday business on Earth.

  Right now, that mostly meant looking at spreadsheets and trying to actually get some work done today.

  So instead of snapping at Marcus, I let out my breath in a sigh. "I'm sorry, Marcus," I said. "You're right. I'm a little hung up on her. But I need to get my head back on work. So what did you come over to tell me?"

  He still looked a bit unsure. "Well, okay then," he began, drawing out his words in a manner that suggested that his mind was trying hard to race ahead of his mouth, plan out its route. "You know about Walker and his secretaries, right?"

  "You mean, the way that he goes through them like hungry bear goes through hives of honey?" Walker was infamous for how many secretaries he chewed through a year. It had gotten so bad that most of the other office employees kept a running pool going for each secretary, betting on how long she – and it was always she – would last. The over-under number was right at about two weeks.

  Part of the problem, everyone knew, was that Walker personally oversaw the hiring of these secretaries. It was a policy that made sense at first, since they'd be working with him, first and foremost, and they needed to have good cohesion as a team. The issue arose, however, when Walker began thinking with his dick instead of his brain, which seemed to happen about five seconds into the interview.

  For this reason, the job title of secretary to the CEO of IDS industries tended to be filled by young, perky women fresh out of college, often with more creamy cleavage and long legs on display than actual brains. While this qualified them to serve as models, call girls, or potentially as marketing consultants, it didn't actually help them handle Walker's fiery temper, which generally emerged within twenty-four hours as he realized that he'd missed an important appointment, that his smartphone wasn't syncing its calendar with his computer, or when the poor girl failed to bring him exactly what he wanted for lunch (not that he'd sink so low as to tell her ahead of time, of course). Usually, the poor unfortunate went running for the hills, weeping tears into her low-cut business suit, by the end of the week. Sometimes, the girls had some grit and managed to stick it out a little longer, but they almost never made it to the end of the month, to their second paycheck.