Just a Number(72)

“Owen…” My voice strains through the desire, and I turn my head as much as I can beneath his hold. “Please.”

I feel the heat of his body as he leans over me, his back touching mine, the energy between us sizzling. His teeth graze the shell of my ear, and I clutch the blankets beneath me. “What do you want me to do?” he asks gruffly, thrusting his hips against my backside.

“F-fuck me,” I stammer. “I want you to fuck me—” the next words to leave my mouth are unexpected, but he responds as I expect any man would “—hard and fast.”

Keeping his hold on my hair, Owen straightens up slightly, his free hand grabbing my hip as he guides himself into me. Our simultaneous groan of contentment fills his bedroom, and then he does as I asked: he fucks me hard and fast, his hips moving furiously behind me until both our bodies are covered in a thin sheen of sweat. My climax doesn’t take long to build, having been slowly swelling inside me since before I dropped to my knees and took him in my mouth, so it doesn’t surprise me that after only a few short minutes, we’re simultaneously crying out with satisfaction as we hold each other close.

When his hips stop moving behind me, I let my knees finally give out and fall to the bed, breathing heavily and reveling in how fiercely my heart pounds against my chest. Owen relaxes on the bed next to me, pulling me into his arms and kissing me softly, and I nuzzle into his side, inhaling deeply at the crook of his neck.

I bask in the way every square inch of my skin is still tingling in the wake of my orgasm. “That was incredible.”

“Yeah?” he inquires, seeming somewhat uneasy. “I wasn’t…too rough?”

Just thinking about how he’d turned me around and taken me makes my toes curl and my belly flip. “Oh god…not at all,” I assure him with a sigh, stretching my body beside him. “I’m all right with a little kink every once in a while. Scarves, handcuffs, blindfolds…you know, that sort of thing.”

He shifts next to me, and when I look up, I find his eyes on mine, a look of shock and awe obvious in them. “You just keep surprising me.”

“What? Don’t tell me you’ve never engaged in a little light bondage before?” Now I’m the one who’s surprised. I mean, I know Gretchen never really seemed the type to experiment in the bedroom—that stick up her ass didn’t really leave much room for anything else—but surely he’d been with women before who’d been into that sort of thing, right?

Owen chuckles, his cheeks turning a light shade of pink that travels to the tips of his ears. “I can’t say that I have, actually.”

I pull away from him and roll onto my stomach, propping myself up on my arms. “How is that possible?”

Owen shrugs, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I guess I just hadn’t been lucky enough to find someone as sexually liberated as you,” he confesses.

Before I can say anything else—not that I know how to even respond to hearing his confession—he smirks that devilish smirk of his and wraps his arm around me, pulling me close again. “Now, about these handcuffs…”

I laugh as his lips descend on the column of my throat, and soon we’re going for round two. Sadly, I don’t have my handcuffs with me, but one of Owen’s ties does the job in a pinch.



Owen’s given me free rein of his bedroom to get ready, taking his tux with him to the washroom. Earlier that morning, I had a “quick” shower—with Owen, of course—and then had a late brunch and watched a bit of TV before we had to start getting ready. Now, being a girl, I have quite a bit more primping to do than Owen, so he actually does some light house-cleaning and offers to go and pick up my shoes from my apartment while I start curling my hair and doing my makeup.

Of course, this means I had to tell him the color of my dress. I was sure to request a specific pair, though—my black four-inch, peep-toe sling-backs—not sure if I could trust his fashion sense enough to choose on his own.

The party is scheduled to start at seven that evening. I’m really looking forward to it, not only because it’s my first masquerade ball, but also because it’s the first public date that Owen and I will have. Sure, we won’t be coming right out in the open with our relationship, but that’s only a couple of days away.

It’s actually hard to believe that within the next couple of days, my father will know, and we’ll be able to tell everyone—well, everyone who doesn’t already know, that is.

While I style my hair, I take the low-cut back of my dress into consideration, sweeping my loosely curled hair over my left shoulder and securing it with several hairpins. When it comes to my makeup, I use dark plums and smoky blacks to enhance the color of my eyes. Normally, I keep my eye makeup pretty understated, but since I’ll be wearing a mask, I really want to accentuate them and make them pop.