He watched her tongue glide over her bottom lip, leaving it coated in slick moisture. Dear God, just one kiss and I’ll let this one go. I swear on a stack of Bibles. Again, he almost laughed. His name might be Jonah, but it was the only biblical quality he possessed.
“Thank you for reminding me why I avoid places like this and people like you.” She pulled the dripping lollipop out of her drink and bit it in half with a crunch, keeping her eyes deliberately locked on his. “Now go try that line again on someone with a bustier and leather pants. I’ll pass.”
Jonah dragged his gaze up from her mouth, knowing he’d be looking again within seconds. He’d gone rigidly hard when she’d sunk her white teeth into the lollipop. Not only because her spirit turned him on like hell but because it had felt like a transgression. She’d gone against his long-indulged wishes, and his dominant instincts made him want to chasten her for it, have that fierce spirit at his command. Not her. Not yet, anyway. “See, that was unwise. Now I’m just picturing you in a bustier.”
Her eyebrows lifted innocently. “Well, knock it off.”
“The bustier?”
She hummed in her throat, sizing him up as if for the first time. It wasn’t, but if she wanted to delude herself into thinking she hadn’t checked him out thoroughly minutes earlier, he’d play along. While she mounted her next attack, Jonah nodded at the bartender to pour him a drink. This was going to take a while.
Caroline watched the action with interest, not missing a thing. Her smile turned smug. “All right, I think I get where this is going, Johnny Pickup Line.”
Jonah sighed at his bartender’s jerky reaction to the girl’s disrespect, something he never tolerated under any circumstances. No doubt the entire staff would know by the end of the night.
It’d better be worth it.
“You’re obviously a regular here and know what goes on a short elevator ride away. So I have to ask myself, what are you doing moving in on me? Possibly the only woman at the bar who isn’t dressed for whatever evil torture goes on upstairs.”
“And what conclusions have you drawn?”
“Either you’ve already gone through every woman in the joint—”
“I think there might have been a compliment in there somewhere.”
“—or you think I’m waiting for someone to show me the ropes. Pun intended. Maybe you’re hoping I read that oh-so-popular novel and I’m here to hogtie my very own billionaire.”
He feigned ignorance. “What book?”
She blew out an exasperated breath. “If you are indeed a regular in this”—she waved her hands around—“scene, then I’m sure you’re familiar with it. I’m dropping it now. Any further discussion on the subject would indicate that I’m curious, which I most certainly am not.”
Her glasses slipped down her nose, and she pushed them back up. He squashed the sudden urge to throw them across the room and punish her smart mouth with his own harder one.
“I’m not being critical, but I refuse to facilitate a discussion wherein you try to convince me pleasure through pain is the ultimate high. That’s where this is headed, isn’t it?”
“For someone who has never tried it, you seem terribly confident it’s not.”
“A person doesn’t necessarily need to encounter pain to know they don’t desire it. For example, without having been hit by a semi-truck before, I’m pretty sure it would suck.”
Jonah hid his smile by taking a pull from his scotch, watching her over the rim of his glass before he lowered it. “What if I told you it’s only about pain for some? For others, it’s an entirely different experience.”
He watched her process that, liking the fact that she wasn’t disregarding his words outright. She was listening, weighing, deciding whether or not she agreed. It was refreshing. So often, he found people were unwilling to consider any point of view save their own.
Again, he felt a sting in his chest at the reminder of others’ unwillingness to trust a word that came out of his mouth, simply because he owned Serve. If anything, the precautions Serve’s management took with each and every individual allowed upstairs should speak for itself, but people refused to trust what they didn’t understand.
She spoke then, interrupting his dark thoughts. “If that’s true, that people have different experiences, then tell me. What else is there?”
For some reason, his answer seemed infinitely important. As if it could make or break the connection developing between him and this woman, whose name he still didn’t know. The people who frequented his club knew what they wanted and didn’t usually require an explanation about what to expect, so he didn’t have much practice putting it into words. He had managers who dealt with beginners. His first experience in a BDSM club had been at age twenty-one and completely by accident. While on shore leave in Germany during his stint with the Navy, he’d stumbled half wasted into an underground club, and his life had been irrevocably changed by a half-crazed dominatrix named Velda. He was fairly certain she hadn’t sat him down and given him a syllabus.