Gray had conveniently lost Hawk's card. Which both irritated me and made me smile deep on the inside.
He picked up my hand and drew circles on the inside of my wrist. "What kind of different things?"
Why did he insist on driving me insane? The skate of his fingers across my skin was soft and still lit me on fire. "You know."
He reversed the direction of the circle, drawing a figure eight with his thumb. "No. Tell me."
Tell him what again?
Oh, right. What the hell I wanted to do with my new harem... instead of him. "Kinky things."
"Like what?"
I almost said it was none of his business. But he'd made it his business the second he brought out his cock during my first taste of kinky, freeing sex.
Not that he'd touched me. Even when I'd asked him to. He wouldn't touch me, but he'd damn well watched and he'd certainly touched himself.
Since then he'd been sulky and silent on the issue.
It was his own fault. We, or at least I, could be happily playing at his BDSM club, but he still wouldn't take me. The Asylum wasn't someplace I could get into on my own. One could only get in with a member.
Grayson was a member.
That still sent shivers up and down my spine, and then between my legs.
I tugged my arm away, but he didn't let me go. "Don't make me say it."
"How are you going to do it if you can't say it?"
Damn. Good point.
"I want to fuck." Yeah, I'd blurted that out.
"I've had my fill of crappy ass love-making. I want to suck cock and I want someone else to watch me do it." Hint, hint. "I want to ride someone's tongue like a rodeo bull. I want to command someone to fuck my ass and enjoy it while they spank me. I want feel like a dirty girl and a dominatrix."
"You don't need a stable of men at your beck and call to do that."
"Then take me to The Asylum." Score one for Angelina. Come on. He had to see that coming.
"No." He released me and started the car back up. "I never should have mentioned it. It's not your kind of place."
Leadfoot took off so fast I was pressed back in my seat. Probably to throw me off balance, distract me from the conversation. Not a chance. I wouldn't even have thought about the Asylum if he hadn't brought it up in the first place. There had to be something I'd done or said that night that made him change his mind. But I'd been over it in my head a thousand times – not like that was a hardship – and still had no clue why if he'd offered then he wouldn't take me now.
"How would you know?"
He continued to look at the road, but I saw that one slightly raised eyebrow he was famous for.
You let a guy see you naked, screwing around with two other men once, and they think they know your every inner thought.
"Humph." I folded my arms and looked out my own window.
I wasn't going to admit that he knew me better than anyone else in my life. That tended to happen when you spent almost every hour of every day with someone, whether they were a bodyguard or not.
But did I know him as well as he knew me? I'd had no idea he favored the kinky sex, much less that he was a member of an elite BDSM club like The Asylum.
Where I let it all hang out, all my fears and all my disasters, he'd kept his personal life to himself. Not that I'd noticed.
I always thought we were friends. But there's a give and take to friendship and while I'd taken a whole hell of a lot from him, I couldn't say what I'd ever given back. Maybe I really was a bitch.
At least we'd always been real with each other.
How could I have so many feelings for someone I actually knew so little about? I rubbed a hand over the weirdly empty spot behind my sternum.
Neither of us said anything for the rest of the drive to the estate. Fine by me. Gray took his frustration out on the poor car pushing its limits. The muscles in my back and neck felt suddenly tired and tight. Not in same way that a massage would fix either.
When we got home he didn't stop at the front to let me out. The car crunched over the gravel leading to the garage. He parked, turned it off and sighed.
"Do you want me to take you to a club, Angel? A different club? There are plenty of choices in the city."
Yes. "No."
Interesting. So, it wasn't that he wouldn't take me to get my kink on. It was that he didn't want to take me to his club.
"Come on. We'll go, you'll learn some new and naughty things, and we'll be done with this harem business."
I knew that cajoling tone. It was like the one where a mom tries to convince her child that broccoli tasted delicious if only you'd try a bite. I wasn't a child. He wasn't my parent.
While I did want to check out the whole sex club thing, I had zero expectation that Gray would participate.
That was unacceptable.
We sat there in the silence of the garage. He waited for me to jump on his idea. I waited for him to figure out he was being an ass. A girl could only wait for so long. "Good try, but it's too late. I've already contracted a recruiter. She's in Italy tonight to interview two potential applicants."
Boom. From idea to done in one. One-hundred thousand dollars that is.
Gray went still and quiet. When he spoke, it was his scary voice that made me think he was pretending to be calm but in reality was ready to flip his shit.
"Who is this person? Can you get a hold of him and call it off?"
I hated the damn scary voice because it meant I had to tell him the truth about everything or face the consequences. I didn't know what those would be, but I was sure I wouldn't like them.
"I'm using Gloria Forsyth. She used to run one of those mail order bride places that masqueraded as a foreign matchmaking service."
He stared at the steering wheel like he could turn it to stone. "I would have liked to vet her. Do my job. How do you know you can trust this woman?"
"Why wouldn't I? She built a whole business around finding compatible partners for the rich and famous."
"Because of exactly that. She's predicated her career on taking advantage of people with money. Can you get a hold of her and call it off or not?"
Didn't he already say that? If only I could get his one-track brain onto a different track. The take-Angelina-to-bed line would be my choice. "I could, but I'm not going to. Everything will be fine. I'm not the naïve little girl everyone thinks I am. He'd die if anyone knew, but my father's CFO found his wife, Nadia, through her. She offers a service I needed. End of story."
Gray gripped the steering wheel so hard I thought it might become a diamond under his hands. "Angel, don't do this."
Was he asking because he had feelings for me and didn't want to see me with other men? Or because he thought he was protecting me?
He was my bodyguard and refused to be my lover. That right there answered my question, and it wasn't the answer I wanted. That pissed me off.
I didn't let my temper out to play very often. In fact, never. Well, maybe that was another side of my personality it was time to explore.
"Don't tell me what to do. Men have been telling me how to behave my whole damn life. I'm not being that good girl anymore. You can either support me or not. I don't give a fuck."
The skin on my cheeks burned all the way to my ears. That hadn't felt as good as I thought it would.
Gray reached across me and pulled the latch, shoving open my door. Then he stared at me until I got out.
The three seconds of adrenaline from my little tirade plus the new burst flowing into my bloodstream at this moment made my ears ring and my skin tingle like it was too tight.
Esta jodido. Gray told me to go after what I wanted and needed. Now that I was, he didn't like it. Typical guy bullshit.
I got out of the car, didn't bother to shut the door and used that same sex goddess who owns the universe sashay to walk away.
I was a woman with a plan and the initiative to get it done. I would have my harem. It didn't take much.
Money and resources to recruit men, check.
Contacts at an Ivy League university, check. Thanks to the generous donations from my family over the past three generations.
A place to play with my harem. Check. My brownstone was perfect for room and board and all the fun times I intended on getting up to.
The heat of my anger turned to a churn in my stomach. I'd never been impulsive like this in my life. I'd never been allowed to or thought that I could. So what if I wanted to hire a whole stable of men to service me?
They'd be a perfectly fine substitution for what I really wanted and couldn't have. They were a means to an end.
Why did I feel like I'd made a mistake?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Meet and Greet
Hay, Dios Mio. I'd been running around like a chicken with its head cut off all day. Why did Gray have to take a vacation the week the harem boys were all scheduled to show up?