Page 13 of Duke
I willed myself to unfreeze, to slap him, to back out of his reach, to dosomething, anything. But my body betrayed my brain by remaining still. All I could do was stand there as he slid his palms over my shoulders and down my arms, brushing the blouse off along the way. His eyes were roaming and flicking, fixing on my breasts then moving up to my face. His hands, though. God, those hands were a tease. Hovering at my waist, not quite touching me.
“You’re fucking gorgeous,” he murmured.
Put your hands on me, goddammit. I stood stock-still and stared up at him, waiting, barely breathing. Willing him to make the move so I could claim all I was doing was going along with it.
He didn’t, though. Didn’t touch me. He simply looked, his big chest rising and falling a little too quickly for me to believe he was unaffected.
“You take my shirt off for any particular reason?” I asked, working hard at sounding casually sarcastic.
“Yep.” He rubbed a thumb over the lace, across my erect nipple, sending a shiver through me. “I wanted to see your tits.”
“And do you typically just take what you want without asking?”
He brushed his thumb over the other nipple, sending another shudder through me. “Yeah, for the most part. But I don’t think you need to act all pissy, since you didn’t exactly stop me, did you?”
“You didn’t give me a chance.”
“Bullshit, sweetheart. I’m touching you right now, and you’re not stopping me. Nothing’s preventing you from taking a step backward, is there?” He pressed closer to me, his hand now closing over my lower back, just above the waistband of my skirt. “Even now, you can stop this, if you really want to.”
“Implying that I don’t want to?”
“I’m not implying anything, Fancy. I’m flat out stating it. You don’t want me to stop.” He pulled me against him, but he did it slowly and gently, giving me plenty of opportunity to put the lie to his words. Only, I couldn’t. Because I’m stupid, and he was right, damn him. “You want me to touch you. You don’t want me to stop.”
I’ve always had a weakness for bad boys with an attitude. Some girls have a weakness for diamonds, others for chocolate, or boys in uniform, or dimples. And then there’s me. Is he an unmitigated asshole with a superiority complex? I’ll take him…for a couple hours. Assuming he can last that long; most can’t. If he’s shit in bed, he’s gone the second he pulls out—buh-bye. I haven’t had a guy stay for a second round in more than a year, and it’s no one’s fucking business how many single rounds there’ve been. Enough, just leave it at that. Or, maybe not enough. Maybe I just haven’t sampled a wide enough range of men to find one worth keeping around for a second fuck.
What? Guys are the only ones allowed to be one-and-done horndogs with a one-track mind and short attention span? Fuck that. I like sex, and I don’t like clingy guys who want “more”, primarily because they’re only pretending to want more so they can get a ride in my private jet, or get stage-side tickets from my dad, or swim in the infinity pool at our place in Malibu they saw on the show. They think they can pretend to be in love with me, and they let me take them on exotic vacations and even buy them expensive cars, and then once they’ve sampled the perks of dating Temple Kennedy, they’re in the wind. Yeah, been there, done that, already burned the T-shirt. No thanks. Worse than the gold diggers are the ones who just want to get a pic of themselves with me so they can sell it to TMZ or whatever. Yeah, that’s happened a few times: take a guy home only to discover he snuck a pic or two and sold it. Or if they don’t have a pic, they have a story they told their bros and then somehow there’s rumors going around that I did anal on the first date (both true and false—true because I do like anal, but false because I’d never give that up on the first date, and nobody ever gets a second date with me, or even really a first, because I don’t date, so thus even though I like it, I don’t actually ever do it), or that I gave a BJ in the back of a club (false, I don’t give BJs, and I certainly don’t hang out in clubs), or that I like to ride around topless in my Aston Martin (again, both true and false—true because what’s the point in having privacy glass if you’re not going to go topless, and false because my car isn’t an Aston Martin, it’s a Bentley).
Okay, so that was a lot of internal rambling. The point in all this is that Duke is a bad boy. Duh, like, obviously. The problem is that he was clearly created in a laboratory with the single specific goal of tempting me into doing something spectacularly stupid, like fucking him without an NDA. I know, it seems stupid, but I’ve been screwed by too many selfish assholes. I have a system, and it works. No sex without an NDA, they always bag it, no photos, and no dates. That way, I get the sex I need, and I don’t have to worry about the fallout, because if they break the NDA I’ll sue them into poverty. My system protects me from myself, because I have absolutelyterriblejudgement in men. Like, the worst. Line up ten guys, all hot, and I will unerringly pick the biggest douchebag in the line-up. My judgement is unerring in this respect.
Thus, I don’t trust myself, or anyone else, guys especially.
After the last asshole burned me, I signed off all guys. No boys. No sex. Nothing. I need to reset myself, try to rejuvenate my head and my sex drive and my anorexic sense of morality. Which means no sex. NO sex. NO SEX.
I’m an idiot to think I can go three months without sex.
But I’m sticking to my guns, I’m holding onto my rules, because those rules are keeping me out of trouble.
And Duke threatens this. IWANThim. Like, bad. I want to fuck him so many different ways it should be illegal, but I don’t dare. The second I give in, he’ll turn into a douchebag, like all men turn into douchebags after you fuck them, and sometimes they are douchebagswhileyou’re fucking them. And I actually like Duke, so far. He’s honest to a fault about what he thinks and what he wants, doesn’t try to hide or disguise who and what he is, and also, he got me out of that house with the scary foreign dudes.
I let out a breath, and step back; Duke immediately lets go, even though his eyes continue to bounce between my tits and my eyes. “Wrong again,” I said, lying through my teeth. “No more touching.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it.”
“It is.” Not. My sex drive was really pissed off at me at this point, telling me I’m turning down what’s sure to be the ride of my life.
Duke took one last look at my breasts, and then turned around, making for the bedroom. I snagged my shirt off the floor, slid it on, and buttoned it, going as far as buttoning it all the way to the second button from the top, meaning I felt a little choked, but if I didn’t show him cleavage, maybe he wouldn’t look at my tits as much, which would be good and bad, because I liked it when he looked at my tits, I want him to touch them again but I’m not having sex with Duke because then I’ll want to have ALL the sex with him, and that’s not going to happen, for the aforementioned reasons.
There was only the one bedroom in this apartment, and the door was closed. Duke stood in front of the door, hand on the knob. He twisted the knob and started to open the door, then stopped and glanced back at me. “Try not to freak out, okay?”
“Why would I—” I started, and then he opened the door and I cut myself off, because holy shit. “Oh. That kind of stash.”
Guns.
ALL THE GUNS.
Like, literally, he could put a gun in the hands of an entire fucking army. There are so many different kinds of firearms in this room that I don’t even know what to do with myself, other than stare in shock. Machine guns, handguns, rifles, old guns, new guns, big guns, small guns, boxes of ammo, big clips and little clips, at least three different types of grenade, a fucking actual rocket launcher, three machetes, six big knives like Rambo used inFirst Blood…
And a stuffed tiger, old and tattered, the fur worn, one eye replaced with a coat button.