The Dare Collection May 2020

“I’ll buy you more,” he growled, and she had no idea what he meant.

Until he tore her panties off her.

And she couldn’t help but gasp at that. She even rocked forward with the jolt of it, up on her toes.

Dylan’s hands moved around to grip her ass. As if he owned it. And her. Then he pulled her forward, straight on to his mouth.

He didn’t seem to care what she did with herself. Where she put her hands or how she was propped up against the secretary. He dipped his shoulder so that one of her legs fell over his back, and his hands gripped her, holding her right where he wanted her.

And he ate at her as if she was a ripe fruit, and he didn’t give a shit if she ran all over his face.

She tried to brace herself against the secretary behind her, but he was too intense. His tongue, his teeth, that jaw.

It was like he was truly feasting on her. Eating his fill, and so wholly focused on the task, so deeply unconcerned with her reaction, that she felt herself…unravel. Or let go, at last.

She dug her hands in his thick, dark hair, and stopped trying to anticipate which way he would rock his head, or angle that chin.

And all the while, he licked into her. He scraped at her gently, and then not so gently, too.

And it was his intensity that rocked her. His total focus, and his fingers digging into the flesh of her ass, kneading gently from time to time to increase the sensation.

Jenny didn’t have to do a thing. Dylan wasn’t checking to see what her reaction was. He’d told her he wanted this, and he was taking it, and she believed that he truly didn’t care about anything but pleasing himself. He was hungry, she was his appetizer—

And that was what threw her over the edge.

She’d had orgasms before. Some quite delightful ones, she would have said. By her own hand, with a partner—they’d been sweet little finishes, like a cherry on top.

But this was nothing like that.

This was a gut punch.

This was a seismic event.

She felt everything in her seize, and this had nothing to do with cherries, and she was shaking everywhere, inside and out, and a noise was coming out of her throat that scraped.

And she heard a deep, male rumble, that she knew—though she’d never heard anything like it before—was the sound of his pleasure. His satisfaction.

That made her come even harder.

And he didn’t stop.

He kept going. He sucked her clit into his mouth, making her arch and sob, and she couldn’t get her head around the fact it was Dylan.

Or what her body was even doing. She thought her eyes were closed, though she couldn’t tell for sure, and there was moisture leaking out of them. And she could hear the sounds he made, and the sounds he made her pussy make.

And everything was bright red, muscular and physical, and she was too hot. But she couldn’t seem to stop the noises she was making, or the way she lifted her hips toward him. Because she wanted more. Because she couldn’t think. Because she didn’t know what was happening to her, how she was expected to survive this.

Dylan was eating her alive. He was devouring her.

He’d tripped off a series of explosions, and they didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. One led into the next, and everything was wet, hot and just this side of painful. All the places he wasn’t touching hurt, too. And the hurt was an ache, and it bled straight down into the center of her, hurtling its way through her and into her clit, and he knew it.

Oh, yes, he knew it.

Because he teased her. And he took her. And he consumed her with that voracious mouth of his, making a mockery of her belief that this was something she didn’t like. Because this wasn’t about like, it was about need—

And she came so hard again then that she saw stars, but she couldn’t make any more noise. Because everything was too bright and searing. And it was all shattered to pieces.

Jenny was only vaguely aware of him moving, pressing a kiss against her inner thigh, and then leaning her back against the secretary she’d forgotten was even there.

She had to breathe, but it was hard to make her lungs work. She had to concentrate on the act of breathing, and only when that had gone on awhile could she take notice of her surroundings. And the fact Dylan had slid her back on the secretary when he was done with her, leaving her slumped there with her jeans at her ankles, like a crumpled doll.

An image that surely should have horrified her, but instead made another spear of bright, thick heat wind its way through her.

It seemed to take an hour or so, and enough effort to climb a mountain or two, to turn her head to the side and watched Dylan as he bent over the sink tucked into the wall outside the WC. He splashed water on his face. Then he ran his hands through his hair. And when he looked at her, clearly completely aware of her and what she was doing, Jenny thought her heart stopped.

She wanted to say something arch. Amusing.

But all she could do was slump there, entirely wrecked, until the corner of his mouth kicked up a bit.

He reached down below the sink and pulled out a fresh towel, then he moved over to her. She expected him to hand her the towel, but he didn’t. He cleaned her up instead, with a brisk efficiency that made her breathless. There was something about how at ease he was with her body. As if every inch of her was his. It made her a bit light-headed.

When he was done, he tossed the towel in a basket, then set her on her feet. She was boneless and useless, so she did nothing when he squatted down, fed her foot back into the leg of her jeans, and tugged them back up. And she was only aware that she’d kicked off the flashy new heels she’d found in a boutique this afternoon when he slid them back onto her feet.

“Are you with me?” Dylan stood, then buttoned her jeans. Then he held her hips there, looking down at her.

All she could manage to do was nod.

“I’m going to need a word or two, I think.” He lifted one hand, and ran his thumb beneath her eye, collecting that moisture she couldn’t seem to keep from spilling over.

“I’m with you,” she whispered.

Though in truth, Jenny didn’t know what that meant. Or where they were. Or her own damned name.

Dylan smiled, but it wasn’t that friendly smile she knew so well. This one was darker. And far more satisfied.

He laced his fingers through hers again, and led her out of the room. And she couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. Not really. It was like a dream. He was leading her down another hall, then into a lift. And all she could think about was his hand in hers, and how sensitive her pussy was now, swollen and still molten, brushing up against the seam of her jeans because he’d left her with no panties.

He ushered her out of the lift, and then to a table on a rooftop patio festooned with walls of plants, heaters and clever lighting that managed to make every table seem private—even though she was fairly certain there were other people about. And it wasn’t until they sat down, and she looked out at the stunning, sparkling view laid out before them from the Harbour Bridge to the Opera House and the skyscrapers of central Sydney, that she could place the way he touched her.

It was proprietary.

Something inside of her curled up at that, shivering in delight.

Dylan didn’t ask her what she wanted to eat. He had a quiet word with the waiter. Another thing she wanted to find a little outrage about, and yet when the food arrived she was not only ravenous, she couldn’t have chosen better for herself.

“Good?” he asked, sounding far too entertained.

“Surprisingly, yes.”

“What’s the surprise, Jenny?” And he sounded like her Dylan again, lazy and careless, but she couldn’t quite believe it anymore. Not when she’d seen what lurked beneath. “I’ve known you a donkey’s age or two, haven’t I?”

She ate what he’d ordered her, but she kept getting distracted by thoughts of him feasting, on her. Watching him eat food seemed like a sensual act. His green eyes seemed so amused, lit up in a new way, as he watched her. Jenny ordered herself to make clever conversation. The way she always did, in her role as her father’s hostess. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, the words didn’t come.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, when their mains had been cleared away. Dylan picked up her hand again to toy with her fingers, and that didn’t exactly help. “It’s as if I lost the power of speech.”

“You’re welcome.”

And surely she shouldn’t have found such smugness appealing. She heard herself laugh. “Why would I thank you? I thought that was all for you. It had nothing to do with me.”

“You can consider it an object lesson, then. I’m greedy. I want what I want when I want it.”

He was playing with her fingers, making her right hand feel like an erogenous zone. She leaned closer to him, propping up one elbow on the table. “Is this it? Is this the famous speech?”

“Do I have a famous speech?”

“I figure there has to be something. Some careful line you throw out there to manage expectations. It doesn’t make any sense that out of all those women, not one was ever under the impression that whatever they had with you meant more.”

“I like to be clear.”

And there was that ruthlessness about him then, and a hint of those hard, stern lines to his face that had undone her earlier. She squirmed in her chair, and when his gaze got that much greener, she knew he saw it. And knew why.

“Hit me with all your clarity, then,” she dared him.

His smile was not reassuring. “There are only two things you need to know. I’m going to tell you exactly what I want. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to wonder if I’m liking something or not liking something. You don’t have to concern yourself with whether or not I’m having fun. I’ll tell you.”

She blinked, her mind reeling as she tried to connect that to her supposedly easygoing best friend. “Do people normally worry?”

But even as she asked that, she knew better. Had she ever not felt self-conscious during sex? Had she ever not tried to imagine what was going on as if she was crouched on the ceiling, looking down? And she’d certainly been guilty of checking out a partner’s face to make sure he was still enjoying himself. Or to see if she could move things along.

“All you have to do is what I tell you to do,” Dylan said, and his voice was easy. Almost lazy. But she could see that look in his eyes and she knew he wasn’t kidding.

“That’s a bit bossy, Dylan. Don’t you think?”

“I’m a bit bossy, Jenny. As it happens.”

She laughed, but he didn’t. And suddenly her own laugh made her feel much too restless. “Oh. Well. How bossy?”

His eyes seemed greener, then. “Very, very bossy.”

“What if… What if I don’t like being bossed about?”

But he only smiled. “You liked it well enough when I had your pussy in my mouth.”

And once again, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t break. This wasn’t her Dylan, something in her whispered. This was someone else altogether, and she couldn’t possibly figure out how she felt about that. Because she felt too many things at once. And her pussy was hot and wet, and it pulsed.

“This is your secret?” Her voice was far huskier than it had been before. She couldn’t seem to help it. “You’re… I mean, are you a…?”

“I’m a man who likes to be in charge.” Another dark, stirring smile. “And I like my sex the way I like everything else, Jenny. I like it when it’s mine.”

“Oh,” she breathed, in a sudden rush of understanding. “This is the talk.”

“It is.”

“So what happens if a woman says she’d rather not let you boss her around to your heart’s content, thanks very much?” She frowned at him. “Is that it? Sex off the table?”

“I never take sex off the table.” Again, there was that little crook in the corner of his mouth that was so different from the friendly grin she associated with him that she honestly couldn’t tell if she wanted to smack it off his mouth, or put her own lips against it. Maybe both. “Usually I offer a wee challenge, to see if she likes what I have to offer.”

“And what if she doesn’t?”

“I wouldn’t know.” That little crook deepened. “It’s never happened.”

She blew out a little huff of something that could as easily have been outrage as lust. Or as seemed to be the case with Dylan, all of the above. And everything had already shifted between them, outrageously. Why not take it further?

“I accept this challenge,” she told him, grandly. “You can try to convince me.”

She didn’t expect him to laugh, then, but he did. And this laugh, she recognized. It was vintage Dylan, delighted and long.

“Why is that funny?” she asked, flushing.

“I’ve just had my face between your legs,” he replied. “And unless I miss my guess, that’s not something you’d say you much enjoy, generally.”

“What does that have to do anything?”

And the laughter on his face turned too quickly to stern intent. “I already know that you like to be told what to do, Jenny.”

Her flush got worse. Red and hot. “If you already know, then why are we having this conversation?”

“Because you don’t know what you know,” he said with a shrug, as if that was simple. “Your whole life has been filled with sorry wankers who made you work to get yourself off. It took me moments.”

“I’ll have that challenge now,” she said, trying to sound icy.

Now the laughter had moved into his green eyes, making them brighter, which didn’t help. “Right. Are you sure?”

And she wanted to scream, but they were in public. Jenny leaned forward instead. “I’m beginning to think that you’re stalling, actually. What’s the matter, Dylan? Are you afraid that after all this talk you won’t be able to handle your end of the bargain?”

She could only describe the look on his face then as pitying.

“We covered number one, which is that I’m in charge,” he said by way of a reply. As if she hadn’t spoken. “I wouldn’t want to forget number two.”

“What’s that? I fling myself prostrate at your feet and call you master?”

“You can call me anything you want.” There was still laughter in Dylan’s eyes, and that pitying thing, as if she was already over her head and she didn’t know it.

And too many things rolled through her, all at once. Maybe that outrage she’d been reaching for all along. Or maybe something worse. Less palatable.

Maybe something like longing, something in her whispered.

“As I said, I’m a greedy fucker,” Dylan told her, calmly. Much too calmly. “I’m not always gentle. I like it hard and I like it rough, and when I say that I want you to let me be in charge, that also means I want you to trust me. But that goes both ways. I have to trust that you’ll tell me if something’s too intense for you.”

She lifted her chin. “It won’t be.”

“That’s big talk, Jenny. But it’s easy to think you’ll feel one way now, then find you feel a completely different way later. You don’t have to make a speech. All you have to do is tell me. Stop. No. Raise a hand. Push me off. No matter how far we’ve gone, or what’s going on. Do you understand that?”

“I understand that once again, there’s a whole lot of talking and explaining and anticipation, and yet nothing happens.”

“This is nonnegotiable.”

There was that kick to his voice, and the cool, certain way he looked at her. She remembered, yet again and with that same flood of awareness, that this person she was discussing sex with was not the easygoing friend she knew so well. This was the other Dylan. And the other Dylan was one of the most powerful men in the world.

And he wasn’t kidding around.

“I’m beginning to think I trusted you more before all of this,” Jenny said.

“We don’t have to do it then,” he replied, too easily for her liking. He even shrugged. “It’s entirely up to you. I’m happy to go on home, sleep it off and wake up tomorrow as if none of this ever happened.”

Jenny wanted to punch him. Hard, right in his annoyingly gorgeous face. She felt distinctly violent, and it seemed connected to all the other sensations dancing around inside of her. “I have to tell you, so far I don’t really understand how you’ve managed to talk any woman into sleeping with you. Much less legions.”

“Most of them aren’t you,” he replied. Wholly unbothered, it would appear. “I’m not the one who’s stalling, Jenny.”

Ouch.

“I will tell you to stop if I want you to stop,” she said, very directly, and she knew that he was right. That she was the one who’d been stalling, because her pussy was still swollen, she was too wet and she couldn’t get her head around what happened already. She could feel his shoulder against her thigh and his ravenous mouth, devouring her. And that flush was a part of her now, betraying her and heating her in turn. “And now I want that challenge.”

A different sort of smile played around Dylan’s mouth, then. “Last opportunity to keep that door shut,” he said softly. “To keep it at a crack. Not throw it wide open.”

“Now who’s stalling?”

Dylan didn’t look away. He kept that green gaze trained on her and as she watched, it grew more intense. Until she felt as if his intensity overtook her pulse, then moved through her veins. “There’s a bathroom in the hall,” he said quietly. “We passed it on our way in. I want you to go there. I want you to take off all your clothes, though you can leave your shoes on. I like the heel.”

She was mute. Overwhelmed. But she couldn’t tear her gaze away from his.

By contrast, Dylan looked perfectly relaxed, save for that glittering in his green eyes that made her clit throb.

“I’ll want you bent over, bracing yourself on your elbows. Eyes closed, hair down. And I want you to wait for me.”

“With the door unlocked?”

“I want you to wait for me,” he said again, with that pointed patience that made her feel weak. And something like bubbly. “Can you do that?”

“I…” But her throat wasn’t working properly. And her mouth was so dry she thought she might go up in flames.

Maybe she already had.

“You don’t have to tell me about it, Jenny,” Dylan said in that quiet, powerful way of his. It hummed inside of her. “You don’t have to find the words. You can either get up from the table and make your way to that bathroom, or you can sit here. We can discuss the weather, or the football. Old stories from uni. And everything will go back to normal. It’s entirely up to you.”

The breath in her lungs felt too hot. It took up too much space, and was much heavier than normal breath. Jenny was shaking so hard she worried she might fly apart at the seams, but when she looked down at her hands, she wasn’t shaking at all.

And she wanted to find the words, to find something to help her gain her footing again—

But something washed over her as she gazed into the quiet, unmistakable challenge in his green eyes. It wasn’t quite peace. It was too jagged and edgy for that.

Still, it helped.

And he was Dylan. With new and surprising facets, but still her Dylan. He would keep her safe. He would keep that bubble of his around them, and whatever happened there, it would be okay. She knew without a shred of doubt that he would fight to keep it that way.

Jenny pushed her chair back. She stood and tossed her linen napkin on the table.

Then she turned, and walked off to take his challenge.

And she had every intention of acing it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

JENNY MADE HER way through the rooftop restaurant, only vaguely aware that there were other people tucked away in their own little pockets of privacy in the soft, close dark. Because all she could think about was Dylan.

All versions of Dylan.

She found the door that led into the building, then down the same hallway they’d come up—while she’d been reeling from his mouth and barely aware that she was upright and walking.

Sure enough, there was another door with a WC slapped on the front. She stood in front of it for a moment, wracked with indecision, and then swallowed. Hard. She looked around, but there was only the one. No chance that she might arrange herself fetchingly in the wrong bathroom.

She laughed a little bit at that, but when the laugh was done, she was still standing there in the hallway. Definitely stalling, and after all that big talk at the table.

“Right, then,” she told herself bracingly, as if that could launch her forward.

As if what she really needed here was a stern talking to, and then what she was about to do would all seem normal.

But it was Dylan. And she’d come here for this. And even though everything that had happened tonight was so far out of the realm of what she’d imagined or anticipated, it was all right, somehow. Because it was Dylan, and if she believed nothing else, she believed in him.

She always had—but maybe this wasn’t the right time to dig into her long friendship with a man who’d apparently had all of this inside him all the while.

She pushed her way into the bathroom. It was small, but still managed to seem infinitely luxurious the way everything else did in this place. There was only one stall, but it was behind its own full door and it was empty when she checked.

There was dim, inviting light from a sconce on the wall. The sink was ornate, with fluffy towels on the counter and a selection of not only soaps and lotions, but a variety of toiletries.

Including condoms.

And it was only when she could hear the way she was panting—actually panting—that she realized there was no music piped in. It was hushed and quiet here.

“There will be no hiding,” she whispered, to test it. And her own voice seemed unduly loud.

She felt drunk, she realized then. That was different than shakiness, and better, in a way. It made her feel less fragile, and more liquid.

Jenny stared at herself in the mirror that took up the whole of the wall over the sink, and there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that Dylan knew it was right there. And more, that she would be doing exactly this as she decided whether or not to do what he’d asked.

And just as she found him difficult to recognize tonight, she looked like a different version of herself, too. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were dilated. Her hair was full and wavier than usual, because his hands had been in it. Her mouth felt overly sensitive, and her lips were more swollen than before. He’d done that, too.

And the Lady Jenny Markham she had always been would never do something like this. She would never so much as consider it. Lady Jenny Markham was unfailingly polite, scrupulously well mannered, and she did not create scenes. Ever. She did volunteer charity work. She facilitated conversations between the kinds of businessmen who frequented clubs like this, and made them run smoother. She was a credit to her bloodline, as her father liked to tell his friends.

But Lady Jenny Markham was the one who was going to dutifully marry Conrad and live out the rest of her glacially polite days in precisely the manner her father wanted. Quiet gentility, companionship without emotion, like well-appointed rooms in silent houses. It would be a very pretty grave she was walking into. She knew that.

Tonight, she was only a woman. And Dylan had already done things to her that didn’t make sense, that she couldn’t even begin to process, and that had taught her that she was more alive and more hungry than she’d ever dreamed possible.

And she wanted to take this challenge, not because she thought that she wouldn’t like the things he wanted to do to her. But because she wanted him to do them. Now.

She pulled off the soft shirt she wore that managed somehow to look a lot fancier that it was. Then she shrugged out of the tighter tank she’d worn beneath it, that kept her breasts in place without too much fuss. She sighed a little as she pulled it up and over her head, because the fabric dragged against her nipples and it was like lightning stormed through her in response. And it turned out her nipples had a direct line to her clit, and she couldn’t tell the difference, anymore, between what hurt and what might just make her come again.