Driven By The Hero (Hero Romance 1) (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Laura woke up the next morning at 7:30. It took her a bit to open her eyes, but once she did she was startled to find herself in an entirely different room than the one she checked into. Gone were the classy but modest tapestries and carpets; instead, the luxurious room features hardwood floors, rich oriental rugs and a vast, imposing alcove. The bed she had been sleeping in was not only substantially larger, but much more comfortable than she remembered. She rubbed her eyes to assure herself she was not dreaming. Then, she heard the shower from the bathroom on full blast.

She tried to piece together the fragments from the night before, but her head hurt too much. The last thing she remembered was talking to a much older, but handsome man who insisted on buying her drinks. She remembered laughing at his jokes and then… nothing. Her temples throbbed and her mouth felt parched. She felt ashamed, but still she had to double check. She peeked under the covers and saw that she was still in her clothes from the night before. And to make matters doubly odd, there was a guest cot directly facing the bed that was covered by some well-worn, crumpled blankets.

Just then, the shower stopped. She wondered how much time she had to slip on her shoes, grab her purse and creep out of there, but the very thought of sitting up was enough to make her nauseous. She took a deep sigh as the door opened revealing Jack with his hair dripping wet and dressed in a pair of pajamas and a white t-shirt displaying surprisingly chiseled and vigorous forearms.

“Morning,” he said without turning her way, walking over to the mini-fridge. He returned with a bottle of mineral water he placed on the nightstand. “I’ll make you some coffee. Unless you’d prefer tea?”

“No… coffee’s fine,” replied Laura meekly.

“I’ll get you some aspirin as well. I have some fruit in the fridge—you really should eat something.”

She was puzzled by his nonchalance. Still, the sense of potential regret lingered within her. She knew the question had to come out some time, so it might as well be now.

“I’m sorry… but… did we…?”

Jack, who had begun to brew her coffee, gave her an incredulous look before chuckling. “Jesus, Laura... Give me some credit. Do you remember anything about last night?”

She shook her head.

“You were unable to tell me where your room was. You were unable to find your card. If I brought you downstairs, in all likelihood the concierge would have called security. So I let you sleep it off here. I am
not
the sort of person who would take advantage of someone in that state.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she protested. “It’s just that I can’t remember much.”

“Laura, even if you hadn’t been drinking, you revealed more to me than you possibly even know about yourself.” He turned to fetch her coffee and sat on the bed next to her, giving her a warm peck on the forehead. She felt much better, but there was still something new about this experience. Even though she hadn’t remembered much about this stranger—she couldn’t even remember his name - she knew instinctively that there was something different about him. Something compulsive. Something unusual. Something torrential; and something… magnetic.

“Would you think less of me if I told you I can’t even remember your name?”

Jack smiled. “You never asked. Anyways, it’s not important. Not yet. What’s important is… that you need to stop living a lie.”

Laura’s face blanched. “What - what do you mean?”

“What I mean, my dear, is that you were meant for something much more than you think. Do you really think you’re cut out to be a glorified secretary?”

Laura shook her head.

“Do you really think you were meant to be like your friends? I’m sorry, I forgot their names.”

Laura almost felt frightened that either Liz, Aubrey or any of the other conference attendees saw her in that state last night, especially leaving in the arms of an older man. But there was something reassuring about Jack, so she put the thought out of her head. “No - no, not at all.”

“Well, what is it you think you were meant to be?”

“I don’t… I guess… I don’t know,” her voice sounded confused. She had no idea what this older stranger was getting at, or what he was going to ask next.

“Well there’s only one way to find out,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Take off your clothes.”

Laura chuckled. But Jack turned to her sternly, and placed his face just inches from hers, squeezing her wrists.

“I’m serious. Take. Off. Your. Clothes.” He enunciated each syllable so fervently; Laura felt she had no choice but to comply.

She stood up, trembling. She slid her skirt off clumsily, before stretching her arms over her head to remove the blouse. Jack helped her by pulling it off forcefully, giving her a fright. “All… all of them?” she asked. Her head no longer throbbed, but she felt as if any second she was going to cry.

“Yes, all of them,” Jack replied assuredly.

She unfastened her bra slowly with her back towards Jack, but he soon swiveled her around to face him. She lingered over the simple black panties but realized if she had gone this far, she may as well remove everything for him.

Jack looked approvingly at every inch of her body -the supple hips; the small, firm breasts; her soft belly revealing a soft mole that seemed to dazzle in Jack’s eyes like a diamond; the gorgeous, if sleepy, face; the wide, quivering lips; even the heavy, half shut eyelids. He bade her to turn around, not lifting a finger upon her. She did so slowly, and when she turned around to face him, she saw a warm and loving smile plastered over his face. She smiled in return.

“Now, why did you do that so willingly?” Jack questioned her. She shrugged her shoulders. “At no point, did I force you to. At no point did I threaten you. At no point, was I going to lay a finger on you. Now there must be something that possessed you to do so of your own free will, wasn’t there?”

She could feel Jack’s question piercing her. Every illusion she had of free will seemed to crumble. Who was she? What were the choices she made in her life? Were they hers, or were they done solely to please outside interests? Did her choices define her? If not, what did?

Still, there was no denying it. She stripped for Jack solely because he had asked her to. She had never experienced a man being so direct with her before in her life. Every one of her relationships had involved a senseless rigmarole, an increasingly transparent game that she was tired of being an active participant in. But in Jack’s game?

She felt passive. As if she were the board, and not the pieces. And the more passive she felt, the more excited she became with the novelty of it all. And the more excited she became, the more secure she felt.

“I’ll ask again… What possessed you to strip for me of your own free will?”

“I… because… I,” Laura hesitated to try to put into words what was going through her brain. Finally, she had no choice but to admit it. She felt it last night, when Jack was acting the perfect gentleman while she was drunk out of her gourd. She felt it as soon as she even laid eyes on Jack for the very first time. And she felt it now, naked in this man’s penthouse suite. “It’s… Because I wanted to!” she yelled, with a force that surprised even her.

For the first time in her life, Laura Kimball felt entirely in control of herself - in control of her life, in control of her body. Seized as she was in Jack’s snare, she knew she had made a conscious choice in her life. She knew that submitting to him wasn’t duty, or an act of loneliness. She knew that submitting to him wasn’t a question of how much she was willing to give, but how much she was willing to let go.

Jack bade her to sit down in front of him. She felt confused at first until he sternly made her kneel in front of him, while he firmly bunched a fistful of her hair in his hands. Clammy, hung-over and red-eyed, she was still the most beautiful woman he had seen in several years. As he tugged gently on her hair, the shock made her wince until he touched the dimples of her cheek with his finger.

“Laura, I need you to understand something. You are not what you think you are. You are not your self-doubt or your self-pity. You are not some office drone. You are neither weak nor are you a coward. But you are mine. Do you understand?”

Laura nodded.

“Are you mine of your own free will?”

Laura paused before eventually stammering, “I… I guess… so.”

“Do you even have a will?”

Laura paused, uncertain what Jack meant. He saw the consternation in her face, and seized her by the hair roughly. “Do… You… Even… Have… a will?” He emphasized each syllable sternly until she had no choice but to answer.

“Yes.”

“What is your will?”

“My will is to serve you.” She was surprised at how rapidly and assuredly the words slipped out of her mouth.

He smiled as he stroked the curve of her upper lip, before leading her on to her feet. “Lay down on the bed,” he said very matter of factly.

She did so, and wondered if all the elaborate rigmarole she had heard about in D & S was simply an elaborate psychological game leading up to what would have been a fairly standard lay. As it turned out, it wasn’t.

He retrieved his iPhone from the bureau and turned it on her. “Now tell me… about the very first time… you ever had a thought about another man.”

She was bewildered. She knew that she had given her word to Jack, but had no idea he was going to record her. She didn’t know if she should tell him the truth or make up a lie. She was in no mood to exaggerate, and given that Jack could have very likely could have seen through her lie, she opted for the former.

“I guess… I guess…”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I guess all girls,” Laura continued very frankly, suddenly growing unusually comfortable with the green light of Jack’s phone recording her. “When they start to hit puberty… sort of carry over their old childhood fantasies about Prince Charming or what have you. But that never really appealed to me; I saw it as being sort of old fashioned, I guess you could say. I always… this is going to sound crazy, but I always identified more with the villains.”

“Were you an underdog, Laura?”

“In a lot of ways. I was an only child, and I had a pretty active imagination. I developed early, and wasn’t comfortable with all the leers, so I decided to take up running to see if I could tone my body down a little.

“Anyways,” she continued. “There was this one boy when I was in high school named Mark. I didn’t know much about him, but he always had this sinister sort of leer about him. He was a loner too, and I kind of used to worship him from afar. He always seemed so aloof but… very handsome in a dark way. Like an attractive serial killer,” she chuckled. “So he was… sort of the first boy I ever… masturbated to. And I was raised Catholic, so that whole guilt thing… it’s a big deal.”

“What went through your head when you masturbated?”

“It was twenty years ago. What’s… important about this is that I remember maybe a couple years after I graduated and was in college. We were at this party, and I saw him there. I had a few beers and we were talking… and he asked me to go for a walk down by this park. So I did, and he was still very, very good looking.”

“Were you a virgin?”

“At this point… no. But I was still inexperienced. So we started fooling around…” Suddenly, the thought began lighting up her body. She began to feel beads of sweat and burgeoning warmth between her legs. She was looking straight up at Jack, who was recording her the whole time, an utterly impassive look on his face. She remembered Dan had once propositioned recording their sex lives and the thought had utterly repelled her. But here she was, naked in front of an absolute stranger taping her, writhing at the very thought of some boy she hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years. She was not only comfortable but she was irremediably turned on. She decided to come right out and ask Jack.

“Look,” she said with a slight fluster. “Would you mind if I… touch myself?”

“Would that make you more comfortable?”

She nodded, and Jack did so in return. She continued as she began stroking the folds of her sex, already glistening and damp from the strangeness of the morning. “We were fooling around and… I wanted to seem a little worldlier. So I asked him if I could take him in my mouth. I’m not… I’m not usually that forward, but I guess I still had a crush on him. Even though it was night, we had to sort of hide near this covering. There were always joggers around. Anyways, I started sucking him off and… I had never done that before. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and he was really… kind of rough with me. He was calling me all sorts of names, and I began to feel embarrassed. But, I was also really turned on. So as he was… basically using my mouth, all of a sudden we saw this jogger. Maybe twenty feet away, watching us,” she explained between gasps. The thought of Jack recording this for posterity was getting to be too much. She pinched her nipples for him, smiling as she closed her eyes and continued recounting the story.

“Anyways, he got scared… his dad was a cop… and he zipped up his pants and ran in the opposite direction. He just left me there, drunk and helpless while this jogger just looked at me with the most disgusted look on his face. I was so humiliated,” she paused, gasps pouring out of her as she felt the dampness in her being brought out to the forefront. Her eyes were closed as Jack pressed the pause button on his phone.

“You forgot the worst part of it,” he said nonchalantly as he leaned over her, rolling her onto her stomach. “The worst part is that you loved every second of it.”

The words reached right into her. This was the first time she had ever even told this story, and this stranger had gazed right into the depths of her soul. She was left stunned and with at a loss for words. It had taken her a minute to regain her composure; but by that time it was too late.

The open palm of Jack’s hand stung her ass cheeks with a resounding slap, as he tugged on her matted hair. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes, but they were less of pain than of gratitude. He spanked her soundly a second time, and then a third, seizing her by the shoulders and forcing her onto her knees on the bed in front of him. She bit her lip as he spanked her a fourth time, using the other hand to softly massage her shoulders. This was the first time she had let a man get away with handling her so roughly, and she felt quivering in his stern hands. She cooed softly as he spanked her, feeling herself grow numb until there was no choice but to submit to him as he pried her legs apart.

She felt him enter her swiftly, piercing her folds. With each successive thrust, Jack grabbed onto more of her hair, using the strawberry blonde tresses as leverage as he took her from behind. The curve of his prick jutted upwards inside of her, humming with some dim and seemingly hostile energy that was resolved to break down every last one of her barriers. Every trace of her frail ego seemed to melt with the friction… both her vanity and her self-doubt, discarded like so much old confetti, All her fears, all her pettiness, her jealousy, her envy… all dissolved in the heat of his buckling rhythms, now furious inside her in an ancient rhythm, a cipher whose meaning he alone held the key to. His fingers explored the contours of her mouth, keeping her from screaming out in either savagery or ecstasy. He seized her shoulders as he forced himself into the very depths of her, drawing out the hissing moan which seemed to spring from the base of her spine and electrified every pore, every nerve until it culminated in a scream that began at the top of her skull before emerging from her frazzled mouth.

Jack pulled out of her, and let her collapse face down on the bed, panting and moaning. Though he was slightly dazed himself by Laura’s reaction, he knew that one of them had to maintain some semblance of restraint. He knew the virtue of patience. Soon, Laura would as well.