Fall Into You (11 page)

And if he ran it, did that mean he was into it, too?

Charli was dragged from her thoughts as Colby walked over to one of the younger women
in the front—a dark-haired beauty who
looked to be pulled from the pages of an old-fashioned pinup calendar. He cupped her
chin and titled her face toward him. “Stella, would you please show the group what
a nice stand and kneel you have?”

The girl kept her eyes down. “Yes, sir.”

With one fluid movement, Stella rocked forward, tucked her toes under, and rose to
a stand. It was a simple sequence of actions, but even Charli couldn’t deny the utter
elegance it conveyed—like a silk curtain lifting with a gust of wind.

Colby gazed down at her with pride. “Lovely, Stella.” He looked to the group. “You
see that, subs? None of this putting one leg up first or pushing yourself up with
your hands. Unless you have some injury stopping you, your master or mistress deserves
that kind of grace from you.” He put a hand on Stella’s shoulder. “Down.”

“Yes, sir.” As if the rewind button had been hit, Stella reversed her movements and
rocked down into a kneel with the same fluidity. She ducked her head and placed her
palms on her thighs. Beautiful. Subservient.

The idea should have rankled Charli. She’d spent her whole life making sure men saw
her as an equal, showing no weakness, no softness. But there was such feminine beauty
to Stella, Charli couldn’t help but feel a tug of envy. What must it be like to draw
that kind of rapt attention, to get that dripping-with-lust gaze from a man? Something
low and deep within her stirred at the notion.

Colby crossed his arms over his broad chest, looking like a drill sergeant. “Now I
want to see all of you follow Stella’s example. Up.”

The group instantly sprung to life, each person trying to emulate the graceful act.
Charli hesitated for a moment but then snapped to it when she realized not following
would only bring attention to herself. She attempted the movement, but her hand landed
onto the floor when she overcorrected on her balance. She rose to her feet with the
elegance of an offensive lineman suffering a concussion. Terrific.

“Down,” Colby barked.

Everyone scrambled back to the floor. Some smoothly, some not so much.

Kelsey shook her head,
tsk
ing. “Pitiful.”

Charli felt the heat of shame rising up from her chest. Shit, what had she gotten
herself into? And why should she even care if she was a pretty kneeler or not?

Charli stared down at her hands, wondering how she could sneak out with anyone noticing.
She needed to get out of here—stat. This was way out of her zip code. But right when
she started to turn her head to venture a peek at the door, a heavy hand landed on
her shoulder. “You seem to be lost, Ms. Beaumonde.”

The voice behind Charli held barely restrained violence. She closed her eyes, wishing
she could fall through the floor or wake up. This all had to be some bizarre nightmare,
right? Dancing orangutans would twirl through the room anytime now. But of course
when she opened her eyes again, Grant’s hand was still on her shoulder. And she was
still in the middle of some odd How to Be a Sex Slave class.

His breath was a hot tickle against her ear. “You have three seconds to stand up and
come with me before I embarrass you and let everyone know you’re an intruder here.”

Her jaw clenched, but when she caught Kelsey’s curious gaze, Charli tamped down her
smart-ass reply. She didn’t want to make Kelsey look bad. Plus, the thought of being
exposed as an outsider suddenly seemed too much to stomach. She was in that role way
too often in her life already. She rose to her feet—at least a little more smoothly
than she had the first time.

Grant seemed huge next to her all of a sudden, as if being in this place somehow made
him even taller. He grasped her upper arm
and none too gently led her from the room. After shutting the door, he tugged her
again like she was some disobedient puppy and guided her down the hallway. “Not a
word until I get you behind a closed door.”

The clipped command sent both a whisper of fear and some other unidentifiable emotion
through her. She shivered beneath his grip, which apparently didn’t go unnoticed by
him. He gave her the side eye and the hard line of his mouth dipped into a full frown.
But he stayed silent until they’d gone up an elevator, down another elegantly decked-out
hallway, and into cozy sitting room, complete with a stone fireplace. Through another
open door, she could see a bigger room with a desk and large plate-glass windows that
looked out onto the black night. Grant’s office.

He let go of her arm and shut the door they’d come through, then pinioned her beneath
an iron gaze. “Sit.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Charli, it’s been a long night. You’re trespassing after I explicitly told you not
to, and you’ve taken me away from something important tonight. Do you really want
to play word games right now?”

She sat, suddenly feeling the true extent of his anger. He was always a bossy son
of a gun but here, at this place, she sensed that part of him had dialed up from low
buzz to rattle-and-hum mode.

Then it hit her.

Grant was like Colby.

She remembered the way Grant had made her hold the bar in the shower, the way he’d
taken control.

He
was one of the men who made women kneel for him.

Charli thought of pretty, subservient Stella, and her stomach plummeted like she’d
been thrown from a bridge. No wonder Grant had left last night. She was everything
girls like Stella weren’t.

She looked away from him, staring at the unlit fireplace. “I’m sorry. You’re right.
I shouldn’t have come over here.”

“Damn right, you shouldn’t have,” he replied, his angry voice
hitting the wood floors and reverberating around her. “What the hell were you thinking?
I told you I have security. You didn’t think the staff would see someone hopping the
fence?”

“I thought this was a swanky resort for rich families,” she protested. “I didn’t think
I was going to stumble into some, some…”

“Some what, Charli? Say what you think this is.”

She glanced up at him, meeting the challenge in his eyes. “Some, I don’t know, sex
club, brothel, God knows what.”

He smirked. “You think I’m running a whorehouse?”

“Why else would you be training people how to kneel?”

He closed his eyes briefly, as if reining in the desire to shake her. “Because those
people are submissives who want to learn how to please a dominant. This is a fantasy
resort. BDSM being our speciality.”

Her brows lifted. “BDSM? Is that the same as S and M?”

He blew out a breath, sinking onto the couch opposite her, the fight visibly draining
from him. “That’s the older term for it. But yeah, basically. Bondage, dominance,
submission, and sadomasochism. And this is supposed to be a place where I guarantee
people the highest level of privacy to practice it. If my members knew that I’d allowed
some nosy reporter to sneak onto the property…” He leaned back in his seat. “It could
ruin my entire reputation.”

Her teeth had gnashed together at the nosy reporter comment, but she tamped down her
response when she saw how weary he looked. This was obviously a very big deal here,
and she had been the one to break the rules. She pushed back all the snarky things
she wanted to say. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I’m not going to pretend I understand
all this, but I had no right to come over here. Sometimes my curiosity gets the better
of me.”

He eyed her. “You think?”

“Damn. Okay. I get it. I said I’m sorry. What do you want me to do? Grovel for forgiveness?”
The words were out before she could snatch them back.

His head tilted, mischief in his eyes. “Not a totally unappealing idea. Maybe you
learned more in that training class than I think.”

Her neck burned, the heat traveling up like mercury in a thermometer.

“What
were
you doing kneeling in the intro class anyway?”

She studied the tops of her hands, his inquiring gaze suddenly too much to take head-on.
“I sort of got persuaded by Kelsey.”

A soft chuckle. “Ah, Kelsey. She’s new to my staff, but a very promising domme. If
she can persuade
you
to do something, maybe she deserves a raise.”

Charli’s head lifted, her eyes narrowing. “Right, of course, because I’m nothing like
those women in that room.”

He leaned forward, forearms braced on his thighs. “No. You’re not.”

For some reason, the words pierced her like barbed wire. She herself had been thinking
in the session she was nothing like those women. But hearing him say it with such
conviction lashed at the same battered spot her boss had created when he’d told her
she hadn’t gotten the on-air position. Not good enough. Not pretty enough.

She hauled herself up from the couch as if the furniture had caught on fire beneath
her. The telltale stinging sensation of impending tears seared her throat. “I want
to go back to my cabin.”

He mouth dipped. “We’re not done here. We need to talk about last night, and I need
to know that you’re not going to—”

But she was no longer listening as she moved toward the door. She had to get out of
here. Right. Now. She wasn’t exactly sure why she felt ready to fall apart. All she
knew was she was not going to do it in front of Grant.

She reached for the doorknob but a large palm landed against the wood over her head,
preventing the door from opening. “Charli, stop. Why are you running?”

She stared at the door, the polished wood blurring in her vision
and Grant’s body heat radiating against her back. He was so close. There was no way
she was going to escape without him seeing her tears. She pressed her palms against
the door. “Please. I need to go.”

But the words were choked, cracked, revealing what she was trying so hard to hide.

“For God’s sake, freckles. You’re crying?” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned
her around. “What’s going on? Is this about last night? Because I am so sorry about
that.”

“Yes. No.” She shook her head, staring at his boots because she was too mortified
to look up at him.

“Tell me, Charli.”

She didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to lay her shame bare. But in that moment,
she couldn’t stuff it down any longer. She swiped at her ridiculous tears. “I’ve spent
my whole life working hard, proving myself. And no matter what I do, everyone always
wants what I’m not.”

“What are you talking about? Is this about your job?”

“My job, my mother…you.”

“Me?” he asked, sounding genuinely perplexed.

She raised her gaze to him and managed a
well-duh
smirk. “If I didn’t make it embarrassingly clear last night in the bathroom, I’m
attracted to you. And of course, you can’t be a guy who would just want to have a
quick fling with someone like me. No, you want the epitome of all that is stereotypically
feminine. The gorgeous goddess on her knees.”

The lines around his mouth deepened. “Charli.”

She raised her palm. “Please. Don’t. If you say some pitying comment, I’m going to
punch you in the face.”

His shoulders sagged with a heavy sigh. “That’s not what I was going to do.”

She stepped around him, walking to the window on the far side of the room and putting
her back to him. “Right.”

She heard his boots against the floor as he turned around, but
he didn’t come any closer. “Believe what you want, but let me say my piece. Since
the night I found you out on the road, I haven’t stopped imagining what it would be
like to get you in my bed. Every time you talk back to me, I want to hush you up in
all kinds of creative ways. And last night, it took every letter of my moral code
to walk out and not take full advantage of the situation.”

Her blood seemed to halt in her veins, her whole body pausing as if to make sure she’d
heard him right. His footfalls sounded behind her, and then his scent was invading
the air around her.