Truly Helpless: A Nature of Desire Series Novel Read online

  “Free form thinking?”

  She smiled. He wanted to sound sullen, but she could tell he was curious. He was also calmer, less twitchy. “Engineers and tech people have very rigid thinking processes. It comes from how they’re trained in college. They might be able to write programs or design systems that would boggle our minds, but they can’t break it down for lay people. And they have very little mechanical or improvisational skills, unless they had them before they went through their formal education. I reintroduce them to those concepts and how to apply them to their work and interacting with clients and non-engineer coworkers.”

  He nodded, his expression becoming more closed. “Were you one of them? Engineer?”

  “Still am. I have a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech. I also have a teaching degree. I went to work out of college for a big corporation, but then I was hired away by a consulting firm they’d brought in to teach what I do now. Usually I travel a lot to do my job, but I’ve agreed to a two-year contract with the community college as part of their corporate resource program.”

  His fingers crumpled the napkin, though he stilled again at her look. “Sounds like you’re used to the corner office set. Good thing this is all about using one another. Otherwise I’d say you get off on slumming.”

  She lifted a brow. “You think you’re being insulting, but if all that mattered to you was using me to get back into The Zone, our class differences wouldn’t bother you.”

  Unrolling her fork from her napkin, she twirled it in her fingertips, and then brought it down in a swift movement against the top of his hand, still flat on the table. She didn’t stab him; merely pressed the tines against the series of veins running from his knuckles to his wrist. She increased the pressure while holding his gaze, which had gone steely gray. He could reach over with his other hand and remove the utensil, brush her away, but he didn’t. His acting out against her seemed to have self-imposed boundaries, which also interested her.

  “You know what I want in a man, Marius? It’s a short list. One who’s honest, and who uses his head and follows his heart when it comes to caring for and serving me.”

  “That’s not a long list.”

  “It has the only things that matter on it.” Setting aside the fork, she laced her fingers on the table. “Any other questions?”

  His jaw flexed. “Any kids, husband, exes?”

  “No. None of those. I’m very particular about who shares my space. While I haven’t ruled out the idea of children, a husband is a far harder choice, and I won’t have one without the other. I’m a traditionalist that way. You?”

  “No.” He scoffed, taking a swallow of his water. She tilted her head. “Do I seem like the type of guy interested in offering anything to a woman other than my dick? And a guy they call ‘Rabid’ isn’t at the top of a list to play father to a kid.”

  “I’d argue just the opposite. I think you’re very interested in offering your heart and life to a woman. You just have a lot of crap piled on top of the desire. And you’d use those ‘rabid’ instincts of yours to tear apart anyone who hurt her or any of your children.”

  She’d hit a serious nerve. His gaze flicked to her, showing her an odd flash of vulnerability before something far harder replaced it.

  “Give the floor to Dr. Phil,” he said. “Turning something that isn’t a problem into one. What I want from a woman is an even shorter list. Want to hear it?”

  She pinned him with a cold expression. “Resort to crudeness, and I’ll slap your ear through your head. If you think Mommy won’t spank your ass in front of everyone in this restaurant, I’d think again.”

  His lips parted, a baring of teeth. While his eyes fired in challenge, she let him see nothing in her own but resolve. After a weighted moment, he shut his mouth, his jaw flexing before he spoke.

  “I only want one thing from a woman. That she doesn’t ask for more than I’m willing to give. It’s only when she does she gets herself into trouble.”

  “Kind of like the person who sticks their hand into a tiger’s cage and then gets outraged that she gets bitten?”

  “Got it in one.” He attempted a casual shrug with tense shoulders. “Maybe we should stick with talking about you.”

  She extended her palm. “Let me see your hand.”

  His visage turned wary, but he put his hand palm-to-palm with hers and then deliberately moved farther up to clasp her wrist in a firm hold. It allowed her to do the same with his, so she ignored the impertinence for now.

  “You’re as mercurial as a bulb with a short,” she observed. She stroked her fingertips over his pulse. It was pounding, a hard current. “But you know what I could be for you, Marius? The sun. Doesn’t matter what kind of clouds your bullshit kicks up. My job is to bring light. Make things grow, keep you warm, tell you there’s something more than darkness.”

  Her gaze held his. “You’re not quite being the asshole you think you are, because most of what’s coming out of your mouth is honest. And that’s what I want. But if you want to keep pushing toward the asshole side to make this date be over, you can save the effort and say so.”

  “What about the concert?” he asked.

  “You’ll let me keep the tickets so I can find someone else to go with me tonight. I know that, because you want to be good to me. You just can’t get out of your own head. So what about it? You want it to be over?”

  She didn’t bring up The Zone ultimatum. He wanted back into The Zone, but that night in Tyler’s office, he’d shown he would set fire to his own interests to protect deeper things. While him getting back into The Zone wasn’t the main reason she was doing this, she knew whatever they were confronting now was one of the big hurdles to it.

  The waiter arrived as the decision hung in the balance. From the picture hanging at the entrance, she identified the handsome Lebanese man as one of the owner’s sons. In the way of a well-run family restaurant, he was proprietary and proud of the food he arranged between her and Marius. Spinach puffs and spicy potatoes, a bowl of soup, a basket of fresh pita and a trio of shawarma meats on small steel spits.

  “If anything isn’t excellent,” he declared, “you let us know and we’ll fix it.”

  “Thank you.” As she smiled at him, her focus lingered for an extra second on olive skin, broad shoulders and dark, dark eyes.

  The waiter hesitated but then nodded, backing away. He bumped the table behind him, fortunately empty, before he recovered his balance and strode away.

  She brought her gaze to their food. “So where do I start?” she asked. “And do we ask for a to-go bag for you?”

  “Maybe you’d like to take him to the concert?” Marius asked in a tone that brought to mind an ill-tempered wolf.

  Regina propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. “Would you like to know what I saw when I was looking at him?”

  “No.”

  She ignored him. “When a man catches my eye outside the club scene, it’s rarely because I’m interested in pursuing him. He’s another page in a book of inspirations when I imagine what I want to do to my subs. For instance, in that blink of contact with him, I imagined myself stretched out on a white sand beach on Cyprus. You’re one of my slaves captured from foreign lands. You come to me and kneel beside my lounge chair, holding a tray of dried fruits, nuts and candies over your head so I can pick what I want to eat. I enjoy all your bare skin, because my slaves wear only a short tunic. Nothing under it, of course.”

  Reaching out, she slid a fingertip along Marius’s neck. “I take my time making my choices, and your arms start to quiver. You say nothing, so determined to please your Mistress. But I know when enough is enough and tell you to put it down beside you. I tie your hands behind your back and order you to pick up each piece of food I want in your mouth. You must come and drop it into my hand, or place it between my lips, without getting yourself in trouble by trying to make that close contact into an actual kiss.” Her gaze coursed over him. “I expect
you’d try very hard to get into trouble, though.”

  Those eyes of his were like a mood barometer. Silver for anger, defiance, confusion. When he was aroused, like now, the blue in his eyes became more pronounced, the pupils even more dark in contrast. His lips firmed. She sensed something in him had both relaxed and become more tense at once.

  “That’s my purpose in appreciating our waiter,” she said. “I like who I’m with tonight, Marius.”

  She noticed he’d shifted his hand closer. “What do you want to touch, Marius? One thing.”

  “Your hair.” The response was instant, surprising her. When she nodded, he lifted his callused palm to her shoulder, and closed his grip around the fall of slender locs there, fingers stroking, testing the way they felt before he released them, and drew his hand back to his side of the table.

  “I’d suggest the potatoes first,” he said abruptly. “You can use your fingers if you like. Sometimes it’s better that way.”

  “All right. I like my idea of you using your mouth better.” She shot him a look. “But we’d probably scandalize the family diners.”

  Her playfulness seemed to take him off guard. As she proceeded per his direction, she braced herself, since she didn’t care for a lot of unfamiliar spices or textures. Instead her taste buds instantly approved the crispiness of the potato, and the mild blend of herbs flavoring it. Before long she was sampling from all the offerings and folding the shawarma into a piece of fresh pita from the basket on the table.

  “This is amazing. I love these little spiced potato things. What’s the soup?”

  “Lentil.” He spooned up some and started to offer it, then rethought that. Before he could return the spoon to the soup and push the bowl her way, she touched his wrist, telling him it was okay. She leaned over to let him put the spoon in her mouth. His hand was steady but the energy bouncing off him was not, his attention on her so intently. She sat back, touching her lips with her napkin.

  “Good stuff. I’ll take some more of that.”

  Pushing the bowl in between them, he picked up the second spoon, nudging the handle of the other to point toward her side of the table. “Lebanese food is better shared. Try the spinach puff.”

  He hadn’t answered her question about wanting the date to be over. She’d let that go, crisis averted. He seemed to like watching her share the soup. As she tried the spinach puff, licking the delicate flakes off her lips, she went the casual conversation route again. “Okay, your turn to spill. Tell me how you knew about the tickets. Seriously.”

  He leaned back. His leg brushed hers under the table when he braced his foot against the bottom slats of the chair next to her at the four-chair table. She didn’t move away. The incidental touch created heat, something she was sure he felt as much as she did.

  “One night at The Zone, you and some of the other Dommes were hanging out in the lounge. You, Mistress Violet, Marguerite, Lyda, Lisette… Violet jabbed you with a finger and said she wasn’t taking any shit about Taylor Swift from someone who owned every Boys II Men song ever performed.” His gaze lit with careful amusement. “You started singing one of their songs at the top of your lungs. She covered her ears and howled.”

  Regina laughed. “I don’t recall seeing you. You must have been lurking.”

  “I was covering the bar. You all were caught up in the girl talk thing.”

  “Girl talk.” Regina snorted, but pulled the concert tickets from her back pocket and looked at them. They’d printed a photograph of the current band trio on the face of the stubs. “Originally they started out as four guys, with Michael McCary singing bass in his wonderful deep voice.” She offered a half smile. “He’d already left the band when I discovered them in middle school, but I’d put on my head phones and go to sleep with his voice and the rest of them crooning their ballads. My music tastes are pretty eclectic now, but like most people, the songs you loved in your teens are your touchstone of good memory and nostalgia.”

  She noticed his face went blank as an empty page. It was a look she wasn’t sure how to interpret, but it sent an uneasy tingle through her stomach. Trying to defuse it, she offered the tickets back to him. He shook his head, the expression disappearing.

  “You’re right, they’re yours. If I piss you off before we get there, you can still go.”

  “Are you anticipating or planning for it, to get out of going to a Boys II Men concert?”

  He chuckled. While it was reserved, it was the first true laugh she’d heard from him. She expected an unleashed one would be rolling and deep, and stroke a woman’s nerves in the right direction. “Too obvious a strategy,” he said. “I can handle one boy band concert if the company is worth it.”

  “I don’t know. You’ve already told me sex is the point of all this, and you’re not getting sex tonight.”

  “It’s an investment in the future.”

  Shaking her head at him, she put the tickets back into her pocket and took another bite of meat-filled pita. “So who was your favorite band in your teens?”

  He spooned up more soup, lifting a shoulder. “Don’t really remember. Probably same as most guys.”

  He kept his eyes on the food, the set of his body language saying it wasn’t a topic he wanted to pursue. With a shock to her system, the meaning of the blank look clicked, along with why it had made her uneasy, as if her subconscious had understood it before the rest of her had.

  He had no frame of reference for teenage rites of passage like favorite rock bands. What kind of childhood wouldn’t have included music?

  She thought of Marguerite’s words. It’s a place that holds no safety for him.

  Maybe there had been music, but darkness covered that and the rest of the memories. He clearly kept them locked away, inaccessible.

  She’d made a vow to keep this a normal date. But since D/s sessions had different goals, she filed the information away as a key that might get her further into his head during one of those. She gestured to their surroundings.

  “How long has this little place been here? It looks like a hole in the wall from the outside. But most good restaurants do.”

  He nodded. “About fifteen years.”

  She’d glanced at the menu and found the prices unexpectedly low. Which raised another thought. “There’s no way you bought those two concert tickets plus my dinner here for fifty dollars.”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “Got the tickets in trade. Did some work for a guy at the Amalie Arena and he owed me a favor. You never said I couldn’t work it out in trade,” he reminded her.

  She hadn’t, but then she hadn’t expected him to go the extra mile that way. His charm routine had never struck her as a long con. She was impressed, not just by him doing it, but by doing what most men wouldn’t. Paying attention and giving her a gift she wasn’t expecting but truly wanted. Another thing that interested her was how long ago that night with the other Dommes had been, and yet he’d remembered that one key detail.

  Men didn’t remember such things about women who didn’t interest them. They barely remembered those kinds of details even when they did. As Marius had pointed out, they often did have one-track minds, at least during the dating phase.

  “So have you ever taught regular school?” he asked. “With your teaching degree.”

  “I did some substitute work and helped out in my mother’s daycare. And I offered GED coursework in the prison system when I was working as a correctional officer. I did that for a few years while finishing up my engineering schooling.”

  His gaze snapped up to her and she smiled. “In my current job, I teach people to think outside the box. Nobody thinks outside the box quite like a convict or a preschooler. There’s always a way around things, which means you have to teach them to integrate morals and judgment into those decisions, without hampering the positive sides of creativity and survival skills. I’m sure you can figure out how the skills apply to a Dom/sub dynamic.”

  He bit into a pita he’d stuffed with the shawar
ma and potato, chewed and swallowed. “A prison guard?”

  “We prefer correctional officer, though prison guard evokes more Dom/sub fantasies. So you can use either term.” She smiled faintly. “Got a few images teasing your cock now, right?”

  She bumped her leg against his under the table and stayed there, knee pressed to his thigh. She liked the smile he gave her, a little sheepish and a lot of heat. Naughty boy and aroused man intertwined. If she sat next to him, she could put her hand beneath the cloth-covered table and stroke his cock through his jeans, feeling the evidence of those fantasies swelling its size.

  A normal date could be chock full of sexual innuendo, couldn’t it? But she liked the sweet pleasures of anticipation, so she reined it back. He helped by teasing her, too.

  “Has it ever been difficult to keep it straight? Solitary for prisoners, time-out for kids, and full head mask on your sub?”

  She chuckled. “Fortunately, the subjects have significant differences. Though all of them could use a good paddling on occasion, I was only allowed that option on the subs. Here, have some more of this. Take it from my hand with your mouth.”

  She gave him a warm look, proffering a spinach puff. He leaned in and bit, but clasped her wrist to steady the contact. He holding her as they brought their elbows down to rest on the table. She rocked inside the grip, turning her fingers around to trace his knuckles. He watched her touch him, his eyes shadowed.

  “You’re interesting,” he said gruffly. “Even if you are fucking with my head.”

  “Hey.” She touched his chin. “There’s a difference between that and making it clear you’re not going to fuck with mine. I want you to do one thing for me. Think you can?”

  “Depends on what it is.” His lips had that rueful twist. “I can’t stand on my head or buy you diamonds.”

  “Well, damn, that was exactly what I was going to ask you to do.” She waved her bare fingers and motioned to the sparkling bangles on her ears, costume jewelry. “Because obviously expensive baubles are my thing.”