I Broke His Rule to Get Near Him, So the Billionaire Made Me Count novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Key

He binds her wrists with a red lockout lanyard and gives her the key to her own knot; they take each other on the leather couch, set their terms at dawn, and in the elevator the cousin who wants him gone says her name.

I didn't wait to be sent for.

Thursday was my night off.

At two in the morning I drove back to the terminal, badged into the office tower and rode the elevator up by myself.

Royce Brockman was at his desk, in the same white shirt.

He looked up when I came through the door, and he didn't say a word.

He opened the top drawer and laid something on the blotter.

It was a lockout lanyard, thick red nylon, the kind every hand on the dock wears.

At one end hung a small brass padlock, and next to it lay a single key.

"Your lock," he said. "Your key."

"I know what it says on the gate."

"Then you know what I'm offering." He stood. "Come here, Lozano."

I went.

He took my wrists, turned them palm up, and looked at the rope scar across my left hand.

His thumb passed over it once.

Then he crossed my wrists in front of me and wound the red nylon around them, twice, firmly, and snapped the little padlock shut.

The click went through my whole body.

He took the key and put it in my palm and closed my fingers around it.

"If you want out, you turn it," he said. "It ends. I don't ask why."

"And if I don't want out?"

"Then you keep it in your fist and you count."

He walked me backward to the leather couch against the wall and sat me down on the edge of it.

The key bit into my palm.

He knelt on the carpet between my knees.

He undid my work boots and set them aside, then drew off my pants and my underwear in one pull, and pushed my knees wide.

"Last night I gave you fourteen," he said. "Tonight it's fifteen."

He ran his thumb along the inside of my knee.

"Count fifteen breaths for me, slow, out loud. If you get to fifteen, I'll let you come."

"And if I don't?" I said.

"We start again," he said.

He put his mouth on me.

"One," I said.

He licked up the center of me, flat and slow, and I let out the breath.

"Two."

His tongue found my clit and circled it, lazy, hardly touching.

"Three."

I stared at the tank lights through the glass and tried to breathe long.

"Four. Five."

He closed his lips around me and sucked, very lightly, and my hips tried to lift.

He pressed them down with one hand.

"Six," I said, and my voice shook.

His tongue slid lower, found my entrance, and pushed in, and my bound hands came up and my fist hit my own stomach.

"Seven."

"Louder," he said into me.

"Eight. Oh, God. Nine."

He went back to my clit and worked it with the flat of his tongue, fast and wet.

Two fingers slid inside me and curled.

I lost the count.

"Ten," I said. "Eleven. Twelve, I can't, I can't breathe long."

"Then I'll have to start you over."

He drew back.

My whole body clenched around nothing.

"No," I said. "Please."

"One."

"One," I said, furious, and he went down again.

It took four tries.

Each time I got closer, and each time he stopped on thirteen or fourteen with his mouth an inch from me, grinning against my thigh.

"You're enjoying this," I said.

"Immensely. Count."

By the fourth time I was crying out the numbers with tears of frustration in my eyes.

"Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen."

"Good girl."

He sucked my clit hard into his mouth and drove his fingers up into me, and I came so fast I shouted.

My head hit the back of the couch.

My wrists strained in the nylon.

I came for what felt like a full minute, shaking, and he held me through every wave, his fingers still moving inside me.

"I have you," he said against my thigh.

I was gasping when he stood.

He unbuttoned his shirt with steady hands.

Under it he had a hard chest, a long, flat stomach, and dark hair that ran down from his navel to his belt.

I looked at him and wanted him with a force that frightened me.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"Fuck me, Mr. Brockman."

His mouth twitched.

He pushed his trousers down, and his cock sprang free, thick and flushed and ready, and he knelt over me on the couch.

I wrapped my bound wrists around his neck, holding on with the key in my fist.

He took his weight on one arm.

He put the other hand under my knee and drew it up and pushed into me, slowly, inch by inch.

I felt every inch of it.

I arched.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, you're big."

"Breathe," he said, and he pushed deeper, until he was seated all the way and my body was stretched tight around him.

He held still.

I could feel him throbbing inside me.

"Tell me," he said.

"Move."

He did.

He pulled out and thrust in, long, hard, and the couch creaked, and I cried out against his neck.

He set a rhythm and drove into me, again and again, and with each thrust the base of him ground against my clit.

"You feel," he said, breathless, "so good."

"Harder," I said.

"Say please," he said.

"Please. Harder. Please, Mr. Brockman."

He gave it to me.

He gripped my thigh and hauled it up around his hip.

The angle changed, and every stroke hit the place inside me that his fingers had found.

I was making sounds I didn't recognize.

I could feel another climax building, deep and fast.

"Come with me," he said. "Now."

"Yes."

I came again, harder than the first, clenching around his cock.

He groaned against my shoulder, drove in once, twice, deep, and went rigid and shuddered, spilling inside me.

For a long moment neither of us moved.

His forehead rested on my collarbone.

I felt his heart slamming against my chest.

Then, slowly, he sat up, took my bound hands, and kissed my wrists above the red nylon.

I opened my fist.

The key had left a deep print in the middle of my palm.

I hadn't used it.

I looked at it, small and brass, in the dent it made.

I understood what he had really handed me.

At six, with the sky going gray over the channel, we sat on the floor of his office in our clothes.

We drank black coffee out of paper cups from the machine.

My wrists were free and rubbed pink.

He leaned his back against the desk and his knees were drawn up.

"Terms," he said.

I looked at him.

"I'm forty-one, and you work for me, and in January I may not be able to see you for a while," he said.

"If this goes on, I want three rules. You can have three of your own."

"Go on," I said.

"One. The key stays yours, always. Whatever I put on you, you can take off."

"Done," I said.

"Two," he said. "Never on the dock. Up here, on the boat, anywhere else."

He turned the cup once.

"On the dock you're one of my hands, and nobody touches you."

"Done."

"Three." He turned the cup in his hands. "No lies in this room."

He looked at me.

"I've had a year of people telling me what I'd like to hear. I won't have it from you."

My mouth went dry.

"Done," I said.

I watched his shoulders ease, and I felt like the lowest thing on the Ship Channel.

At ten past six I rode down in the elevator, with my jacket over my arm and my hair undone.

The doors opened on four, and a man in a navy suit stepped on.

He was smiling.

He had sandy hair, a pressed shirt open at the collar, and an easy, friendly face.

He looked me over, once, from boots to hair.

"Morning, friend," he said. "You're early for the day crew, Miss Lozano."

I had never seen him in my life, and he knew my name.

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