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  I had her in the palm of my hand. She was glassy-eyed from arousal, and driven to the peak of frustration. I had to steady her as I led her from the bathroom.

  I took her over to a couch in a darkened corner, but before she could sit down, I grabbed a cushion and dropped it on the floor. “Sit,” I quietly ordered.

  She looked down at it for a moment, but I didn’t have to urge her. She sank gracefully down to sit at my feet.

  I pulled her head against my knee, stroking her hair as I tried to cool myself off. I wanted nothing more than to drag her up on the couch and bury my cock inside of her. But I couldn’t share that with everyone here. She belonged to me alone. And while I would show her off, I would only give others a taste of her.

  But she nuzzled her way between my legs, her breath hot through my pants, turning so her mouth was against my cock that strained against my pants. With the mask over her eyes, she was still completely Sierra. I never imagined her as someone else.

  I twined my fingers in her hair as she pressed her hot mouth against the mound of my hard-on.

  “You would suck me off here?” I asked hoarsely. “With everyone watching?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes glinted through the mask in animal hunger.

  “You would do anything I say?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  My voice hardened. “Then kiss my boot.”

  Her mouth opened in a gasp. I knew that it wouldn’t be easy for her to kneel down to me and kiss my foot in the middle of the Masquerade. It would be even harder than giving me a blow job.

  That’s why I wanted it.

  With her breasts heaving, she backed up slowly. She glanced down at my polished boots, then back up at me. I waited on edge, knowing I was asking a lot of her, maybe too much. If she resisted, the spell would break. She was not one to fight against her submission. She needed to dive into it like someone who was fearless in leaping off a cliff.

  But I had to know if it was true. Did she belong to me?

  She pulled back her cushion and settled her knees, leaning over with her entire body. In one graceful motion she placed her lips against the top of my boot. I could feel her press her mouth into the leather to feel my foot inside. Then before I could say anything, she rose and sank again, kissing my other boot.

  My heart swelled as she sat up on her heels, smiling shyly up at me. She was giving herself to me, no holding back, no second thoughts. She trusted me…

  Even though she shouldn’t.

  I had a golden collar in my pocket, but I suddenly knew I couldn’t put it on her. Not while the lies were still between us. It would make a mockery of everything we had done if I collared her while she didn’t know the truth about me. Even if it was only for one night while we were masked.

  My finger touched her mask. Why was it easier this way? Maybe it was the barrier between us that allowed me to let go completely.

  I took her by the hand and led her through the Masquerade. I wanted nothing more than to get out of here, to run off with her alone. Every vaguely familiar face was threatening, was someone who could break the spell I had woven between us. So I rushed off into the night, my only desire to get her home.

  She dashed after me, her hand outstretched in mine as I drew her along. I ducked into a cab with her, giving my address, and then turned on her with a voraciousness that surprised us both. I kissed her mouth, her face, her neck, biting and pulling her flesh with my teeth until she cried out. I didn’t care about the cabbie, I was barely restraining myself from doing more.

  She drowned under my assault, her fingers pressing against my chest as she tried to breathe. I pulled her across my lap, holding her tightly as I kissed her. The noise of the cars, the honking and sounds of the city disappeared in her lips.

  I pulled it together long enough to make it into my building and up the stairs with her. I had been mugged before, and I wouldn’t let that happen while I was with Sierra.

  But we were barely through the door of my apartment before I was kissing her again, my hands popping the hooks on her corset. She was pulling up my shirt and unbuckling my belt, as I jerked down her skirt.

  She raised her hand to swipe off her mask, but I stopped her.

  A little more time, that’s all I needed. Before I had to tell her the truth.

  She stopped, her eyes questioning, stilled by my refusal.

  The mask hid what she was thinking. For the first time, I wasn’t sure about her. She stood there wearing only her long peasant blouse and her stockings, while I had on my pants with my shirt off.

  And our masks.

  My hand cupped her neck, and I drew her closer. “You’re mine.”

  Her chin jerked, as if instinctively denying it. She was fighting me.

  I brought her forehead to meet mine, my hand still around the back of her neck. It was vivid in my mind how she had surrendered to me the first night I had met her. It was wrong to get so turned on from frightening her, from convincing her that I held her life in my hands. But she had given herself over to me completely, and I took her.

  Just like I wanted to take her now, and plunge into her, claiming her for my own.

  “You’re mine,” I repeated hoarsely.

  “No…,” she barely whispered.

  In surprise, I drew back to look into her eyes, that were suddenly swimming with tears. She was crying! She couldn’t be crying now, but she was!

  But I didn’t hurt her.

  She was crying and looking up at me as if I had. “I wish it was true,” she managed to say.

  My fingers tightened on her arms. “It is.”

  “No, it’s not. And you know it.”

  I stared at her.

  “This is just a game you’re playing with me,” Sierra told me. “This isn’t real.”

  I felt the ground drop beneath my feet. It was true. I had created the Victor persona for her to fall for, the millionaire master every girl wanted.

  Is this what it had come to? I would have to confess at the height of our scene? Destroy everything I had built for her throughout the night?

  I reached for Sierra and slipped the mask up to wipe her tears. I felt the familiar jolt in my cock at seeing her so vulnerable, as the knowledge burned along my nerves, setting me on fire.

  Maybe I was torturing her for my own pleasure. Maybe I was that messed up, needing to see her suffer to prove that she would stick by me. But she could sense the walls between us. Instincts couldn’t be denied.

  And neither could my raging hard-on.

  Touching her face, separated by a wall between us that I couldn’t ignore, I had to admit the truth. “I’m not really Victor. I’m Vic.”

  I pulled off my mask, letting it drop behind me.

  She blinked up at me, her eyes enormous from the tears. “What do you mean?”

  “You were right the first night we met. I was born in New Jersey. I grew up there. I was so mad that you called me on it, in that snide way, and that’s why I scared you. Because you reminded me of all that.”

  “All what?”

  I raised my eyes to the ceiling. “I wasn’t beaten or abused. Maybe you’d understand that. I was ignored. I didn’t exist. I still don’t…”

  “You don’t exist?” Sierra asked slowly.

  “I know it doesn’t seem possible, but this man you’ve gotten to know isn’t me.”

  “In some ways, I feel like I hardly know you.”

  “What is there to say? I grew up dirt poor and abandoned. My sister… is really my mother. Until I was thirteen, I thought my grandparents were my parents. Until I finally saw my birth certificate, and then it made sense. Why none of them liked me or wanted me around. I was shame to my grandparents, a mistake to be erased from my sister’s life. My mother’s life. She was fifteen when I was born. They should have given me away. Maybe then I would have had a fair chance.”

  I never expected to make my confession this way. Never imagined telling her my darkest secret. But I had been longing to be honest with her
, to find a way to open my heart so she would understand. And it spilled out.

  “I’m Vic, not Victor,” I repeated more firmly. “Nobody, really. I got no education, had no hope of bettering myself. I had to do it all on my own. I never thought I would succeed at anything.”

  Sierra put her hands on my chest. “Vic, I do understand. I had to fend for myself as a kid, and take care of Lola. But at least I had my older brothers to help me when I was little. I wasn’t completely alone. That must have been awful.”

  I nodded, putting my arms around her. “It’s the only thing I know, being alone. The one time I tried, that I fell in love, it was a disaster.”

  This was it, time to confess it all. That this was Adrianne’s old place, and that I was only a baggage handler. That I had lied to her from the beginning. Time to turn that shining love in her eyes to disdain. And she would look at me the same way my grandmother looked at me when I came through the kitchen door, as if she wanted to take the broom and sweep me back outside with the garbage.

  “Sierra, I’m sorry… I’m so fucked up. I’ve done horrible things to you. I don’t know how you’ll ever forgive me—”

  My chest twisted as I strangled on the next words I had to say.

  “It’s okay,” she told me. She reached up to kiss me softly. “I’m glad you told me. I’ve been longing for this moment, when you opened up to me. Vic…”

  I kissed her back, feeling that unbearable tightness begin to ease. I knew I should say the next words, to admit everything. I had jumped over the present and suddenly bared my soul to her. I never planned on doing that. But I trusted her so much that it had burst out of me.

  And now I was filled by her acceptance. That empty place inside of me overflowed with the love in her eyes. For her to know I was nothing, unwanted by the people who should have wanted me the most, unlovable and unable to love... yet somehow she cared about me even more.

  So I kept on kissing her. In a distant part of my mind, I knew it was wrong. But it was too much for me. I had woven a spell around her all night, keeping myself on a razor’s edge to give her the exhilaration she was seeking. With my emotional release—telling the truth about what twisted me into an imitation of a man—came a relief so great that I couldn’t control myself anymore.

  I hugged her tight, kissing her with abandon.

  Chapter 30

  Sierra

  I felt Vic holding back at first, but then he let go and I let go with him. I felt so bad for him. Now a dirty tow-headed boy replaced the snotty rich kid I had imagined him as a boy. Why didn’t he realize that people would respect him more to know he had made a success of his life despite such hardship? The rejection he suffered from his family had cut him deep.

  Our kiss quickly caught fire. As he picked me up and carried me to the bed, taking his time to strip off my stockings and kiss my legs all the way from my toes to my lips, I threw away restraint.

  I couldn’t get enough of the way his skin felt, the hardened muscles shifting underneath as I clung to him.

  He was insatiable, and so intense in the way he watched my every reaction, and drank in every moan and gasp. He seemed to take the most satisfaction in giving me pleasure.

  The beauty of his eyes, pale gray-blue, so clear it was like I could see inside his soul. It made me feel as if I was saving him, like the romantic movies that I loved.

  That feeling was more than pleasure as we rocked together, him quickening and then pausing to plunge as deep inside of me that he could, making me moan to be so filled. Building slowly, our bodies moving together, never stopping until pure sensation was rippling through me.

  I wanted him with a fierceness that I’d never imagined. All of him, not just his body and the feel of his hands on me, but his thoughts and emotions, too. I wanted to know everything about him, and it felt as if we balanced on the verge of something grand, tipping over into a passion that would unite us as one.

  He looked into my eyes, brighter than tears, as I arched my back. He started to come, and I knew it was because of me, that I was giving him that pleasure.

  It sent me right over the edge.

  ...

  When I woke up in the morning, the sunlight was streaming through the big windows even though the loft faced west. I could hear the sleepy holiday traffic and distant sirens through the glass.

  Vic was still asleep, his thick bronzed lashes fringing his closed eyes.

  I looked down at him as he slept, and felt a swelling of love like I had never felt for anyone. I wished I could wipe away the past that haunted him. But I also wanted to talk to him about it, so that he would know he was finally understood and loved. I was ready to dive into the abyss with him if it would help him heal.

  It was a miracle that I had finally broken through to him. It hadn’t been planned, my sudden burst of tears last night. But when he said, “You’re mine…” I knew it wasn’t true. I could feel it in my heart, a sudden sharp pang, that there was something terrible standing between us.

  Our masks said it all. I wanted to take mine off, but he wanted to keep them on. At first it was so freeing to wear my mask to the Masquerade. It let me get beyond myself, enough so that I had let him cut off my thong in the bathroom in front of everyone and begged him to have sex with me right then and there.

  He touched me in ways I didn’t know existed, playing with my mind and emotions as much as my body. I would have done anything for him last night, and that’s why I kissed his boots.

  Why did the thought of it make me squirm and throb between my legs? It was so wrong, but it felt so right.

  But in the end, I couldn’t make love to him with our masks on. Not when he called me “mine.” Not when I wanted desperately for it to be true.

  So he had to be honest, and he did it for me. Because he wanted us to be together.

  I was reluctant to wake Vic, as much as I wanted to talk to him—I had tons of questions stored up for him. But he was sleeping soundly after our late night last night. I sneaked into the bathroom and then into the galley kitchen. Going quietly through the cabinets, I saw that Vic had run out of nearly everything. There was nothing I could throw together for breakfast, not even eggs.

  I picked up my discarded costume from the floor and untied the gold cords so it was an ordinary long skirt again. And I tightened the neck of the blouse so it didn’t fall over my shoulders. Picking up the bronze corset, I carefully folded and smoothed it with the cords, laying it on his desk. Vic’s place was so compact there weren’t many places to put things.

  I took his keys and quietly let myself out of the loft. It was a beautiful morning, with the hottest weather of the summer safely past. The street was empty, probably because it was the long weekend, the last of the summer when so many people left the city. But things like holidays didn’t matter for a girl like me. I would be working tomorrow on Labor Day.

  The corner deli had nice-looking lox, so I ordered two toasted everything bagels with lox and cream cheese. And two large coffees.

  I was returning with our breakfast when I saw Dick. He was lurking between two cars, looking up at Vic’s windows.

  I stopped short.

  A surge of anger made me clench my fist in the bag. That asshole lied to me! Lied to my sister, too. Took advantage of us both. I remembered Lola in handcuffs with mascara smeared under her eyes, standing in the door to our apartment with Dick holding onto her arm. I was so scared that Lola was going to be arrested and ruin her life. I was so grateful to Dick, so pathetically grateful that he wanted to take care of Lola.

  “You! Dick!” I marched toward him, juggling the bags while pulling my phone out of my purse and dialing 911. With my thumb poised over send, I ordered, “Get the fuck out of here! Or I’m calling the police.”

  Dick raised his hands, caught off guard with my approach from behind. “Sierra! Hey, wait… I tried to text you but you didn’t answer.”

  “So you come here to stalk me?”

  “Your rich boyfriend will pay. Lol
a owes me two thou. You know she does. Hell, I handed it over to you some months to cover rent.”

  “That’s between you and Lola. I don’t live with her anymore.” I pushed past him. “You better go now or I’m calling the cops. And I’m telling them you impersonated an officer. You handcuffed my sister and threatened to arrest her.”

  He blanched. “Hey, wait a second… You can’t do that.”

  “Oh, yeah? Consider it done.”

  I punched the number and when the operator came on, I said, “I want to report I’m being harassed by a man who identified himself—”

  Dick eyes went wide. He turned and abruptly ran off. His bulky body swayed back and forth as he scuttled around the corner. It served him right to run like a scared rabbit.

  The dispatcher was asking for my location. “I’m sorry,” I said. “He heard me and ran off. I don’t know where he is.”

  As I hung up with the dispatcher, I saw Vic standing in the doorway of his building. His hair was standing on end and he was wearing sweats and no shirt or shoes, like he had run down six flights of stairs to help me.

  “Are you all right?” Vic demanded, coming up to me panting and flushed.

  I was shaking. “Did you see Dick run when I called the cops? Like I lit a fire under him!”

  Vic was shaking his head. “I saw you two from the window. What happened?”

  “He asked for two thousand dollars. He says Lola owes it to him.”

  “Then he better go ask Lola,” Vic muttered. “Why’s he here looking for you?”

  “He wants me to pay it.” I wasn’t going to tell him about that “rich boyfriend” crack Dick had made. “I called him on lying about being a cop. The coward ran off.”

  Vic had his arms around me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. But he looked like he had been punched, like he was in pain.

  As we went upstairs, I was proud of myself for confronting Dick and calling him on his shit. I was talking too much, keyed up, but Vic didn’t have much to say. At first I thought he was worried about me. I expected him to tell me to call the cops as soon as we got inside his place.