“Who has the key to the apartment?” I asked Brax as we stepped into the building. We were surrounded by marble and chrome, straight lines and stale air.
I am officially in big city hell.
“Ben said he’d have it.”
“Mind if we stop at the restroom before we head up?” I motioned toward the back of the building, past all the gleaming black marble, fancy fixtures, and suits wandering around aimlessly.
Brax sighed as though he was put out. “Fine.”
The man had been downing coffee like it was nearing extinction, so I didn’t buy for a minute that he wasn’t in need of the facilities.
A few minutes later, feeling ten pounds lighter, I emerged from the restroom and waited for Brax to finish with his pretty-boy routine.
I grinned to myself. I found it ironic that Zeke had taken to calling me pretty boy instead of Brax. Granted, there was a hint of condescension in his tone when he did it, so I wasn’t mistaking it for a compliment. Still, it amused me to no end.
I’d never been called pretty in my life, and believe it or not, I wasn’t the sort to prance around in hopes someone would check me out. That came naturally and it had nothing to do with ego. At six foot three, two-hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle, I got the stares without even trying. I was a big man and I worked damn hard to keep it that way. The single dragon tattoo that adorned the upper half of my body garnered some attention as well.
But I was no pretty boy. However, there was something erotic about the way Zeke said it, so I wasn’t complaining.
The truth was, Brax was the pretty one in the relationship. With his perfectly mussed golden-brown hair, those emerald-green eyes, and the baby face, he looked roughly ten years younger than he was. Which was saying something considering he was all of twenty-seven. Most people figured him for a teenager.
He damn sure wasn’t a teenager. I could vouch for that.
The men’s room door opened and Brax stepped out, pressing his Stetson firmly on his head while those curious eyes scanned the space around him.
Fine. With the cowboy hat and those sexy-as-fuck Wrangler jeans and boots, he didn’t look like a teenager. He looked like a man you wanted to strip naked and engage in some wild and kinky sex. For the record, I’d done that plenty of times.
“You ready?” I asked, pretending I was tired of standing around waiting for him.
He turned to me, a serious expression on his face. “You have to be on your best behavior, Case.”
I frowned. “Me? Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because the last time we were here, you got Addison in trouble. That girl doesn’t need any more trouble.”
I chuckled. “No, that girl lives for trouble. I didn’t do anything. She used me as an excuse to get her ass paddled by her Doms.”
“You locked her out of her office,” he declared.
“No I didn’t. She did. I merely engaged the lock. She was the one who shut the door.”
Brax rolled his eyes, then pivoted toward the elevator.
“You think Zeke’s here?” I didn’t want to voice the question, but I had to get it out there. That damn Sadist was all I could think about these days.
“Not if we’re lucky,” Brax said, his voice pitched low.
I knew Brax was looking forward to seeing Zeke every bit as much as I was. Perhaps more. Okay, maybe not more. Ever since that damn scene at Dichotomy, when Zeke had whipped me right into subspace, my dick had been perpetually hard. No matter how often I came—by my own hand or Brax’s phenomenal ass or mouth—it didn’t seem to help. I wanted what Zeke Lautner could give me. Us.
Since the day I met Brax, I had never questioned what I found so appealing about another submissive. He was one of the greatest men I’d ever met. Wicked smart, eerily attentive, ridiculously attractive, and damn good in the sack. Those were all qualities that appealed to me. However, he was a masochist like me. He wanted someone to give him pain, not to offer it.
Insert Zeke Lautner. Big, brooding, and brutal. All the things I longed for in a Sadist. Brax and I agreed that Zeke was the only man who could give us what we needed. While I was content with the status of my relationship with Brax—I loved the man, for fuck’s sake—we both knew we needed more than what we could give each other.
See, we were both masochists, and while we longed for pain and humiliation, neither of us was equipped to dish it out. We took care of each other and we sated those basic biological functions, but there was still that underlying need, the ache to be manhandled, beaten, fucked within an inch of our lives.
