Asking for More Read online

  Titles by Lilah Pace

  Begging for It

  Asking for It

  Asking for More

  Asking for More

  Lilah Pace

  InterMix Books, New York

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  ASKING FOR MORE

  An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright (c) 2016 by Blue Moon Publications, LLC.

  Excerpt from His Royal Secret copyright (c) 2016 by Blue Moon Publications, LLC.

  Excerpt from Asking for It copyright (c) 2015 by Blue Moon Publications, LLC.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  INTERMIX and the "IM" design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about The Berkley Publishing Group, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 9781101989166

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  InterMix eBook edition / March 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Titles by Lilah Pace

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Excerpt from His Royal Secret

  Excerpt from Asking for It

  About the Author

  Warning: This book contains explicit scenes that graphically simulate sexual assault, although every encounter between the hero and heroine is fully consensual. The hero is not the perpetrator of any nonconsensual sexual acts. Potential readers should be aware of the intensity of these scenes, and those who find such depictions triggering or traumatic are advised not to read.

  Chapter One

  6) The Sistine Chapel was painted by: Leonardo Da Vinci.

  It's all I can do not to roll my eyes. For four and a half months, I tried to drum some rudimentary knowledge of art history into freshman brains. Some of them got it; most of them, even. The ones who truly fell in love with some of the paintings and sculptures they'd seen--they're the students who make TAing feel like it's all been worthwhile.

  But then there are kids like this one, who didn't even manage to absorb anything about Michelangelo, and who also appears to think that the Renaissance started in Germany. No wonder, since he skipped a ton of classes and probably spent the others checking Facebook on his laptop. I only provided the short fill-in-the-blank section to provide a few easy, slam-dunk answers to boost the students' confidence before they dove into the exam proper. Maybe it worked that way for most of the kids, but wow, not so much here.

  As I reach for my red pen, the phone rings. Glancing over, I see a name glowing on the screen: JONAH MARKS. At once I start to smile.

  "Hey, you," I murmur as I tuck the phone between my shoulder and ear.

  "Vivienne. Hi. I wanted to check in, see what you were doing."

  Jonah's voice has always had an effect on me. He speaks with such cool, assured command, even in simple moments like this. I found him forbidding, once. Even frightening. Now I know and love the good man inside him, the one he's had to fight so hard to be.

  Jonah's a seismologist and volcanologist. The profession suits him. He's like the mountains he studies--strong and silent, but incredible heat, power, and danger simmer just beneath the surface.

  I know his most forbidden fantasies because I share them.

  "Just grading finals here on campus," I tell him. "This stack should be my last of the semester, though."

  "Do you think you might be free by later this afternoon?" He pauses, savoring the anticipation that is building between us both. "If so, I'm in the mood for a game."

  We haven't been back at our games for all that long. The weeks without sharpened my hunger, honed the edges of my desire. Now I hear that same need within Jonah, and I can't imagine how we ever held off, even for a day.

  "Yeah," I whisper. "I'm free."

  "I'm the only one in this wing of the building today. That's unlikely to change. So the stairwells are empty. Mostly dark. Potentially dangerous."

  He means that these are places where a woman could get caught alone. Where someone could take advantage.

  And that's exactly what I want from him.

  We both get off hardest when we pretend this is a rape.

  He's the attacker. I'm the victim. When our games begin, I hand control over to Jonah. The only power I have is contained in our safe word, silver. Although I've designed a few of our scenarios, often I leave it up to him, which is what I do now. This is the first, subtlest moment of my surrender. I ask only one question. "When?"

  "Four P.M. Here's the key code." Jonah lists off the numbers, which I jot down with a shaky hand.

  After he finishes, he just hangs up. Jonah's not big on good-byes.

  Besides, he's already begun the transformation into the figure from my darkest longings. He will become forbidding. Commanding. Even dangerous. And I will turn into the victim in his own forbidden daydreams--weak and pliant, vulnerable to his schemes and to brute force.

  We do not love the desire we share. But we love each other, and together we're learning how to own this--our rape fantasies--so that they will never again own us.

  ***

  I lost my virginity to my rapist when I was only fourteen years old. Anthony Whedon, my older sister's boyfriend, forced himself on me while we were watching TV on the sofa in my own living room late at night. Upstairs, the rest of my family slept through the whole thing. In my fear and confusion, I didn't even think to scream--which is part of why my mother and sister have never believed I was "really" raped.

  Some rape victims find it difficult to ever have sex again. Most work very hard to avoid reminders of what happened, possibly the most painful incident in their lives.

  However, the human psyche is a strange, tangled thing that twists and bends in unexpected ways. Within my brain, Anthony's attack became jumbled up with what little I knew of sex. My physiognomy provides what most women would kill for: orgasms that come quick and easy, through penetration alone. But what Anthony did to me cast the wicked fairy's curse over that gift; it made sure that I could only get off when I was thinking about being raped. Instead of forgetting what was done to me, I felt as if I were forced to relive it, or scenarios like it, in order to have any pleasure at all.

  Until last year, I simply fantasized inside my head while having sex. I only ever asked one guy to act out a scenario with me--my ex, now friend, Geordie Hilton. When I remember that now, I can't imagine what made me ever think it would work. Geordie's funny, sweet, gentle, and pretty thoroughly in the vanilla column, which makes him the last guy in the world who would ever go for a rape fantasy.

  But I'm glad I asked him. It was the first time I actually found the voice to name what I really wanted. And when Geordie drunkenly apologized to me in the middle of a party for not being able to act out my fantasy, we were overheard by Jonah Marks.

  Within the next half hour, Jonah came up to me on the edge of the party--where I wasn't alone, he said , so I'd know I was safe--and offered his services.

  Rape as fantasy. You'd like to play one role; I'd like to play another.

  It was madness. I knew that from the start. But Jonah left all the decisions entirely to me. We met on neutral ground. We set limits, chose a safe word, and determined what it would take for me to feel safe. Jonah had his own boundaries; even as I swore to respect them, I didn't understand just how important those were. I could only think of the danger I was courting--offering my body, my powerlessness, to a man who got off on the thought of forcing women.

  We both thought we could remain nearly strangers. That we could keep our distance to heighten the suspense of our encounters. Jonah and I knew only one thing about each other . . . but it was the most intimate thing we could possibly know. Once you've bared the most painful secret of your soul to someone, holding back anything else provides only the illusion of control. Not the reality. One kind of bond blossomed into another. Within a few months, Jonah Marks and I had fallen in love.

  He learned what Anthony had done to me. And I learned that Jonah came from a background of almost unimaginable sexual sadism--one in which his stepfather had forced him to witness the rape of his mother, not once but maybe dozens of times. He'd been taught that this was all sex was: male violence and coercion, female submission and pain.

  Jonah had the inner strength to reject that message. He's the last man on earth who would ever force a woman in any way. But that inner knowledge couldn't banish those primal fantasies. His demons could never be exorcised, only conquered.

  We conquer them together.

  ***

  Four o'clock has never felt so far away. The hours would seem to crawl by even if I were doing something more fascinating than grading art history exams.

  "You're awfully quiet in here," says Kip, the department secretary, as he appears in the doorway of my tiny office. He drums his fingernails against the doorjamb; they're painted a brilliant, summery orange.

  "I'm quiet because I'm working. Which is what you should be doing. Then you wouldn't be so bored."

  "You know me well enough to know I'd be working if there were anything for me to do." He breathes out in exasperation. "The semester breaks bore me to tears. Hardly any crises for me to resolve, no attractive men around, not even any parties worth attending. Unless you know of some festive gatherings on the bleak horizon--"

  "Not much here. Geordie's taking things easy for now, Arturo and Shay are busy with the baby, and Carmen actually flew out to California yesterday."

  Kip raises an eyebrow. "She's moved already?"

  "No. Just looking for her apartment at Stanford." I manage to say it without getting teary. Even though I encouraged her to follow her dreams all the way to a Ph.D. program on the west coast, my best friend's imminent move has hit me harder than I expected it to.

  "And your delectable Jonah Marks isn't the type to throw parties. His one great flaw."

  "He's not antisocial," I insist, which is true, though I'm mostly making a point of it to disguise the warm flush in my cheeks at the sound of Jonah's name. "Just not the 'party hearty' type. But hey, there's the gallery opening tomorrow. You've got that to look forward to, right?"

  Kip gives me a flat stare. "You mean, standing around bored for three hours while enduring the endless posturing by your fellow students who aren't as confident as you?"

  "C'mon. This is Austin. If you want something better to do, it's out there. Even with the students gone, there's plenty of music to hear, or restaurants to try . . . bats to watch . . ."

  "I suppose."

  The thing is, Kip and I both know the real reason he has too much time on his hands. It hasn't been that long since Kip broke up with an abusive boyfriend, one who tends bar at one of our (former) favorite local haunts. It's enough to ground the most social butterfly of us all.

  Still, it can't be doing Kip any good to sit around his apartment moping every day. "Okay," I proclaim, "I'm giving you a challenge."

  He perks up immediately. "What's that?"

  "Contact the gallery. Tell them you're in charge of the party tomorrow night. You have twenty-four hours to turn the art show opening into something fabulous."

  "They're never fabulous."

  "That's why it's a challenge."

  Kip opens his mouth to bicker with me some more, but then I see the spark return to his eyes. "Very well, Miss Charles. From drab to fab in one day."

  With that he swans out, so deliberately over-the-top that I have to giggle. Maybe I've only given Kip one day's worth of entertainment, but it promises to pay off with a night to remember.

  Today's going to be memorable for other, far more delicious reasons. All thanks to Jonah.

  At twenty 'til four, I finish inputting final grades into the system, shut off my computer, and get ready to go. My legs feel slightly wobbly, and my entire body seems to be flushing warm with anticipation. So I take a moment in the department restroom to throw myself together.

  My honey-brown hair needs a trim; by now it reaches almost to my shoulders. As I brush it out, I check the rest of my appearance. I don't bother with much makeup, particularly during sultry Texas summers, so the tinted moisturizer and lip balm I've got on are enough. The tiny jade studs in my ears won't catch or snag while Jonah does . . . whatever it is he's going to do to me. With trembling hands, I undo the slender gold chain around my throat and drop it into my purse pocket.

  Sometimes he can be rough. I love it every time--but I have to take precautions.

  The white sundress I'm wearing is flattering, though I wonder whether it might get stained or torn. I've taken to buying old clothes at the Goodwill that Jonah can rip off me. However, he usually warns me when to wear those. Maybe the sundress is safe. I wish I'd worn a different pair of shoes instead of these chunky, high-heeled sandals, but I'm not about to traipse across campus barefoot. They'll have to do.

  My panties are already damp. Ever since Jonah called me, I've been aroused, my whole body ready for him at any moment. I toy with the idea of slipping them off and tucking them into my purse, but decide not to. When Jonah touches me there, feels how wet I am and have been for hours, he'll get even more turned on.

  I wash my hands, apply a little lotion, and head out. As I walk past the main department office, I wave good-bye to Kip, but he's oblivious to anything but the phone conversation he's having: "Lucky for you, we need appetizers. Set this up, and I'll consider that favor returned in full."

  Does everyone in Texas owe Kip a favor? It seems that way sometimes. Come to think of it, I owe him several.

  But the mention of hors d'oeuvres has reminded my belly that food exists, and that I ate fairly little of it at either breakfast or lunch. My lips curl upward as the elevator goes down, while I imagine following Jonah's "attack" by dining out on the town.

  I don't have dinner plans tonight . . . but I meant to. When I spoke to Shay on the phone yesterday, we'd talked about getting together to head out to one of the food trucks. Although her six-month-old son, Nicolas, is too young for nice restaurants, he can squall, laugh, or babble to his tiny heart's content at a picnic table. I love snuggling the baby, but Arturo and Shay are harder to pin down than they used to be.

  New parents, I figure with a sigh. Shay had promised to call me back today with a specific time and truck, but I haven't heard a word. Even though I'm sure they're going to beg off again, I had better check in just in case.

  Later on, neither Jonah nor I will be in the mood for interruptions.

  So I bring them up on my phone and listen to it ring, only to go straight to voice mail. These days, they never check their messages, so I disconnect and start sending a text instead. No time tonight? I type as I walk across campus. Just let me know. Maybe we can get together this weekend.

  I set my phone to silent and drop it back in my bag. No more tasks; no more distractions. For the rest of this afternoon, I can give myself to Jonah completely.

  The University of Texas at Austin campu s is never deserted, but this is as close as it gets. At the final edge of the semester, only a few students linger. Normally they'd be shouting to their friends or lounging together in the grass, but today they trudge to and from the library, wearing their sloppiest sweats or pajama bottoms, hollow-eyed with stress.

  Nobody notices me. Nobody watches as I approach the building where Jonah works. Nobody sees a thing.

  I walk in through one of the main doors and turn down the wing where Jonah's office is located. The cool breeze of air conditioning is deeply welcome even after only a few minutes outside. A fine sheen of sweat lies upon my skin. The clock high on the wall says it's 3:58.

  Will Jonah be in the stairwell already waiting for me? How far up should I walk? Is he right about nobody being around to find us? Certainly the building seems deserted, and the heavy doors would give us some warning if anybody else took the stairs.

  Besides, this wouldn't be as hot if we didn't take a few risks.

  Inhale. Exhale. My body tingles with anticipation: fingers, nipples, even my clit. I put my hand onto the stairwell door, pause for just a few more moments--and then I go in.

  The stairwell is more of a fire exit than a main corridor of the building. No bulletin boards hold the usual flyers for foreign film screenings or study-abroad programs; no windows offer a campus view. Only a dull fluorescent light illuminates the ground floor, and a glance overhead reveals that the upper stories are dark. I hear nothing.

  My trembling hand closes around the metal railing as I begin to climb. The chunky wooden soles of my sandals make every stop echo. I force myself to look down at my feet, not up or ahead. Jonah will want to surprise me.

  Suspense can be the ultimate aphrodisiac. I don't know precisely when Jonah is going to confront me, or where, only that he is. Once he does, only my safe word, silver, can provide any escape.

  But I don't want to escape.

  The second floor. Shadowy rather than dark because of the light below, but ahead of me it's black as night. As I keep going upward, I can't help glancing behind me, wondering whether I ought to hit a light switch just in case--

  --when a strong grip closes around my upper arm.