CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

Kiera

I was crying in my apartment with a bottle of wine. I hadn’t even bothered to pour it into a glass. I was just slugging it right out of the bottle.

I knew that Demetrius did not deserve my tears. He was the idiot, not me.

But he’d been so horrible to me earlier. I didn’t get it.

And the really screwed up thing about it was that there was this moment—maybe a couple of them, actually—in which I felt really fucking turned on by the whole thing.

That was insane. He was a jerk, and I didn’t want to be treated that way. I didn’t find it sexy when a guy was rude to me.

Honestly, I kept sex very compartmentalized. If I found myself thinking about it too much, I would make sure that I spent some time reading some trashy books or even watching porn. Supposedly, women were not supposed to be as into porn as men, because women weren’t supposed to be turned on by visual stimulation or something, but I found that to be bullshit.

I liked watching porn sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes.

It did the trick.

Sometimes I didn’t need to read or watch anything. I’d just have my own fantasies.

And I knew that having a sex life that involved no one except me and my vibrator meant that I was vaguely pathetic, but I just didn’t want to waste any time on trying to meet a real guy.

Not only that, it wasn’t as if I was the most appealing woman in the universe. I was a big geek, and I wasn’t exactly… girly. I mean, I tried, but a lot of stuff that women were really into, like manicures and wearing lots of makeup, I just didn’t understand. I guess you’d call me low maintenance.

So, I didn’t expect that I was going to find the perfect guy just waiting around for me somewhere.

Anyway, when I did find him, I wouldn’t want him to be a jerk.

But I guessed there was something that was kind of appealing about his being… commanding.

Like, the thing with Demetrius was that he was so big and burly and male. And he had that voice that could get all low and deep. And when he’d been angry with me earlier, it had done that. He’d been angry with me, growling at me, but it had still made me feel shivery.

So.

Maybe I was lying to myself. Maybe I was attracted to Demetrius after all.

On a purely physical level. It was all about biology. Had to be. He was built like a caveman, so the cavewoman within me wanted him. Some primitive part of my brain lit up when he grabbed me by the shoulders. I had ancestral memory of being dragged around by my hair back to his lair. A tall, hulking shadow of a man would slowly strip away the furs that I wore from my body before he had his way with me and forced me to be his…

God, even thinking about it was kind of turning me on.

But it was horrible.

I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want Danger. Not in any real sense.

And that wasn’t why I was crying. I was crying because I thought that I had done well. I had done something innovative, gone above and beyond, and I had gotten valuable information for the job. But he’d called me an idiot.

Not once, but three times.

That hurt my feelings.

And even though I knew he was just a big jerkface, I wanted him to think well of me. I wanted to be the best damned hacker he’d ever worked with. I wanted to do this job perfectly.

I had to.

Because I had screwed up in the past. And not just a little screwup, either. An epic one. One that had destroyed everything. And if I didn’t manage to prove myself, then…

Well, I just had to prove myself. I had to be better than the best. I had to be perfect.

That was the reason that I put my job above everything. Because it was the only thing I cared about. Once I had reached that level—and I wasn’t sure exactly what that level was, but I knew I would feel it when I got there—then there might be time for other things. Not before.

I didn’t deserve anything else until I got to that level.

Right now, the shadow of that epic screwup fell over everything that I did, and it hurt so bad sometimes, it felt like I couldn’t breathe. As if my rib cage was slowly tightening, squeezing my internal organs, crushing me to death. I fought against that pain with every successful hack that I did.

This job that I was doing for Danger?

This job was a real job, with lots of different things that I would have to do. I had to nail this.

But I was off to a bad start, because Demetrius thought I was an idiot, and he was probably right.

I was probably going to fail spectacularly at this. And the worst thing about that was that another person’s life was on the line this time—an innocent girl from the Ukraine, who had never asked to be part of this. If I failed at this job, I failed Natasha.

I slugged down some more wine.

This thought process was only making me cry harder, because I wasn’t sure that I was up to it.

Deep down, I was pretty sure that I was a big, fat failure, and that hurt worse than anything.

* * *

 

Demetrius

I managed to keep busy for the rest of the day, but when I got back home, I didn’t have anything to keep my mind off of what had happened. I took a shower, intending to let hot jets of water pound over me and scald away any of my stupid thoughts, but I ended up jerking off in the shower.

I had this dumb fantasy about her, and I always caved to it, even though I had told myself over and over to stop thinking about her when I masturbated. It made it awkward whenever I saw her.

In my fantasy, I was alone with her, and she was lying down on a bed. I stripped her clothes from her, and she trembled.

She looked up at me while I undressed myself, but she didn’t help. Her eyes were big and wide.

When she saw my cock, she let out a little tiny breath, a sound of awe and dismay. “It’s so big,” she whispered. “It’s too big.”

Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the most creative fantasy in the grand scheme of things. It was pretty run of the mill, I guessed.

It got me off, though, and I returned to it over and over again.

It wasn’t just the idea that she was so impressed by the size of my cock. It wasn’t a fantasy that I was well-endowed, either. I had it on good authority that my cock was larger than average. And it was always nice to be big. People say stuff about size not mattering, but they have small dicks. If size really didn’t matter, no one would say that it didn’t, because it would be a non-issue.

Anyway, I did like fantasizing about her being impressed, but there was more to the fantasy.

In the fantasy, she was so innocent that she had no idea what was going on, and I had to… to teach her.

That really turned me on.

And the idea of her being a little bit afraid of me, but allowing me to soothe her, to show her that I would be gentle with her, well that was all part of it too.

But it was all just a stupid fantasy, because I would never touch her.

I couldn’t do something like that to her, couldn’t teach her about sex or about pleasing me or about any of those things, because then I would be taking responsibility for her, and I couldn’t do that.

Being near me would only hurt her.

I might hurt her.

Maybe that was the darkest part of the fantasy, the part that I didn’t even like to admit to myself. But I was aroused by the idea of being too big for her, of taking her tiny, tight pussy even as she flinched under me and struggled to accommodate me.

That really got me going.

I was some kind of sick bastard, that was what I was.

I would never hurt her.

I just…

Fuck it.