The Auction (The Original Sinners Pulp Library) Page 8

  “I’ll only say one more thing—whatever price anyone pays for it, for you, it wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Ah, true,” she said with a smile. “But it would be better than nothing.”

  He’d tried. There was nothing else to do.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said.

  “You will?”

  “At Vitale’s?”

  She smiled nervously. “Right. Yes. See you then.”

  For the third time, he turned to leave. The door was right there, just a few steps away. He’d almost made it when Anya spoke again, stopping him dead in his tracks.

  “Maybe you can help me?”

  He looked at her, her back still to the white fireplace mantel. Her face was pink again.

  “You said it’s different, really doing kink with someone? Maybe, you know…we could practice?”

  Daniel blinked once.

  “Yes,” he said. “I could help you with that.”

  He locked the door.

  Anya’s eyes widened. Her amber eyes. Daniel knew all about amber, fossilized tree resin. A famous geologist had left his life’s work to the New York Public Library and it had been Daniel’s job to catalog every page, every piece, including a large chunk of bright clear amber that held inside it a million-year-old butterfly. He’d wanted to free it. Like now. Like he wanted to free Anya, to melt the amber she was trapped inside and watch the beautiful little prisoner spread her wings and fly.

  First he would need heat.

  Daniel walked over to Anya who backed up so far against the fireplace she almost stepped into the grate. Only an inch separated their bodies.

  “Now?” Anya asked, breathless.

  “Now. See? You agree to submit to me, and you give up your power. I say when, not you. You like it? You can tell me no.”

  “So far it’s not so bad.” Her voice shook.

  Not so bad? It was a start.

  Daniel felt the enormous weight of responsibility settle onto his shoulders. But—according to Anya—he had broad shoulders. He hoped they were broad enough to carry her over this threshold and not let her fall.

  “You have a safe word?”

  “It’s um…Leonard.”

  He almost laughed. “Leonard?”

  “It’s my cat’s name. I found him in an alley on an old blue coat someone had thrown away.”

  “Ah. Leonard Cohen.” He knew the song well, “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Leonard Cohen was one of Canada’s most famous exports. Leonard Cohen. Maple syrup. Hockey.

  “My mother sang his songs all the time. To us. To herself. To nobody. Now I sing his songs to Leonard. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

  She was nervous, talking to cover it. He wanted her to keep talking, to tell him all her secrets. He wanted to know everything there was to know about this lovely lonely girl who sang “Famous Blue Raincoat” to the alley cat she’d rescued.

  “You’re allowed to talk,” he said. “Until I say you can’t. How does that make you feel?”

  He moved closer so that their bodies touched. Her cheek brushed his shoulder. His hips brushed her stomach.

  “Scared?”

  “Good. Fear can your save your life.”

  “I feel safe, too. I don’t know how that can work. Doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.” She met his eyes, briefly, then looked down to the floor.

  “Because you are safe.” He put his mouth to her ear and whispered, “For now.”

  A shiver passed through her. Daniel saw it, felt it, relished it. He raised his hand to her face and brushed her cheek. It was burning hot.

  “What do you fantasize about when you make yourself come?”

  Anya laughed—loud and sudden. A shocked laugh that she tried to cover with a nervous giggle.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” No mercy. No quarter. If she wanted to go through with this stupid auction, he would make certain she knew what she was getting herself into.

  “I can’t—”

  “Yes, you can. This is submission, Anya. I’m in charge. You put me in charge. I ask the questions. You answer them. I give the orders. You take them. I spank and you are spanked. I flog and you are flogged. I whip and you are whipped. I bite and you are bitten. I kiss and you open your mouth and let me kiss you until you’ve forgotten how to do anything but everything I want you to do.”

  He put his lips to her cheek at her ear, then kissed, but only there, on her cheek.

  “Are you going to kiss me?” she asked. “Really kiss me?”

  “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “I want you to.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She exhaled loudly.

  He could barely stop himself from laughing. “Why should I kiss you? You haven’t earned it yet.”

  She leaned a little closer to him. Any closer and she’d be standing on his toes. “How do I earn it?”

  “Call me ‘sir’ for starters.” He placed his hands on her hips, around her narrow waist. The muscles of her stomach tightened when he touched her. He could feel her every breath.

  “Sir,” she said. “There?”

  “Better. Not good enough, but an improvement.”

  She made that sound of purest frustration again. Delicious.

  “Are we having fun yet?” he taunted.

  “You make me so mad.”

  “Then I’m doing it right. And you forgot to call me ‘sir.’ And you still haven’t answered my question. You have five seconds to do both, or I’ll do something cruel and terrible to you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll leave without kissing you. Four…three…two—”

  “You, sir.”

  He pulled back and looked down at her face. She met his eyes very briefly before lowering them.

  “You think about me when you come?” He couldn’t have come up with a better answer himself.

  “Last night. Sir.”

  “What was I doing to you?”

  Her pink cheeks turned crimson. “You were, ah…flogging me and I was tied up and then we, you know.”

  “Made love?”

  She was shivering in his arms. He held her closer, tighter. He was hard and hungry for her but knew he had to hold back.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “Sir.”

  “Good. Now you’ve earned your kiss.”

  She raised her face to his and he pressed his mouth to hers. The kiss was soft at first, as he explored her top lip, then the bottom. He could feel her heart beating against his chest. Poor little girl. She had no idea how much he could make her feel if she would only let him.

  He forced her mouth wider and slipped his tongue inside her. She moaned and he made it worse by sliding his hand down her back and then up again, under the skirt of her sundress. He cupped her bottom, slipping his fingers under her panties to stroke one soft, warm cheek. He wanted to hold her pussy in his hands, cradle it, stroke it until she was begging for him to be inside her. Whether she realized it or not, she was pushing her hips into his. If that’s what she wanted, he would give it to her.

  Daniel wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the floor, settling her against his hips and pinning her back to the mantel. She gasped against his mouth but didn’t break the kiss. He pushed his hips into hers and she pushed back. If they’d been naked, they’d be fucking. Instead they worked against each other through their clothes. His cock was hard and her panties were flimsy. He knew she could feel his erection. He could feel the heat of her pussy against him. He worked his hips harder into her soft mound as he deepened the kiss. Deeper. Harder. Faster. He wanted to overwhelm her with sensation, need.

  He carried her to the sofa, pushed her onto her back and laid on top of her, only breaking the kiss long enough to make her want it again. He found her mouth, her tongue…he rubbed his erection against her softness. She opened her legs wider. Her fingers gripped the back of his shirt and dug in. So close…almost there. Her breathing was hard and heavy.

  So
meone knocked on the door.

  Anya gasped and looked at the door. Daniel sat up. Before he could say a word, she scrambled out from under him and ran to the door.

  She opened it and there stood Kingsley in the doorway, looking rakishly disheveled, like a pirate who’d spent the night with a duke and stolen his clothes the next morning. Shirt unbuttoned to the collarbone, hair down, bare feet.

  “Hello,” he said. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Anya said quickly. Too quickly.

  “Are we sure?” Kingsley looked straight at Daniel.

  “Some asshole named Harpring came by,” Daniel explained. “He was harassing Anya. I locked him out.” He was doing his best to sit casually on the couch and not look like a man who’d been seconds away from coming one minute ago. He doubted Kingsley was fooled.

  “Harassing you?” Kingsley scowled. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No, he was only being disgusting. Daniel sent him away.”

  “Good,” Kingsley said. “Never liked him anyway.”

  “I don’t want him at the auction, if you don’t mind, monsieur,” she said.

  “C’est la vie,” Kingsley said. “Whatever you say. There will be plenty of others.” He gave Daniel a look that was almost a wink.

  “He might come back.”

  “Anya, you can go up to my office and work on the files instead. If anyone comes to the door, we’ll just ignore them today.”

  Anya nodded and started to leave. When she stepped into the hallway, she glanced back—not at Kingsley, but at him. Daniel smiled. She smiled in return then went quickly up the stairs. Daniel watched her until she disappeared through the door on the second floor. It was physically painful to pretend indifference, to stay there and not follow her, to kiss her again. But he didn’t want her getting in trouble with Kingsley.

  “Well,” Kingsley said. “That didn’t take long.”

  Daniel glared at him. “We were talking.”

  “Her lips were swollen. Were you talking for ten hours?”

  “I was trying to talk her out of being in your stupid auction.”

  “Talk her out of it or fuck her out of it?”

  Daniel smiled. “Five more minutes and I would have done it.”

  “Five more seconds, I think.”

  “Guess I’ll never know, thanks to you. Great timing.”

  “Have you ever thought that perhaps…you should let her do what she wants? Women like that, I hear.”

  “First of all, I don’t think she wants to do it. I think she thinks she needs to do it. And second, I’m not going to take relationship advice from a man who calls his girlfriends his ‘collection.’ Makes you sound like a fucking serial killer with a cellar full of bodies.”

  “It’s a joke. And they’re not girlfriends. They’re simply friends I have enormous amounts of sex with.” He shrugged. “Enough about me. Our mutual friend told me Elle paid you a visit.”

  “She did.” Daniel stood up. His erection was long gone by now, thanks to Kingsley. If it wasn’t, mention of Elle would have dealt the death blow.

  “And?”

  “She dumped me. Again.”

  “Not surprised but, for what it’s worth, you have my sympathy. She is very special. You know, the way volcanoes are very special.”

  “Volcanoes?”

  “They’re beautiful, you don’t run across them often, and you’re always happy to get away from one with your life.”

  Daniel laughed. He hadn’t thought he could laugh over losing Elle but he already was, one day later.

  “Well, I’m alive,” Daniel said. “It’s over. You can tell our ‘mutual friend’ I won’t try stealing his girlfriend ever again.”

  “He’ll be glad to hear that. I’m certain he was shaking in his shoes.”

  “It’s not my fault she has bad taste in men.”

  Kingsley laughed softly. “I’ll tell him you said that, too. He’ll be very hurt. He might even cry.”

  Daniel met him at the door. “Has anyone ever told you that sarcasm isn’t sexy?”

  “When you’re sexy, everything you say is sexy.”

  “Say ‘Massachusetts,’” Daniel said. “I dare you.”

  Maggie had told Daniel long ago that Kingsley’s English was perfect, except for his one Achilles heel—Massachusetts.

  “Can’t do it, can you?”

  “I live in New York for a reason.” Then he cleared his throat. “Mass-a-shoo—”

  “I knew it.”

  “Now I know why Anya hates you so much.”

  “One of many reasons. You’ll keep on eye her, right?”

  “You care about her, don’t you?”

  “I couldn’t save Maggie. Eleanor didn’t want saved. Do I get to help one beautiful girl in my life? Just one? Too much to ask?”

  Kingsley glanced up and Daniel followed his gaze. Anya was peeking over the staircase bannister down at them, eavesdropping. He didn’t mind. He’d been eavesdropping on her earlier. When they caught her looking, she straightened up.

  “I have a question about the files,” she said to Kingsley.

  A smile spread across Kingsley’s face. “I’ll be right up.” She disappeared. Kingsley met Daniel’s eyes. “Do you trust me?”

  “Not as far as I could throw ten of you to Massachusetts.”

  “Ah, fair. But I’m going to help you anyway.”

  Kingsley patted his shoulder and sauntered toward the stairs. As he walked away, Daniel issued a plea.

  “Please don’t.”

  8

  Two days passed. Long days. Daniel had meetings to keep him occupied—lawyer, accountant, financial advisor. Being rich was a full-time job, Maggie had warned him. True. Not that he was nostalgic at all for his salad days. Between being rich and being broke, well, it wasn’t a competition at all. Look at Anya, working two jobs and selling herself to a stranger in one week’s time to get her brothers and sisters out from under the thumb of an angry alcoholic father. Anyone who romanticized poverty had never been poor. But…he did sometimes miss having a real job. When he jogged past the Stephen A. Schwarzman building where he used to work, he was hit by a wave of nostalgia. The library was just opening for the day. Not too many tourists there yet in the Rose Reading Room to be offended by his sweaty t-shirt and track pants.

  Daniel jogged up the stairs and once inside the scent of wood polish and old books hit him like a truck. He almost had to sit down, the memories washed over him so hard, so fast. The day he got the job at the most famous branch of any library in all of the United States of America…calling his parents from a payphone to let them know he was going to be okay, that they didn’t have to worry about him anymore…first day at work, taking the tour with Suzette Mayer who’d worked there for fifty years, knew every nook, every book, everything there was to know about the place and tried to teach it all to him in one day...

  Boxes of dust. That’s what she gave him for his first task. So it seemed at least when he pulled off the parcel tape and a cloud of dust wafted into his face. He sneezed for five straight minutes before he went back to the box and found the papers of a famous dead poet inside, papers that had been moldering in a New England attic for eighty years. Suzette said they’d been saving that box for the “new kid.” Lucky him.

  He was lucky. He loved the work, the quiet hours, the digging deep into the past like an archeologist-slash-treasure hunter. He did find treasure. Loads of it. The missing last will and testament of a long-dead industrialist, one that changed the life of a distant descendant. A first draft of an Emily Dickinson poem jotted on the back of an envelope. A previously unknown love letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Arthur Stieglitz.

  Daniel had brought Maggie here on one of their early dates, at night, using his key to let them into a staff door around the back. The place was empty but for the security guard and the cleaning crew. He’d taken her up to the third floor, to one of the Rare Books Rooms. He’d only brought her there to show off. The library was legenda
ry. A work of art in itself. The Rare Books Room contained a million dollars’ worth of books and he had the key to the cases. She’d been dazzled. Though a life-long New Yorker, she’d never seen the hidden rooms of the library. Sure, she worked in a Manhattan skyscraper with people who made more money in a day than he made in a year but had she ever been to the secret storage room where all the Victorian-era pornography was hidden away, brought out only for authors and grad students doing “research?”

  He remembered it like yesterday. It had been the first time they’d had sex. Here, in the library. First kiss in the Rose Reading Room. Second kiss as they turned the pages of a photo album full of sepia-colored photographs from a birching club that had been in business around the turn-of-the-century. Men being spanked. Women been whipped. By the time they made it up to the Rare Books Room, Daniel was dying to have her. He’d kissed her there too, after shutting and locking the door.

  The entire time he’d been fucking her he couldn’t believe this incredibly beautiful obviously over-educated older woman had her legs wrapped around his twenty-five-year-old back and was tight enough around him to clench his cock like a hand. He had put his hand over Maggie’s lips to silence her moans. He had pushed a finger into her mouth and told her to bite him if she needed him to stop—otherwise he wouldn’t. She didn’t, and neither did he, and he came inside her so hard he’d almost blacked out.

  After the sex, she’d done something even more wicked than fuck a librarian in his own library. She’d taken a pencil and one of the rare books—a first edition, first printing of Moby Dick, worth about fifty-thousand dollars—and written inside the back cover, Daniel Caldwell is a great lay. When he’d told her she was on the hook for fifty grand, she said she could afford it. When he told her she could get him fired for that, she promised she’d take the blame.

  Daniel wondered…was it still there? He hadn’t erased it, worried he’d do the old book more harm than good. He took the stairs up the to the third floor and into the Rare Books Room. There was the big oak table where he’d had Maggie all those years ago. There was the barrister bookcase. There was the book. She’d only picked it because it had “Dick” in the title. The bookcase was locked and he’d long ago turned in his keys. He knew he should let it go, just enjoy the memory but for some reason, he wanted to see Maggie’s handwriting again.