Chapter l
FIVE YEARS LATER
Clint stood in the shadows of one of his favorite clubs, his eyes narrowed on the dance floor. He liked Diva’s for a variety of reasons. The music was a mix of tracks. A little hard rock, a little Goth, a little pure fun. The women were the same mix, but he had found they all went for one thing in particular. The darker edge of sex. The dominance games, the harder, powerful sensations to be found with a man willing to push their limits. He hadn’t expected to find Morganna here.
The music playing now, he imagined, was meant to be pure fun. It should have been causing a riot.
A mix of fury, disbelief, and wild hunger filled him as he watched the witchy little woman on the dance floor strut some daring stuff. She had his body tense, his cock engorged. A man only thought about one thing when he watched a woman dance like that, and it wasn’t how concerned he should be with her safety. A man thought about sex when he watched her, and when he watched her dancing like a wanton, the need for sex overrode all else.
The song was a fast-paced rock version of a messed-up line dance, he guessed. The dance floor was packed with women and a few men, laughingly following the singer’s direction. Hell if he had ever heard of the guy. Casper? Clint shook his head in disgust. Diva’s had an interesting mix of music some nights. The point being to get the women on the dance floor. On display.
This music wasn’t his thing, but Morganna was.
Unfortunately.
There she was, dressed in a little hip-hugger girls’-school skirt that barely covered her curvy little ass. Her ass nothing, the top of the skirt barely kept her decent. He swore if it dipped just a breath, then there would be no secrets left to bare between those pretty, shapely thighs.
The white tank top she wore might at first thought have been considered demure. On the rack it might have been decent. On Morganna, it was a crime. It barely reached her belly button, flashing an indecent amount of skin, not to mention that damned gold belly ring he didn’t know she had. When the hell had she had her belly button pierced? Raven hadn’t said anything about that, and his sister was usually a font of information where Morganna was concerned.
The top was thin; thankfully, it looked like she might be wearing a bra. He couldn’t be sure from this distance. She wore a pair of black-and-white girl’s shoes on her dainty feet but a pair of over-the-knee white stockings on her sexy legs. Those stockings were going to be the death of him. He could see her stretched out on his bed, her hands tied to the headboard with the silky hose while he stretched between her thighs and drove her crazy with his mouth. The image almost had him panting in anticipation. Oh yeah, he knew exactly how to use those stockings.
Long, long, nut-brown hair rippled down her back as she tilted her hips forward, placed one dainty foot in front of her, and shook her ass in a move that had a cold sweat popping up on his brow. His dick was ecstatic. If she could dance like that, then those sweet hips moving, rotating, thrusting, would play hell on a man’s sanity in the bed.
And to top the entire outfit off was a thin black leather collar buckled around her neck.
Sweet God have mercy, Clint prayed silently as he watched her, his eyes narrowed, his muscles tense. And the truly frightening part was that she was actually having fun. He could see it in her face, in her exotically tilted laughing gray eyes. In the way she moved.
If she put half as much effort into fucking a man as she did into driving them crazy on that dance floor, then Clint was in trouble. Deep, deep doo-doo, as his dad once used to say.
As the song came to an end, she shook her head, causing that long skein of hair to ripple and sway again as the leather-clad man beside her lifted her in his arms and swung her around with a laugh.
If his hand had slipped down so much as a thought farther than it had toward her shapely ass, then he would have gone on the endangered-species list. Because Clint knew he would have tried to kill him.
She patted the man’s shoulder, making a laughing comment as she turned away and headed back to the crowded table she had been sitting at. The chairs were taken, but rather than taking the offer one of the men made as he patted his knee, her hip bumped at one of the women, who moved over a few scant inches on her own, allowing Morganna to perch on the edge.
She crossed her legs as she leaned forward, listening to something the heavily Goth-dressed woman beside her was relating with an animated wave of her hands.
Clint wiped the sweat from his brow and took a deep, steadying breath. He felt as though he had run a marathon. His heart was pounding in his chest, blood pooling between his thighs, torturing his cock. And it was all Morganna’s fault.
He glared back at her, not even bothering to rein in the crash of male irritation the thought brought. What the hell was she doing here? The women who came to Diva’s knew the score, knew what they wanted, but even more, they knew what the men wanted. Sex. Wild, often extreme, sometimes not so sober, sex.
He shifted his shoulders, flexing the muscles in an effort to relax, at least marginally, to find the strength to pull his eyes from the sight of the leather-clad man who had embraced her moments ago, bending close to her, his hand lying intimately on her shoulder.
Clint had been standing there for over an hour, hiding in the dark corner, watching her, trying to watch those around her.
He had come there to find a woman to help relieve the dark restlessness growing in his gut since he had been home. And he had found the woman. Despite the objections his conscience threw out at him and against all common sense, he was going to take her.
From all appearances she knew the crowd she was running with well, which meant she had progressed past fairy tales and daydreams and into reality. He could fuck her and walk away, just as he had with every other woman he had taken to his bed. There would be no tears, no recriminations, no dreams of happily ever after.
Did she have a lover? He watched the men who seemed to flock around her like wolves. She wore a collar around her neck with no adornments, no leash. It meant here, within Diva’s, she was unclaimed. No other Dom held her loyalty and no Dom could be penalized with the loss of membership by disappearing with her.
Clint watched the men around her. That didn’t mean she didn’t have a lover. Not that he cared at the moment. Not that he would care later.
She didn’t seem to pay attention to one man more than the other, and as she ordered a drink from the waitress, Clint could have sworn he caught a glimpse of weariness in Morganna’s face.