desire for Bliss: a novel of Sex, Mystery and Romance (RiverHart Book 2) Read online

  His eyes glittered in the dimness, remembering. He’d told her that in answer to a question she’d asked while she straddled his lap. His big hands around her hips slid her very tight, wet cunt up and down his substantial erection, to give her the greatest pleasure. He smiled a little as she shifted in her seat. She was remembering, too.

  This wouldn’t get the story told. And he couldn’t take her again until he figured out how to proceed without the Companionship agreement he made with all the women he had sex with.

  “Hay bales made me strong. Which helped make me a jock. That and hitting six-foot two by the time I was sixteen. It was a small school; I was a star. Girls followed me and left notes and pushed themselves at me and …” He shook his head.

  “I was a smart kid. Not like my brother Scott, he really is a genius. But nobody thought of me that way, even though I’d skipped a grade and had a scholarship to Cornell in the fall. I was a jock, not a brain. ... The girls -” He stopped and rubbed his face.

  “I was young. A secret nerd. I didn’t know what they wanted. I wanted sex, I really wanted sex. But not with them, you see?” He waited for her to answer.

  “I think so,” She answered. “You were on a pedestal, kind of. A school hero. High expectations from everyone. Fame, for want of a better word, makes us sort of unreal to other people. I think you wanted a girl who’d see you as a regular guy. It probably felt like they all just wanted to be had by the hero. Like a prize they could show off. Am I close?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t understand any of that, then. I just avoided them all. I was going off to college a virgin. Bet you didn’t expect that.” She kept silent, letting him find his way through his story.

  “My first baseman’s sister came home from college a few weeks before we graduated. Beth. She was almost nineteen. I think when she saw me pitch, she figured I was older. After the game she stood next to Dave while we talked. No flirting or any of that. She just watched me and listened.”

  He cocked his head at her. “Kind of like you’re doing now. You do that a lot. Must be how you get all those secret sources to talk to you.”

  She smiled but didn’t speak. He was right, but she wanted him to go on.

  “We all hung out that summer. Usually with her family. I wanted her, but, I didn’t know what to do about it. I was captain of both teams I played on. So it seemed natural - the guys following, me leading them. But I didn’t have a clue what to do with this girl. I wanted to grab her. I wanted to feel her. I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do that. I wanted her to want me.”

  “One day we’re at her house when everybody else was out. On the couch. TV on. She sat close to me and looked up at me until I finally kissed her. It was - it was great. More than great. I was instantly steel hard. And had no idea what to do about it.” He looked out the window, seeing nothing, remembering.

  “I kissed her a few more times and she kneels on the floor between my legs and runs her hands up my thighs and my erection through my jeans. It was the most … so far past amazing or sexy or any of those words, I ever felt. She sits back, hands in her lap and says, ‘Anything you want, Ben. Do anything you want. I just want to please you.’ I thought my dick would burst into flames.”

  He smiled as if at some joke he played on himself.

  “I think now, she said that to make me comfortable. Because she knew I was a virgin and probably nervous. If she wanted to please me, I didn’t have to please her. But what I experienced, was her being submissive to me.”

  He looked straight at Avia. “I was on top of her on the floor a second later. I had one hand in her hair and the other around her wrists, holding her hands above her head. I don’t remember to this day getting from the couch to there. But I remember every detail after. My tongue in her mouth, hers pushing back against mine. Her legs around my waist.

  “Her nipples got hard, I could feel them through both our shirts. She moaned and her hips tilted up against me. Her mound pushed against my dick. … I came.”

  Avia kept her expression perfectly neutral, though her heart went out to the boy he was describing.

  Ben rubbed his face with both hands for a second, running his fingers through his hair. “I never told anyone that before. It’s still embarrassing. I let go of her hands and looked down at her and she was so turned on. She asked me to tell her what I wanted. Tell her what to do. ‘I want to see your tits. Show me.’ I told her. I ordered her, really.”

  “I was trying to buy time, but when I said that it made her … I felt her thighs grab. She made this whining sound in her throat. It was so fucking hot. I never went soft. She unbuttoned and - well - in the end things went okay.”

  The S.U.V. left the highway.

  Avia sucked greedily on the fat straw, the creamy taste of chocolate malt filling her mouth made her moan. Ben shifted in his seat.

  “If you want to hear the rest of this story, do that with a lot less sensual delight,” he told her, starting on his own food.

  She looked up at him from under her lashes, her lips still firmly closed around the straw and took another long, slow, pull, teasing him.

  “The Session’s over,” she said after another moaning swallow. “And you won’t have sex with me any other way, right now, so ... I’m thinking you’re out of luck here.”

  “I could jack off in front of you,” he said. “Tell you in detail what I’m going to do the next time I touch you. You want that or the story?”

  That, please. But she put the malt aside and picked up her chili dog. “So Beth went off to a summer job and that was it?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “But now I knew what I wanted. I asked around about Dominant/submissive stuff, bondage, all that. But there wasn’t much to find in Fargo. Then a guy I hardly knew, worked at the 7-11 after graduation, invited me on a road trip.”

  “Minneapolis?” She asked.

  Ben smiled. “Winnipeg. It’s closer. Minneapolis is a tougher town than you’d think, we didn’t need to be screwing around there.

  “The Winnipeg club was very underground, careful to keep things under control. It was like a place to fulfill every fantasy I’d ever had. I looked older; I was big guy. All those hay bales,” he smiled, but looked sad, somehow. “Uncollared subs were practically lined up at my feet for anything I wanted. Doms offered me their subs, for sex or punishment, if they could watch. If everyone could watch. Besides booze, there was grass. Coke. X. It was a Fellini movie.”

  “I have a question.” Avia said. “How did you afford it?”

  “The 7-11 guy paid. Chris. He didn’t have a car. He was running weed to the club from Fargo. I just drove and drank and screwed. And we only went a few times, then I was off to Ithaca. And I thought … I thought it would all be over. Like it was an end of summer thing. Some craziness before college. I thought, ‘now I’ll meet regular girls, have some normal relationships.’”

  He stopped to put his used wrappers and cup on the tray attached to the window. “No time. I was on a baseball scholarship and a partial academic. All I did was practice and study. I was smart enough in a small highschool, but now I was just a clever young kid in a mass of clever older kids. I did love it, but I was really horny. I was a teen-ager, you know?”

  She nodded, putting her own trash on the tray. Ben flicked on the intercom. “Whenever you’re ready, Eustace. Let’s take Ms. Rivers home.”

  The driver’s door opened immediately and a blond giant of a man about thirty appeared at Avia’s window. Taking the tray along with his own, he dropped them at the servers’ window of the drive-in restaurant. Ben laughed at her surprised expression.

  “You’ve never seen Eustace before, have you?” He asked.

  “No, I just thought, you know, driver, Eustace, he’d be an older man. It’s an old-fashioned name. He looks like a professional wrestler or something.”

  “He’s also my bodyguard. Eustace followed me home from Afghanistan,” Ben said. “Well, technically he followed his Master Sergeant, who followed m
e.”

  “His Master Sergeant?”

  “Hugo,” he said, referring to his chief of staff, Hugo Ramos. When Avia met the forty-something Hispanic man with the salt and pepper hair and warm smile, he told Avia Ben gave him the title because “‘guy who manages all kinds of stuff in my life and business’ is really hard to fit on a business card.”

  Ben laughed again, dimple in evidence, at the avid curiosity that suffused her features. “Which story do you want to hear?” He asked as Eustace got back behind the wheel and the S.U.V. started to move.

  “Dominant, please.” She responded promptly. “You found a club, I assume?”

  “Several, it was New York. I got a fake ID. Nobody checked too closely. I paid for myself, now, so I didn’t drink much. No drugs, at all. The subs were still on their knees for me, so it took me a while to notice.”

  “Notice?”

  “The Doms.” He hesitated, considering how to go on. “You know how in highschool there were always those guys that hung out together and hated all the jocks? And all the smart kids. And pretty girls and anybody who looked happy at all? But they never tried to do anything, themselves. They just hated everybody else.”

  She nodded. “Kids at the bottom of the social ladder with no self-esteem. But instead of being anybody you’d sympathize with, they were just nasty and resentful.”

  “Yeah. A friend of mine would call them Omega males.” He said.

  “Your friend is a social scientist?” Avia asked.

  “Physical anthropologist. Mostly an evolutionary genetics specialist, but Giddy’s pretty erudite.” He said.

  “So, you’re saying these Doms were Omega males? All of them?” She looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t that make all the females Omega as well?”

  “I don’t know.” He ran his fingers through his hair again, and looked out the window. “I don’t pretend to understand why some of those women were there. But the Doms all seemed like loser guys arranging to have a winner experience. Parading women around and ordering them to do shit, just to prove they could. Women they could have any time without any real effort. Without having to be - anything.”

  “Don’t you think they had to be what those women wanted?” She asked. “Are you implying the women were all mentally deficient or emotionally ill?”

  His gaze returned to her. “It wasn’t a very politically correct thing to say, was it?”

  She laughed. “You think there’s a lot of politics to kinky sex?”

  “You think there isn’t? To all sex?” He asked. “You haven’t had to struggle with your own feminist philosophy while you’ve been involved with me? You didn’t skew your erotica story in The Week to account for your readers’ attitudes?”

  She considered this. “I concede. You’re right. I would tell hardly anyone I not only let a man control me, but I like it. I can hardly admit it to myself.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Giddy,” he said.

  “I’m talking to a shrink tomorrow. Him first, then anthropologist, if need be. So what did you end up doing?” She asked.

  He shrugged. “One night I sat at a table and just drank coffee and watched. It was … libido-killing. Over the next few weeks, I made a round of all the clubs and did the same thing. And saw the same things. Aand felt the same way.

  “I was still really young. I don’t know if my picture of it was accurate. Or if my reaction to it, would be the same, now. Or not.

  “But back then, I kept thinking about my parents and my friends’ parents. I wanted to be them, not one of those guys in the clubs. Then I asked myself if I could be happy with a lifetime of vanilla sex? The answer was no. But I sure as hell couldn’t keep going to those clubs, either.”

  He rubbed his hands over his face. “I felt like an outcast for the first time in my life. I’d look around campus and it seemed like everyone was with someone and it was so easy for them. I began hating everyone who was happy. I became the loser, I guess.”

  He sat staring out at the night for a long time. Avia waited for him to speak.

  “I got depressed. First, and I hope last, time for that shit. Christmas break came around and I went home for a few weeks. But I felt like a fraud. An alien. My family noticed something was wrong. Gave me some space.

  “Then one snowy day I came out of Stockman’s Feed just as Beth pulled in. We got coffee. We were both a lot older, even only a year and a half later. Guess what she had?” He asked.

  “A Dom?” Avia answered. He looked startled.

  She smiled gently at him. “I don’t think she was being nice to you, I think she took one look at you Alpha-maling all over everybody from the pitcher’s mound and wanted you. I’m wondering if she was Alpha, too.” He nodded, impressed. “I'm not psychic, at least, not with anyone but my sister,: she laughed. "I’m a woman, you know. We get each other.”

  “But you don’t want a Dom,” he said. “I wish you’d believe me.”

  “I want you,” she returned. “Whatever you are.”

  That stopped him. The S.U.V. turned into a drive and parked near the back entrance to her condo building.

  Ben wrapped up his story. “Talking to Beth helped me feel like less of a freak. Her Dom came for Christmas; I met him. He was her Chemistry T.A. Just a guy like …”

  “Like you?”

  He nodded. “I dated a few women in college my senior year. A lot of girls like a forceful guy. But … I never really felt like I could really be myself.

  “After I graduated, I went in search of an answer. Couple years later, I ended up in Nepal. Found a teacher. Everything about that was so non-judgmental. It was true freedom. After that, I knew what I wanted - needed - was a woman who’d follow me to Ecstatic Orgasm. Be that open, that vulnerable. With me.”

  “So you developed the Companion system as a substitute for relationships?” She asked.

  Pain flashed across his face. “You think this isn’t a relationship?”

  “I think it is. That’s why I stopped the arranged part, until we can figure this out.” She moved over beside him. “You were, what? In your early twenties when you decided this? Twenty-six when you had your system in place? How’s it been working for you?”

  Not well, from the frown that appeared. He looked away from her. She wanted to reach for his hand, but realized she didn’t have permission to touch him when she wanted to. “I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, I just -”

  She cast about, hoping an answer would come. “Okay. You ever hear that country song by Tom T. Hall about getting to Memphis?” He shook his head. “He says ‘If you love somebody enough, you’ll follow wherever they go.’ Ben, I think you’ve been doing it backwards.”

  She placed one hand tentatively on the side of his face. He leaned into her palm subtly, as if he were trying not to.

  Watcher 2

  When the silver Mercedes GLS had turned onto the block, Watcher had pen, paper and cameras ready. All vehicles connected to any target were photographed, with special attention given to license plates or unique identifying characteristics, like damage or bumper stickers.

  The S.U.V. passed by and entered the complex. A moment later, it stopped at the back door, the view through the hallway was almost telescopic. It sat for a while. Seven minutes later, the door opened and the target slipped out the back passenger door. Whoever dropped her off could not only afford the vehicle, but also pay a driver.

  But no view of person or persons inside the S.U.V. presented itself. The vehicle slid by almost silently on the way out and the reporter’s last light blinked off half an hour later.

  Running the license number through NCIC brought up the registration of the S.U.V.’s plate: BVH Custom Luxury, Ltd. With a Colorado address. Querying the Secretary of State’s website in the morning would provide ownership information for the company. Watcher set a cell phone alarm for six-thirty, and settled back to catch a nap.

  The Curtain Wall

  A full moon bathed the landscape in surprisingly bright silvery light throug
h the clear, mile high air of the Colorado foothills. Ben usually ran in the afternoons. But now, he pounded along between the four-foot high parapets of the Curtain Wall at 3am.

  Now you’re using castle words in your mind, he thought ruefully, as he rounded the curve that would take him north along the far edges of the acreage around his the house, a three-story stolid mass of granite with two sub-levels. It was a fortress surrounded by an eleven-foot high double-walled stone edifice. Two outer stone walls, three feet apart, filled with well-tamped earth, topped by a thick layer of fine black cinders made the perfect jogging path.

  Only the intersections of suspended bridges to the Keep, the top floor and his very private personal quarters, interrupted the interior parapet walls. Another castle word, Ben thought.

  The wall meandered, providing a two point three mile track jogging track and a bulwark of inner defense. Defense against what, Ben didn’t know. It had been this way when he bought the place from the defense contractor who’d built it. But he couldn’t deny he valued the feeling of isolation from an increasingly intrusive and demanding world.

  So much of his life involved dealing with people individually and in groups; the social and the business melded into one steady demand for charm and acumen in perfect balance. He swam with business sharks and threaded his way through competing agendas of partners, politicians, vendors and business rivals. In this way, he achieved the goals that kept his revenue stream running at a healthy rate and supported thousands of workers on three continents in seven countries.

  But here, inside the wall, he retreated into calm and isolation. Into control of his "domain," as Hugo liked to call it. He surrounded himself by a few he trusted, by staff and family who visited often. He jogged in the afternoons and swam in the second floor pool in the mornings, contemplating design problems and business decisions. But not now.

  Now, he wasn’t thinking about hotel magnates in Macau or expanding into sex videos or military contracts for some of his brother Scott’s most amazing discoveries in metallurgy and polymers.