Page 7 of Desire

Dante almost choked on his tongue. “The boots,” he said when he was in control of himself.

“Perfect,” Anya said. “Help her down from there. I’ve got to see if we’ve got her size in the closet.”

He walked over to Emma, but instead of taking her outstretched hand, he had caught her around the waist. Pulling her into him, he had lifted her off the stool and put her on the ground. It had been too much of a temptation not to drag her down the length of him on the way down. She had felt like heaven.

He might have even tried to kiss her if Anya hadn’t come back into the room. Emma had jumped away from him as if Anya had caught them fucking instead of just standing close to each other.

Dante had left before Emma tried on the boots. He knew there would be other meetings full of similarly torturous temptation, where her beauty and vibrancy would test his fortitude. But he would endure it, over and over, without ever crossing the line. Joey’s friendship, Dante’s chosen family, meant far too much to risk it all on mere lust.

No matter how deliriously tantalizing the temptation might be.

But he hadn’t been able to get the memory of her out of his mind. So now, he was going to the Couture party to keep an eye on Emma and make sure no one treated her with disrespect.

It wouldn’t be the first time that he had to draw a line in the sand where Emma was concerned. She had always been a shy little thing. Bookish and sweet, with a smile that would light up a room. But she also had a vulnerability about her that attracted bullies.

Before his asshole parents had shipped him off to boarding school, Dante and Joey had been able to track down anyone stupid enough to make Emma cry. He wasn’t above beating the shit out of some snot-nosed punk, but Joey didn’t want things to get physical. Toward the end, Dante had stopped telling Joey about the football players. It made plausible deniability so much easier when the jocks had bruises the next day.

“Rough practice.” Dante would shrug, and that would be the end of it.

Until it happened again. There was something about Emma’s vulnerability that made her irresistible to assholes who looked for easy prey. And assholes didn’t have a gender, it seemed. Punishing the boys had been easy. Disciplining the girls who were bitches to Emma had been a little bit more difficult. Dante had to get creative. As a rule, he didn’t hit women unless they asked him to do it or if they hit him first. Then all bets were off. He hadn’t minded if they snubbed Emma. She was better off without them anyway. But when they tried to booby trap her locker or catfish her, then Dante stepped in.

He rigged a glitter bomb on one girl’s locker and hid rotting meat in another. The pranks stopped after that. He hadn’t found out about the catfishing until it was too late to stop Emma from heartbreak. But it wasn’t hard to find the guilty parties and make them pay. One girl’s tires were slashed, another had sugar put in her gas tank. Jill, the third bitch—the one who had made the fake account and strung Emma along—well, Dante paid her boyfriend three hundred bucks to dump her hours before he was supposed to pick her up for prom. The best part of that was the boyfriend tried to get back together with the chick the next day, telling her he only did it for the money.

Yeah, that had been a mistake. Jill went nuclear on him and then stormed over to Dante’s house to read him the riot act. Dante wound up hate-fucking her in his father’s office while she clawed the hell out of his back. Then he had ghosted her. Not his proudest moment, but he was confident she now knew how Emma had felt and that was all that mattered to him.

Unfortunately, Dante got used to the taste of chaos and violence, and it hadn’t looked good for his college prospects. So his parents shipped him off to boarding school. He and Joey tried to stay in touch, but high school had been challenging and all too soon Joey was headed off to the army and Dante off to college.

He never forgot, though, that when things got really bad at Dante’s house, Joey always had a warm place for him to sleep and a hot meal. Sometimes Emma and Joey’s parents knew about it. A lot of the time, they didn’t.

So now that Emma was back in his orbit, Dante was going to make damned sure that no one laid a finger on her or made her feel like she was less than wonderful. Kiki Pretty was on his shit list for that stunt she tried to pull in Colleen’s office. Istvahn had told him about it. She was one of Dante’s submissives. She liked to be punished for being a spoiled brat. She picked the wrong person to act out on, though.

Dante was going to mention to Colleen that Kiki didn’t have the maturity to coexist with Club Inferno and Couture. Kiki would have to find another Dom because Dante would have nothing more to do with her, and hopefully she’d find another dungeon to play in. Emma wouldn’t ever have to worry about Kiki again.

Now all he had to do was try to keep Emma out of Club Inferno. When she was here, in his realm, it was hard to keep seeing her as Joey’s little sister. His fingers itched to reach out and brush back a stray lock of silken hair that had fallen across her face. To cup her cheek and pull her into a hungry, devouring kiss. She was sweet and curvy and he’d love to teach her all the ways of surrender. If she was anyone but Emma, she’d already be tied up in his dungeon.

“Master?” Jana approached him timidly and knelt before him, bowing low enough to touch her forehead to the floor.

Dante frowned. She and Leo were supposed to be set dressings in a scene with Creed and Bella. Creed was training to be a Dom, but Dante and Colleen didn’t think he had what it took. Still, he was willing to apprentice to Simon, and if anyone could teach discipline to a Dom, it would be Simon.

Dante gripped Jana by the hair and pulled her to her feet. Jana’s bare nipples tightened and she smiled at him.

“Why are you here?” he asked sternly. “Disobeying orders.”

She bowed her head. “I deserve to be punished for that, but you need to come and see this scene. Simon had to leave on an emergency, and Creed decided to go on without him.”

That was absolutely against the fucking rules. “You were right to come and get me,” he said to Jana. He caught the flicker of disappointment over her expression. “But that doesn’t get you out of your punishment.”

If the situation wasn’t so serious, Dante might have chuckled at her arousal and relief. “Go.” He shoved her forward. “I’ll be watching over the scene.”

“Thank you, Master.” Jana hurried back to the dungeon.

Creed did a double take when Dante opened the dungeon door using his master key. But the nasty snarl on his face died when Dante merely glared at him.

“You may begin,” Dante ordered.

A muscle ticked in Creed’s jaw, but he turned back to Bella.

Bella was bound in an intricate rope suspension. It wasn’t bad. Nowhere near the skill of Max, one of Club Inferno’s shibari specialists, though. But Creed was still learning the ropes, so to speak.

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