Page 31 of Wicked Player

“I’d rather take care of myself.” I sounded bitchy. I hated sounding bitchy. I wasn’t a bitchy person, but this wasn’t what I needed. “Please. Just go.”

He peered at me, worry and anger mixed in his dark brown eyes and then he nodded, pressed his hands to his knees and shoved to his feet.

“Wouldn’t be any better than him if you asked me to do something and I didn’t listen. So I’ll go, but I will send someone out here to clean the glass.”

I focused on peeling off my shoe like I was performing neo-natal heart surgery. “Thank you.”

I didn’t breathe until he stepped away, and jumped when he called my name.

“What, Gage?” My tone defeated and with the weight of the world pressed on my shoulders, it took forever to lift my head to meet his gaze.

“That guy. I heard what he said, and don’t do that with him. He’s a selfish dick, using two women to get his rocks off. I might not know you, but you deserve better than his scraps.”

Goddamn. I was going to cry all over again.

Why did getting that confirmation from him feel so darn good?

“You don’t know—”

“I know what Velvet is,” he said, cutting me off. “And I know exactly what he’s meaning even if I don’t know the specifics, so yeah, I know exactly what I’m talking about. He loves a woman, he takes her as she is, which means he doesn’t love the woman he’s with any more than he cares about you. He’s an asshole and not worth your time.”

What was there to say to that? Nothing. He’d stolen any intellectual or witty response I could usually think of.

Instead, my jaw slack from surprise at his bluntness, I nodded once and slipped off my shoe.

“I’ll see you inside. But stay away from him. I get the idea he’s a man who doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants.”

He left, and I waited several moments after his footsteps evaporated when it hit me.

He knew what Velvet was. Which meant he knew I liked it there. And I liked something different if he was smart enough to put two and two together depending on how much he’d heard.

He didn’t look at me like I was some freak or like there was something wrong with it.

Instead, he’d done what he’d done and said what he’d said for the sole purpose of taking care of me and trying to make me feel better.

Damn. Gage Bryant wasn’t only hot and sexy and kind and had a big sincere heart, he was caring and could be gentle despite his size. He could probably be brutal and arrogant and stubborn, like most men, but despite the professionalism I was trying to maintain around him, I really wanted to learn a whole lot more.

Eleven

Gage

I walked the hall alone this time, assuring Tristan I didn’t need assistance. The hallway was dark, lit with sconces on the wall probably meant to be seductive and yet I was always creeped out by them. They reminded me of haunted houses, and coupled with the ecstatic sounds filtering beneath the other private room’s doors, it was easy to understand why people into the vanilla lifestyle would find this evil. Wrong. Demoralizing.

I thought of it often. What would happen if my love of rough, dominating sex was revealed to the public? What would it do to my reputation as a philanthropist? How embarrassed would my own family be? What would the consequences be for my own dad and his congregation?

It’d been years since I had a real relationship, not since college when I was just discovering that soft and sweet lovemaking with the college girls didn’t get me off like it should have. Sure, I got off, but there was always something missing. A fire. A passion. The first time a girl I dated asked me to tie her up, something completely different in me sparked to life.

It wasthat.The missing piece finally found when I had a woman tied to her bed, helpless to get away from me, forced to be under my control. Memories of that night still made me go hard. The girl, Claire, had found someone different shortly after, our short fling a purely physical thing most college students embraced.

We separated with no hard feelings.

After college graduation when fame and followers and photographers became a part of my life, reporters declaring me a role model for children, my own hometown naming a street after me, the attention on me forced me to hide my proclivities.

There was too much at stake in my life: my career, my family, the organizations I supported through volunteer and donating efforts, to risk having any woman proclaim a consensual night of intense fucking was anything different. Too many women in my life had made it clear they found me hot, but was itmeor my money?

Funny how I grew up wanting fame and fortune and a long list of football records, but that came with a price, and the cost was trust not coming easily.

Which meant the fact that little miss reporter Elizabeth Hayes, currently waiting for me in the room at the end of the hallway, could possibly be the most epically horrible decision I’d ever made.

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