His Gift (A Dark Billionaire Romance Part 2) Read online

  Lord, I didn’t even know what sex was like and I needed it.

  “Do what?” I echoed at him breathlessly. “Do what?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You tied me up. You tortured me! What kind of man does that to a woman?”

  “What kind of woman enjoys it?”

  I stared at him, agog. Eventually, my tongue found the words for a response.

  “Don’t you dare blame me,” I said.

  “It’s not about blame,” he said. “I only want you to see in yourself what I see in you.”

  “Really? What do you see in me?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer, and my body itched. Not just with my unsatisfied desire, although that was part of it. When he looked at me, really looked at me, it seemed like he was looking too far down. Like he could see deep into me. Like he could know what I really wanted.

  I flushed and turned my cheek to him. He reached out and placed a finger under my chin. He turned me back to face him.

  “You’re beautiful. Every part of you, every inch of smooth skin. Your curves. Your fingers. Your toes. You’re innocent. But I see a loneliness in you, Lacey. Your worrying sends lines down your face. I see you reaching out without reaching out, asking without asking. Because you never want to ask for it, do you?”

  I was quivering as he withdrew his finger from under my chin. I shook my head slowly.

  “Don’t.”

  “Do you think independence is about being alone? About being completely in control, all by yourself?” He smiled and arched his eyebrow at me. “You can’t, you see. You can’t be in control without someone there to control.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “Is that all you want? Control?”

  “No. Oh, no. Lacey. I want so much more.”

  The implication of those words set my body afire. I stared at him, not really understanding what he’d said. Well, except the part about being lonely. But that was true of anyone, wasn’t it? Everybody was lonely sometimes.

  “Well, you control me now,” I said, trying to regain some of my confidence while boosting his.

  “Do I?”

  “You hold all the strings. Don’t you?”

  He ignored my question. Instead, he went to the closet and pulled out a robe.

  “You’re shivering,” he said, laying the robe on the bed. It was white terrycloth.

  I’d been shivering, but it wasn’t the cold.

  “I’m fine,” I said, but I stood up and pulled the robe on. It reached all the way down and brushed over the tops of my feet.

  For a brief moment, I was consumed with jealousy. What other girls did he have here? Were they tall, graceful supermodels? Did this robe fit them perfectly? Then he put a hand on my shoulder, and I brushed away the thought.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  He went smoothly into the hallway and I followed behind. This was a different hallway than the one I’d been in before. Another part of the apartment, another floor maybe.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Don’t talk anymore,” he said gruffly.

  He walked in front of me and I tried to keep up with his long strides. I tied the robe clumsily around my waist. If there were any servants in this part of the house, I didn’t want to run into them half-naked.

  “Is this the same floor as the party was on?” I asked, pausing briefly to check out a pastel painting on one of the walls. A Cezanne. Jesus, this guy was rich.

  “Don’t talk.”

  “But—”

  Instead of telling me to shut up again, he opened a door to his right and stepped through into the room. I stepped in behind him, and I was struck dumb by what I saw.

  Chapter Three

  It was a studio. No, it was the studio. The art studio of my dreams, if I had ever imagined something as lavish as this.

  One long window at the east end looked out over New York City. The sun was beginning to peek out from over the horizon. Pink and orange light shone in, bouncing off of the mirrored windows. From this room I could see why the sky had been getting lighter.

  Sunrise. It seemed like it should have been longer. Last night I had left Jake and gone to work. Last night, after he had touched me.

  The recent memory sent blood rushing again between my thighs. I ignored it and stepped further into the room.

  Everything was white. All of the walls, the ceiling. The floor was smooth white. There weren’t even any lines, although I would swear that it was tile under my bare feet.

  And everywhere, stacked by the half dozen against each other, were canvases. Big canvases. Small canvases. Square and rectangular, in every proportion. They scattered across the room and propped against the walls.

  Across from the window was another door. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t white, it seemed. It was wood, dark wood, with a padlock on the outside of it.

  Turning slowly, I saw the table that was just to the side of the door. The cabinets were painted white as well, but I could imagine what was inside: brushes, paints. And more canvases, stacked like they weren’t the most precious thing.

  Blank canvases. All of them waiting, ready for paint. All of them yearning to be covered.

  I breathed in through my teeth and let out the breath in a slow hiss. I had been tired at the end of my shift, and I’d been awake for hours since then. But this room sent a rush of adrenaline through me that made my fingers itch to work. Almost as much as my body itched to be scratched by Jake’s own fingers.

  I glanced back at him, waiting for an explanation. He gave me an order instead.

  “Paint.”

  “What?”

  I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t. I would have pinched myself, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. This was a dream whether I was asleep or awake.

  “You said you were an artist.”

  “I’m half-naked and—” I cut myself off before I could say extremely aroused.

  He smiled, as though reading my thoughts.

  “It’s good. You have blood rushing through your system. You have emotions.”

  “Sure.” I have emotions. Like total irritation. Unsatisfied longing. My body was screaming at me to orgasm, oh God, why can’t he just make me orgasm like before?

  “I thought you would be tired, but I couldn’t wait to show you. Would you rather rest first? Or—”

  “No,” I said in a rush. “No. I want to paint.”

  “Paint, then,” he said. “I want to see what you’re feeling right now. Paint what is going on in that innocent mind.” He smirked.

  “Right,” I said. He was well aware what was going on in my mind, and none of it was innocent.

  I walked over and examined the canvases. God, these weren’t the cheap ones I always worked with. The frames were solid and the canvas was a quality linen that had already been prepared for painting.

  I went back to the table and opened the cabinets. I tried not to gasp my surprise at the assortment of paints in front of me. Spray paint, oils, acrylics by the gallon. There were delicate brushes of a few hairs, and thick brushes, wedge-shaped, bleached at the ends. There were rollers of different textures, layering palette knives of all different shapes and sizes. There was everything I needed and more.

  “I can use any of this stuff?” I asked. My fingers reached out, touching the materials in wonder.

  “Any of it. Except for the storage area, which is locked.” He pointed to the black door that had a padlock on the outside hinge. “That’s not to be touched. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I said, still gaping at the paints. Lord, this was thousands of dollars’ worth of paint sitting on this table. Maybe tens of thousands. And not the cheapo stuff, either.

  He smiled a bit at my expression before turning away to leave.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, before he had taken two steps. There was amusement in his eyes as he looked back at me.

  “I’m going to get us breakfast. You will stay
in here and paint.”

  “And if I don’t?” It wasn’t a real question. I just wanted to see the spark light up his eyes again.

  “If you don’t obey me, you’ll be punished. The same goes for if you touch yourself. Understood?”

  I flushed. Even with all that he had done to me, touching myself in front of him made me turn red with imagined embarrassment.

  “Understood.” It was a squeak coming from my mouth. I didn’t know why he had chosen me. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the girls who had swarmed his party.

  All of those thoughts dropped away, though, when I looked back at the blank canvases waiting for me to put my mark on them.

  Maybe that’s what he saw in me. That, and… loneliness.

  I didn’t think a billionaire could know what it was like to be lonely, but maybe…

  Jake cleared his throat. He pushed himself away from the doorframe and turned to go.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  ***

  I painted.

  It had been a while since I’d painted on an actual canvas, and in good light. All of my street art had been thrown up hastily, in dark alleyways or on subway cars in the train yard at night. I never got a good look at what I was painting, not really.

  The first canvas I picked up was one of the bigger ones. Without too much preamble, I tossed it down onto the floor and headed back for the cabinets to pick out the paint.

  Back when I was in elementary school, part of the ritual I had for painting was arranging all of my paints and brushes beforehand, getting everything ready before I started. I’d set my brushes out carefully, lining them up next to the paper. Slowly, meticulously.

  Since living in New York City, I’d learned how to work as a street artist. I never got a chance to settle in before painting—I simply didn’t have the time. Security guards would be patrolling, and I had to paint out of my backpack with cans and brushes that I threw haphazardly back to make a run for it if I saw anyone coming.

  So if you’d told me that I had a room full of painting supplies all to myself, I would have told you that I would take my time. I would go slow. I would savor the moment.

  But I didn’t.

  I don’t know what it was. The sleepless night, maybe, or the drugs they’d used to knock me out. Mostly, though, I thought it was the face that Jake Carville had spent the past hour teasing me past the point of sanity, and I didn’t have any mental energy left to think about the painting I was going to do.

  So I just painted.

  I didn’t bother to take out all of the paints and lay them out, or pick out all of the brushes I would use. I went for it, grabbing a handful of brushes and an armful of paint tubes. Without forethought, I squeezed the paint onto one of the plastic mixing palettes and started. No ceremony, no ritual. Nothing but pure emotion.

  First, green. Green like his eyes. That would be the background. I smeared the brush back and forth, adding daubs of black when I needed to make the color richer, the values more contrasting.

  As I painted, I remembered what he’d done to me. My frustrations surged through me and erupted out onto the canvas. The strokes of his fingers became strokes of my paintbrush.

  I painted quickly, the way I wanted him to touch me. The brush roughed across the canvas in thick sheets. There was nothing in me to tell me to stop, that I was using too much paint. There was no restraint to tell me I should go slower. There was nothing but the furious insistent beat of my heart as I worked the canvas to its natural end.

  I used a small brush to pick up beads of gold paint, spattering them over the deep emerald color with abandon. I didn’t wait for it to dry.

  Then I painted a swath of rich dark red diagonally. A stripe of darkness, like a blindfold over the eyes. Looking at it, I could see all of my frustration on the stretched fabric. I could see the strokes of the brush hairs.

  Standing up from the canvas, I felt dizzy. Had it been a minute or an hour? Paint spattered my ankles, and I’d gotten smears of green and gold on the bottom of the white terrycloth robe. I looked around. He wasn’t back yet.

  I’d finished a canvas. Did he mean for me to paint more?

  There were so many canvases here. So many blank spaces. The white of the room and the increasing brightness of the rising sun turned the white squares and rectangles brilliant with light. Brilliant and yet empty, with nothing painted on them. All around me was pure, pure white.

  Something inside me broke. The neediness in my body was converted to a manic whirlwind of painting. Stepping to one wall, I picked up a large canvas, threw it down onto the ground at that spot, and began to paint furiously.

  Jake had held back so much. He had given me a taste of what he could deliver, and then he had pulled it back. For the whole night he had teased me, hanging satisfaction just out of my reach. Dangling my desires in front of me, then pulling them away.

  Now he had given me this, and I would take it. I wouldn’t wait for him. I wouldn’t be ashamed. I would take it, all of it.

  I painted another canvas, then another. Paint smeared all over my hands and ankles. I used the white robe as a towel to clean off my hands when I needed to. I used the edge of the robe to swipe at misplaced brushstrokes. The terrycloth robe grew heavier as paint soaked into its edges, until I looked like I should be heading over to Broadway to star in a production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

  I filled my canvases with my longing. Flowers grew, straggling across the white, bleeding violet and goldenrod where their leaves stretched forward. I painted all of the images that I dreamed of painting, painted and painted and it still wasn’t enough.

  At my feet were half a dozen paintings, rough, frenzied works. None of them were what I needed. I looked wildly at the other walls to find a space that would fit the sweeping colors that whirled in my head.

  Blank canvases all around, none what I had in mind. The flowers didn’t work, fitted in the square of a single space. I didn’t know what I needed. Something bigger, maybe.

  I looked only once at the door to the storage area, wondering if there were other canvases inside. But no. He’d been very serious about staying away from there.

  Break in and maybe he’ll punish you again.

  I scolded my mind for the thought. A faint heat rose to my skin, even as I tried to quash it.

  Then I saw it.

  It wasn’t a canvas at all. It was a space on the wall in the corner of the room. The light from a skylight fell perfectly into the corner, radiating brightness all around.

  That was what I needed.

  I picked up the bucket of green paint and headed there.

  I mixed black in with the green on the wall. And impulsively, I grabbed a spray paint can.

  Lace.

  It was my name. It was my tag.

  The green went on in wide strokes, and I’d barely finished the contours of the letters before coming back with the can of black. My arm swung wide, not outlining the letters but instead marking the shadows that the letters would cast if they were there.

  I was normally quite precise, but my emotions were running so high that my finger slipped once, and once only. The extra blast of paint dripped, dripped. It would ruin the effect.

  Unthinking, I undid the tie from the bathrobe and slipped the tie off. I used it to press against the wall, mopping up the stray drip. A glimmer of white from behind the paint showed through. Yes. That was what it needed. I scraped away paint in soft curves, highlighting the swells of the letters where the light shone.

  I stepped back and admired it. It was possibly the best version that I’d ever done. The effect was three-dimensional, the shadows and highlights making the tag stand out.

  I was finished. My breaths came hard, and I wiped the beads of sweat off of my brow. I’d done it. It was perfect. I stared at it, willing it to seep into my brain so I could recreate it on another wall, somewhere that wasn’t in a billionaire’s apartment.

  Oh, cr
ap.

  This was his apartment.

  He’d told me to paint, but he surely didn’t mean that I could paint the walls. It was a horrible mistake to do this. What… what was I thinking?

  You weren’t thinking. You were feeling.

  Behind me, I heard the door open again. I whirled around to see Jake standing in the doorway, a silver tray in his hands.

  He took me in. Standing there in an untied robe coated with paint, my bra and panties exposed. Paint spattered all over my limbs. And on the corner wall of his perfect apartment, my tag. His eyes widened.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Chapter Four

  I stared at Jake, my heart sinking. I’d defaced his walls. Blood rushed to my face.

  He set the silver tray down. I noticed with the part of my mind that was numb that there were two cups of something hot; the steam rose as he put the tray on the floor. He stood up and crossed the room quickly, his strides long and determined.

  I was stammering out another apology when he reached me.

  He pushed me back against the wall. Kissed my neck. I barely had time to breathe before his hands moved down, yanking the robe from my shoulders.

  “Oh!” I cried. “You’re getting paint on your—ah!”

  He bit at my neck, a bite on the shoulder as though he was claiming me. He buried his face in my hair, his hands pinning my arms back. The paint was still wet behind me, and cold for only a second before he licked my neck and flames took my body whole.

  My hands moved down to his chest, tentatively at first. I had paint all over me, and every touch smeared red and green and blue onto his suit. But it was ruined already, and when his hands found my ass I couldn’t care at all about it.

  Kisses, kisses everywhere but my face. His hands gripped my ass and squeezed and I cried aloud.

  He picked me up and shoved me against the wall. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he buried his head in the crook of my neck, pressing kisses all the way down from my ear to my collarbone.