Wild Licks Read online

  I would unzip my trousers and my erection would strain upward and I would command her to engulf me. The test: “You have ten seconds to get me all the way inside you.”

  In her haste she would climb astride me and simply yank her panties aside, struggling to get the head of me positioned between her lips. Yes, the struggle would be the sweetest part of all, as she would fight to accommodate my size without any preparation. Once inside, I would find her snug and slick with desire but the initial penetration would make her bite her lip and me gasp…

  I nearly gasped aloud there in the limousine as I realized I had imagined Gwen and not Excrucia at all. Thank goodness we were pulling up to the privacy hedge that surrounded my condo. I opened the door, desperate to escape the allure of this woman. From the curb I turned to close it and saw she had crawled to my side of the seat and was looking up at me with huge, lust-filled eyes.

  That’s your imagination, I told myself. You’re confusing her with every other woman who has sucked you into a vortex. “Ms. Hamilton,” I forced myself to say in the most polite tone I could muster. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  She held out her hand and I took it gingerly, my fingers disconcertingly damp, and kissed the back of her hand. Her skin was smooth, perfect, and I knew all I had to do was tighten my grip, pull her out of the car, and tell her to come with me and I could have her.

  And I could ruin her. And that would not be good. I let go reluctantly.

  “Until next time. Good night, Mal,” she said, before reaching out and closing the door herself.

  I didn’t even wait until I reached my bedroom. The moment I was on the other side of my front door, I tore open my trousers and relieved the pressure that had been building there as if I were a hormonal teen again, on my hands and knees like an animal, painting a series of grayish stripes on the foyer tile, my control utterly gone.

  * * *

  GWEN

  As we drove away, I clung to the sense-memory of Mal’s lips against the back of my hand. I don’t think it was my imagination that his lips lingered a little too long. Mal Kenneally was obviously interested in me. For a guy who supposedly hid all his emotions, Mal was as readable as a billboard on the 101. I was sure I hadn’t heard the whole story behind his sex and dating rules, though. Maybe it was as simple as him justifying his fear of commitment? Why else make a rule that he could only have sex with a given woman once?

  I mean, I get the whole rock star thing. He had a steady stream of women throwing themselves at him. He didn’t have to make a commitment to have plenty of sex, so why should he?

  I, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky, and pretty much all I could think about while he’d been sitting there in the car with me was how his cock had felt inside me yesterday.

  You’re deluded, I tried to tell myself. If he wanted you, he would have invited you in. He wouldn’t have said no.

  Besides, you’re making him seem more interesting than he probably is. Yes, the sex was hot, but come on, he’s obviously got issues. He’s clearly a big old cup of avoid-for-your-own-good, right? Buy a bigger dildo instead.

  But while my insides clenched with need every time I thought about him, I knew it wasn’t his cock I really craved. It was something else. His attitude. His…mastery?

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. If I was going to get into dom/sub role-playing, I was supposed to find a guy and exchange checklists and negotiate and talk about limits and aftercare before we even set foot into a dungeon. I was not supposed to hop onto a beer bottle on command.

  But just thinking about it was making my insides melt all over again. Maybe with time I might have forgotten about Mal or reduced the memory to the status of a favorite fantasy, but now having spent the evening next to him—touching him and getting to know him—I was more attracted to him than ever. It was like getting hooked on a drug where a big second dose ensured the need took hold.

  To think tonight we hadn’t even had sex. Maybe we didn’t have to. The film had stimulated all the right parts of my fantasies, even the deep hidden and forbidden parts. And Mal had as much as admitted that it had done the same for him, too.

  I slipped back into thinking about that room backstage, draped with cloths and tapestries like a vestige of an ancient seraglio. He’d ordered me to put the condom on him and I’d done it, and obeying him was the best aphrodisiac ever. No, the second best. Him reducing me to a fuckable hole was the best.

  What the fuck was that about, anyway? I lowered the window to let the wind into the limo, to feel the air moving on my face. I’d always been interested in various kinks. Growing up, I’d known they existed. Bondage had looked like fun, spanking had sounded great, but I’d never fantasized about being a human sex toy. Had I?

  Was that why Mal only did a groupie once? Because what got him off was treating her like a disposable fuckdoll?

  Worry about Mal later, I thought. Why did you get off on being treated like that?

  Was it a leftover vestige from Chuck? My first real lover, my first time doing kink, and Chuck had degraded me and ordered me around and spanked me and I had loved it at the time…until I’d realized he was actually a really degrading person. But I’d imprinted on that style of dominance, I guess. How else could I explain why I found bossy male entitlement hot?

  But you don’t find it hot in spoiled brat dudebros, I thought. They had entitlement up the wazoo, too.

  But they were boring. They didn’t even care enough to boss me around or make it hot. They’d just expected me to lie there and think of New England.

  And they weren’t Mal.

  I tripped and fell right into a fantasy about Mal, like something out of a historical romance only much dirtier, Mal as viscount or duke ordering me to get on his cock…to milk him dry so that when the upper-crust seductress intent on tricking him arrived at his English country estate he wouldn’t be able to impregnate her. He’d keep me hidden, naked and chained by my collar under his palatial four-poster bed, and after a lavish dinner in the formal dining room, he’d take the woman to bed. The bed would creak and groan while he tried to satisfy her. Maybe he’d even fuck her—yes, Mal would get it up, of course he would—and she’d be none the wiser that he had barely a dribble of seed to plant between her legs. Then when she was gone, he’d pull me out from under the bed and put me into the covers and snuggle with me all night long…

  Oh, self. That was not a good fantasy. That was a degrading and useless and fucking hot fantasy.

  Maybe I should talk to Ricki. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to get into the intimate details of my fantasies with her, though. We were close, but still, we had boundaries, too. I wondered if Granddad thought about that when he left the running of the Governor’s Club to us. Did he think about how two sisters like us would manage to run a secret sex dungeon for Hollywood’s elite without it getting too incestuous?

  For the most part, we just stayed out of each other’s way. If one of us was playing in a scene room, the other one was “on duty” as hostess, so we never actually saw each other play. When Axel put Ricki in bondage, he never did it in the main central room. I got spanked by everyone in the club for my birthday, but that wasn’t like a scene-scene; I didn’t even take off my clothes. Come to think of it, Madison was probably a much better choice of someone to talk to. We’d really hit it off, and she had tons more experience with kink than I did. I knew she wouldn’t judge. She was also great as a dungeon hostess.

  Running the dungeon was fun. I really liked being part of people having good sex and having a safe place to get kinky. But I really needed to figure out what was going on in my own head.

  And buy a bigger dildo. I took out my phone to mail-order one before I even got home.

  Chapter Four

  All Work and No Play

  GWEN

  My sister and I have this in common: We’re very systematic about things. We make lists. She loves spreadsheets. I like flow charts.

  And I liked sex with Mal. No, liked wa
s not the right word. Craved, needed, “would die without”—those were more accurate. By morning I had decided to set aside all my doubts about my underlying motivations and focus on concrete goals. I had tasted the forbidden fruit and all I could think about was how to have more of it.

  I sat down with my tablet in my room and drew a circle on one end and wrote GWEN in it. On the other end I drew a triangle with MAL in it. Okay. Now to visualize the paths from one to the other.

  One potential path was going to be through the publicity dates, so I wrote the word DATES in the middle. The obstacle there was Mal’s rules. He would have to get over the whole rule thing—let’s face it, he’d have to get over himself, too, and what were the chances of that? I suspected if he really grew to like me that he’d start to bend the rules or decide that they no longer applied, but he had also demonstrated a fairly iron will, so it wasn’t going to be easy. I made a dashed line through the word DATES to indicate the shaky nature of that plan.

  Of course another potential path was through the Governor’s Club. C-L-U-B. Axel was already a member. Just a few weeks ago Ricki and I had floated the idea about whether the rest of the band, being so intimately linked to Axel, should be invited, too. It was obvious to me now that Mal was a kinkster at heart. Would he be able to resist me if the right situation in the dungeon came up? Maybe he’d consider anything that happened in the dungeon to be under a different set of rules from either groupies or dating. Certainly worth finding out. I drew another dashed line, this one through the word CLUB. There was still the question of whether he would accept an invitation, and even if he did, whether I could get through his resolve.

  Then there was a third way. I wrote SUPERFANS on the tablet and swooped my finger through a thick black line. Obviously given what I had seen, Mal would have rock star sex regularly with girls he didn’t know. I still had the contact information of the superfans I’d met at the show. I’d have to cook up a convincing disguise, but hey, if it worked once, it could work again.

  I liked the third way best because it was another test of my acting skills and it was the plan that relied the most on me and the least on anyone else. Mal could just be Mal; he wouldn’t have to change anything, and we’d both be happy.

  Time to set up a fake e-mail address.

  I had just finished setting up an alias and mail-ordering a black wig when a text came from Ricki:

  Next week, Bob Monteleone fund-raising bash, you, me, Axel, Mal?

  I pulled up my to-do list and drew a circle around the word DATES. If it was going to work, I just had to be ready when he changed his mind. I called her instead of texting back. “Fund-raiser, you say?”

  “Yes, a banquet. CTC has a whole table.”

  “Well, if he’ll put up with it, I wouldn’t mind having Mal Kenneally as my date.”

  “Was he that bad? I thought you were getting along great at the premiere.”

  “Oh, he’s a sweetheart, but I think he’d rather be sitting in his crypt pulling the wings off bats than talking to me.”

  Ricki laughed and then tried to stifle it. “Oh, Gwen. That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement.”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way! He’s interesting to talk to and I could listen to his accent all day. But I’m not the one you might need to convince. Mal told me it was his manager’s idea that we should be seen together for publicity purposes. I think I might be more willing than he is.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Does this mean you’re getting used to the idea that raising your public profile could be good for your career?”

  I held in a sigh. I still didn’t really like that idea, but now that I had ulterior motives for being with Mal, I rationalized it. “Maybe I’m finally figuring out that being seen is part of the job description.”

  Besides, I was already planning the ultimate test of my acting skills.

  * * *

  MAL

  Why do rock stars wear sunglasses so much?

  Perhaps some enjoy the mystique. I have also been told that those avoiding the paparazzi prefer them because photos that do not show your face are less desirable to photographers.

  In my case the dark glasses were purely practical. Los Angeles is very nearly a desert and the sun shines as wretchedly bright as in the Sahara. Especially when one has spent most of the previous night on a glorious, whiskey-fueled songwriting binge. The five of us had played until nearly four a.m. before grabbing a few hours of sleep before a morning photo shoot. I didn’t regret the night’s activities one bit, but I did ever so slightly regret how bloodshot my eyes were.

  I, at least, didn’t scream like a schoolgirl when the stylist put the drops in my eyes, unlike Axel. Chino, not to be outdone, put on a full horror-movie act, complete with dropping to his knees and clawing at his face in agony. I held in a smile as the poor assistant stylist, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, stood beside him with her hands fluttering, a look of pure terror on her face.

  Chino laughed, hopped up, and took a bow, the rest of us applauding and the stylist breathing a sigh of relief. I think he’d convinced her she’d accidentally put acid in his eyes. Which was what it felt like, but no.

  Photo shoots are a test of both physical and mental endurance. The band would rather play a three-hour show in West Texas with no air-conditioning than do a photo shoot.

  But they are a necessary brick in the path of success.

  This one thankfully did not take all day. The photographer had just two hours with us before she had to move on to her next gig, which suited us fine. We changed clothes only once and needed hair touched up once. Doable. At least this shoot took place inside a studio and not somewhere ridiculous like the “LA River” (the giant concrete drainage ditch you always see in movies). Our previous one had taken place there, the Santa Ana winds had been blowing, and we ended up blanketed with wildfire smoke and ash.

  A much more pleasurable task was that afterward we signed autographs for a few fans who had found out where we’d be—and there were nearly always a few, no matter where we went. A group of about a half dozen were patiently clustered on the sidewalk outside the building and we spent several minutes autographing things and taking selfies with them.

  One of the women there was the zaftig blonde, Aurora, whose day I made by asking, “Aurora, have you e-mailed that photo yet?”

  “I did! I did!” Her eyes, her face, her entire body lit up with euphoria. “Did you not get it?”

  “Just checking. I had you send it to our management office but I haven’t checked with them yet. I will inquire.”

  “Let me know if you need me to send it again! In fact, here, just to be sure, I’ll e-mail it again now.” She bent her head to her phone and I took the moment to study the faces of the other girls, looking for the mystery girl, “Excrucia.” None of them were redheads and my memory of her face was as dim as the light in the room had been. In fact, my brain seemed to be conflating her and Gwen Hamilton, since the face I now pictured was Gwen with heavy black eyeliner.

  We arrived at the rehearsal studio by midafternoon. Basic Records was pushing us to deliver the next album, but I was insisting we not go into the recording studio with a producer again until we had a better handle on the material to choose from. They had wanted to put an album into the pipeline before we went on the road, but given how disastrously the recording sessions had gone, we’d only managed to fully finish two songs. Now that the tour was over, we needed to buckle down and get back to work.

  Between what we had in inventory and what I’d written while we were on the road, I think we had close to forty potential songs to work with, which sounds like a surplus but trust me, once a producer like Max Martin or Larkin Johns starts ripping your music to shreds, sometimes you have very little left by the end. Well, we hadn’t worked with Max Martin, but our experience with Johns had left me with a very bad taste in my mouth—so bad that I was wary of producers as a whole now.

  I sat down with my electric tuner and my current
favorite guitar, a Paul Reed Smith with a dragon inlaid in pearl. Yes, a dragon. It was an indulgence in image and an insanely expensive guitar, but also an insanely good one, imminently playable with incredible tone. Not to mention beautiful to look at. But if it had merely been beautiful to the eye and not also to the ear, I wouldn’t have bought it.

  The rest of the band went through their own preparations. Ford tuned his bass across the room from me, doing the bottom string with a tuner and then using his ears for the other three, his eyes unfocusing as he listened, his dirty-blond hair hanging in front of them. Axel had gone into the bathroom to warm up his voice; everyone sounds better in the shower because of the echoes off the tile, and professional singers are no exception. Chino tightened his cymbals on their stands.

  “Where’s Samson?” I asked Ford.

  He shrugged. “I’m not his keeper. Why are you asking me?”

  Hmm. The reason I was asking him was because the two of them so frequently traveled together, but his defensive answer made me think perhaps now was not the time to point that out. “Just thought you might have heard him say something.”

  I heard the outer door open, though, and in came Samson. He had his hair up in a topknot and was carrying a stack of pizza boxes. “Ta-da. Aren’t you guys hungry?”

  Ford’s eyes were shadowed and he said what I was thinking: “We should really get to work.”

  “Hey, we’ve got to eat sometime.” Samson set the boxes down on the table against the wall. “Look, I even got it from the place you like.”

  Americans are strangely sectarian about certain things and pizza is one of them. Honestly I could not see why if one wanted melted cheese and tomato on flat bread it mattered so much whether the crust was thick or thin, crunchy or chewy, or a thousand other variations, but the others assured me it did. And we often let Ford pick what we ate because, we jokingly said, he was the runt of the litter and needed to fatten up. Ford wasn’t actually significantly shorter than anyone else in the band but me. In fact, he and Chino were the same height, though Chino outweighed him by about forty pounds of muscle—but facts have never stopped a good round of ball-busting, and never underestimate the amount of ball-busting necessary to keep any band sane.