“I’m not a romantic. Hallmark holidays aren’t my thing.” I ignore the half-empty heart-shaped box of Russell Stover candy I bought at Walgreens on the way home.
“Guess we have that in common, then.” He’s close now. If this were real life, the wispy dress Lenore is wearing would be whipping in the breeze, brushing against his skin. He looks like he wants to rip it off her. I kind of want him to until he lifts his hand.
My fingers, so in tune with the controller by now, automatically shift to make Lenore take a step back. My heartbeat has picked up speed. The danger signals are going off in my head, the virtual world playing tricks on my real brain.
“Why are you scared to play, Lenore?” The voice caresses my senses, startles me with its quiet edge as he lowers his hand.
“What? I’m not. I just . . . like to watch.”
“I know. I’ve watched you watch. I’ve also watched you deftly deflect any offers. You’re good at the tease. Good at playing the less-experienced dominants and keeping them panting after you.”
My throat tightens and I reach for my beer. I’ve seen glimpses of Dmitry in the game. But if he plays, he does it privately. And he doesn’t seem to have any regulars he talks to, either. He’s like a shadow. That guy at the bar who comes in, drinks, and leaves. But somehow he knows. He knows that despite the submissive designation on my character, I’ve never actually played that role in the game. “You watch, too.”
“Yes, I do. But I also study. There’s a difference. I’ve studied you.” He steps closer and this time my fingers are frozen against the controller. There’s so much that I don’t know. I don’t know what he really looks like. I don’t know how he smells or if his real voice is that deep. But somehow with his words in my ear, the soft sound of his breath, my body reacts anyway, knows there’s a real man on the end of this phone line. My skin is warming, my blood pumping, arousal and a hint of fear twining together. He reaches up and brushes hair away from Lenore’s face. I shouldn’t feel a tingle against my brow where his fingers would be, but I do. “I’m tired of watching.”
“Oh.” My voice is small, an afterthought. My persona as Lenore the Confident Vixen slips out of reach as my real self invades.
“I think you are, too.”
I close my eyes, the words filtering through my blood, my defenses rising, trying to put up some sort of fight against my galloping libido. “Why would you think that? You don’t know me.”
“I know enough,” he says with utter calm. “I know that you’re smart and that anytime someone gets you close to participating in the game, you make jokes, get sarcastic, and protect yourself. You’ve got a sharp wit and a smart mouth, Lenore. I bet in your life you’re a force, a successful woman with a lot on her plate. You don’t give in to men. You don’t give in to anyone.”
The truth of his words rattles me. This man doesn’t know me, but somehow it’s like he’s peering through the computer screen and seeing my life.
“And that’s exactly why you crave this so much. Why you’re here so often. You want to know what it’s like, and it terrifies you.”
My throat is dry, the words thick against my tongue. “This is just a game.”
“It’s been a very long time for me, Lenore, and I know this is a game. Believe me. But ignore the window-dressing on the screen. What’s real is that I’m here and you’re here. Whatever roles and labels we have in real life aren’t with us right now. All that’s left is this: what we want to do right now, alone, with no one else watching or judging. No one will know what happens tonight except us. You can let go. You’re safe.”
Safe.
My mother would say that word is its own kind of lie, but I want to believe it. Right now, I do. The truth tumbles out of me. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Close your eyes.” The words are gentle but commanding.
I can’t do anything but listen. My lids fall shut.
“All you have to do is listen to my voice. You can always say no at any point, but trust that I’ve got your pleasure in mind. I can give you what I know you’re craving when you watch. All I ask is that you’re honest with me, in your reactions and in what you’re telling me you’re doing. And I’ll give you the same.” He pauses for a long second and when he speaks again, his voice has grit in it, his own need sneaking through. “Give me tonight. I want to hear what you sound like when you surrender to it, how you sound when you come.”
I swallow hard and something tightens low in my belly. I knew all along where this was leading. From the very moment he walked into my corner of the game. That’s what Hayven is about ultimately—sex. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use what I watched in Hayven for fantasy fodder. But I’ve never taken the step of sharing that experience with another player. It seems a little too . . . far. Too personal. Like it stops being a game and becomes part of my life. And maybe a piece of me had thought it would be like cheating on Kevin—Kevin who was never my boyfriend. But there’s no more Kevin and the temptation is beating through me like a wild drumbeat.
“Don’t you want to know what it’s like? To give up the power for just a little while? To let go of any responsibilities and just listen and act?” His voice is like a dark, winding river, rumbling against my senses, dragging me into the current. “To let me bring you to your edge? To know you’re bringing me to mine?”
I inhale deeply, keeping my eyes closed, and focus on just his voice. Not the game. Not Lenore. Not the romantic comedy playing in the living room. Not the fact that everyone else I know is on a date tonight. Just the unfamiliar sound of a sexy, dominant man making irresistible promises in my ear. Let me bring you to your edge.
Your instincts know, Cora.
I’ve spent my life avoiding dangerous men.
I won’t tonight.
In the tell-no-secrets safety of my bedroom, I say yes.
Chapter 1
Four months later
BigMan232: I need you naked and at my feet tonight.
You’ve been a bad girl. Time to pay up.
Cora kept her phone in her lap as she surreptitiously read the message lighting the screen and tried not to roll her eyes. Ugh, get a clue, dude. She clicked ignore and block. She thought she’d done that the last time BigMan had contacted her in the Hayven game but apparently not.
She quickly checked her inbox to make sure she didn’t have a message from the guy she really wanted to hear from, but there was nothing there. Bummer. He’d been quiet the last few days.
“You better not be working over there, cupcake,” Grace said from across the table, her voice barely cutting through the din of voices and music at the party. She popped a stuffed mushroom into her mouth and gave Cora the cocked eyebrow of challenge.
Cora pressed the button to make the screen go black. “Not working.”
“Liar.” Grace leaned forward on her forearms, her silver bangle bracelets jangling against the table and her poker-straight blonde hair turning gold under the soft lights of the winery’s gorgeous cedar-and- glass event space. “Well, cut that shit out. This is called a networking party for a reason. No hiding in our phones. We’re here to drink loads of local wine and to mingle.”
“The wine I can do. But mingle? Have you met me?” She held her hand out across the table. “Hello, I’m Cora Benning, you’re mingle-averse best friend.”
Grace ignored Cora’s outstretched hand. “Mingle-averse?”
“It’s a thing, actually—like an allergy.”
“Uh-huh,” Grace said, deadpan.
Cora gave her a grave look. “I should’ve made you aware ahead of time. I could break out in hives or something, or you know, go anaphylactic on you—throat swelling, eyes bulging. Not pretty. Really, I should be carrying an EpiPen with me just being around all these strangers who require small talk. This is why I went into IT. Medical safety.”
Grace tossed a balled up
napkin at her, missing left. “Well, you’re going to have to get over it, smartass. You’re the one who wanted to start her own company. And part of that is putting yourself out there and meeting new people. Mingling. Mixing.”
Ha. She loved that Grace framed it as Cora wanting to start her own company instead of the truth—that she’d quit her last job in an unplanned blaze of non-glory only to find out afterward that she had no decent job options that didn’t involve working overnight at a call center. Yay for expensive college degrees that apparently meant diddly without a recommendation from your previous employer.
“You need bigger jobs than setting up virus protection for Marv’s Auto Parts or helping your mother out at the police station—which, by the way, she should be paying you more for. You’ve been getting intern pay for how many years now?”
Cora shrugged. “You know I don’t do the police stuff for the money. It’s for a good cause.”
Plus, she’d never admit it to her mom, but she loved the challenge of working on cases. In a different world, she may have gone into the field herself, but her mom had always warned her away from it. Too dangerous. Crappy pay. Find yourself a fancy office to work in, Coraline. Capitalize on that brain of yours.
“Yeah, the good cause of keeping your mother off your back. But I promise you, if they contracted that work out to someone else, they’d be paying whoever it was a helluva lot more. Playing Good Samaritan doesn’t pay the bills. Your landlord isn’t going to care that you’re doing good deeds when you can’t make rent.”
Cora groaned and took a big sip of her wine, trying to focus on how delicious the Water’s Edge Tempranillo was and not on the cold splash of reality Grace insisted on giving her. Last thing Cora needed to think about was the dwindling number in her bank account. She’d had a decent savings when she’d left her job at Braecom, but she’d had to lean on that to get her business started. And though the part-time gig at the police station helped provide some steady income, it wouldn’t be enough to sustain her once her little nest egg dried up. She needed to land some bigger accounts.
However, that didn’t mean she’d suddenly developed the ability to mingle. Business meetings? Presentations? She could handle that stuff. But small talk with strangers? Ugh. She’d been only half-kidding about the hives. “I can make business contacts by e-mail. I’m better in writing. Or on the phone.”
Where I can control things and not have to be charming.
“No, babe. That’s called spam, and it’s the chickenshit way of going about it. You’re better than that.”
Cora rearranged the food on her tasting plate. Cubed chorizo and smoked Gouda became little Monopoly-style neighborhoods, the spicy mustard a moat in between. She resisted the urge to level the whole gourmet town with a sweep of her hand. Grace didn’t get it. The girl sparkled at these functions. She could talk to a wall and make it interested. Cora could make that same wall feel awkward and want to excuse itself to grab a drink.
When she felt Grace’s stare burning into her, she looked up and attempted a deflecting smile. “So I’m a chickenshit. Exactly when did I hire you as my business coach? Because this motivational talk is really helping. I mean, I feel like I need a poster with a dude jumping off a cliff into the open sea or something. Or maybe that one where the cat sees the lion in the mirror.” She held up her hand and curled her fingers like a claw. “Rawr.”
Grace pointed at her. “Don’t get snippy with me, Benning. I’m acting as your benevolent and helpful mentor, which means I’m not above kicking your ass. I don’t want you living on ramen by the end of the year or worse, going to back to Braecom to beg for your job back.”
“Not gonna happen.”
No fucking way. She’d sell hot dogs on the street before she returned to Braecom. When her boss had gotten wind that she’d been sleeping with Kevin, Cora had gotten a talk about how to conduct herself professionally. A week later, he’d told her that she was no longer being considered for the supervisory position she was in line for because the rest of the guys on the team wouldn’t respect her as an authority figure.
And what had Kevin gotten? Her promotion. Fucker.
“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be,” Cora said, trying to sound upbeat and swallow past the bitterness the memories dredged up. “I have prospects. The other day I had a lady offer me two grand to hack into her ex-boyfriend’s Instagram. I think there’s a business opportunity there. Cora Benning—Avenging Hacker for Victims of Cheating Assholes.” She spread her hands like she was seeing the words on a sign. “Though we may have to play with the company title. That may be too much to put on a business card.”
Grace snorted. “Yeah, let’s try to focus on things that won’t land you in handcuffs. You don’t need go to the dark side to make money.”
“But it wouldn’t really be the dark side. I mean, technically yes, but it’d be for a good reason. Only shitty people would be harmed. It’d be like Dexter or that show Cheaters, hacker style.” She gave Grace a bright grin, knowing it’d only piss her off.
“Okay, Robin Hood of Hackerville. Let’s not give your mother a reason to throw you in jail, all right? You just need to get out there and rub elbows with people who actually have cash and could use your services—the legal ones. You’re a badass, motherfucking, white-hat hacker. They need you.”
“Now that’s what should be on the business card. Badass motherfucking hacker. I’d get loads of business.”
“Not if you don’t speak to anyone ever.”
Cora deflated at that, her mood souring further. “Come on, Grace. I’m a start-up. The people here are big deals. We’re at some hoity-toity winery, for God’s sake. That big-ass cowboy who was welcoming everybody when we came in? Yeah, that’s Grant Waters, the owner. He’s got so much money he’s lost count. These people walking around? They own corporations and yachts and shit. They’ve already got a team of IT security on their payroll. They’re here to drink expensive wine and network with other CEOs, not people like me. I appreciate you getting Jonah to snag us an invite, and I love you for thinking I’m at this level, but I need to start smaller. Like way smaller.”
Cora’s phone vibrated in her lap again, and she forced herself not to check it. Grace knew she was always online, but assumed Cora was just a workaholic. She’d die of shock if she found out Cora was a regular player in a kinky online game. And then Cora would promptly die of embarrassment. Yes, my sex life is now 100 percent online. No, that’s not pathetic at all.
“You don’t know that these people don’t need you,” Grace insisted.
“But I do.” Cora glanced out at the milling crowd. There were no tuxes or sparkly cocktail dresses. From the outside looking in, these people didn’t look important with a capital I, but she knew better. In the dot-com world, the more casual someone looked, the more money they probably had. The thought of pitching to any of them made her stomach knot, especially after the trauma of the job interviews she’d had right after leaving Braecom. You could only hear “not the right fit” so many times before you started to wonder if you’d accidentally been assigned to the wrong planet. She looked back to her best friend. “Plus, let’s not pretend you finagled an invitation to this party for my benefit. You’re here to meet hot internet moguls.”
Grace put a Who me? hand to her chest. “Is it so wrong to have a two-pronged reason for being here? That’s called being efficient. And I don’t see how that would be bad for either of us. Your on-the-rebound dry spell has gone on for way longer than is healthy.”
Cora stabbed a toothpick through the Gouda tower she’d built on her plate. Was it really being on the rebound if the relationship hadn’t actually been a relationship? “I’m not in a dry spell. I’m on hiatus by choice.”
Truth. Sort of.
“No. You’re avoiding.” Grace lifted a hand when Cora tried to protest. “Since the Kevin incident and quitting Braecom, you’ve us
ed starting up your business as an excuse to shut down your social life. That worked for the first few months, but I’m not buying that excuse anymore.”
Cora sniffed. “Exactly when did I have this booming social life?”
“You used to at least go out after work sometimes. And you’d let me drag you to bars. And before Kevin, there was that guy you saw for a while—Nick, Nelson.”
“Neil? You’re going that far back? We went on three dates in college. He liked to talk about dorm room beer-making. And smelled like old bread.”
She flicked a hand. “Details. Now you shut me down anytime I ask for anything that involves you going out after seven. I bet if this hadn’t been work-related tonight, you would’ve cancelled on me. You would’ve turned down free wine and fancy cheese.”
True. She almost had. And really, turning down free fancy cheese was probably on her personal checklist of The Girl Ain’t Right signs. But she’d agreed to go because she’d wanted to see Grace, and she knew Grace wouldn’t let her get away with inviting her over just to hang out and watch movies again. “I have a lot going on.”
“I know you do. But you can’t let all that stuff shut down your whole life.” Grace gave her a pointed look. “It’s my duty as your best friend to not let you become crazy, sexless cat lady because some asshole wronged you. It’s in the handbook.”
Cora smirked. “I’m allergic to cats. And I’ve had sex. You’re cleared of liability.”
She cocked her head in that take-no-bullshit way she’d perfected. “Had being the operative word there. Had, Cora. I get that you needed some time. But don’t let what happened with Kevin turn you into a hermit. You thought you had something with him and you didn’t. He was a jerk about it.”
“He called me a bro with a vagina, Grace.”