Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 21

She pretends to scoff again, but I can see the tiny blush of pride in her cheeks. “In my experience, that kind of money usually just gets you some pathetically small chunk of fish in a bizarre foam, and a man with a shitty mustache explaining to you why it’s God’s gift to taste buds.”

I pretend to frown. “Have you been spying on me?”

She laughs, then grabs a slotted spoon and starts to fish the fried doughnuts out of the oil. Each one gets dropped into the bowl of sugar, rolled over a few times until it’s well coated, then set on a pan.

She doesn’t mind a mess. Flour coats her fingers and forearms, and when she wipes her forehead with the back of one hand, it leaves a white streak of the stuff just below her hairline.

But it suits her.

There are a million women in this city who look good when dolled up and dressed to the nines. Give them access to Spanx, a Sephora, and some t****k tutorials, and they can all pass for a Kardashian.

But there are much, much fewer who look good like this.

In their element.

Working.

Un-self-conscious.

She sets another sugared round on the pan and counts what’s left in the bowl. “That’s, what, a dozen?” she says. “Fourteen? I suck at math, but it’s definitely a lot for just the two of us. You’re a big guy, but… I mean, not that I need these. Big shocker, a woman who looks like me eating a doughnut at mid⁠—”

“Stop.”

She freezes. The bubbling oil is the last sound in the room.

“I was joking,” she says meekly.

“I know what you were doing. Don’t do it again.”

“Okay, wow. It’s a doughnut, not a⁠—”

“It isn’t about the f*****g doughnut.” I stride around the cart into the good light so she has to look at me. “That’s the second time tonight you’ve made a joke like that. I won’t tolerate a third.”

She sets the spoon down on the rag carefully, eyes cast low.

“It’s a habit,” she mumbles. “It’s how I— People relax when I say it first.”

“Say what?” I ask. A note of menace has snuck into my voice.

Delilah hesitates, then sweeps a hand up and down her body. “The obvious. Just look at me.”

I grab her wrist and settle it back down by her side. Then, my fingers dusted with the flour from her skin, I touch under her chin and force her eyes to meet mine.

“I haven’t stopped looking all night,” I rasp. “I see you. I know what and who you are. You’re the one who seems blind to the ‘obvious.’“

She’s squirming, obviously uncomfortable, but the light pressure of my two fingers under her jaw is enough to pin her in place.

“So don’t make that joke again,” I finish. “Not in front of me.”

“You can’t just decide what comes out of my mouth,” she snaps.

“Watch me. In front of me, you don’t talk about yourself like that.”

Her squirming eases. Her eyes are curious now, liquid honey. But that self-hating crease in her forehead has vanished. For the time being, at least.

“You’ve known me for three hours,” she says.

“And in that whole time, I’ve never once thought what you’re afraid I’m thinking.”

She breathes out. Then she reaches into the bowl, picks up a doughnut, and takes a bite standing right where she is, sugar on her mouth, watching me the whole time like she’s daring me to comment.

I don’t.

I just reach out and take one, too.

The first bite ruins me forever.

It’s hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth, but I couldn’t care less, because I could never taste anything again for the rest of my life and this one bite would still be enough to sustain me.

Sugar cracks. Then the inside gives, soft, warm, and buttery. The texture is perfect. It’s like chewing a cloud.

I have eaten in Paris and Tokyo and Moscow. I have paid the world’s finest chefs to describe food to me while I chewed it.

None of it was this.

Not. Even. f*****g. Close.

There’s only one thing better than enjoying the fruits—or rather, the sweets—of Delilah’s labor.

And that’s watching her enjoy it.

She lets out the tiniest, squeakiest little whimper. Her eyes flutter closed and she licks the sugar-frosted tip of her finger. Her lips open and close, her cheeks ripple with the motion of chewing, and she exhales through her nose.

That aura of ease steals over her again.

A happy woman, with sweetness on her lips.

Fuck, what I wouldn’t give to taste her.

When she swallows, she cracks her eyes open again and squints at me warily.

“Well?” she says.

“It’s good.”

“Wow. Somebody call the newspapers. We’ve got a food critic on our hands.”

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I clarify as solemnly as I can, so she knows I’m serious.

She preens. “That’s better.”

A moment of silence follows. The popping of the oil has settled down now that the burner’s off, so our mingled breathing and the groan of the walk-in freezer are the only sounds left in this warm little oasis.

The world outside is cold and frosted over. But in here, the swirls of flour and sugar feel like a private snowfall for us and us alone.

And we are definitely alone.

In a sick and twisted sort of way, this is what I came for tonight. I wanted a brief, private audience with Connor Boyd, so I could squeeze him until he crumbled and gave me what I was truly after.

In many ways, this is better. I have direct access to the source. I’m one whispered threat away from getting this woman to sign over her life’s work to me.

A single sentence and a single signature. That’s all it would take, and the last building on this block would finally be mine.

“What?” Delilah asks, suddenly nervous. It’s like she can sense the dark turn my thoughts have taken. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

I make a spur-of-the-moment choice:

Not yet.

I won’t rip it all away from her. It’s f*****g Christmas Eve, after all. Even I’m not that cruel.

Or so I tell myself.

Instead, I lie.

“Because you have sugar on your face.”

She frowns and goes to wipe it with her forearm, but that’s dirty, too, so it only makes things worse.

“Stop moving,” I order.

She stops.

I step even closer.

She doesn’t know what’s happening. I’m not sure, either. The possibilities at my fingertips are endless.

All that’s obvious is that I am here and towering over her, and she is here and so f*****g breakable beneath me. Her pupils are enormous. Her chest rises fast under the apron bib. Her hands hang open at her sides, floury, useless, and the breath that trickles between her plump lips is tinged sweet with sugar.

It’s fear in her eyes.

It’s want.

It’s both.

It’s everything.

I hold there and let myself savor the taste of it all on my tongue.

Because this is the thing I’ve been hunting in fights and card rooms and bottles for years. Not obedience. Not a woman lying still and smiling at whatever I say.

This.

Somebody truly alive in front of me.

“Kane…” she whispers.

“Hold still.”

I lift my hand and paint her cheek tenderly with my thumb, from the bone down toward her jaw. The sugar comes off her skin. She doesn’t dare breathe.

Then, without breaking eye contact, I put my thumb to my mouth and suck the sugar off of it.

When there’s nothing left, I sigh and step back.

“There,” I say. “You’re clean.”

I turn away from her. I need distance. We’re too warm and too drunk on sweets and the irresponsibility of being tucked away from a snow-covered world at midnight.

Anything could happen in here.

That is a very bad idea.

“I’m leaving,” I announce.

Her head comes up. “Now?”

“Right now.”

“Were the doughnuts that bad?”

“I meant what I said: It was the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” I retrieve my coat from the hook where she draped it. “That’s not why I’m going.”

“Then why?”

“Because I need to think, and I can’t do it in here.”

She wipes her hands on the apron and shuffles anxiously in place. I shrug my coat on and feel the weight of it settle back down, reminding me of who I am and what my role is in this life.

It’s not to eat f*****g pastries with a shy, beautiful civilian, that’s for sure.

“Thank you for the food,” I say.

“Uh. You’re welcome.”

“I’ll be back soon.” I bump the door of the swinging kitchen open with my shoulder, then stop. “One more thing: Don’t tell anyone about me.”

“Why not?”

“Just humor me.” I look back at her, standing there in flour and party dress. “Tonight will be our little secret, Lilah.”

She frowns at the name. “Lilah?”

She’s framed in the doorway, curvy and gorgeous. The snow is coming down behind her in the window glass and she’s got flour on her forearms. If she told me she was an angel sent to this earth for me and me alone, I might be crazy enough to believe her.

“Everyone in your life has a name for you,” I explain in a gruff voice. “Your husband says Dee. Your sister says Dee-Dee, like you’re a dog. Your mother says Delilah Aileen when she wants something out of you.”