The Auction by Tiffany Reisz

9

Anya’s confession sent the last of Daniel’s self-restraint packing. Wrapping both arms around her, he lifted her out of the bathtub. Water poured off them both as he carried her to his bedroom.

Without a trace of gentleness, he put her on her back and yanked her panties down her legs. He tugged her dress up and heard it tear as it came off her and ended up in a wet pile on the floor.

Anya arched underneath him as he took a pale pink nipple into his mouth and sucked on it while his fingers found her other nipple and kneaded it. Daniel felt Anya’s hands sliding up his shoulders. He pulled back, grabbed her arms, and pinned her to the bed by her wrists. Using his knees, Daniel wrenched her thighs wide open. Only when Anya stiffened in obvious fear did he stop. Closing his eyes he took a deep slow breath to calm himself.

“Tell me this is what you want,” he said in a low voice. “Say it.”

“I want you, sir.” Her voice sounded so small, so scared. “I want you inside me.”

He knew she meant it. She’d called him “sir.”

He opened his eyes and bought his mouth to Anya’s. She opened herself up to his kiss, to his tongue, to his lips. Her mouth tasted as sweet and intoxicating as a dessert wine.

Daniel willed himself to slow down and think. He had condoms, lube…what he needed was a little self-control here or he’d rip her open. Before opening his eyes, Daniel took deep breaths. He hadn’t been this aroused in years. Not with Irina, not with Eleanor, not since Maggie. He had to stay calm. He had to be in control. Especially since she was sacrificing her chance to save her siblings by sleeping with him.

He wanted her but he wanted to take care of her, too. Her and her family.

“Any price,” he whispered into her mouth. “I’ll pay it.”

“What?”

He smiled against her lips. “If I take your virginity you won’t be in the auction. I’ll pay you whatever you want for it.”

Anya tried to pull her hands away from him. He didn’t let go.

“Pay me?”

Something in her voice warned him he’d said the wrong thing…or the right thing the wrong way.

“I didn’t mean it like that. Only—”

Anya tried pulling away again.

“Anya, stop. Please listen. You’re worried about money, about your brothers and—”

“You think I want to give myself to you for money?”

“No. But you were in the auction for money. And I know you want money and God knows I have more of it than anyone needs. I just meant I’d pay you—”

“Leonard.”

Daniel almost didn’t understand what she said. But the look in her eyes told him exactly what she meant.

He released her immediately and Anya sat up and pulled her knees tight to her chest in a sudden display of modesty.

“My dress,” she said, her voice hollow and cold. “Please. And please put your clothes on, too.”

Daniel moved off the bed and picked up her sodden dress from the floor.

Anya wouldn’t even look at him.

He handed her the dress and she held it to her chest and made no move to put it on. Then he realized she was waiting for him to leave, to turn his back. Just two minutes ago she’d been completely naked underneath him, her legs open wide, her body wet and waiting for him…now she’d pulled tight into herself, shut down, pushed him away.

Daniel walked into the bathroom and found his pants. As he pulled them on, he berated himself for saying, yet again, exactly the wrong thing to Anya. He’d only meant to help her, to comfort her, to take some of the pressure off of her. That was the only reason he’d offered to pay her. He had to make her understand.

“Anya!” Daniel ran from of the bathroom and found his bed wet and empty. Calling her name again he raced to the living room, tracing her wet footprints. Throwing the front door open, he saw the elevator at the end of the hall closing. Had he been able to fly he still wouldn’t have made it there in time to keep it from closing. But that didn’t stop him from trying.

A few feet from the elevator he called Anya’s name again. All she had to do was reach out and hit the Door Open button. But she had her arms wrapped tight around herself. She looked broken and beautiful, her dress wet with bathwater, her face wet with tears.

“Anya…please stay.”

“I hate you.”

The door shut in his face. And she was gone. And he knew chasing after her right now would only make things worse.

Daniel returned to his apartment and couldn’t even look at the wet mess in the bathroom, on his bed. He stayed in the living room all night, stretched out on the couch, going over every perfect moment with Anya in his head.

The second he had her in his arms, it felt like he finally knew why he had arms. The second he kissed her he understood why he had lips. The peaceful contentment in her eyes as she knelt at his feet made him understand why he’d been born to dominate in the bedroom. And when she lay beneath him in his bed, he understood for the first time why Eleanor had let him go—because he didn’t belong with her.

He belonged with Anya.

There’d even been a moment tonight—fleeting, the span of a skipped heartbeat—when he’d thought, “She’s the one. She’s the one I’m going to marry someday. She’s the one Maggie wants for me, why she left me that note, why I found it today…”

He’d died when Maggie died and Eleanor brought him back to life. And now that he was alive, he knew exactly who he wanted on stage with him for Daniel Part Two. Anya.

That she’d lied to come see him, and had been willing to give up so much money to give her virginity to him instead of at the auction meant only one thing—she was falling in love with him, too.

And he’d fucked it up completely.

He barely slept that night. Or the next. He called Anya every day and received no answer. He stopped by Signore Vitale’s and was told time and time again she was working at another shop—and no, Daniel couldn’t have the address of it. Even Kingsley was of no help.

“She told me she wants to be in the auction, mon ami. And she told me to keep you away from her.”

“When did you start taking orders from submissives?” Daniel had demanded of Kingsley.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Kingsley said, “and I do take orders from furies.”

Daniel spent that night fantasizing of elaborate ways of killing Kingsley. By morning he’d decided on the guillotine. Fitting for a Frenchman. And a traitor.

Three days passed without Daniel hearing a word from Anya or even being able to see her. And during those three days apart from her, he realized he’d give every penny he had just to kiss her again. That’s all. Just a kiss. Less than a kiss. He’d give every cent he had to know she was safe and wouldn’t be giving her body to a dangerous stranger.

Every last cent.

That thought followed him to bed the night before Kingsley’s auction. It lay with him on his pillow and whispered to him until dawn.

And when he woke up the following morning, he knew exactly what he had to do.

He picked up the phone and called Eleanor.

* * *

“You’re an idiot.You realize that, right?”

Daniel sighed and sank back into his leather sofa. “Yes, I realize that. I also realized that when you told me the same thing five minutes ago. This verbal abuse is well-deserved, Elle, but not particularly helpful.”

Eleanor stopped pacing the length of his living room rug and turned to face him.

“Can you at least explain to me why, at the most intensely vulnerable moment of Anya’s life, you decided to offer her money for her virginity? Can you do that for me, Daniel? I’m begging you to do that for me. If I woke up to find a crop circle in my bedroom, I would be less curious about the origin of that than I am about why the hell someone as intelligent as you would do something that mind-blowingly stupid. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I swear…”

Crossing herself dramatically, Eleanor collapsed and lay like a murder victim in the center of the floor. With one finger she started outlining her body, etching a makeshift chalk outline in the pile of the rug.

“I wasn’t thinking with my head at the time. Sorry. Anya’s in the auction to make money so she could get her brothers and sisters out from under her father’s thumb. I just wanted her to know that if she slept with me, she wouldn’t have to worry about the money. I would take care of her. She didn’t have to worry about anything—money or otherwise. That’s all I was trying to say.”

The corpse of Eleanor raised her head and stared at him.

“And you just couldn’t say it just like that? You couldn’t say, ‘Don’t worry about anything. I will take care of you’? Trust me, that’s hot. I’m speaking as a woman who is constantly broke and if a guy told me he’d take care of me, I’d appreciate it. Actually, I probably should have thought of that before falling in love with a man under a vow of poverty. If I fuck you again, will you pay off my student loans?”

Daniel glared at her.

She shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

Daniel rubbed his forehead as he re-imagined that moment with Anya on his bed:

Don’t worry about anything, Anya. I’ll take care of you… And maybe she’d ask him what he meant by that, and he could have said, I want you but not just in my bed and not just tonight. I want you in my life. And I want kids, lots of them, and you come with five of them. I’ll take them all because I have big empty house in the country that you and all your brothers and sisters are welcome to. If you want children of your own we can have them and if not, that’s fine. Let me own you, all of you, and you will never have to worry about anything ever again…

If he had said that, what he really meant, she would have stayed all night. And maybe even forever.

“Am I insane for thinking I could fall in love with her?” Daniel asked.

“No. But you are insane for fucking it up so badly.”

“I do that a lot.”

She gave him a look. Pursed lips. Pure disapproval.

“Stop with the self-pity,” she said. “You didn’t fuck anything up with me. I was already in love with someone else when we met. And you didn’t fuck anything up with Maggie, and you know she’d say the same thing.”

Daniel sighed again. “She would, yeah. She even…she left me a note telling me to get married again because I was such a good husband to her.”

“See?”

“And yet…I’m fucked.”

“Well and truly fucked, Danny Boy. Question is—how are we going to get you un-fucked?”

Daniel slid from the couch to the floor and lay down beside Eleanor. “I think I have an idea.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to buy her at the auction tonight.”

“I’m going to buy her at the auction tonight.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not? Bad idea?”

“Impossible idea. See?”

Eleanor rolled over and grabbed her bag. Digging through it she tossed out books and pens and notebooks, a small brown plush animal dinosaur, a map of Belgium, a package of birth control pills, a pair of handcuffs, a set of rosary beads, and finally some kind of folded card.

“Here.” She gave him the paper. “It’s the auction program for the night. Look under the submissive listings—they’re the ones on the left.”

Daniel studied the cover of the program. The heavy black paper was embossed with gold ink. “The 8^th Annual King’s Trust Charity Auction.” King’s Trust. Cute, Kingsley. Very classy.

Daniel opened the program. As was customary, the submissives were auctioned off first—three women and two men. After intermission, it was the dominants’ turn—two women and two men, including Daniel.

True to form, Kingsley had made sure everything looked respectable and above-board. The program boasted that the winners would be allowed an evening on the town with their prize—all expenses included in the winning bid. Daniel knew what the phrase “all expenses included” was code for.

Winner takes all. BDSM, sex, and BDSM sex.

Daniel scanned the listings and found Anya as the last item on the submissive side of the program. Next to her name written in elegant calligraphy were the words “Grand Prize – Take Anya on her First Date Ever.” Daniel’s stomach churned at the words “First Date.” Code for “still a virgin.” An animalistic possessiveness reared up in him. Anyone who dared bid on Anya would run the risk of the world’s most dangerously infatuated librarian dominant tearing him apart limb from limb.

“Check out the disclaimer,” Eleanor said.

At the bottom of the program it read, Auction prizes are not allowed to bid.

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “She must have told Kingsley to keep me out of the bidding.”

Eleanor shook her head as she threw her flotsam back into her bag. “Did I mention you’re an idiot and this entire mess was preventable if you’d been thinking with your actual head?”

“Does your owner let you talk to him like this?”

“The first words out of my mouth when I met him were ‘You’re an idiot.’ It was love at first slight.”

At that Daniel could only laugh miserably as he gazed up at the ceiling.

“So Plan B?” Eleanor asked.

Plan B. Daniel had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. He’d fucked things up badly enough with Anya that he feared any sort of subterfuge on his part would only make it worse. But it wasn’t about having her anymore or taking her virginity—not that it had ever been about that. He had to keep her safe. Even if she ended up hating him and never speaking to him again…it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about him and his happiness. Only Anya.

He turned his head and looked at Eleanor lying next to him on the floor. She was such a beautiful woman with her black hair and green-black eyes, her full breasts and fuller lips, her intelligence, her wicked wit, and her untamable heart. And for the first time in a year and a half, he didn’t even remotely want her.

She raised her eyebrow at him and waited.

“You aren’t in the auction, are you?”

Eleanor stared at him. “God, you’re an idiot.”