Shivers run down my spine.
I shift my weight from one foot to another.
His fingers run up the side of my leg and tug at the first suspender strap.
It unfastens quickly, dropping into his hand. Instead of leaning over, he places one hand on my butt and another on my stomach and twists me slightly.
Another strap is off.
He twists me again, only this time his hand lingers a bit on my naked buttocks. I love the feel of my ass in his strong hands and revel in the moment.
He takes off another strap and unfortunately there aren’t ten more.
I glance down at him.
Our eyes meet.
I can see his professionalism wavering.
I lift up his chin higher and sweep my fingertips across his lower lip.
My heart rate speeds up. He opens his mouth and wraps it around my finger, pulling it inside.
My knees get weak.
When they start to wobble, Nicholas grabs my butt cheeks again and spins me again.
“Two more straps to go,” he says. “Stand up straight.”
My legs feel weak as if I’m about to fall down. I take one step to the side and then another.
Instead of going up my side, this time, his hands hesitate just below the small of my back.
I clench my butt and then relax, allowing my cheeks to fall naturally into his cupped hands.
My body jerks and another strap comes off.
One last twist.
I adjust my stance so that he actually has to put some force into it.
He places one hand on top of the panty line and runs the other one down my butt, outlining the contours of each curve.
Fire starts to build within my core. His fingers run down the inside of my thighs and then back up.
He stops for a moment, touching the thong right between my legs for just a moment before continuing on and removing the last strap.
My body deflates from disappointment.
Nicholas smiles, pleased with his power, and gives me a little slap on my ass. “Let’s go,” he says.
7
When it’s time to play…
Luckily, the drive to this place isn’t far because sitting in this corset makes it nearly impossible to breathe. The bones that keep the corset tight and in place, shaving inches off my normal waist and giving it an unattainably small diameter is the same thing that makes bending at the middle futile.
“How did you find out that I have a history with this kind of…work?” I ask.
I’ve never been arrested or convicted of anything before. I never told anyone, not even Sydney.
I always worked alone so telling others was an unnecessary risk.
By the time Sydney and I got to be close friends, I’d put that part of my life behind me.
I locked the secret up in a little box and promised myself never to open it again.
But that’s the thing about secrets, if they are forced into a dark place, they find a way out.
“I already told you,” Nicholas says. “I’m very good at research.”
“But there is no one who knew anything about this.”
“Just because there were no charges doesn’t mean that there weren’t people who had their suspicions about you.”
My fingertips turn to ice.
“Who?” I ask in a whisper.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
Nicholas shakes his head. “I do not reveal my sources. All I can say is that they’re not after you. It was just a Tiffany necklace. She married a man who could buy her twenty of them a day.”
I search my mind for names. The problem is that I had gone through so many dorm rooms and so many jewelry boxes that I couldn’t possibly know every owner’s name.
None of the women confronted me.
None of them even acted suspiciously around me.
“Why did you stop?” he asks as we pull up to a large manor house.
“I got close once. Close to getting caught. There was a big fraternity party that all the Kappa Kappa Kappa girls were obviously invited to. It wasn’t going to be a lavish affair, more like the exact opposite. Raunchy and dirty with a mud wrestling pit for those who really wanted to impress the guys. None of the women were going to wear their expensive jewelry to this party and I had some time to break in and go through the merchandise carefully.”
I’ve never told anyone this story before.
It feels good to share it now, especially with someone who understands the desire to take what’s not yours.
The expert way that he lifted that bracelet off Kathy Moreno and replaced it almost simultaneously with a fake made me realize that he might be one of the few people in the world to know how I feel.
“What happened?” he asks.
“That night I got away with about ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. I replaced them with good quality replicas that cost me about a grand, so that was a good night’s work,” I say. “But when I got home, something happened. No one suspected a thing and it had nothing to do with getting caught. I just felt…bad. I’d occasionally have these pangs of remorse over what I was doing, and they were debilitating.”
Nicholas nods to keep me talking.
But I don’t need any additional encouragement.
“One part of me would say that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It’s not like these women deserved to get ripped off but they wouldn’t even know that anything happened, so who was I really hurting? What was the big deal? But another part of me, the one that kept me up at night, would gnaw at my conscience. It doesn’t matter if anyone knew what I was doing, it doesn’t matter how much money they had or how little money I had, all that mattered was that stealing was wrong and I was better than that.”
A valet opens the door for me and I step out in my sky high stilettos.
I am not an expert heel wearer by any stretch of the imagination, so I take each step with care and deliberation.
This way I don’t look like I don’t know what I’m doing, instead, I look like I’m just taking my time getting there.
“So, you haven’t run a con since?” Nicholas asks, taking me by my arm.
I cinch my trench coat a little tighter around the waist and shake my head.
“I went to counseling to stop,” I say. “But in order for it to work, I needed to divulge details, which I wasn’t ready to talk about. So, I quit cold turkey.”
He leads me up the steps and I lean on him for support.
“Is this something I should be worried about?”he asks as we walk inside a glamorous modern house with minimalist furniture.
A woman standing at a podium next to the double doors at the entrance asks for our names.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. and Mrs. Puglisi, the coat check is right over there.”
There is no one else in the foyer besides us and the thought of taking off my trench coat makes me sick to my stomach.
I cross my arms, tightening my hands around my shoulders to make sure that nothing can take my cover away from me.
But when we enter the adjacent room with a bartender and couples in various states of undress lounging, drinking, and laughing, my anxiety lessens.
The women are dressed in a lot more provocative clothing that I am and the men are hardly wearing anything except for tight underwear that leave very little to the imagination.