Page 33 of Indecent Demands

Ididn’t expect Ariana to make me dinner. Frankly, after last night and keeping her in my house all day today, I expected her to resent me a little bit. But when I walked in she was smiling and cheerful, and I found my heart flipping in my chest.

This was so close to what I had wanted for so long, to come home to someone, to no longer be alone. But it was all temporary. Ariana needed me to protect her and not turn her in, and she wanted to be on my good side. This dinner was probably a form of bribery. I couldn’t let my dick or my heart get in the way of my head.

We sat down to eat, and Ariana thanked me for giving Tony a good reason why she wouldn’t be at work.

“Well, you’ll pay for it,” I pointed out with a smirk after swallowing a bit of the delicious stew. “Every day that you’re hidden here, you know what you have to give me in exchange or I turn you in.”

“But you could’ve just turned me in instantly,” Ariana replied, almost flirtatiously. “Most people would have. They wouldn’t have seen any value in what I was doing.”

Yet, I had. I couldn’t deny that despite her illegal way of obtaining the money, I was sympathetic to her crusade to help others who were less fortunate. “How did you get into doing it?” I asked.

Ariana shrugged and absently swirled her spoon in her stew. “It just felt like the right thing to do. I wanted to spare others the pain I’d felt.”

“But all your medical debt is paid off.”

“You think that happened legally?” Ariana laughed bitterly. “My father had just died when my mom got into the car crash. We hadn’t paid off most of his medical bills and suddenly we were saddled with more. I tried to pay the bills down but there was only so much that I could do.”

A deeply pained expression came over her face. “It’s my one regret—letting her drive. I didn’t realize how bad she was after Dad’s death. She would have days when she was fine, and times when she really, really wasn’t. I should’ve offered to drive her to the store myself if she was willing to wait.”

I reached out and took her hand, squeezing it. It was all the reassurance I could offer, meager as it was. “You know it’s not really your fault.”

Ariana nodded. “I know. Logically. It’s just . . . I miss her and feel so alone sometimes.”

I squeezed her hand again, and she squeezed back. I thought about my parents—I didn’t get to see them as much as I’d like but I made a point to fly out during the holidays to spend time with them. They’d love Ariana, or at least that was what I thought. She clearly needed a family, and to not be so alone.

Ariana withdrew her hand, but her eyes held mine. “After my parents died… I had lost all my friends taking care of them. Not that anyone just dropped me, but it was hard. I couldn’t have a social life. And we were in such debt. So I did what I had to do to get myself out of it. I know it was selfish but I was so angry and depressed. I had just lost my parents. I didn’t want to be drowning in debt for the rest of my life from trying to take care of them.”

She exhaled a deep breath before continuing. “My father had already taught me about the importance of technology and how technology itself isn’t bad or good, but the way people use it can be either of those things. The way that these tech oligarchs control it all and use it to scrape data on us and sell us things… it’s a horrible privacy breach, but they don’t care, because it makes them rich. So I decided that it was only fair that these people give back some of their wealth. I stole from the company I worked for to pay off my debts, and from there…”

“You stole to pay off the debts of other people,” I completed.

Ariana nodded, and her chin lifted determinedly. “I never wanted anyone to go through the pain that I had. People die every day because they can’t afford the medical care they need. People have to ration out their insulin and they die when they run out and can’t buy more. Meanwhile, these men sit on money they will never, ever use and is illegally gained. There’s only so much you can spend your money on and the rest just literally sits there.” Her eyes blazed with passion and conviction. “I know it’s ethically wrong, but I took it to help people survive. I never took anything for myself once my debts were cleared. Never.”

I hated to admit it because it felt like I was betraying my client, the person who had hired me, and she was technically breaking the law, but… I agreed with her. I admired her, actually. She had done what so few people actually managed. People talked all day long about how things should change or be better, but few people actually did anything about it. Ariana had. She had helped hundreds of people. How many people could really claim they’d done the same?

And yes, she’d broken the law, but she had done it for a good cause, fighting against a system that benefited the few rich and ignored the thousands of struggling poor. Until the system changed, people were going to keep dying and suffering, and she was doing what she could to balance the scales. Could I really blame her for that?

“I think that’s amazing,” I said honestly. “What you’re doing, how you’re helping people…”

Ariana gave me a sad smile. “But you can’t let it continue.”

I couldn’t deny that she had a point. I wasn’t law enforcement. I couldn’t force her to do anything and truthfully, I had no obligation to turn her in. But how could I let her just go on doing what she was doing when I might run into her again when another client hired my company?

Ariana cleared her throat. “It’s—it’s fine. I’ll figure something else out. My luck was bound to run out eventually, right? Nothing good lasts forever.”

She abruptly got up, clearing our plates from dinner and taking them to the sink to wash the dishes, and put away the leftover stew.

I stood up. “You made dinner, I’ll clean it up,” I insisted. “It was delicious, by the way. It was nice to come home to someone else being here and having the company.”

Ariana smiled down at the sink. “It was nice to have someone else with me, too. I hadn’t realized how lonely I was.” She paused, and I saw her cheeks go slightly pink. “Or how much I wanted someone to take control from me in the bedroom.”

I started on the dishes, gently hip-checking her out of the way so I could get to the sink. “Well, it makes sense to me. You’ve been alone for so long, making constant choices…” I shrugged. “In my experience, we want in the bedroom things we don’t get in our regular life. They fill a visceral need. They scratch an itch. So if you haven’t had support or have always had to make choices for yourself and take care of others, then it’s nice to be taken care of when it comes to sex, and have someone else supporting you.”

Ariana nodded. “That—that’s exactly it. I—” She swallowed. “That was the best sex of my life, honestly.”

Pride flooded me and I nearly dropped the plate I was washing. I knew I was good at sex. It wasn’t like I’d never been complimented on my skill in the bedroom before. But coming from Ariana it meant more to me. I didn’t want to think about why. That was a dangerous road to go down.

“By the way, I liked the paint swatches in the bedroom,” she said, changing course so fast it almost made me dizzy. “I think you should go with the darker teal color. It’s soothing and it matches the darker color scheme you have going through the whole house. Have you considered wallpaper in some rooms on the ceiling?”

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