Page 36 of Masks and Mishaps

His eyes peel away from his hands and lock on mine. “Don’t make me answer that, Essie.”

Oh. He doesn’t want to admit his compensation is four weeks of fucking the woman he apparently loves.

I know the responsible thing would be to forget this—for both our sakes. The ramifications could easily get messy, and Dalton has a knack for making things messy.

…But Dalton is also a grown ass man who knows the risks involved and understands the volatility of his own feelings.

“Are you almost finished?” he inquires, letting out a spoiled, rich boy sigh. “As much as I love watching you read, I’ve been awake for nineteen hours now.”

Fine. I sign and initial, and there—Dalton and I can add “camming partners” to the long list of things we are to each other.

He flips through the pages. “It’s good,” he declares. His extended hand is the final confirmation, and I can’t keep the smile from my face. We’re going to makeso muchmoney together.

“Hey,” I offer, tugging my fingertips as I watch Dalton put away the contract, “I know filming content might seem daunting—”

“Get on the bed and take out your phone,” he interjects, speaking while he latches his briefcase.

I blink through my confusion before I can offer a graceless “What?”

“Get on the bed and take out your phone,” he repeats before he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a thick, black cloth. With a flick, he unfurls it.

It’s not a cloth, but a mask—a fucking ski mask: black with two eye holes and a hole for his mouth.

Dalton came prepared.

He tugs the mask over the top of his head, but doesn’t cover his face yet. His eyes stay on mine, and with total frankness, my good friend Dalton—my colleague, my soon-to-be-stepbrother, and now camming partner—says, “I’m going to eat your pussy, and you’re going to record it.”

Sixteen

ESSIE

“Whatareyoutalkingabout?” I question, attempting to step back, but my bed is there.

“I’m going to eat your pussy,” Dalton repeats, alarmingly casual in his delivery before he pulls the mask over his face, covering everything but his eyes and his mouth. The black fabric is thick and wooly. Intimidating. Dangerous. The guy in front of me isn’t a double Ivy League graduate with a half million-dollar salary; he’s a near-faceless criminal ditching a break-in to carry out unspeakable acts. “Sit.”

“Dalton—”

“Sit. The fuck. Down.”

I narrow my eyes and sit, swallowing past the throbbing pulse in my neck. From my low dorm bed, he seems preternaturally tall—almost foreboding—and he’s looming over me. “I wasn’t planning on filming right now,” I counter, steadying my voice. “I’m busy. I have to tweak my model.”

“Always making plans,” he muses, pushing a lock of my bangs from my forehead. “You have a plan for everything, don’t you?”

“Making plans isn’t a bad thing.”

His fingers slide down the length of my hair, and he’s studying the ends when he says, “Plans are bad when you can’t change them to get your pussy eaten by a guy who looks—and licks—like I do.”

So cocky. “You made me wait two years. What’s another day or two?”

His laugh sounds genuine. “If you knew what it’s like to have my tongue in your pussy, tasting every slick, decadent inch of you, you would know how silly that statement is.” Dalton drops my hair and clicks his tongue. “I’m about to ruin you, sweet girl.”

Whatever. A lot of men believe they’re great at eating pussy, but a lot of men also believe they could score a point against Serena Williams in a tennis match (which, for the record, they could not). And while I have nothing but good things to say about Dalton, he’s certainly not without delusions. Just this summer, when my brothers came to visit, he thought he could blow up an entire air mattress with his mouth—like, he actually tried to do it. Then he almost passed out, so I had to sit with him on Cora’s couch with his head in my lap—

“Wait. The thing with the air mattresses…were you pretending to be lightheaded so I would pet your hair?”

Dalton blinks. “I’m sorry, was I not clear? I offered to make out with your clit for the next fifteen minutes, and you seem to be talking about…”

“Don’t play dumb,” I snap. “I know you pretend to be less intelligent than you are because it disarms people, and I know you remembereverything. I know you could tell me, verbatim, the first thing I ever said to you.”

---