Page 18 of Pregame

“Trust me,” he says softly.

“I’ll try,” I manage.

He doesn’t move, and I can feel his gaze on me, steady and unrelenting.It’s utterly disconcerting and I want to rip the blindfold off—to see him, to see where we’re going, to not feel so damned vulnerable—but something stops me, and instead I sit quietly.

“So, what do you want to know about me?”he asks conversationally as if this were a normal date and I’m not sitting next to him blindfolded, unable to see him, only able to hear the sound of his voice and the thunder of my own heartbeat.

I don’t even know where to begin.

“Um, where are you from?What do you do?”

His hand strokes along my thigh lightly as he answers.“I have an apartment in San Francisco, where I live most of the time, and another in Manhattan for when I’m there on business.I’m originally from the East Coast, but I went to college at Stanford and fell in love with the city, so I stayed.I run a company in San Francisco that invests in a variety of business ventures, but our primary work is tech and internet based.”

“You run a company?Like, you own it?”I ask.“You can’t be over thirty.”

“I’m twenty-nine.I had an idea in college for a web-based stock exchange.It was a good idea,” he adds with a hint of humor in his voice.“I spent the first two years out of college building the platform and the business, and I made a million dollars the first year we went public.Our revenue has doubled each year since, and I’ve continued to reinvest it in things I believe in, which has been equally lucrative so far.”

“Wow.”If he’s already a millionaire, he can’t be on the show to win the money.“So, why are you on the show then?”

“A friend talked me into it.”His hand moves a little higher and I instinctively start to close my legs.“Keep them open,” he commands.

Suddenly powerless in the face of his confident commands, I do as he says, parting my knees again.He goes back to stroking little paths across my inner thighs, his nails occasionally scraping across the sensitive skin.I’m having trouble concentrating, and my breathing is shallow.He’s right; without my sight, everything seems more intense, and his voice is wrapping me in its seductive timbre, seducing me with its hypnotic powers as surely as his fingers are igniting my skin.

“What about you?”he asks.“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“And your family?”he presses.“Do they live in New York also?’

“There’s just my mother.She lives in Texas.”This is really none of his business, and I have no desire to tell him anything more about my family.“I just graduated from NYU,” I say, veering to a safer topic.

“What did you get your degree in?”

“Marketing and design.I want to do internet design.Logos, websites, stuff like that.”

I feel ridiculous.We’re exchanging pleasantries like we’re on a regular date, but I’m blindfolded.And he’s not.It doesn’t seem quite fair.I’m desperate to see his face, to read his expressions, or to at least see out the window and know where he’s taking me.

“Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“When are you going to take the blindfold off?”

“When are you going to stop trying to know and control everything?”he counters.“I’ll take it off when I’m ready.”

I bite my lip, wanting to ask when that will be, but I know he won’t give me a definitive answer.

He growls and then his lips are on mine again, pushing my head back against the leather headrest with the force of his kiss.

“Rule number two,” he rumbles.“If you bite your lip, I’m going to take your mouth.”

I lift my fingers, self-consciously rubbing the lip in question.He captures my hand and sucks my finger into his mouth.His tongue flicks across the pad erotically, his teeth nipping sharply, and my stomach drops in response.

“Tell me something else about yourself, Ava,” he rasps, releasing my finger.

I’m drawing a blank.I don’t want to talk about my past, and my present for the last two years has consisted of nothing but school and my job at the Coffee Bean.Not exactly scintillating conversation.There’s the show, but that certainly doesn’t seem like a safe topic when I’m sitting blindfolded next to the man who bought me.“There’s not much to tell,” I say finally.

“I somehow doubt that,” he says, his voice silky.“You seem to have infinite layers.I’m looking forward to peeling each one away until you’re fully exposed to me, hiding nothing.”

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