When I'm With You: The Complete Novel by Beth Kery Page B

for teaching him the value of control. At thirty-one, he didn’t consider himself to be a hard-core dominant, and didn’t require it in order to have satisfactory sex with casual lovers. When it came to Elise, however, he sensed the importance of immediately asserting his role as the sexual dominant. It would be such a pleasure to dominate her, but he intuited that it was important to Elise. She needed to learn the power of not only self-control but of relinquishing control to another.
    She needed to learn to trust. He needed her to put his trust in him. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to ask it of her, given her history of fragile, impermanent connections, but he wanted it nonetheless.
    How could he expect Elise to trust him when he harbored seeds of doubt about his very identity . . . about the fundamental rightness of his existence?
    Don’t think about that . It will get you nowhere but the bottom of a black pit of despair, he told himself irritably. What he’d told Ian Noble earlier had been true. A man chose his fate of his own free will. Lucien understood that he was more secure in that knowledge than Ian.
    Still . . . the taint lingered; it’s legacy a haunting self-doubt that Lucien absolutely refused to let overcome him.
    He forced his brain back onto the memory of the match this afternoon. Despite his typical discipline, he had allowed his foul mood—not to mention his high and dry state—to get the better of him during the polo match, and that rankled at him.
    He was as horny as a servicing bull. He’d been heavy and aching all afternoon—ever since he’d punished Elise. Pounding in the saddle during the match had only magnified the tight, uncomfortable pressure in his balls. The memory of Elise bending over his desk, of warming the satiny smooth skin of her bare ass with his slapping hand, plagued him.
    He always got worked up after a match, granted. It’d become a tradition for him since he’d first started playing polo as a teenager to have sex after time spent in the saddle. The aggressive, intense game had always primed him for play with a woman.
    But tonight was unprecedented in his experience. He was coiled tight with sexual energy, but for once he had nowhere to spend his tension. He cupped his heavy balls through his pants and slid his hand along the rigid length of his shaft.
    Lust rode him ruthlessly in that moment. The memory of Elise did. With an inevitable sense of resignation, he set down the snifter and walked to his bedroom suite. His fingers moved fleetly over his shirt buttons. Instead of removing the garment all the way, he merely opened the sides wide, baring his chest and belly. In the bedside drawer, he found a bottle of lubricant. He unfastened and lowered his pants, scooping his erection out from the confines of his boxer briefs, shoving the elasticized band beneath his heavy balls.
    God he ached.
    Hastily, he poured some of the lubrication into his hand and rubbed the silky liquid onto his straining cock. He clamped his eyelids closed at the friction against overly sensitive flesh. He let go of restraint, and the floodgates of fantasy opened. Parting his legs and finding a stable stance, he gave in to primal lust, jacking his cock with a combination of precision and forceful, savage abandon.
    What would it be like, to see Elise’s dark pink, lush lips stretched around his girth, to see his straining cock plunging into her tight, humid depths while she looked up at him, the rebellion in her eyes trumped by desire, her gaze giving him permission to use and debauch her a little. Sweet, beautiful Elise . . .
    Her eyes had always slain him.
    He stood there before the floor-to-ceiling window and pounded the staff of his cock. His eyelids flickered open. The golden glow from the lamp provided a blurry reflection of his image. His chest and abdomen muscles flexed tight and hard, his cock looking enormous in his pumping hand.
    But he was alone.
    The image of Elise’s shining, sapphire eyes as