Gray drove us through traffic like he was in a sports car instead of a town car. Damn, the man knew how to make me and my vehicles purr. Too bad he wouldn’t. Make me purr, that is.

Not yet, anyway.

I preferred the smaller cars over the limo and I refused to sit in the back like he wanted me to. Much more intimate and easier to talk. Also, I could lust over that sweet spot right behind his ear that needed licking.

He could make anything with a motor go, and he certainly revved mine. He was a corny hat shy of being an expert sea captain when we were out on the boat. I would have missed many a downtown dinner if he hadn’t known how to fly me from the estate to the high-rise helipad at Cruz towers. There wasn’t a car, truck, motorcycle or any other vehicle with wheels he couldn’t drive.

I had my fair share of sexual fantasies starring me and Gray on a boat, in a helicopter, in the back of a car or truck, but most of them centered around Gray and his motorcycle. There was something about having that much power between my legs.

Whew, I was getting hot and bothered just thinking about it.

He kept glancing over at me in the seat next to him. Was he thinking about it too? I sure hoped so.

“Angel, this is the weirdest, bordering on illegal, harebrained scheme I’ve ever heard of.”

So, no. He wasn’t thinking about me bent over his bike, his hands up my skirt...

“Are you listening to me? I don’t think you should do this. Who has a harem of men?”

I did. Or I would soon. Gray wouldn’t play with me, so I found someone, several someones, who would.

“I’m finally doing something productive with my money instead of real estate spending sprees like my father does.”

My father had no say in how I managed my wealth. It wasn’t his. Never was. Mama always said a girl needed some independence.

The rest of the people in my world, my ex-fiancé included, had expected me to be the posh debutante. Use my money for charitable foundations and be a philanthropist or something else the upper crust did. I gave plenty of my time and money to worthy causes. It didn’t mean anything, nameless faces getting nameless money.

I’d seriously never thought about other options before. If I wasn’t going to be a Fifth Avenue housewife I needed a new plan. My choices had always been simple. Either marriage or become the CEO/owner/founder of a multi-billion-dollar international business. Quite honestly nobody thought the second path existed for me. But those were the choices for the filthy rich. Use your money for good or evil.

I chose option number three, and it had become my new plan. No more housewifery for me. I was going to use my money for sex.

It wasn’t a long-term plan. But I didn’t need to decide what to do with the rest of my life, yet. One life-altering change at a time.

“It’s not harebrained. I provide an opportunity in exchange for a service. Sounds like a good business proposition to me.” I’d spent a lot of time putting the idea together.

Okay, three days. But it felt right. For the first time in as long as I could remember I had an idea of my very own and nobody was putting the kibosh on it.

Gray screeched around a corner, pulled the car to a fast stop. Showed exactly how much I’d gotten under his skin. He was usually much more careful with me than that. I’m not sure I’d ever even jerked against my seatbelt before.

He shut off the engine and pierced me with one of his I’m-here-to-protect-you glares. “Angel, you’re talking about prostitution.”

No, I wasn’t. Not really.

Kind of.

I rolled my eyes and picked at a newly chipped nail. Must have done it flipping the bird so many times at the club. That had been great. This was going to be too, despite Gray’s reservations. I had none. Not one. Really. “It’s not like I’m a madam.”

“You’re paying men to have sex with you.” His voice took on that growl that I normally found sexy. The brat in me rolled around in his ire like a kitten in catnip.

“I’m offering a scholarship and guaranteed admittance to a top university, plus room and board. These guys would be having lots of sex anyway. I’m simply asking them to limit their sexual escapades to me.”

Gray latched onto a lock of my hair. He wrapped it around his finger, playing with it. “I know I said you needed to go out and find yourself, do some sexual exploration, but this is not what I meant.”

His voice had dropped to that husky I-want-you sound that instantly dampened my panties. He could ask me to do almost anything in that tone of voice and I’d be begging to please.

Except this.

I still knew down to my core that Gray wanted me. But he didn’t want to want me.

I pushed his hand away. “I don’t need another boyfriend, and I don’t want a series of random one-night stands.” Although my first and last one-night stand had been pretty epic. “I want to know my partners are safe and I’ll be more comfortable trying different things with someone I know.”

Those someones whom I knew wouldn’t have a problem with my curves. I didn’t want to be with anyone who was settling. I was a BBW and if I embraced my curves, I damn sure expected the men I bedded to do the same.

Even thinking that was a whole new world for me. I’d had so little self-worth for as long as I could remember. I wasn’t at a hundred percent, but I was well on my way. Getting comfortable in my own skin counted for tons of percentage points. Hot raunchy sex with men who found me desirable freed me to practice feeling sexy myself.

I wanted to call Ian and Hawk up. I’d be very happy asking them to come out and play again. They both had proved to me in all the best ways that just because I wasn’t a size six, or even a size sixteen, I was still beautiful, lust-worthy, fuckable.

Gray had conveniently lost Hawk’s card. Which both irritated me and made me smile deep on the inside.

He picked up my hand and drew circles on the inside of my wrist. “What kind of different things?”

Why did he insist on driving me insane? The skate of his fingers across my skin was soft and still lit me on fire. “You know.”

He reversed the direction of the circle, drawing a figure eight with his thumb. “No. Tell me.”

Tell him what again?

Oh, right. What the hell I wanted to do with my new harem... instead of him. “Kinky things.”

“Like what?”

I almost said it was none of his business. But he’d made it his business the second he brought out his cock during my first taste of kinky, freeing sex.

Not that he’d touched me. Even when I’d asked him to. He wouldn’t touch me, but he’d damn well watched and he’d certainly touched himself.

Since then he’d been sulky and silent on the issue.

It was his own fault. We, or at least I, could be happily playing at his BDSM club, but he still wouldn’t take me. The Asylum wasn’t someplace I could get into on my own. One could only get in with a member.

Grayson was a member.

That still sent shivers up and down my spine, and then between my legs.

I tugged my arm away, but he didn’t let me go. “Don’t make me say it.”

“How are you going to do it if you can’t say it?”

Damn. Good point.

“I want to fuck.” Yeah, I’d blurted that out.

“I’ve had my fill of crappy ass love-making. I want to suck cock and I want someone else to watch me do it.” Hint, hint. “I want to ride someone’s tongue like a rodeo bull. I want to command someone to fuck my ass and enjoy it while they spank me. I want feel like a dirty girl and a dominatrix.”

“You don’t need a stable of men at your beck and call to do that.”

“Then take me to The Asylum.” Score one for Angelina. Come on. He had to see that coming.

“No.” He released me and started the car back up. “I never should have mentioned it. It’s not your kind of place.”

Leadfoot took off so fast I was pressed back in my seat. Probably to throw me off balance, distract me from the conversation. Not a chance. I wouldn’t even have thought about the Asylum if he hadn’t brought it up in the first place. There had to be something I’d done or said that night that made him change his mind. But I’d been over it in my head a thousand times – not like that was a hardship – and still had no clue why if he’d offered then he wouldn’t take me now.

“How would you know?”

He continued to look at the road, but I saw that one slightly raised eyebrow he was famous for.

You let a guy see you naked, screwing around with two other men once, and they think they know your every inner thought.

“Humph.” I folded my arms and looked out my own window.

I wasn’t going to admit that he knew me better than anyone else in my life. That tended to happen when you spent almost every hour of every day with someone, whether they were a bodyguard or not.

But did I know him as well as he knew me? I’d had no idea he favored the kinky sex, much less that he was a member of an elite BDSM club like The Asylum.

Where I let it all hang out, all my fears and all my disasters, he’d kept his personal life to himself. Not that I’d noticed.

I always thought we were friends. But there’s a give and take to friendship and while I’d taken a whole hell of a lot from him, I couldn’t say what I’d ever given back. Maybe I really was a bitch.

At least we’d always been real with each other.

How could I have so many feelings for someone I actually knew so little about? I rubbed a hand over the weirdly empty spot behind my sternum.

Neither of us said anything for the rest of the drive to the estate. Fine by me. Gray took his frustration out on the poor car pushing its limits. The muscles in my back and neck felt suddenly tired and tight. Not in same way that a massage would fix either.

When we got home he didn’t stop at the front to let me out. The car crunched over the gravel leading to the garage. He parked, turned it off and sighed.

“Do you want me to take you to a club, Angel? A different club? There are plenty of choices in the city.”

Yes. “No.”

Interesting. So, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t take me to get my kink on. It was that he didn’t want to take me to his club.

“Come on. We’ll go, you’ll learn some new and naughty things, and we’ll be done with this harem business.”

I knew that cajoling tone. It was like the one where a mom tries to convince her child that broccoli tasted delicious if only you’d try a bite. I wasn’t a child. He wasn’t my parent.

While I did want to check out the whole sex club thing, I had zero expectation that Gray would participate.

That was unacceptable.

We sat there in the silence of the garage. He waited for me to jump on his idea. I waited for him to figure out he was being an ass. A girl could only wait for so long. “Good try, but it’s too late. I’ve already contracted a recruiter. She’s in Italy tonight to interview two potential applicants.”

Boom. From idea to done in one. One-hundred thousand dollars that is.

Gray went still and quiet. When he spoke, it was his scary voice that made me think he was pretending to be calm but in reality was ready to flip his shit.

“Who is this person? Can you get a hold of him and call it off?”

I hated the damn scary voice because it meant I had to tell him the truth about everything or face the consequences. I didn’t know what those would be, but I was sure I wouldn’t like them.

“I’m using Gloria Forsyth. She used to run one of those mail order bride places that masqueraded as a foreign matchmaking service.”

He stared at the steering wheel like he could turn it to stone. “I would have liked to vet her. Do my job. How do you know you can trust this woman?”

“Why wouldn’t I? She built a whole business around finding compatible partners for the rich and famous.”

“Because of exactly that. She’s predicated her career on taking advantage of people with money. Can you get a hold of her and call it off or not?”

Didn’t he already say that? If only I could get his one-track brain onto a different track. The take-Angelina-to-bed line would be my choice. “I could, but I’m not going to. Everything will be fine. I’m not the naïve little girl everyone thinks I am. He’d die if anyone knew, but my father’s CFO found his wife, Nadia, through her. She offers a service I needed. End of story.”

Gray gripped the steering wheel so hard I thought it might become a diamond under his hands. “Angel, don’t do this.”

Was he asking because he had feelings for me and didn’t want to see me with other men? Or because he thought he was protecting me?

He was my bodyguard and refused to be my lover. That right there answered my question, and it wasn’t the answer I wanted. That pissed me off.

I didn’t let my temper out to play very often. In fact, never. Well, maybe that was another side of my personality it was time to explore.

“Don’t tell me what to do. Men have been telling me how to behave my whole damn life. I’m not being that good girl anymore. You can either support me or not. I don’t give a fuck.”

The skin on my cheeks burned all the way to my ears. That hadn’t felt as good as I thought it would.

Gray reached across me and pulled the latch, shoving open my door. Then he stared at me until I got out.

The three seconds of adrenaline from my little tirade plus the new burst flowing into my bloodstream at this moment made my ears ring and my skin tingle like it was too tight.

Esta jodido. Gray told me to go after what I wanted and needed. Now that I was, he didn’t like it. Typical guy bullshit.

I got out of the car, didn’t bother to shut the door and used that same sex goddess who owns the universe sashay to walk away.

I was a woman with a plan and the initiative to get it done. I would have my harem. It didn’t take much.

Money and resources to recruit men, check.

Contacts at an Ivy League university, check. Thanks to the generous donations from my family over the past three generations.

A place to play with my harem. Check. My brownstone was perfect for room and board and all the fun times I intended on getting up to.

The heat of my anger turned to a churn in my stomach. I’d never been impulsive like this in my life. I’d never been allowed to or thought that I could. So what if I wanted to hire a whole stable of men to service me?

They’d be a perfectly fine substitution for what I really wanted and couldn’t have. They were a means to an end.

Why did I feel like I’d made a mistake?