Teaser time!!!! I'm at about 30k words on Mastering Lexie (working on Chapter 5). For those of you who keep track, my books are usually somewhere between 80-100k words. Which is actually a little longer than the average novel length (70k words). =) This particular teaser is the very beginning of the book. I haven't done a Prologue for any of my Stronghold books so far, because I haven't felt like I really needed one, but I wanted to go back over some of the events from Taming the Tease, so I figured that would make a good prologue. Specifically, I didn't want us all to miss out on Lexie & Patrick's confrontation in his office, the one that she talks about at the end of Taming when she's at Girls' Night.
So here's a bit of the prologue to whet your appetite =D
Prologue
I'm going to this. Yep. I am really, totally going to do this.
Squaring her shoulders, Lexie pushed the front door to Stronghold open and stepped into the all too familiar lobby. A lobby that she'd spent far too much time in over the last year and a half, just as a way to get her foot in the door. Well she'd gotten that, and she'd even gotten past that door onto the main floor of the BDSM club. Unfortunately, her forward momentum seemed to have stalled out there.
And she was so damn tired of waiting.
It seemed like half her life had been spent waiting. Waiting to grow up enough that it wouldn't be creepy for Patrick to notice her as something other than a little sister. Waiting for him to realize that she was definitely interested in the lifestyle that he led. Waiting for him to realize that working the front desk of Stronghold wasn't scaring her off of the lifestyle, that it was actually making her want it more.
Waiting for him to sweep her off her feet - or at the very least, push her onto her knees.
She'd tried the waiting game. Acted the brat to get his attention when she felt like he'd been ignoring her for too long. Hoped that one day he'd lose his temper enough to actually punish her; to treat her like a real, adult woman, a sexual submissive, and not just the annoying little sister of his best friend.
There were times, moments, when she saw flashes of attraction in his eyes. He hadn't done a scene with any other woman since she'd started working here, not even when she'd had a boyfriend, so that had to mean something, didn't it? The other submissives seemed to think so. Some of them had been kind of pissed at her about it at first, but none of them had tempted him into breaking his abstinence. Which Lexie was grateful for.
She would have dealt with it, but it would have sucked.
By now he should be at least as sexually frustrated as she was. After all, she hadn't done anything beyond making out with her last boyfriend. Trevor had been a poor distraction from Patrick. Honestly, it hadn't really been fair to Trevor either, because she'd been using him. Then again, he'd been a jackass, so she hadn't really felt bad about it at the end.
All of which had led her here. Today. Wearing a coat and heels and nothing else. Unless you counted the two silver hoops through her nipples, which were rubbing against the front of her coat and making her pussy cream at the exquisite sensation. She'd been covering them up and hiding them under her bras while they healed; letting her breasts bob freely felt wonderful not. Not like she had more than a handful anyway. She'd never really needed to wear a bra until she'd gotten her nipples pierced and needed the barrier between the sensitive nubs and the rest of the world.
It hadn't hurt that bad when she'd had them done, but by the next day it had hurt like a bitch. Especially when her breasts brushed against anything. So the bra had served two purposes. A hardcore masochist, she was not.
"You can do this," she muttered to herself, wiping damp palms against the short trench coat.
The club would be empty right now, except for him. Everyone who worked at the front desk knew that Patrick was always here long before the club opened, in his office working on the books or advertisements or whatever else he needed to do to keep the club running. He liked the quiet of this time of day, especially since when the club was open he preferred to be out on the floor.
She hadn't told anyone she was going to be here today, which wasn't like her. But she didn't want the pressure of people waiting to hear how things went. Especially because things could definitely go horribly wrong. She was baiting the bear in his den, grasping the reins from a complete control freak, and hoping against hope that it wouldn't blow up in her face.
Hopefully this would prod him into some kind of action. Getting jumped and ravished would be nice, but she didn't hold out much real hope for that. Maybe a spanking or some kind of punishment, something that would at least give her the chance to show him that she could take it. Even if he just agreed to let her onto the other floors in Stronghold, where people were actually doing the interesting things, instead of making her stay on the main floor at the bar with all of their friends watching over her, in exchange for getting out of his office... she would take it. It would still be progress.
So he'd been her older brother's best friend for years... he wasn't actually her older brother, even if that was the excuse he used for bossing her around. She'd acquired a whole bevy of big brothers from Jake's friends, all of them Doms at Stronghold, all of them super over protective. Lexie called them the Sentinels, after the robots from the X-man. They were illogically, unwaveringly devoted to their cause since Jake shipped off to Afghanistan, and Patrick was their leader.
Slowly but surely, she'd been working on inserting herself into Patrick's life. Showing him that she could handle his needs - hell, that she wanted the same things. Lexie preferred it when Patrick was bossing her around. It didn't just turn her on, it made her feel grounded. She'd spent her entire life with bossy older men, thanks to Jake. Sometimes she liked to poke at them, because it was fun, but she felt happiest when Patrick would put his foot down and draw her back into line. He was the only one that ever did so, the rest of the guys always deferred to him.
It made her feel secure. Cared for. Even treasured sometimes. Of course, it could also get a little smothering sometimes in a way she didn't care for, and that's when she tended to act out. Wishing that he would spank her or tie her down and tease her mercilessly until she was begging to orgasm. The kind of things that the couples in their group did together. As Lexie watched enviously from the sidelines.
She was so damn tired of watching from the sidelines. That thought helped her gather her courage. Her head tilted up, chin in the air, and she squared her small shoulders, marching - as best she could on 4" heels - to Patrick's office door.
