Naughty November

Chapter 3

THREE

NIKO

Parrish took the whiskey out of my hand, sipping at the overpriced liquor while he watched me with a fiery and dangerous expression. He’d never been anything less than trouble, taunting me and teasing me from the first day we’d met. Sometimes I wondered if taking a job at the palace was the biggest blessing or curse in my life, and when Parrish’s lush mouth burned hot against my skin, I didn’t see the difference between the two options.

My affair with Parrish had started off the same as most, I imagined. Not unlike Christian and Kale’s own relationship, against a wall under the cover of shadows. He’d spent weeks pushing my buttons, poking at me, calling me names and diminishing me over my job. And every night I’d gone home horny and frustrated, turned on beyond belief from all the things Parrish had spent the day spewing into my ears.

Finally, once I’d had enough, I shoved him against a wall, my forearm pressed hard against his Adam’s apple and, instead of fighting me off, he moaned. The asshole moaned at me, bucked his hips forward, and pushed his erection into my thigh. Before I could get away, he reached down and took my own hardening length into his hand, spun us both so it was my back against the wall, then he made me come in my pants with nothing more than his fingers.

The next morning, he’d deliberately spilled his coffee on me and ordered me to clean up the mess he’d left on the floor. I could have called a maid—should have—but he already had the towel in his hand and he was pushing me to my knees before I could argue. Whereas he’d spent weeks talking down to me, once I kneeled at his feet, wet rag in hand, Parrish bent low to my ear and called me a good boy, the best boy.

I’d almost come in my pants a second time.

After I finished cleaning up the mess, he’d sent me on my way. Giving me a two-hour reprieve until he caught me in the same corridor, the same afternoon shadows, his hand was down my pants again, fist hot and tight around my cock. Parrish whispered all sorts of names into my ear, slut being his favorite by far. Though sometimes he called me sweetheart instead and the synapses in my brain misfired completely.

We carried on like that for months until Christian fell in love and decided to move to America. Phillip sent me with him, and everything had been in a state of upheaval ever since. Christian and Kale were kinkier than half the guest list at The Black Door, and I’d ended up with an eyeful—or earful—on more than one occasion. I wasn’t a stranger to the things that went on in a place like this, even if my personal understanding of it wasn’t up to par with their own lived experience. Every night I had to tail them to The Black Door, I found myself resentful of my job, my status, my rank. All the things Parrish had taunted me over, the things he’d made into sticking points with the intent to get me off, they burned. Real life reminders that I couldn’t have the things I wanted for myself.

I could have my apartment and my paycheck. The rest would have to wait.

Parrish wrapped his arm around my midsection, a warm banded reminder that my time to wait was, at least temporarily, over.

“Before I make you come, Niko, I want to know why you haven’t called me since you moved,” he said, pulling me away from the bar and toward a small overstuffed chair in the corner. He landed on the cushion and pulled me down onto his lap, using his feet to spread my legs apart and his arm to press my back against his chest.

“I’ve been working.”

“You worked before,” he said. “You’ll work again.”

“I don’t know, Parrish.” I closed my eyes and leaned against him, relaxing into the familiar yet somehow still cruel heat of him.

“Is it because you didn’t know better?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Because you left so soon, so rushed. I didn’t have time to explain what I expected of you.”

I curled my fingers over the top of his forearm, but he wasn’t going anywhere. For as slight as Parrish was in stature, he was just as strong as me, even though I towered over him. I had more height, more muscle, my cock was thicker and longer, but it had never stopped him from dominating me in every possible way.

Sometimes, he liked to remind me of that too.

“Look how pathetic you are,” he had said to me one night, minutes after sunset. My tongue licked him from his ankle to the back of his knee and he told me, “Bested by a man half your size.”

“What did you expect?”

“Do,” he corrected, dragging one of his hands to the inside of my thigh. The touch was delicate and tender, and then he gouged his nails in, pinching the most sensitive skin he could find through the expensive wool of my slacks.

My instinct was to fight him, but he kept me pinned on his lap, fingers twisting the small piece of skin they’d managed to latch on to.

“I wasn’t ready for things with you to end, Niko.”

He said it so simply, so out of context for everything our relationship had been up to that moment. I didn’t know how to process the meaning, so I asked him the only five words that my brain could make sense of.

“What do you expect, Parrish?”