Beck tipped his chin toward the room. “Do you wantthat?”
Maybe Ihadthought about it, enough to know my opinion didn’t matter. I’d traded torment in Hell for servitude on Earth, and I didn’t regret that. I wanted to stay far more than I wanted to return, and staying meant sustaining this strange new form. This demon who asked over and over for one thing.
“I want…” My tongue grated like sandpaper across the roof of my mouth, and I swallowed dry. Then I looked at Beck, forcing myself to hold his gaze long enough to ask, “Can you feed me?”
He frowned. “You mean… sex?”
I nodded and swallowed again, like the action would ease my hunger pangs. Like I didn’t already know it wouldn’t.
Beck cupped his hand to my cheek, then lifted my head until we were eye to eye. Uncertainty cut lines across his forehead, and I wondered if he didn’t believe me, or if he sensed the gap between my wants and needs.
It was a gap I needed him to fill because he had become both. Something desired and demanded. But I reduced it to my vice, that insatiable beast that had been stripping away my soul since the moment I woke up in Hell.
My lips parted, and I breathed in the tendrils of lust that stretched between us.
“Are you hungry, Beauty?” Beck’s voice was low and smooth in a way that made me quake.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Yes, feed me.
Yes, fill me.
Yes, give back what Maslow took.
“All right,” Beck agreed. “But not here. I don’t intend to perform for an audience, and I don’t want to…” He stopped so abruptly it was like he’d sucked the words back in. With a jerk of his head, he beckoned to me. “Outside. I have a car.”
He pulled away, but I stayed put, buffeted by a new wave of fear.
I couldn’t leave the club.
It was bad enough to leave the room after the cameras had doubtless seen Beck enter then leave without accompaniment. Maslow would wonder. He would ask, and he would smell the sex on me, sense I was full again. So really, I couldn’t feed either.
The thought of spending another night starving, deprived of what Beck was willing to give, made me nauseous. I gulped at the air, swallowing and adding emptiness to my emptiness before I managed a weak protest.
“I… I can’t…”
Beck’s mouth bent in a frown. “Can’t what?”
“There’s guards… the bouncers. They aren’t supposed to let us…” I took a moment to corral my frantic thoughts, then settled to say, “We have to stay inside.”
I saw Beck’s questions accumulating, ready to fall on me like a barrage. If he asked, I would answer truthfully. I would tell him all the things that made me bitter, the rules that kept me confined, and the secrets Maslowinsisted we keep because customers didn’t care about our lives, or our names, or why I only had one.
“Do youwantto stay inside?” Beck asked.
I had no reply for that.
Beck glanced up and down the corridor before shrugging out of his suit coat and draping it across my shoulders. My eyes stretched wide as the warm garment covered me to my thighs. The fabric felt slick and smooth against my skin. Like my silks. Like safety. Like rescue.
When Beck stepped away, his expression was almost tender.
No, not almost. Itwas. Because I had value. Because he asked what I wanted. Because he was going to give it to me.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
