No Perfect Princess by Angel Payne, Victoria Blue Page B

kind of damage she wreaks on your cock. Make her bite the bedspread so everyone won’t hear her scream as you stroke her to a climax
    then another,
    and another,
    before you detonate deep inside her—
    And shattered the remaining foundations of our friendship.
    “Okay…you are here.” It stumbled out of her on another one of those raspy little breaths—which might as well have been a caress that covered everything south of my waist. Fuck, princess. Please stop doing that…
    Please don’t ever stop doing that…
    After juicing the fortitude from every muscle in my body, I answered, “Not…for much longer.”
    Her face darkened. “So…you are going back?”
    The longing to kiss away the stress from her lips… Excruciating received a world of new meaning. “Just to my place in town,” I said, instead.
    Her shadows remained. Even deepened a little. “Now?”
    I teeter-tottered my head a little. “As they say, ma’am, my job here is done.” I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t rise to that one. I wouldn’t have, either. “You know how this shit goes, blondie. It just gets messy and drunk from here. Pretty soon, people will be making out in the bushes, skinny-dipping in the pool…”
    “I like choice A or B.”
    Damn, damn, damn. “I’m going to go.”
    Dear God, I needed to go.
    Her shadows gave way to full darkness. With her lips slanted tight, she jerked free from my hold. “Fine. Then go.”
    I stepped back, too. Probably the hardest step I’d taken since my first. Mom had kept the video of that moment, so I knew. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Maybe we can grab some coffee.”
    She swished one hand, fingers down, in a motion that could’ve been yeah, yeah, whatever or get lost, I don’t care . I couldn’t risk sticking around to try an interpretation. Margaux had already enlisted her other to grab a full glass of champagne off a passing waiter’s tray, polishing it off while waving at me.
    As I turned and started toward the house, she’d already downed another.
    I glanced back, just once, to catch the gleam of the party lights on the third glass she tipped up—which might as well have been jammed down my throat then shattered there.
    Changing the subject again in your own unique way, eh, Margaux ?
    The assessment didn’t smooth over the shards still tearing my gut. Leaving her here like this, determined to become the new “it” girl for Cristal, felt wrong on thousands of levels. But would staying help? The footing on our “reunion” tonight… shit. It was a round of fucking Frogger. Take one step, breathe in relief, pray like hell not to get slammed while deliberating the next move…
    If I stayed, the carnage would only get worse.
    I grimaced while crossing the polished Italian marble of Claire’s palatial foyer. If she kept up the pace on the Cris, Margaux was going to wake up in the morning feeling like she’d swan dived off the third floor landing onto this slab. What the hell? Slamming down the bubbles, or even the shit without bubbles, wasn’t like her. Sometimes we’d hung out for hours after work, and I’d rarely seen her go for anything other than water after her second round. But in the last five minutes, she’d killed off three whole glasses of champagne.
    Holy fuck, I hoped she hadn’t driven herself to this thing.
    My first step out the front door brought a reassuring answer to that.
    Her on-call 750i was parked near the front of the luxury car traffic jam in the expansive driveway. Her regular driver, Andre, was leaning against the hood while chatting with another driver. When he noticed me, the big man grinned and waved.
    “Mr. Michael Pearson,” the man said in his musical Jamaican. The guy pulled me in for a shoulder bump that felt like colliding with a bank vault. Andre was at least three inches taller than me, with a chest like the bow of a cruise ship and a laugh like an island Santa Claus. “It has been much too long, my friend.”
    I smiled. “Yeah, Andre.