The Winemaker's Dinner: Dessert (The Winemaker's Feast) by Dr. Ivan Rusilko

know. I could tell she’d already made up her mind at the party, so I was just playing with her. And the second I pull in the driveway—before we even get out of the goddamn car—she literally jumps across the seat and starts grinding into my lap and sticking her tongue down my throat.”
    Elle leaned over and placed a hand on his arm. “I have to run to the ladies’ room,” she told him. “Will you be here when I get back?”
    “Absolutely,” he said, nodding. “Maybe by then they’ll be gone and we’ll be able to hear each other again!”
    She smiled and disappeared, leaving him free to focus on the train wreck of a conversation behind him.
    “You better have fucked her proper.”
    “Here’s the fucking thing. We get inside, barely, and I get her down to her bra and panties in sixty seconds flat. Drunk women are so easy. And she’s hot, trust me. Lean legs, toned stomach, and an ass to die for—a really sporty-looking fuck. So we start making out again real hardcore, and I think I said or called her something I shouldn’t have, because out of nowhere she just fucking stopped with this blank look on her face and broke down crying.”
    “Ouch.”
    “I love my boyfriend…I can’t believe I’m doing this,” the drunk whined in a high-pitched voice. “You know, the typical shit that falls out of a woman’s mouth when she’s had too much.”
    “So, she wasn’t kidding about the boyfriend, eh?”
    “Yeah, he’s some asshole who lives here in Miami, actually. Seems like a real dickhead.”
    Now thoroughly intrigued, Ivan took pity on the guy in the story. Unfortunately, he could totally relate. Poor guy must have shitty taste in women, but I gotta see this girl . He turned and cased the room for the heartless bitch with a killer body in the blue dress. His eyes moved over dancing party-goers and desperate hopefuls, but nowhere was there a blue dress hiding the promise of physical perfection. Then his eyes fell on a once-vacant table that had now been filled by the private party. The dress wasn’t blue, though. It was teal.
    The curve of her hip was one he knew well. He’d gripped it many times before. He knew the feel of the V that formed at the top of her breasts. He’d often laid his face against her soft skin as he fell asleep in her arms. And he knew firsthand the boyfriend in this romantic tragedy who had shitty taste in women. It was him.

Chapter 16
    “Freak on a Leash”
    “S HE W AS S O D RUNK , the bitch ended up passing out. I got her good in the morning though. Told her we fucked.” A snorting laugh followed this revelation.
    “You didn’t!”
    “Yeah, I did. Handle your fucking liquor, slut. She learned a lesson from it too. She and her boyfriend broke up, and of course I was the bad guy. But screw her—she wasted my night.”
    Ivan stared dead ahead at the girl he’d thought he’d known as he listened to the evidence of his romantic homicide being confessed. And the confession was quite different than he’d imagined. Damian Gris’s heartless claims of victory and conquest over someone Ivan held so dear shot rage through his body.
    Each word, each claim, each twisted truth deepened the veil of red forming over his eyes, and within moments, Ivan had lost the battle with his inner beast. The freak he’d subdued just days ago was now off the leash. This time anger had wound the freak into a maddening frenzy of fury, rather than lust. An orgasm of rage heightened his senses and made clear his direction.
    Every moment of despair Ivan had felt in the past six months filled his mind at once—the look on Jaden’s face the night she’d broken him, days and nights of crushing emotional pain, and the nameless faces of the women who’d served as his sexual painkillers. The wreck his life had been saddened him, and it was all authored by him and his manipulation of her .
    But after a moment, one emotion rose above the swirling anger and angst: pity. He felt sorrow that the beautiful