“Have you fucked her?”

The question had him pausing, his gaze sharpening on her now. He wished he had kept the careful distance he had started with. If he had, he might not have noticed the hard little nipples poking against her vest-style blouse, the white cotton doing little to hide the dark points from his gaze. There was no mistaking the arousal in her eyes, but he had been trying to ignore that.

“Is that any of your business, Courtney?” he asked her then, his voice gentle. He had no desire to hurt her feelings.

“Of course it is.” Her smile was faintly mocking. “I don’t want to go shopping with someone who’s already shared your bed, Ian. If I wanted to do that, I would have brought one of my maids with me.”

He arched his brow in surprise at the thread of anger he heard in her voice, as well as the fact that she knew who he played with while he visited. Well, he may as well strike fucking her maids if he visited her father’s estate again. And that was a shame. Dane insisted on hiring women whose coloring complemented his daughter and wife. There had been a few who resembled Courtney so closely he could even fool himself for brief moments.

“No, Courtney, I haven’t fucked Ivy,” he answered her coolly, fighting for a show of strength in the face of a possessiveness toward him that did nothing to soften his cock. “Any other questions.”

A vivid smile shaped her lips. “None. I just wanted to be certain. I would hate to be jealous of a potential friend.”

Aforementioned cock throbbed.

Damn her, he was aching to his back teeth to fuck her and she dared to sit there teasing him? He had done everything he could to avoid her for the past year, going out of his way to refuse Dane’s invitations, whereas he had accepted them eagerly in the past. He had fantasized about her, dreamed about her. Jacked off to her image. And now, he was going to have to deny himself. Denial wasn’t something he did well.

He watched her gaze flicker to his lap and grimaced at the fact he wasn’t exactly hiding his arousal.

“You’re going to get into more trouble than you can handle, Courtney.” Ignoring the situation wasn’t going to solve the problem.

“Am I?” Were her nipples harder? Were they pressing tighter against the cloth of her blouse? He knew his mouth was watering, hungering for a taste of them.

He smiled with an edge of mockery, more toward himself than toward her.

He wasn’t exactly used to denying himself anything he wanted sexually. As the owner of The Club, the exclusive men’s club that catered to dominant males whose tastes ran to the extreme, Ian was considered one of the most carnal of the group.

“Courtney,” he sighed her name warningly.

She grimaced at the tone of his voice. “I’m not a child, Ian. Even though you persist in trying to treat me like one.”

She edged closer. The scent of her, peaches and sweet female flesh, wrapped around him.

“You’re acting like one,” he accused her, attempting to find some distance, some defense against the hunger raging in his loins as she slid across the seat, too close, too warm and willing.

“Am I?” she whispered sensually. “Or perhaps I’m tired of watching you fuck my maids and moan my name as your head falls back and you climax to a vision only you can see. Evidently, a vision of me.”

She was leaning close to him now, watching him knowingly, leaving him no room to deny the obvious.

And what was the point? It wasn’t that he didn’t want her, that he didn’t crave the taste of her. It was her innocence, her connection to him. How could he destroy the purity he saw in her gaze? The trust her father placed in him. His connection to her was so much more than his connection to anyone else in his life. He cared for Courtney. Cared for her in ways he had never cared for anyone.

He hadn’t anticipated this, he realized. He should have. In hindsight, he knew he should have expected it from her. He had seen the attraction grow within her, just as it had grown within him. His experience hadn’t helped him to ignore it, or destroy it. It was a hunger, a fascination he knew could destroy them all. And he cared too much for her to allow that.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered, lifting his hand to touch her face, to marvel at the silken feel of her flesh. “So fresh and so innocent.” He allowed his voice to harden in warning. “Don’t push me, Courtney, to destroy that innocence. You won’t like me much afterwards, and losing your affection would hurt me more than you know.”

She stared up at him, her dark eyes filled with myriad emotions as he watched her process not just what he was saying, but what he wasn’t. In the meantime, he seemed unable, unwilling to stop his fingers from drifting down the smooth column of her throat just to feel the warmth and the hard pulse of blood beneath her flesh.

“You want me,” she stated, her voice soft, aching with need. And in that moment, he wanted her even more.

“I want you until I burn with it,” he admitted bitterly. “Until I nearly denied your father’s request to allow you to stay here. But I want more than you could ever give, baby. What I want from you could well destroy you.”

Something flashed in her eyes then. Some unnamed satisfaction that had his gut clenching in surging hunger.

“Would it? You forget who my parents are, Ian. You forget, I’ve watched you for years, having sex with my maids. And you weren’t alone with them. I’m very well aware of what you are, and what you may want from me.”

His cock was going to burst straight from his pants. Its engorged width throbbed, ached, demanded that he fuck her here and now and responsibilities be damned. Yes, she was her parent’s child, and he knew well the sexuality that Dane and Marguerita shared. Her father wasn’t one of the leading members of The Club for nothing.

“I’m not a game you can play, Courtney.” His thumb smoothed over her pouty lips as his body tightened to the point of pain with his need. She was so young, so fucking innocent, like a breath of pure, sweet air in his life. There was a special type of hell that waited for men perverse enough to corrupt such innocence. His soul was already stained once, he wanted nothing more to mar it.

Son of a bitch, arousal had never been this hard to deny in his life though. The hunger pulsed, bewitched, tempted him as nothing else ever had in his life.

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not trying to play a game, isn’t it?” she asked him softly. “And what makes you so certain I’m a virgin? That’s something only I and my gynecologist knows for certain. He’s not telling… And there’s only one other way to find out…” Her wicked look sent his pulse soaring.

“And no friends.” Ian had learned that lesson the hard way. The best way to lose a treasured friend was to take her to bed. The complications became astounding.

No virgins. No friends. No strings. No emotion. It was a recipe for loneliness, yet also the solution to avoiding the mistakes of the past. There were nights that loneliness ate him alive, but that was far better than the alternative.

He pulled his hand back, glancing past the window as they pulled into the long driveway that led to his home.

The three-story mansion was nearly a hundred years old, built by his grandfather, created as a home for his family. It was Ian’s father and several of his friends who had created The Club, and based it in the back wing of the mansion.

“Spoilsport.” The teasing pout in her voice he could handle. The naked arousal, the ever-deepening hunger touched too much of him, struck too close to a past he wanted only to forget. And it tempted him too much. She tempted him more than anything or anyone ever had in his life.

“Brat.” He glanced at her, smiling fondly, wishing, not for the first time, that life were different. “Come on, let’s get you to your room. Next time you decide to visit, Courtney, an earlier flight might be best…”

Control, he reminded himself as he escorted her into the house and up to her room. All he had to do was remember his control, and everything would work out well. She would leave in a week or so, her innocence and affection for him still intact. And if the loneliness dragged at him, darkened his life or left him regrets, then he would remind himself that at least her smile still charmed the world, rather than being dimmed forever.

Chapter One

One Week Later

If Courtney had a dream, it was Ian. From the time she had first thrown herself into his arms at age ten, ignoring his stiff surprise, his uncomfortable reaction, she had known no one else would do for her.

At first, the dream had been simple. Ian laughing with her, having a tea at her dainty little iron table, smiling at her with that crooked smile that made her feel as though he truly wasn’t certain why he was amused by her.

As she grew older, her needs had grown with her. The boys of her age lacked excitement, they lacked sophistication.

They weren’t Ian.

She had continued with her girlish crush, though the dreams had grown hotter, more erotic as she grew older and developed her own unique, individual personality. Wild and reckless, she had fallen into an older crowd of friends and learned the facts of life much sooner than she imagined her father could have ever guessed.

By the time she was seventeen, she knew of most every sex act and had seen many of them performed. And she fantasized of Ian. His lips covering a nipple, drawing on it hungrily, or buried between her thighs, his tongue licking her with ravenous greed. His cock… She closed her eyes, her breath catching in her throat as she pushed the sheet from her, her fingers trailing to the center of her body and the swollen heat of her pussy.

On his last visit to her father’s estate, she had caught sight of that perfect stalk of flesh. Thick and heavily veined, the crest a dark purple, tapered and glistening with cream as he bored into the housemaid who had shared his bed that night. The small sucking sounds created from the act had her clenching her thighs as her own juices began to flow.

Now, her fingers slid through the thick, syrupy proof of her lust, circling the swollen bud of her clit as she imagined him touching her as he had the maid, fucking her with hard, deep strokes that would surely have her screaming from the tight fit of his erection inside her snug pussy.

She whispered a moan at the thought of him there, between her thighs, tempting her, teasing her, making her beg. And more. So much more. He would push every sexual boundary known to man and most women. He would make her body sing with pleasure, make her blood boil with the heat and desire that had simmered within her for years. He would give her the freedom, the courage to allow the wildness inside her free. To give the tempting fantasies life as the heat flamed through her. He would do more than allow her to be the sexual being she knew she was. He would encourage it.

She bit her lip, the sudden vision of her body, slim and delicate, sandwiched between him and one of the men she had seen going into the back entrance of the house. He would hold her tight, his hands clenched on her hips as he filled her pussy, holding her still as another touched her, pulled her buttocks apart, slid his erection along the crease of her ass until his cock was buried in the small hole there.

She bucked to her own touch, gasping at the fantasy of his expression. Seeing the pleasure, the wildness in his blue eyes, the flushed, eager lust on his face as she cried out for him.

Her pussy gushed, cream flowing to her thighs as her fingers pressed inside her weeping vagina, her palm rasping against her clit as her hips bucked involuntarily.

More. She pressed two fingers inside the hungry tunnel, tossed her head and began to thrust mindlessly. She needed… She ached to the point that she wondered if she could survive the arousal without release soon.

Frustration echoed in her guttural moan as the elusive climax teased her, just out of reach. So close… She was so close. She lifted her other hand to her swollen breast, her fingers pinching at her nipple, pulling at it roughly as the small streak of pain shot from her nipple to her clit, making it throb with impossible desperation. How was she to survive this?