Kinky Boots (Mischief Books) Read online

  The buzzing grew louder. But strangely the world around her seemed sharply focused, more detailed than she could ever remember it being – the smell of cold coffee in a paper cup on his desk, the sound of a jackhammer on a nearby street, the tiny mole just in front of the man’s right ear, the growing crescents of sweat beneath his armpits sharp with the acid scent of nerves overriding the citrus tang of deodorant. ‘Oh, we’re very clear,’ she said, caressing her BlackBerry again. ‘Clear as a bell.’

  She placed the flat of her hand against his chest and shoved him hard. He gave a little grunt of anticipation, like maybe he was OK with a woman taking the upper hand. He had no idea, she thought. He stank of his own lust, and she could damn near read his mind. He thought he was in, he thought she was kinky enough to be turned on by him, the little toad. And when she’d pushed him back until his bum rested against his desk, he practically quivered with excitement. The laugh that came from her throat startled even her. The man was pathetic, and her time was way too valuable to waste on such a creature.

  She spoke as calmly as if she had just told him the football scores. ‘You disgusting little worm. Do you really think there’s anything you could do to persuade me to let me put your filthy little cock inside me? You have two hands, Devlin, I would suggest you fuck yourself, and, while you’re at it, fuck this job because I no longer need it.’

  She heard the pop of joints as he catapulted off the desk into a stiff-necked stance, eyes bulging, chest inflating like a balloon. ‘You filthy slut! Clear your desk, you little bitch. I want you out of my sight. Now!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Devlin. I’m leaving.’ She stepped back just beyond the range of his anger, and it really was as though her right hand didn’t know what her left hand was doing. ‘But before I go, you’ll agree to make sure my unexpected leaving is nicely smoothed over with HR. You’ll also make sure that I’m very well compensated for putting up with you, Devlin, very well. And finally you’ll make sure there’ll be the stellar references I deserve for my CV.’

  ‘You fucking little bitch.’ He lunged for her but she stepped back, pulled the BlackBerry from her pocket and hit the playback button.

  What do you want me to do, Mr Devlin, Jill heard herself say. Then she heard her boss’s fetid laugh.

  I want you to lose the jacket, unbutton that lovely silk top of yours and give me a good look at those tits you’re always pointing at me …

  When she switched the recording off, the man looked decidedly green.

  ‘I think we understand each other, Mr Devlin. I’ll be back Monday to pick up my things and talk to HR. What you do between now and then will determine what I do with this lovely little recording. Are we clear?’

  The man nodded. In truth she was afraid if he opened his mouth he might just throw up.

  ‘I know a lot of the women who work here, and I know how you treat them. I’ll be having coffee with them from time to time, just to see how things are going. You get the picture.’ She held up the BlackBerry. ‘Oh, and one more thing, Devlin. My busker story leads this week’s eZine, according to plan.’

  Then she walked out of his office, shut the door quietly behind her and just kept walking with the strange buzzing in her ears reducing everything else to background noise. She felt like her head was too full, too full of everything, colour and light and darkness and texture and scent and sounds and distance and space and time. And everything felt so completely solid. Inside her there was a powerful urge to run down the street laughing hysterically. The job from hell was finished. Finished! She’d never have to face Devlin again.

  Right next door to the urge for hysterical laughter was the urge to panic hugely. The battling urges threatened to rip her chest open, threatened to cut off her breathing, threatened to drive her to her knees. But the sun was bright and the air was warm and she was going to Shoreditch to fuck the clerk at Kinky Boots.

  * * *

  In the end Chelsea called her fuck buddy, the banker, who called Vivie. Because she fancied him, it hadn’t taken him long to wheedle Jill Hart’s name out of her. It turned out Vivie was a bit of a matchmaker and found the idea of hooking up her friend with a hot bloke irresistible. The hot-bloke bit was Chelsea’s embellishment, not Finn’s, but if it worked, it worked. By noon, Finn had tweeted and Facebooked Jill Hart. He was sure it was her because she had a fairly good photo of herself as her avatar. He’d got the number of her landline, but there had been no answer, and he’d had no response from his efforts with social media. Jill didn’t seem like the type who would leave a debt unpaid. He was sure she’d be back once she realised that she hadn’t paid him for the boots, but by then it could be too late. It was frustrating. It was more than frustrating, it was frightening. Eleanor had never deliberately hurt anyone. Not deliberately. But after the last time, Finn couldn’t believe that she would willingly do what she’d clearly done. The thought made him cold inside.

  He was getting desperate when he got a call from the Water Poet pub. The bartender was a friend. There was a woman at the bar fitting Jill’s description. She was doing tequila shots.

  Chapter 4

  It was only when Jill was in the tube heading toward Old Street Station that the impact of what she had done hit her full-on. She probably would have collapsed in a heap, but the carriage was packed cheek to jowl. She had just quit her job! Christ! Not only had she quit her job, but she’d told her boss to fuck himself. She hadn’t even realised she was recording the bastard. How could she not realise? If anyone else had done what she’d just done, she’d be congratulating them, patting them on the back, buying them a drink for giving the arsehole what he deserved. But it wasn’t someone else. It was neurotic, shy, insecure and now unemployed Jill Hart who had done it. What the hell would she do now?

  Instead of paying for the boots she could no longer afford, Jill ended up wandering aimlessly around Shoreditch silently arguing with herself amid the Saturday bustle of shoppers. The job, which she would have otherwise enjoyed, had been a nightmare from the beginning, and all because of Devlin. And now she had the man by the short hairs. She would have a bit of a cushion until she could find what she wanted. It was all so exciting, she tried to convince herself. She had just opened the door to all kinds of new possibilities. On the other hand, she had just opened the door to poverty and moving back home with her mother, a thought that made her queasy.

  She wasn’t sure how long she wandered about, or which part of her had won the argument, but when she finally came back to herself, leaning against the bar at the Water Poet pub downing her second tequila shot, she figured it was not Betty Bright-Side who had come out on top.

  ‘Tequila before lunch is not a good sign.’

  She was surprised to find the clerk from Kinky Boots standing next to her, if anything looking even sexier in the bright light of day than he had in the mood lighting of the shoe store. He ordered a coffee.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Are my boots equipped with a tracking device for customers who leave without paying?’

  He offered her a smile that seemed to turn inwards, as though he knew a private joke. ‘Something like that.’ Then he added, ‘I figured you’d come back, and even if you didn’t, I can hardly begrudge you the boots after … well, after such a lovely down payment.’

  She laughed softly at her own private joke, but then she decided not to keep it to herself. ‘Afraid a down payment may be all you’ll get. I just quit my job.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My boss is an arsehole, OK, but that’s nothing new. Up until now I’ve managed to get by keeping a low profile. But today … don’t know what came over me. Guess he finally just pushed me too far.’

  The man’s startling eyes darkened like a storm, and he leaned closer. ‘What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  She found that she didn’t, which was strange. There was a time, only yesterday in fact, when what her boss had done to her would have embarrassed her, would have made her doubt herself
and wonder what she’d done to make him think of her that way.

  When she’d finished her story, the clerk’s eyes had gone from stormy to a total cyclone of rage. The muscles along his jaws looked like he could chew bullets, and Jill noticed his fists clenching and unclenching at his side. ‘Sounds like the bastard deserved what he got and then some,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.’

  ‘Well, I did. And now I’m unemployed.’ When she started to order another shot, he laid his hand on hers.

  ‘Don’t do that.’ He held her gaze, and the feeling wasn’t unlike looking over the cliffs into a raging sea. ‘Since you can’t afford to pay for the boots, I see no other option but to have you work off your debt, and you can’t work off your debt if you’re drunk.’

  She blinked. ‘But I don’t know anything about selling shoes.’

  Ignoring the fair-sized crowd of early lunchers and the press of loiterers at the bar, the clerk tilted her chin with the curve of a finger and brushed a tease of a kiss against her lips. Even though it was barely there, no part of her anatomy missed the flick of his tongue. When he pulled away, still holding her gaze, they were both breathing noticeably harder. She was suddenly aware of just how trimly the T-shirt with the electric-blue Kinky Boots logo fitted across his chest. ‘Though it wouldn’t be that hard to train you to work in the shop, what I had in mind is something that I hope you don’t need any training for.’

  ‘Oh. Oh!’ There was something delightful, refreshing, regenerating in the fact that he wanted her still, even in the naked light of day, even with her miserable confession of unemployment. She responded by kissing him back, by answering his tongue with a flick of her own, by brazenly resting a hand high on his thigh. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I don’t get out much.’

  ‘I like women who don’t get out much. That means they’re focused on things that matter to them, and I like that a lot.’

  ‘Vivie calls that clueless,’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘I’m not Vivie, am I?’ This time the kiss included an embrace that jostled the drinkers at the bar next to them and nearly pulled her off her feet. He placed a warm hand against her bare skin, beneath the jacket and under the edge of her blouse. This time there was more than just a flick of the tongue, much more. And Jesus, did the man ever know what to do with his tongue!

  Still ploughing her mouth like he expected to find hidden treasure, he fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a tenner and slapped it down on the bar. Then he pulled away for breath. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

  They were only a few blocks from Kinky Boots, but it seemed too far. He barely had her out of the door before he crushed her to his chest and ravaged her mouth again, this time running both hands up under the back of her blouse, then down to cup her bottom and haul her up onto her toes until she could feel the rake of his growing hard-on against her pubic bone. He pulled away gasping, grabbed her hand and dragged her at a breakneck pace down Shoreditch High Street toward Kinky Boots. ‘We’d better hurry,’ he said. ‘This time I don’t intend to come in my pants, and I certainly don’t intend for you to.’

  Jesus, the man was talking dirty to her right out in the middle of the busy street. ‘You’re taking me back to the shop?’ She balked. ‘We’re going to do it in a shoe store? On Saturday afternoon?’

  He pulled her close and gave her another hard, quick kiss. ‘Shop’s closed. I’m taking you to my place.’

  They rushed and pushed their way through the Saturday-afternoon shoppers and strollers. She was just barely able to contain the urge to elbow and stiff-arm people out of their way to clear a path when, at last, he led her through a maze of alleys to the back of a building. He unlocked the door and practically thrust her inside with his lips and tongue. One hand slammed the door behind them while the other shimmied the jacket off her shoulders onto the kitchen floor and made quick work of the buttons of her blouse before nimbly dispatching the hooks of her bra. That done, he gave a desperate kneading squeeze to each breast and a hard suckling kiss to each nipple, making her wet her knickers with delight before he returned his attention to her mouth.

  ‘I dreamed about you last night,’ he said, shoving her skirt up over her hips. ‘I was trying to find you so we could finish what we started.’

  ‘Me too. I dreamed about you.’ She fumbled with his jeans, in an inelegant effort to free his cock, but he pushed her hand away impatiently. She watched in fascinated arousal as he unbuttoned and unzipped with one hand and, glory hallelujah, if the man wasn’t commando! The swell of him spilled anxiously into his hand, ridged and weighty against the press of his balls and the pillow of dark russet curls beneath.

  He rested one hand on his erection, almost like he needed to control it, almost like he were afraid it might get away from him. The other hand slipped aside the crotch of her panties. She thrust her hips forward and gave a little jerk of a gasp, banging her head against the wall at the startling pleasure of him parting the swell of her with two fingers. Then she yielded to his probing.

  ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘I don’t fuck the unconscious.’ Then he let out a low whistle. ‘Jesus, woman, you’re so slick and soft. Once I’m inside you, I may never want to come out.’

  ‘Once you’re inside me I may never let you out.’ She reached for his cock. ‘Do it. I need you to do it. Now.’

  Cupping his hands beneath her bottom, he lifted her as though she were weightless then pressed her back into the wall so she could shift her hips to open for his cock, so she could have the leverage to bear down and thrust back once he was inside her.

  The power of his first thrust left her breathless. The girth of him felt as though it was forcibly spreading her hipbones apart. And when she was certain he’d rammed himself all the way up until he could touch the beating of her heart, he gave a soft grunt and held himself there, deep and tight, while she gripped and suckled and slicked herself down there, down between her thighs, in the painful pleasure of being so full, in the delicious effort to accommodate.

  Then slowly, very slowly he began to withdraw, with her body grasping desperately as though it were making an effort to hold him there. All the way, he withdrew all the way, and they both cried out as though something had been ripped from them. Her throat ached from a growl that was barely human, and her body felt fevered and raw and so sensitive that she feared even a touch would abrade skin and bone. And yet she longed for so much more than just a touch. She could smell his animal-dark heat mixing with her own wet summer scent, making her wild with the want of him. Then he slid two fingers inside her and circled her clit with his thumb, never touching the rest of her, only circling, so close that she held her breath anticipating his conquest. All the while his dark seawater gaze was fixed on her face.

  ‘I love that you’re so wet,’ he said nipping her throat just below her ear. ‘I love that you’re so ready for me.’

  He held her there suspended, her legs still wrapped around him, her back still pressed tightly to the wall. The tip of his erection was almost but not quite touching her pout. It jostled and bounced while his fingers circled and probed and dipped until her clit felt like a small, hard mountain raised up by the circumnavigations of his thumb.

  Just when she was certain she could no longer stand the heat, the sheer delicious friction of it, he thrust back into her. Hard! Fire shot up her spine and the buzzing returned to her ears, that same buzzing she’d had when she’d confronted her boss. She felt everything, every single pore of the clerk’s skin where it touched hers, every hair follicle, every undulation of muscle, every sweep of breath. As the thrusting grew to a frenzy, he took her mouth with bruising force and when they were both so close to the edge that she was amazed he could speak at all, he forced the words out in a breathless hiss: ‘I’m Finn, by the way.’

  Finn? Where had she heard that name? It was familiar. ‘Jill,’ she gasped. ‘I’m Jill.’

  He bit her lip. ‘And who else?’

  She bit him back. ‘Just Jil
l.’

  This time the impact of his thrust felt like it would go clear through her and the wall behind as well. ‘Oh, you’re more than just Jill,’ he managed. ‘Way more.’

  There wasn’t time to question. There wasn’t time for anything because they were there, on the edge, both tight and stretched and ready to shatter. He came first, but only by a breath. ‘I’ll ask you again,’ he cried out. ‘Who are you?’

  It was only as she tumbled into orgasm that she realised, and she knew exactly who he was looking for. Even as the mother of all orgasms ripped through her, she was certain that not only was she not alone, but she hadn’t been since she left Kinky Boots last night. In that instant, someone else borrowed her voice as though it belonged to her. That someone else said, ‘I’m Eleanor, Finn, you silly man. You know who I am.’

  Chapter 5

  As waves of orgasm convulsed her, last night’s dream came rushing back to Jill in vivid detail. She felt like her brain was caught between channels, with visions of the woman sliding in and out of focus in her mind’s eye, with memories of her touching her, exploring her, delighting in her. ‘Who’s Eleanor?’ Jill gasped. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Finn wrapped his arms tightly around her and held her, still fully impaled, still pressed against the wall. ‘Jill, I’m going to pull out of you now. Just relax, stay calm and I’ll tell you everything.’ She might have been able to do as he asked if he hadn’t, while still holding her gaze, said, ‘Eleanor, I’d appreciate it if you’d cooperate.’

  ‘Who the hell is Eleanor?’ she asked again, struggling to stave off the rise of panic that wasn’t supposed to be a part of post-coital bliss. But as he slipped out of her, as she felt their combine moisture trickle down the inside of her thigh in a warm rush, the rising panic slipped out of focus and hungry arousal slid into its place. She raked her fingers between her legs, then brought them first to her nose, then to her lips. ‘Oh, my, how we taste together, Finn.’ She repeated the action and brought the offering to his lips.