Mistress, Inc. Read online

  The sudden blare of a horn shook Jessa and she looked up to see a dusty white pickup truck parked beside her at the light and the white red-headed man looking down into her car. She raised her finger and sucked off the juices as she winked up at him just before she tooted her horn and accelerated forward, leaving him behind.

  Dropping the cell phone onto the passenger seat, she felt a little of her anxiety eased. Just a little, though. She rode in silence, wishing she could erase the scenes replaying in her mind like an old-school record that skipped:

  The first time her husband, Marc, had invited Eric over to the house when he moved into Richmond Hills. I honestly looked at him like a brother ... back then.

  The moment that a look shared between them had changed everything between Jaime and Eric. When Jaime thought Eric and I weren’t to be trusted she had been so wrong because that moment came years later and it surprised us both.

  That first kiss they shared in Eric and Jaime’s kitchen. Once we crossed the line, there was no turning back.

  The first time they made love, said I love you, or planned to be together. It felt like we were made to be.

  The moment she pressed Send on that text message to Aria, Renee, and Jaime. They had stopped being my friends long before that. All of them.

  The moment she realized that Eric wasn’t moving in with her, wasn’t giving up his marriage, wasn’t willing to make her his number one. His betrayal shattered me and I thought it couldn’t get worse.

  Until ...

  Eric had begun to stalk her. I am a grown woman and his insistence didn’t fool me into thinking that was love. It was pure craziness.

  And then the look in his eyes as Eric tried to kill her. Jessa shivered from that last memory as she reached up and lightly touched her neck. Thank you, God, for letting me live.

  Jessa slowed her car as she neared the front gate of Richmond Hills. She slowed to a stop and lowered the window to enter her code into the keypad. The tall, black wrought-iron gate opened with ease and she drove forward, passing the glass-enclosed security booth and giving Lucky, the red-faced portly security guard, a brief head nod before she zoomed forward around the curve leading to the clean streets lined with beautiful, stately homes that were worth three quarters of a million. Mostly more.

  From behind her shades she ignored how the few neighbors not attending the funeral eyed her vehicle as she passed them. Judging me, she thought, fighting the childish urge to flip their condescending asses the bird.

  Instead, she forced herself to slow down and do a slow roll through the subdivision. She refused to speed through. She refused to hide.

  It takes two to tango, and Eric was right there dancing with me. And once I ended the dance, he tried to kill me.

  Jessa’s lips twisted as she eyed the large silk black wreath hanging on the front door of Jaime’s house. And it was Jaime’s house now. Eric’s suicide left her to play the role of the grieving suffering widow.

  A bunch of bullshit. Jaime was as full of shit as a stopped-up commode. She probably had her trick, the stripper with the dick for sale, on speed dial for a “good-bye to her husband fuck” once the last guest left her house after the repast.

  Jessa knew all about Pleasure. Once Eric discovered that his perfect wife had cheated on him with the sexy stripper, he had Jaime investigated by a private detective. Eric had been more than willing to lay up in Jessa’s bed and share every sneaky-deaky detail of the investigator’s report with her. And the detective earned every red penny of his three thousand dollars. He dug it all up, including Jaime’s secret trips to that strip cub for years ... and the fact that the sexy Pleasure was serving up his dick at a price.

  It took every trick I had to suck and fuck away the anger Eric felt from his wife making a fool out of him.

  Jessa sucked air between her teeth and waved her hand dismissively as she pulled her Jaguar into the driveway of her brick and stone French country-styled structure. She paused a bit to see a large floral arrangement on her front doorstep. As she climbed from her car and tucked her clutch under her arm, she looked over her shoulder just as her next-door neighbor Mrs. Tuttle, Mr. Houston from across the street, and the Levys all turned away from staring at her. She felt the coldness of their shoulders even across the distance.

  It was always easy to sweep at someone else’s door. But the problem was there were no real secrets in Richmond Hills.

  Mrs. Tuttle’s gardener, Hector, was chopping down more than the bushes. Mr. Houston’s wife had no clue that she couldn’t get his dick as hard as Yuri around the corner. And the Levys? Word on the street was he’d backhand her like a pimp did his ho if she got out of line behind closed doors.

  Everyone has secrets, yet everyone judges, casting stones and sweeping around the wrong doors.

  She shifted her eyes to Renee’s spacious and pristine brick Colonial and then Aria and Kingston’s beautiful Mediterranean. Humph. Everyone.

  Turning around, she continued up onto the porch, stooping to pluck the card from the flowers.

  Jessa,

  I’m very happy you’re okay and I appreciate your gratitude for my help, but I can’t accept flowers or pretend I approve of your role in the entire thing.

  Best,

  Mrs. Livingston

  The flowers she sent Mrs. Livingston for saving her life had been returned and her thanks thrown back in her face. The weight of their judgment was bearing down on her shoulders and hindering her revival. Every attempt she made to do better and to be better was being rebuffed.

  “Fuck all of you,” she said aloud in her husky voice.

  With one last look around Richmond Hills, with eyes filled with just as much condemnation as her neighbors had for her, Jessa used her key to enter her home, leaving the arrangement on her porch as she closed the wooden door securely behind her.

  Chapter 2

  In the hours that passed since the funeral, Jessa’s anger had not cooled one bit, especially when she had been busy putting things into place to make sure Jaime regretted the stunt she pulled at the funeral. Visions of slapping the taste out of Jaime’s, Renee’s, and Aria’s mouths haunted her as she kept replaying the embarrassing scene in her head, over and over. She sat soaking in her oversized porcelain floating tub and the hand lightly resting on her thigh closed into a fist.

  “You deserve that and more!”

  Jessa shook her head in disbelief as Jaime’s cold words continued to echo around her.

  Really, I deserve to die behind a dick? Bitch, please.

  She closed her eyes as she lightly rested the back of her head on the smooth edge of the tub. She had tried to read her new leather-bound Bible to find solace, but that had not worked until she found the verse she took as a clear sign that Jaime deserved to get as good as she gave: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

  Okay, truthfully, she knew what she had planned for Jaime was hardly sanctioned by God, but Jessa couldn’t let Jaime slide with embarrassing her like that. Jessa had never been one to be slapped and turn the other cheek. Never.

  God, you will have to forgive me.

  Just as the water in her porcelain floating bathtub began to cool, Jessa rose, letting the water run down and drip off the curves of her body as she reached for the plush white towel from the heated rack on the glass multicolor tiled wall. She moaned a bit at the feel of the warm cotton against her skin as she stepped out of the tub and buried her feet into the thick plush mat.

  Looking around, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy her surroundings. Everything spoke of affluence. “So different from how I grew up,” she whispered aloud, shifting her eyes up to take in her reflection in the oversized mirror.

  Raising her hand, she lightly traced her face, remembering the sad little girl she used to be: afraid to hope; afraid to dream; afraid to love. Being abandoned by a mother had a way of doing that to a little girl.

  In time, she learned to push down the sadness and shield it
with emotions that made most think she was inherently sarcastic and insolent and vain. All the while she was a wounded child trying to make sense of it all.

  Sighing, Jessa pushed aside the sadness and regrets, leaving her bathroom en suite to enter her spacious circular-shaped walk-in closet/dressing room. She paused at the marble island and dropped her towel to the hardwood floor. Atop the island she selected one of the thirty perfume bottles neatly organized alongside her various scented lotions and black suede jewelry displays.

  Jessa smoothed lotion onto her body, sprayed her pulse points with perfume, and selected a racy sheer corseted bustier to wear with a matching ruffled bottom panty. When she stepped out of her dressing room/closet, her feet were cushioned in one of the hundred pair of heels lining the shelves on the far wall.

  She was just closing her new leather-bound Bible and sliding it inside the top drawer of her dresser when her doorbell rang. She licked her nude lips and gave herself one last look at her reflection before she left her bedroom and tightly closed the door behind her.

  With each step she descended she kept her eyes locked on her closed front door. Mostly because she wanted to get to what awaited her on the other side, but also because she didn’t dare chance a glance into her living room. Since she returned to her home yesterday, she pretended the room didn’t exist. The room or the memories.

  Jessa planned to call in her interior designer to gut the room and hopefully her memories of Eric trying to kill her along with it.

  Stepping in front of the door, she fixed her face into a sultry smile, but then remembered there was no need for the pleasantries or even seduction. Not with a paid dick.

  Opening the door, her eyes shifted up and her head tilted back a bit to take in the square and handsome face surrounded by jet black and thin dreadlocks. He was all things built for good sex: tall and muscular, rough and unpolished with black tattoos on his deeply bronzed caramel skin.

  “Pleasure, I assume?” Jessa asked, reaching out to lightly wrap her hand around his wrist. She was surprised that she actually felt her pussy tingle at the sight of him. The feel of his smooth, oiled skin. The smell of his warm cologne. The way his eyes were taking in all of her own sex appeal in the naughty little getup she greeted him in.

  Damn!

  Looking down at his cell phone, he nodded his head as she pulled him inside. “You’re Jessa Bell?” Pleasure asked, his voice that deep timbre that made you think of walls crumbling.

  “The one and only,” she said, pausing slightly when she wondered if he had seen her on the news. “Do you know me?”

  “Not yet,” he said with a lick of his smooth lips as he eyed the top of her full breasts and shifted down to her shapely legs. “But I will.”

  Jessa didn’t know if he was lying or not and didn’t care.

  Jaime didn’t give two shits about Eric, but this man standing before her, ready to please, had been the woman’s fixation for years. He was the man Jaime was fucking when her phone missed and dialed her husband, unknowingly filling his voice mail up with the sounds of her being fucked well by her lover.

  Jessa stepped forward to look out the door and down the long and winding street. Sure enough, cars were lining the street outside of Jaime’s home. The bitch was there.

  But first things first.

  Jessa stepped back in the house and closed the door behind her, turning to eye Pleasure as she leaned back against the wood.

  “How did you get my number?” he asked.

  Jessa’s heart double-pumped, but she smiled smoothly. “You serviced one of my neighbors.”

  “Which one?” he asked.

  Jessa lifted a brow before she pushed up off the door and turned slowly with her hands up in the air slightly. “No guns. No shields. No police here,” she said with a laugh as she finished turning to face him.

  Pleasure smiled as he pushed his hands into the pockets of the black oversized sweats he wore with a black wife beater T-shirt.

  “But it was Jaime. Jaime Hall,” she said, her eyes on him.

  His eyes widened a bit before he frowned and licked his lips.

  “She told me you were a good fuck well worth the price and I just had to see it for myself,” Jessa added, walking up to him. “A thousand, right?”

  Pleasure nodded before he freed his hands to grab her waist and jerk her forward. He bent his head to press his mouth to hers, but Jessa turned her head slightly, causing his lips to land on her cheek instead. She cut her eyes up at him as he leaned back in surprise.

  “No kissing,” she told him softly but firmly. “I mean ... really, though?”

  Pleasure nodded in understanding as he stepped back from her. “No problem,” he assured her, even though his eyes glinted just a bit.

  Jessa knew her tone was slightly mocking, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t paying to placate him. She reached up and stroked his cheek and slid her hand down his bare muscled arm before she moved past him to take a seat on the stairs. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for dick today. Eat me,” Jessa said softly as she used her hands to press her knees apart. Wide.

  Pleasure crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at her with an almost bored expression on his face. “I don’t eat pussy,” he countered, seeming to deliberately drag his tongue across his bottom lip.

  Jessa leaned back and pressed her elbows onto the stairs behind her. “Yes, but I can pay you enough to eat me ... but you can’t pay me enough to kiss you.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  Jessa nodded as if acknowledging a deft chess move before she raised her legs and raised her ass from the step to ease off her panties. She flexed her foot to toss the panties at him before spreading her legs wide again. “Five thousand dollars.”

  Pleasure eyed her as Jessa used her red-tipped fingers to spread her lips and expose her clit. She tingled and moaned in the back of her throat as she let her head fall back and her eyes closed.

  She smiled in pleasure and pure satisfaction when she suddenly felt the energy of his presence near her, moments before his hands replaced hers.

  Jessa’s hips thrust up at the first touch of a man. This man. Shit!

  “Five thousand,” he whispered hotly against the pulsing flesh of her pussy.

  Jessa licked her lips and nodded as she brought her hands up to cup the back of his head. “Humph. Everyone has a price,” she moaned as she eased his head forward until she felt the first cool touch of his mouth to her clit.

  Jessa’s entire body seemed to melt. It had been so long since her sex drive shifted out of park.

  Eric’s compulsion for her had killed any desire to bring a new man into her life. She had worried that even the sight of her with another man would truly push him over the edge.

  But now? Now Eric was in a place where he couldn’t affect her. See her. Stop her.

  Pleasure stroked his tongue around her throbbing clit before suckling it into his mouth.

  Jessa cried out and arched her hips upward to do tiny and tight circles against his mouth. No wonder Jaime couldn’t get enough of this Negro, she thought with a wince of enjoyment as he probed her core with a flicker of the tip of his tongue.

  Damn.

  Jessa released her grip on his dreads to massage her breasts and tease her taut nipples pointing up to the ceiling. “Oooh, eat my pussy. Oh shit. Eat my pussy. Oh my God,” she moaned with a hiss as she allowed her mind to pretend that it was her deceased husband, Marc, pleasing her and not some stranger that she was paying. And that thought made her shiver more.

  “You like that?” he asked.

  Jessa looked at him to find his deep-set coal black eyes on her intently before he ran his tongue inside the moist fold of her pussy. “For five grand? I damn well better,” Jessa said, her body still a mass of shivers as a fine sheen of sweat coated her body.

  His skill and technique could not be denied. The man knew his way around and inside a pussy. Every move. Every suck. Every kiss. Even every heated bite. Everything ha
d a purpose. Everything.

  “Damn your pussy good.”

  Jessa arched her back and wrapped her legs around his waist as she felt the familiar rise of heat in her loins. She felt nervous and anxious as he licked, sucked, and stroked her closer and closer to an explosion. A nut that she needed.

  “What do you want from me, Jessa?” Pleasure asked.

  Jessa looked at him, surprised by his intensity. “What?” she asked dazed and brought out of a passion-filled fog that felt like fugue state.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked again, his eyes locked on hers.

  Jessa frowned, feeling like he was trying to draw her into a trance or some shit. What the fuck? “I want you to make me cum,” she snapped, making a face like “duh.”

  Pleasure dipped his head to lick the cord nestled just above her plump clit.

  Jessa’s stance softened again as heat rose inside her pussy like an inferno. “Oh. My. What. Oh. Oooh. Oh. Yes. Yes. Yessssss,” she moaned, her heart pounding.

  “You want to cum?”

  Jessa reached out her hands. One pressed against the wall and the other gripped one of the rods of the staircase. “Yes, make me cum all in your mouth,” she told him, biting her bottom lip as she slowly rocked her hips back and forth against his mouth.

  Oh Marc, she moaned in her head, enjoying both the reality and the fantasy.

  “Say please.”

  “What?” Jessa asked, wishing he’d keep his mouth filled with her pussy and not words.

  “Say please,” Pleasure demanded, shifting his head to kiss her inner thigh.

  Jessa sat up a bit. “Please give me my money’s worth,” she snapped.

  “What’s my name?”

  Jessa laid back against the stairs and sighed, feeling her ardor cool. She said nothing, hoping he would shut the hell up. Giving herself a five count, she forced herself to relax and guided his mouth back to work. “Look here, playa. I’m not feeling this routine of yours, and maybe it works on lame-ass women like Jaime, but I don’t need the sideshow. My focus is on the main arena ... if you get my drift,” she told him, looking down at her pussy as she flexed and opened it like a blooming rose.