Beg for It by Megan Hart
Dedication
This book is for all the ladies who like it on top and all the men who want them there.
Chapter One
Her boy.
Her first and, as it had turned out, her only boy. Over the years, Corinne had thought of her boy in the middle of hot afternoons when she yearned for a glass of iced coffee, sweetened to perfection, and there was nobody to prepare it just the way she liked it. Nobody to bring it to her. She’d thought of him, too, when she itched and twitched for something that seemed to dance beyond her grasp, leaving her empty when she should’ve had everything she could want to fill her up. She thought of him now in the darkness, stretched out on the king-sized bed that she could still only bring herself to use half of.
Corinne thought of her boy when she wanted to remember that once upon a time, she had not been an overworked and overwhelmed single mother in a precariously situated job with an unexpectedly burdensome mortgage and an ex-husband disgustingly contented with his new wife and family. Once upon a time, Corinne had been cherished and worshipped and adored.
She’d been a fucking queen.
Well, that had been one long damned time ago, Corinne told herself as she rolled over to slap some sense into her alarm clock. It would’ve been way too tempting to snuggle back into her pillow’s lumpy comfort, but it was already half an hour past the time she ought to have been up and in the shower. Also, the bed itself was a tangled mess, sheets kicked off in the night because she’d been way too hot in this late September heat wave for anything but her pajamas.
Once she’d slept naked in her boy’s embrace, neither of them minding the stickiness and the sweat. The memory of it sent her rolling again, this time to bury her face in the pillow to stifle a long, low groan. Frustration, at first, mingled with a latent but stirring arousal.
She’d giving up dating over the past six months or so. Her last few dates had been all right. Guys who were nice enough. Guys with kids and mortgages of their own and jobs they weren’t certain were going to last the month. She’d gone out with one guy five times before they slept together, and after that she’d found herself unable to rouse enough interest to return his calls. The sex had been bland, which was bad enough, but worse, in the morning he’d stared her down over scrambled eggs and made mouth noises about “the future.” It should’ve been what she wanted. It was what her single girlfriends said they wanted while Corinne nodded along.
The truth was, she wanted something far less…conventional.
She’d looked for it, casually, in the first months after her divorce. The specialty dating site had seemed promising enough—you could check off your likes and dislikes the same as the vanilla sites, but this one included choices like “pony play” and “cuckolding.” Identifying herself as a dominant woman had led to an influx of men fairly demanding she top them. Bewildered by the attention, Corinne had tried to start off with conversations that had usually turned quickly into something else. To her surprise and disgust, she’d found herself inadvertently domming a few guys who’d managed to piss her off enough to make her reply with more rudeness than she would have otherwise. That had been enough for her, and back to vanilla land it had been, without much more success.
That long, low moan turned into a strangled sob she tried to hide by biting her pillow, but though her jaw clenched, the pitiful sound still leaked out. She wept, hating herself at first before giving in to the emotions ripping through her, leaving her raw. She was forty-two years old, mother of two, divorced for almost two years, and she didn’t weep for anything that had been her life with Douglas.
She wept, instead, for the loss of her boy.