She Used Me for a Dare… Now I Own Her Mother

She didn’t just want him. She needed him. And she needed him right now.

Jennifer realized it with brutal clarity. The shame that had nearly drowned her moments ago was gone, replaced by a dark, hungry clarity.

The fingers, the fantasies, the watching through a slit in the velvet — it was all thin compared to the real thing.

She didn’t want shadows.

She wanted his weight pinning her down, pressing the Vanderbilt name out of her until there was nothing left but breath and skin.

She moved to stand, her legs bucking beneath her as if the very bones had turned to liquid. Gripping the cold stone balustrade, she forced herself upright, her breath coming in sharp, jagged hitches.

She looked through the gap in the curtains.

The scene inside stopped her cold.

Silence.

Complete, heavy silence where moments ago there had been screaming.

Jennifer’s eyes tracked across the room.

Helena was sprawled on the carpet near the table pale and motionless. Her mind and body seemingly short-circuited after just one encounter.

Jennifer’s gaze shifted to her mother. Vivienne was slumped against the window frame, her “Iron” shell crushed into the carpet, looking less like a billionaire and more like a discarded silk rag. They were both gone… not just spent, but erased.

’One round,’ Jennifer thought with vicious contempt. ’Just one fucking round and they’re both done. Pathetic.’

Then her eyes found him.

The masked man… He stood in the center of the amber light, his jaw set in a line of hard, predatory indifference. He wasn’t panting. He wasn’t tired. He loomed over the wreckage of the two women like a man who had barely begun to exert himself.

Jennifer’s eyes widened, a fresh jolt of electrical shock racing through her core.

Despite the brutal, relentless energy he had just poured into her mother and aunt, he was still as hard as rock… raging and unyielding, a magnificent, terrifying weapon that had clearly not been satisfied.

“Is that it?” His voice carried through the glass, a low, serrated growl filled with effortless contempt.

He looked down at Vivienne’s slumped figure, then at Helena’s unconscious form, a mocking smirk curling his lips.

“I thought you Vanderbilts were supposed to be built of sterner stuff. I thought we were going to fight all night.” He stepped over Vivienne’s hand as if it were a piece of trash.

“What a pathetic display. No strength left to even look at me? You’re both broken before the night has even truly begun.”

The mockery in his voice made Jennifer’s blood boil, but not with anger… with a possessive, competitive fire.

She looked at the two women on the floor with a new, venomous contempt.

’They’re just old,’ she thought viciously. ’They’re fragile. They’ve spent their lives behind desks and bank accounts, and they think they know what it means to be strong. They can’t handle a man like him. They can’t even stay conscious.’

Jennifer’s gaze tracked back to him… specifically to the raw, unyielding proof of his endurance. It stood at full attention, a defiant spire of steel that mocked the two failures crumpled on the floor.

​’He needs more.’ The realization was a jagged thrill. ’They couldn’t handle him. But I can.’

​The certainty settled over her like armor, cold and impenetrable.

​’I’ll go in there right now,’ she decided, her pulse a rhythmic drumbeat of war. ’I’ll give him what they couldn’t. I’ll fight him until the sun bleeds into the sky if that’s what it takes. I’ll show him what youth and hunger can do that age and desperation never could.’

​The thought of Vivienne “offering” her up tomorrow… as if Jennifer were a piece of property to be traded… was a poison in her veins. She wasn’t a gift to be given. She wasn’t a second-round consolation prize to be handed over by a woman who couldn’t even keep her eyes open.

​’I take what I want. I don’t need your permission, Mother. I’m not following in your footsteps… I’m stepping over your body.’

​But as her hand hovered over the latch, the cold steel of the handle sent a shiver of reality through her soaring ambition.

The predatory fire in her gut suddenly flickered, dampened by a wave of sharp, agonizing nerves.

​It was one thing to claim the throne in the silence of her mind; it was another to walk onto the killing floor.

’How could she possibly find the words to ask him to do to her everything she had just watched him do to her mother? To ask him to destroy her with the same casual, crushing violence?’

​But her hesitation was cut short. Inside, the man let out one final, low curse of dissatisfaction and began to move. He wasn’t heading toward the bar or the broken women on the floor. He was heading for the door.

​’Where is he going?’

​Panic surged through her, cold and sharp.

’Was he leaving?’ The thought of him walking out of the penthouse… leaving her alone with the ghosts of her mother’s dignity and her own unquenched hunger… was intolerable. She couldn’t afford a single second of doubt.

​”No,” she breathed, her voice a desperate ghost of a sound. “Not now.”

​She didn’t wait to find her heels. She didn’t wait to fix her clothes. She moved with a feral, frantic urgency, rounding the corner toward the hall.

She was a ruin of silk and skin; her trousers were gone, her top barely clinging to her frame. The evidence of her own dark release on the terrace was still fresh, the slick heat of it making her thighs slip against one another as she ran, a constant, humid reminder of what she had done in the dark.

​She didn’t care about the shame anymore.

She didn’t care about the Vanderbilt name. She only cared about the distance between them.

​She would beg if she had to. She would throw herself at his feet before she let him reach that door.

She was a predator who had turned into a supplicant in the span of a heartbeat, driven by a need so primal it had stripped everything else away.