Tease Me Read online

  Tease Me

  Kaye Blue

  Tease Me

  Copyright © 2018 Kaye Blue

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents are invented by the author or used fictitiously. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, businesses and business establishments, places, or events are entirely coincidental. This book is intended for mature audiences only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.kayebluewriter.com/newsletter

  Contents

  Kaye’s Newsletter

  Sometimes friends make the best lovers…

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  A Note From Kaye

  Kaye’s Books

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  Sometimes friends make the best lovers…

  Sometimes friends make the best lovers…and sometimes sex ruins everything.

  Dallas is a stereotypical artist: passionate, creative, and flighty. She’s also not getting any younger. She wants to settle down, but her lack of experience in the bedroom is a stumbling block to building a serious relationship.

  Prince Kristian, second in line to the throne of the Kingdom of Medina, maintains rigid order in every area of his life, including his work as a chef and restaurateur. Everything has a place-- and in all the years since they met at college, Dallas’s place has been firmly in the friend zone.

  So when she asks him to be her first, he says no…and then realizes he hates the thought of her sleeping with another man. But just as things finally heat up between them, Kristian’s meddling family and Dallas’s old insecurities interfere. Can he convince Dallas to give him another chance, or will these friends turned lovers lose everything?

  One

  Kristian

  “Kristian, I need you to take my virginity.”

  “The steaks will be done in—wait, what?” I sputtered.

  I had been so engrossed in cooking, it had taken a moment to process the statement. But once Dallas Miller’s words sunk in I froze, certain I had misheard.

  Yeah, this had to be a misunderstanding. There was no way Dallas, my best friend of over ten years, had said what I thought she had.

  Confident I had misheard, I took my time turning off and wiping down the stove and then plating and serving the meal I had just prepared. When I finally looked at Dallas where she sat on a barstool at my oversized kitchen island, my confidence started to waver.

  She looked at me intensely, her light amber eyes slightly narrowed, impatience and what looked a little like fear in her gaze.

  That wasn’t like Dallas.

  If there was something the woman was afraid of, I didn’t know what it was, but I could admit Dallas might take pause at saying what I now knew for sure she had said.

  “You didn’t let the meat rest,” she said.

  The alarm bells that had been ringing in my brain went up to high alert. Dallas couldn’t tell a whisk from a cannon, so if she was giving commentary about food preparation, I knew I was in deep shit.

  Deep shit I didn’t want to confront on an empty stomach, so I slid Dallas’s plate closer to her and then began to attack mine. After a few seconds, she joined in, and we shared a few minutes of companionable silence as we ate.

  But, while I didn’t speak, my mind was racing a million miles a minute. There had to be an explanation for what she’d said, and I intended to get it. I pushed my plate aside and then looked at Dallas, who continued to eat while staring at the stove, into the pantry, out the window over my shoulder.

  Everywhere but at me.

  Another dead giveaway that shit was about to get real. The knot in my stomach tightened, but I ignored that and kept focused on Dallas. There had to be an explanation, and I would get it.

  “So, what did you say?” I asked.

  “I said you didn’t let the meat rest,” Dallas responded without pause.

  I didn’t speak, but from Dallas’s sheepish grin, I didn’t need to.

  “Oh. That other thing, you mean?” she said, her eyes lowered but not quite averted.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice impatient, “that other thing.”

  Dallas took one last bite of her food, and then stood, swiftly gathering the dirty dishes and heading to the sink.

  “It’s no biggie,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. She would have pulled it off too, if not for the slight tremor in her voice and her absolute unwillingness to meet my eye.

  “Dallas,” I said, my voice low and firm.

  She huffed. “Fine. Let me finish these dishes, and then we’ll talk,” she said, still not looking at me.

  Patience wasn’t exactly a strong suit of mine, but I didn’t press. Something was up with Dallas, and I needed to figure out what. As stubborn as she was, if I pushed, I knew I would get nowhere, so I needed to play it cool and let Dallas do this—whatever the hell it was—in her own time.

  After what felt like an eternity, Dallas grabbed two waters from the fridge and walked back to the island to take her seat. We’d sat here countless times before, tossing back a few beers after a long day, listening to each other as we plotted, her her art and me my restaurants. But it had never been quite like this. There was an undercurrent now, a tension that hadn’t been there before, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was about to change.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she finally said.

  “You said that before, and I have to disagree. It is a big deal. So what the hell is this about, Dallas?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm, though I wasn’t sure I succeeded.

  Dallas sighed and then rolled her eyes, the same gestures she made when she thought I was being too rigid or acting too princely or generally being ridiculous as she liked to say. But this time, there was some strain in the familiar actions, which told me this really was serious, much as Dallas might like to pretend otherwise.

  As I took a swig of water, Dallas started to speak.

  “I want to get married.”

  The water I had been on the verge of swallowing came spewing out, and I looked at Dallas wide-eyed.

  “Not to you, dipshit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You really do have a high opinion of yourself, Prince Kristian.”

  For once, I let Dallas’s teasing pass and instead focused on trying to get my heart rate to return to normal.

  “I knew you were commitment-phobic, but damn, Kristian, I simply said the word ‘married’ and you’re about to pass out.”

  She punctuated her words with a light laugh, one that was familiar but that I couldn’t pay much attention to when she’d said what she said.

  “Forgive me for jumping to conclusions,” I said sarcastically, “but I’m sure you could see how I made that leap.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, but still, you gotta talk to someone about that commitment thing,” she said.

  “And you have to explain yourself and stop shitting me. You’re not a virgin,” I said.

  “You say that like you know for sure,” she said, one brow lifted.

  “I do. I mean…” I trailed off, racking my brain as I
tried to think back over Dallas’s dating life.

  I came up blank, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

  “What about…what’s his name, you know that furniture designer?”

  Dallas made a great display of rolling her eyes and shaking her head, and in that moment, I saw the Dallas I had known all these years. “His name is Damon, and we went out twice. Five years ago,” she said, putting emphasis on the five.

  “But surely…” I said, grasping at straws.

  There was a lot to think about in this conversation, but for the moment, I was preoccupied by how little I knew of Dallas’s life. She was my closest friend, the person I spoke to more than any other. How could I have missed such an important thing about her?

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Kristian,” she said.

  “What makes you think I’m beating myself up?” I spat.

  “You’re being defensive. That’s a pretty good hint.”

  I didn’t bother to argue because she was right, and we had more important things to talk about.

  “Let’s try this again. What’s going on, Dallas?” I asked, sincere in my question and hoping she could see that.

  From the way her shoulders slumped ever so slightly, she had. She let her body sink into the barstool, sighed, and then looked at me.

  “I’m not sure whether or not I should be flattered that you’re so surprised, but yes, Kristian, I am a virgin. I’m looking to change that.”

  “So you can get married? But not to me?” I asked, the confusion in my voice not even touching the confusion in my mind.

  Dallas nodded vigorously. “Yeah, that’s about the sum of it.”

  Some other time, I might have laughed at her response, but there was no humor to be had here. Instead I finished my water, went to the fridge, grabbed two beers, and returned to my spot. “Fill in the blanks,” I said.

  “Not much to the story, really. I didn’t plan things this way, but I never met the right guy. But I want to get married, have a family of my own. Losing my virginity is the first step,” she said with unshakable certainty.

  “And you want me to take it?”

  Pushing the words out made them real, and for a moment I paused, let them sink in. At the same time, I thought back to forty-five minutes earlier when she’d first uttered the question, that time feeling like a lifetime ago.

  It was late, well after midnight, though there was nothing out of the ordinary about that. I was a chef and dinner service was my most important activity of the day, and those services inevitably led to very late nights.

  As an artist, Dallas was on whatever schedule, or no schedule, that she chose, so it wasn’t uncommon for us to have these late-night meetings. In fact, this time was what I most looked forward to, and I’d come to associate the late nights with the camaraderie and companionship that Dallas’s friendship brought me.

  Even now, when I was so exhausted I could barely keep up, I looked forward to seeing her. I was weeks away from opening my second restaurant, and fully immersed in trying to make everything perfect. Seeing Dallas was always a needed break from the stress of my new project.

  Now it seemed that Dallas had discovered a project of her own.

  “Look, Prince Kristian,” Dallas said, repeating her teasing usage of my title from before.

  I frowned, because I knew what was coming next. From the time we’d first met, she’d been amused by the fact that I was a prince, second in line to the throne of the small Mediterranean kingdom of Medina, but the only time she ever really referenced my status was when she had something particularly outrageous in mind.

  “It’s just a favor,” she said.

  “Just a favor?” I repeated, incredulity in my voice.

  Dallas flinched, but recovered quickly, setting her face in a long-suffering expression.

  “Do you need to walk through this again?” she asked.

  “Walk through it again? We haven’t walked through it the first time,” I said.

  I wasn’t angry, mostly perplexed, but even more curious and determined to get answers. Dallas huffed, then put her hands on the quartz counter, her long fingers entwined with one another as she circled her thumbs, sending them round and round.

  For all the years I had known her that had been her tell, and that she was doing it now told me she was nervous, or at the very least somewhat anxious.

  I didn’t like that. In fact, one of the things I appreciated most about Dallas was how infrequently she seemed to be nervous or uptight around me. I didn’t want that to change, but some part of me feared it was too late.

  Yet another reason why her request was completely out of line and why I needed to get to the bottom of this.

  She stood, then turned to walk toward the professional-grade refrigerator that dominated my open kitchen.

  “Beer or wine?” she called.

  “Water,” I responded.

  I would ordinarily indulge in another drink with her, but I needed my wits about me, not willing to tangle with Dallas on a subject this important when I wasn’t completely lucid.

  She tossed the water bottle toward me, then retrieved one of her own before retaking her seat.

  Yet again I was struck by how casual this all seemed. At this point, Dallas knew she had the run of my house, and she had no discomfort getting her own drinks. And tossing me the bottle at the end, that was a clear sign of the easy camaraderie we shared.

  I worried Dallas wanted to kill that easy camaraderie. She took two deep swallows from the water bottle, her neck working, her dark skin still lit by the kitchen lights.

  Then she tilted her head slightly, giving me an opportunity to study her profile.

  I knew her face almost as well as I knew my own. Until tonight, thought I knew everything there was to know about her. But that couldn’t be true, not when she’d managed to keep her secret for so long, and not when she had the ability to throw me off balance as she had tonight.

  “Well, since you’re pretending to be dense,” she said, punctuating the sentence with a slight roll of her eyes, “I’ll say it again. I want to get married. I’m sick of being alone, and I want to change that. But I have a…situation,” she said, looking sheepish.

  It was my turn to lower my brows.

  “A situation? Is that what you want to call it?” I asked.

  “Call it whatever you want, but the bottom line is I’ve waited for far too long to explore this area of my life. I’m a wonderful artist, like to think I’m a good person, but I want to be more than that, Kristian,” she said.

  The little dip in her voice, the sound of longing in it, almost broke me. Dallas rarely showed that kind of vulnerability, and at hearing it, I was ready to do anything she asked, even if what she asked was madness.

  But I stayed strong and shook my head, mostly to remind myself that this could never happen. “I’m still not connecting the dots, Dallas,” I admitted.

  My own voice had dropped, and Dallas pursed her lips before continuing on.

  “Look, this isn’t ideal, but I want to take the next step. And to take the next step, I have to take the first step.” She paused, her gaze drifting toward the kitchen before she turned back to me. “Taking that step with you feels…” she seemed to be groping for the right word before she finally whispered, “right.”

  I heard depth and a desire in her voice that I hadn’t heard before.

  I ignored both. “So why not just do it the old-fashioned way? I’m not convinced your virginity is as big a deal as you’re making it, but let’s assume I’m wrong. Wouldn’t you want it to be with someone special?” A ripple of some emotion I couldn’t name crossed her face, but it was gone almost instantly.

  “Right. In theory, your plan sounds reasonable. In practice—” she said, looking at me skeptically.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I want to be bold, carefree, really put myself out there. If I’m waiting for ‘someone special,’” she said, her words dripping with disgust, “that won’t ha
ppen.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I have a pretty good idea of my patterns,” she responded.

  There was the faintest twinge of melancholy in her voice, but mostly, she just exuded a certainty that I knew I would find it hard to argue with. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

  “So what? You know your patterns and can’t get over them?” I asked.

  Dallas nodded.

  “Bullshit,” I said without pause. “Whatever your issues are, run over them, get around them. It’s not like you to try to shrink away from a challenge.”

  “Good insight on your part too, and that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If you see a barrier, you just run toward it, knock it down, and that’s what I’m doing right now.”

  “How does asking me to sleep with you fit in?” I asked.

  “Simple. I’m super-awkward with most guys, uncomfortable, and maybe to some degree I’m afraid of becoming intimate with someone. It just takes too long to build trust, and for some unfortunate reason, at least right now, trust is the one essential element I need for me to share my body with someone else.”

  “So that leaves me?” I asked.

  She nodded curtly.

  “Yeah. Because I trust you. This might not be the romantic connection I’d dreamed of, but at the very least I know you wouldn’t lie, wouldn’t intentionally hurt me.”

  I scowled at her, knowing that she was playing on one of my biggest weaknesses.

  I loved my family, my friends who had become family, and the thought of them hurting with me having no way to fix it was one that made me ill.