The Pleasure Trap

Book 4: Mistress Series

by Niobia Bryant

Genres: African American Urban; African American Women's Fiction; African American Romance; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Pleasure is his name, one that women whisper-and scream-with desire. As a popular exotic dancer and escort, he fulfills his clients' every sexy fantasy. His climb has taken him from the streets' most lethal ride-or-die ladies to the even more dangerous world of wealthy, powerful women. All along, he believed leveraging his chiseled body for a life of luxury would help him outrun his tormented childhood. But now a mysterious woman has him at her mercy, determined to punish him for reasons he doesn't understand. Saving his own life means Pleasure must figure out which of the women from his past has a deadly obsession. And when a long-buried secret arises, will he be able to survive? Or will facing it completely destroy him?

Release date: October 28, 2014

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

1998

“I’m sending you to live with your father.”

Graham had on his headphones and the sounds of Aaliyah played but he heard his mother clearly. Not bothering to turn away from his computer to face her, he shrugged his shoulders and took another swig from his can of soda.

“Today,” she said, firmly.

That made him stiffen a bit as he reached to set the can back on his desk. Nevertheless, he caught himself and relaxed his body as he pretended to be lost in the music. Pretended she didn’t exist.

Pretended his heart wasn’t pounding in his chest.

A firm hand rested on his slender shoulder. “Son,” his father said. “You hear your mother talking to you?”

Graham couldn’t hide his surprise as he turned in his swivel chair and looked up at his father. He nodded and removed his earphones. “Yes, sir,” he said, standing up to face him. He was sixteen with a thin and athletic build, but his father still towered over his six-foot height by another four inches.

His entire life he’d grown up on the comparison of their looks.

“Tylar, that boy came out your guts!”

“Your daddy sure spit you out, Graham.”

“Ain’t no denying that one, Ty.”

The broad face with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and slashing eyebrows but soft, full lips and long, thick lashes had drawn many a woman’s eyes—and other body parts—to his father. Thus the end of his parents’ marriage.

Tylar Walker smiled and wrapped an arm around Graham to hug him to his side. “Looks like I have a roommate,” he said with a smile.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it that,” Cara Walker said from behind them, still positioned in the doorway.

He felt his father stiffen. “Cara,” he said in warning.

She shook her head and stepped inside Graham’s room, kicking sneakers and dirty clothes out of her path. “You act like it’s a wonderful thing that he just got expelled from school for fighting every damn week like he has no sense,” she said, her tone sharp and rising with every word.

Graham eyed her. “Ma, I didn’t—”

“Didn’t what, Graham?” she asked, tears brimming in her eyes. “Didn’t want to get suspended three times before they finally expelled you? Didn’t want to waste all of the money we already paid for you to go to private school? Didn’t want to waste living in a good community with nothing but opportunity? Huh?”

“Cara,” Tylar said again.

The sight of her crying softened some of Graham’s anger toward her. “I’m sorry, Ma,” he said.

She swiped at her tears as she turned to leave his bedroom. She paused and turned back. “Life doesn’t owe you a damn thing, Graham,” she told him fiercely, her finger pointed in his direction. “It’s yours to either throw away or to thrive. You remember that if you don’t remember shit else I tried to teach you.”

And she was gone.

Tylar cupped the back of his head, patting it comfortingly. “Pack up your clothes. We’ll get the rest of your stuff this weekend. Okay?” he said. “Let me talk to your mama for a little bit.”

Graham nodded and turned to grab his oversized Polo duffel bag, which hung on the back of the leather chair sitting in front of his desk. As he removed his clothing from hangers in his walk-in closet, he caught sight of the five-by-seven picture frame on his nightstand. Dropping a pair of shorts atop the duffel, he leaned over to pick up the photo of him at just five years old, flanked by his parents. “Better days,” he muttered, shaking his head before carelessly tossing it onto his unmade king-sized bed.

Any dreams he’d had years ago of them being one big unhappy family again were gone.

His parents had divorced more than three years ago, and everything about his life changed. His father eventually moved out of the home in the suburbs of Bedford, New York, and rented a one-bedroom unit in a duplex apartment building in Brooklyn. Graham was shuttled back and forth between them.

Well, I used to be.

He finished carelessly pushing his dry-cleaned clothes into his duffel bag. He dumped the books and notebooks from his book bag to shove his precious six pairs of Air Jordan sneakers inside that. For a second he contemplated a suit and dress shoes, but he shook that idea away. His father didn’t go to church every Sunday like his mother.

For that he was more than glad.

Shaking the sudden tension from his already-broad shoulders, Graham heaved the strap of the duffel bag over his head so that it crossed the thin but still athletic build of his chest. With one last look at his room, and barely a moment of regret, he walked down the hall to the wrought-iron staircase.

“I just want to know why he’s so angry.”

“He’s a boy,” Tylar said. “It’s probably just a phase... regardless, he know I don’t play that shit he been pulling around here.”

Graham paused at the top of the stairs at the sound of his parents’ voices.

“So it’s my fault?” his mother asked.

His father sighed heavily and Graham could picture him wiping his mouth with his hand. “Look, I’m not going to argue with you. I thought the divorce put an end to all of that.”

“And did the divorce put an end to you slinging your dick into every piece of pus—”

Graham purposefully coughed and cleared his throat as he noisily came down the stairs and into the den. Thankfully, the rest of his parents’ words evaporated. It was an old argument he was tired of witnessing. “I’m ready,” he said.

They both looked at him.

“Tell your mama bye,” Tylar said, shoving his hands into the front pockets of the green uniform pants he wore for his job as a sanitation worker for the city of New York.

Graham walked over to stand before her. At just sixteen, he towered over her by four inches already. “Don’t cry, Ma,” he said, reaching to hug her close with one arm.

“The weekends belong to me,” Cara said, rising on the tips of her toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “And most holidays.”

He nodded even as he stepped back from her and started toward the archway leading into the spacious foyer.

“And you call me every day, Graham,” she called from behind him.

His mind was already focused on leaving that house and starting his new life with his dad. He paused on the brick wraparound porch just long enough to look around the cul-de-sac. He was happy to see the last of the tree-lined streets and quiet atmosphere. To hell with this boring shit.

He placed his bags on the rear passenger seat of his father’s dark blue Ford Expedition before hopping into the front passenger seat. He instantly inserted his ear buds and let the sounds of Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” cause his head to bop.

“It’s a hard knock life for us . . .”

His words stopped when the ear buds were pulled from his ears with twin pops as the suction was released. Graham looked over at his father. His eyes widened when he held out his hand and waved his fingers.

“Man, Dad,” he moaned, removing the Discman and ear buds to hand over to him.

Tylar slid the CD player into the middle console. “This ride back to Brooklyn is plenty of time for you to tell me what’s really been going on with you,” he said, turning the key in the ignition and placing the SUV in drive.

Graham stayed quiet.

“You got kicked out of school so much for fighting that they held you back in the ninth grade, son,” his father said, side-eyeing him as he drove. “Now you’re expelled just a few weeks before the end of your sophomore year. You want to be twenty and still in high school?”

Graham slumped in his seat and looked out the passenger window. He wasn’t in a talking mood, but he knew that didn’t matter. He couldn’t ignore his father the way he did his mother. Still, he had no plans on sharing anything he didn’t want to share, and nobody could change that. Both his truth and his lies were his to tell.

Graham lay across the king-sized bed that dominated the one bedroom in his father’s apartment. It was just the beginning of June, but during early evenings the heat was sweltering and the only air-conditioning unit was in the bedroom. While his father was at work during the day, Graham soaked the air up because at night that oscillating fan he used barely cooled him off as he slept on the sofa bed in the living room.

So far, his requests for an A/C unit had been met with “McDonald’s is hiring twenty-four seven, son. Twenty-four. Seven.”

The luxuries of a two-story home with an in-ground pool in the middle of suburban New York made his father’s stylish but small apartment seem like the projects.

He looked around at the room. The walls were bare, there was a pile of dirty clothing growing out of the top of the hamper, and a thin layer of dust needed to be handled. The décor left a lot to be desired, but there weren’t many men willing to go further than a comforter set and matching curtains, and Graham was 99 percent sure one of his father’s women had picked that out.

And there were many.

Graham shook his head at the line of women—all pretty as hell with banging bodies—that his father paraded in and out of their small apartment. In just the two weeks since he’d moved in full-time he counted six. He heard the sex cries of each and every one through the thin wooden bedroom door as he dug his head under the pillows and tried to sleep.

Brrrnnnggg.

He dropped the remote onto the bed and picked up the cordless phone from the nightstand. “Hello,” he said, his eyes still on a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie on the fifty-inch television.

“Hey, lover.”

Graham pressed the phone closer to his ear at the sound of the soft, sexy, and feminine voice. His heart pounded. “Excuse me?” he asked, grimacing at the way his voice cracked.

“Who is this?” she asked with wariness.

He pressed the back of his head onto the pillow and looked up at the white ceiling. “This is Graham . . . Tylar’s son,” he said, being sure to deepen his voice.

“Oh . . . oh shit. I’m sorry,” she said. “I called your dad’s cell, and when he didn’t answer all morning I thought he was off from work.”

And another one bites the dust.

“He’s at work. You wanna leave a message?” Graham asked more out of politeness than anything. He already knew she was on the shut-out list—whether she knew it or not. He picked up the remote and started turning up the volume on his movie.

“Tell him Yvonne called.”

Click.

He dropped the phone back on the bed and laughed. Daddy running through ’em like tissue.

As far as Graham could tell, all of the women were fine with being in rotation with one another because he had yet to see one just drop by and run into another. Everybody played her position. And well.

It was obvious the last thing his father wanted was to be remarried, and Graham couldn’t blame him. The only female Graham came even close to banging was a white girl he went to school with who gave out blow jobs as if they were lollipops. Cheap lollipops.

Still, he hadn’t given up his virgin card, and ear hustling his father straight slaying women left and right just a few feet from where he slept wasn’t helping.

“Stop, Nikko. Stop!”

Graham rolled off the bed and looked out the window that overlooked the driveways of their apartment building and the one next door. A little brown boy of about ten was wetting a slender teenage girl with a hose. Graham’s eyes widened at the sight of the bra covering her small but plump breasts being exposed by the moisture.

“Your ass is mine,” she screamed before she fought through the stream of water to snatch the hose from him.

Graham looked on as she dropped the hose and chased the little boy inside the building. He felt disappointment when she was gone from his view. So did his dick. He looked down at it pressing against the front of his oversized basketball shorts.

Moving away from the window, he rubbed the length of his semi-hardness. “I need to jack this off,” he muttered, pulling down on it.

Instead of heading for the shower to use the water and soap to help him nut off some of his horniness, Graham fell across the bed and resumed flipping through the cable channels for the next hour until his urges faded and he felt sleep claim him. He didn’t fight it.

I always have somebody to fuck . . . in my dreams.

When Graham awakened with a stretch of his long limbs, the room was dark save for the light from the television. The room was cold from the air conditioner running on high even though the temperature had dropped outside with the disappearance of the sun. Shivering, he climbed off the bed and turned the window unit on low.

The cable box said it was after ten.

Daddy shoulda been home.

Graham frowned as he opened the bedroom door to check if his father was sleeping on the couch.

“You love this good pussy, don’t you, Ty?”

Graham froze at the sound of the whispered words floating toward him from the living room. One of the lamps on an end table dimly lighted the room, just enough to cast a glow on the two bodies on the couch. One straddling the other. One curvier than the other. One moving against the other.

“Give me that good pussy,” he heard his father whisper back.

Graham stood transfixed in the hall just inches from the entrance to the living room, looking on as some woman he couldn’t place gripped the back of the couch as she glided her hips back and forth. She leaned back, and the move thrust her breasts up with her hard nipples almost pointed to the ceiling.

His dick hardened in a rush. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t look away.

He didn’t want to.

His father moved his hands from where they gripped her buttocks to palm her breasts and then stroke her nipples with his thumbs.

She gasped hotly before she moaned.

“Damn, you can ride a dick,” Tylar said, leaning over a bit to watch the back-and-forth motion of her hips.

She sat up straighter and then shifted her body easily to press her feet into the sofa as she squatted above him to slowly move her hips in a tight circle as she sat atop the tip.

“Mo-ther-fuck-er,” Tylar groaned in sweet agony as his legs shot out straight with his uniform pants and boxers still gathered around the top of his boots.

She laughed and licked her lips as she rose onto her toes and began vibrating her ass up and down with the speed and intensity of a power driver.

Graham’s eyes and mouth widened. Look at that chick go.

“That’s the nut drainer,” she said, looking down into Tylar’s face before licking hotly at his open mouth.

Suddenly her eyes darted up and locked on Graham where he stood with his dick hard as jail time.

His body became tense with alarm as he stepped back, expecting her to scream out in surprise or shock—or something.

But she didn’t.

Her smile was devilish as she leaned forward and pressed a thick brown nipple into his father’s mouth, keeping her eyes locked on Graham. “I love dick-dick-dick-dick-dick,” she said huskily as she continued to ride his father and then lifted a finger to beckon Graham forward from the darkness.

But he didn’t move. Excitement had his heart racing and his dick throbbing at a crazy pace as she caused the blood to rush through his body.

“Dick-dick-dick-dick-dick,” she said, uncurling her tongue to wickedly flicker the tip of it as she continued to stare in Graham’s direction.

He knew she could still see him and she wanted him to see her.

Graham swallowed over a lump in his throat, his hand going down to wrap around his aching erection. Damn.

“Your pussy getting hotter,” Tylar moaned against her fleshy breast.

“I wonder why,” she said, smiling at Graham over his father’s shoulder as she pressed his face against her body.

Graham felt out of breath. Hot. Bothered. Horny. Needing to nut. Needing to nut so badly. He panted as he reached inside his shorts to free his dick as he watched her watching him as she rode his father harder.

Tylar broke his head free of her grip. “This dick gone cum,” he said thickly.

“Cum for me,” she ordered them both softly, her fingers digging deeply into the softness of the couch.

Graham locked his knees and bit his mouth to keep from crying out as he felt the first surge of cum fill the line. He jacked his dick harder and nearly broke the skin beneath his lip as he bit down to keep from hollering out at the exact moment that his father’s cries of passion roughly filled the air.

Never once did she break her gaze on him even as she soon let out short, high-pitched shrieks as she found her own release.

“Shh,” Tylar whispered. “You gone wake my son.”

Too late.

She just smiled weakly and blew said son a kiss.

Graham’s heart was pounding as he backed into the bedroom with his hand and dick wet and sticky with his release. He eased the door closed with his shoulder before he snatched his T-shirt off with his free hand and quickly cleaned himself with it.

He had barely dropped the shirt to the floor and lain on the bed before the door opened. Closing his eyes, he feigned sleep.

“Did we wake him?” she whispered.

“No,” his father answered.

At the sound of her voice, Graham’s gut clenched. He was glad when the door closed and he was alone. As he rolled over onto his stomach, the nervous anxiety clashed with his after-nut glow. He couldn’t believe what he’d just experienced, and any shame he could possibly feel for being a peeping—and jacking off—Tom were barely noticeable.

Best nut ever.

Two Weeks Later

Graham hitched the wide black straps of his Nike backpack higher on his shoulders as he strolled up the block toward their apartment building. It was late morning and everything was relatively quiet for a summer day. He figured the majority of their neighbors were working or sleeping—something he would’ve been doing if he hadn’t hit the streets early to hunt for a job.

I’m sick of being broke.

He hoped the four applications he’d filled out and the one interview he’d had that day turned into something. His mama used to give him a weekly allowance. Unless it was a necessity, the only paper his father was giving out was the want ads.

Jogging up the brick steps of the duplex, he paused when the front door opened and Essie Nunez leaned her frame against the doorjamb. She didn’t say a word even as she leveled her wide-set eyes on him and gave him a knowing smile. The same knowing smile she’d given him since the night he watched her sex his father and she watched him jack off.

Graham’s gut instantly clenched as if in a reflex to an oncoming punch. He felt nervous in her presence. Nervous and out of sorts. He fought between a desire to rush past her so fast that he knocked her over, or to turn to run back down the stairs and up the street away from that smile.

Essie was well into her thirties—if not older—but had the type of body and wardrobe that made teenage girls seem boyish. From her messy topknot down to the crimson polish on her toes, everything spoke of being sexy and knowing it.

Unable to deny himself, he flicked his gaze over everything from her juicy gloss-covered lips to a red tube top that did nothing to hide hard nipples in the center of large, pendulous breasts. Her middle was a little soft from the three kids she’d borne, but even the slight muffin top over the top of her cutoff shorts looked inviting to him. And those shorts exposed her thick thighs, and her plump pussy pressed against the seat like a fist.

Essie was thick, maybe even thicker than a lot of men’s taste, but Graham had seen firsthand that she knew how to move every bit of her pounds with ease. Lots and lots of ease. He licked his lips and glanced away at the hot memory of her shifting from a sitting to a squatting position.

When he looked back at her with his eyes squinted against the summer sun, she hadn’t moved from her spot blocking the doorway. She gave him that knowing smile again as she reached inside her tube top to pull a soft pack of Newport cigarettes and a lighter from her cleavage. She pressed a cigarette between her glossy red lips.

I wish it was my dick in her mouth.

It jumped to life like it agreed.

“Excuse me,” he mumbled, taking the last two steps up onto the wide porch to stand befo. . .