Claim Me

by Geneva Lee

  “You want to know why he keeps secrets from you. Don’t act surprised,” she said when I stared at her. “Everyone on the security team knows that you two have been fighting. Probably most of the palace staff. You’re not exactly subtle about it. Look, he’s been keeping secrets from you because he’s been holding part of himself back. Now you’ve erased those final boundaries.”

  And we had. I’d felt the subtle change.

  “Of course, he loves you and that complicates matters.”

  “Complicates things? Shouldn’t it make things easier?”

  “Submission isn’t just about sex,” she said, “and it isn’t about romance a lot of the time. You guys have that all mixed together now. It’s going to be up to you and him to make sure that you’re clear on the difference between those areas.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You should set some hard limits,” she advised. “Things you won’t do. Behaviors you won’t tolerate. Decide if you’re willing to submit to him full-time or if you’d prefer scenes.”

  “Full time? Scenes?” I felt like I was getting a vocabulary lesson.

  “You’re not a full-time girl,” she told me. I opened my mouth to protest but she held up a hand. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not either. I still want to choose when and how I submit to someone. I’m not interested in a collar and am not interested in being a slave.”

  “Slave?” My mouth went dry. There was a lot I had to learn.

  “Taking orders. Humiliation. Not my bag.” But her eyes darted away from mine. She might be willing to guide me, but something told me that there were layers to Georgia Kincaid she would never show me. “And Alexander will need some boundaries. He’s a natural Dominant, but he’s got some screwed up ideas about that. He thinks he was punishing himself, but he was discovering himself.”

  “I feel like I’ve been holding him back,” I confessed.

  “He held himself back, but I always suspected…”

  “That he wouldn’t be able to let it go,” I said. How had I not seen it?

  “My guess is that he’s been training you without even knowing it himself. Pushing the line. Testing your limits.”

  “I let him…he…” It felt wrong to tell her what we’d shared, like I was betraying a confidence. Alexander had finally shown me that part of himself.

  “You don’t have to tell me what he did. I can guess.” Her mouth twisted as if recalling a memory, and shivers broke out over me. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t about her shared past with Alexander. It was about my future with him. “But you can tell me how you felt when he did it.”

  “Nothing,” I said in a low voice, “and everything. It was like everything went blank and there was only this connection between him and I. I was more aware of him than I was of myself.”

  Her lips pressed together while she listened. When I finished, she said, “That’s called subspace. Everything goes blank and you’re…”

  “Free,” I said. “Is that why you do it?”

  “I’m not going into details—unless you want them, you kinky bitch.” It wasn’t evasion, but I decided to respect it. Georgia didn’t have to explain her preferences to me.

  “It wasn’t just sex, though,” I continued. “I mean, I heard what you said about it not being about sex.”

  “It’s different, but a lot of people enjoy sex as part of it. Considering the number of times I’ve had to pretend not to hear you two going at it, I imagine you will.”

  I ignored this comment. “What else? Do we need things?”

  “You’ll need a safe word.”

  The heat on my cheeks kicked up a few degrees. “We have one of those.”

  “I see what he likes about you,” she said, laughing at my blush. “I wonder if the rest of you turns that red.”

  “Who’s the kinky bitch now? Do we need other stuff?”

  “Do you want me to take you shopping?” she asked flatly. “I’m discreet, but there’s no way you’re going to be able to walk into a shop and buy a whip without winding up on the cover of every tabloid in the world.”

  “Good point.” I chewed on my lip.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Get you a starter kit. Consider it a baby present.”

  “That will definitely be the most unique one I receive,” I said.

  “I don’t do pacifiers and prams,” she said. “You don’t really need much. I’m sure he’ll take care of that.”

  “I want to show him that I want this,” I confided to her. “He thinks I’m doing it for him. After, he apologized.”

  “That’s his own head messing with him. Alexander never had anyone love him for who he is,” Georgia said with odd insight. “You’ll have to give him—”

  “A little rope?”

  “That’s a start.” Something like a giggle escaped her but she hid it. “I have to admit that I’m a little jealous.”

  “Should I not talk about this with you?”

  “I’m not going to steal your husband. Don’t get all hormonal on me, but I’ve seen what that man can do.” She sighed as if it was a fond memory. She’d told me once that he’d left scars.

  “I haven’t,” I said quietly.

  “You will.”

  I couldn’t tell if that was a threat or a promise. Georgia started the car and headed toward Buckingham. There was a lot to process, but, strangely, one point stuck out more than most. “I think we’re in danger of becoming friends.”

  Georgia’s eyes never left the road. “I wouldn’t buy matching bracelets just yet.”

  Chapter 14

  Alexander

  I threw the morning tabloids on Sarah’s breakfast plate, which she was enjoying well past noon. That probably explained how the girl in the photos looked so well-rested after a night of drunken partying.

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter how perfectly they cook the eggs if there’s newsprint in them.” Yolk dripped from the pages as she picked them up with a look of disgust.

  “I thought you’d want to take a look up your skirt, since half of Britain already has.” The cover of the top paper included a rather unflattering photo of her on her ass somewhere in East London.

  “Lighten up. You used to take me to that club.” She shrugged, lifting her tea cup to her lips. “You sound like Dad.”

  I looked to the heavens. If there was a god, he would grant me patience. I felt like her father, because she was acting like a child. “I stopped going to that club years ago.”

  “When you got married, right? When you became boring. When you grew up,” she spat the words at me.

  “Yes, Sarah, life went on without you. I’m sorry we didn’t all wait for you to come home.”

  “But you didn’t even wait for me to wake up. You told everyone I was dead.” She stood and put herself on equal footing. “I’m just showing everyone I’m not.”

  “You’ve been home one day—” I began.

  “And I went out one night.” She dropped back into her chair with a trembling lip. “Do you know what I did when they let me have a phone—and after they showed me how to use the damn thing? I looked up my friends. Married. Kids. Divorced. Dead. I know life went on without me. You can’t imagine what it was like just to miss so much.”

  “Not all of your friends have moved on,” I said. She was right. She’d been home one day and I’d jumped all over her.

  “Pepper,” she said with meaning, “and you’ve disinvited her to my house.”

  “She brought that on herself.” I would listen to Sarah, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t correct her.

  “Did you know I had a boyfriend before the accident? He’s married to some cunt in Devonshire.” Tears swam in her eyes. “About the only thing I have going for me is that I have money and no responsibilities because I have no job, no education, and, oh, yeah, my dad is dead. But, hey, I’m second in line to the throne.”

  “Third,” I corrected her gently.

  “Of course,” she said with a snort. “Soon to be f
ourth. Your perfect wife is procreating.”

  “She welcomed you into our home.” My patience was wearing thin and bringing Clara into things stretched it further.

  “She had no choice!”

  “Yes, she did. It was up to her.” If Clara had said no, that would have been the end of the matter.

  “She really has you whipped.” Sarah stared at me like she’d woken up with new eyes.

  “First, no one says ‘whipped’ anymore. Allow me to catch you up on that. Next, I wouldn’t underestimate my wife.”

  Sarah shook her head, frowning with what looked like sympathy. I realized too late that she’d misunderstood me. “I knew she had to be a conniving bitch. Married with two children—she tricked you. I did the math, she got pregnant so you would marry her. You don’t have to lie. Are you sure the baby is even—”

  “Shut up,” I said in a low voice. She was teetering on the edge of saying something I couldn’t ignore. “I don’t deserve Clara or my daughter. They are the most important people in my life.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?” she hissed. “No one else warrants much thought, do they? I notice you didn’t come to visit me when I woke up. Every day, I learned some terrible new fact and all that information came from strangers.”

  “I wanted to keep the press away.” Brex had told her as much, but my absence spoke louder than any message, it seemed.

  “You wanted to keep them from finding out what you did, but you can’t shut me up, Alexander, and you can’t lock me away. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.” She stood, grabbing her tea cup. “If I want to dance naked on the streets for the next six months, I will. I’m an adult now.”

  I wanted to tell her to act like it, but we were interrupted by Norris’s arrival. A man in a navy blue suit followed behind him. I clamped my mouth shut, not wanting an audience for our disagreement. Their presence had a similarly stupefying effect on Sarah. She stared at our new guest with ravenous eyes until they fell on his wedding band.

  “Excuse me,” she huffed and sauntered down the hall.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  He shrugged. “Teenagers.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  I stood and started toward my offices. This was definitely a visit that needed to remain private. Norris took his leave to check in with the staff.

  We shut the door behind us and I reached for the Scotch.

  “Thank you for meeting me.” It was an overly formal greeting given our history, but Smith Price tended to put me on edge. I knew enough about the man to know we had similar predilections, but that was where our similarities ended. We’d been bred for very different lives. Him to cover others’ sins and me to pay for them.

  Smith took the drink I offered him. He swirled it around the glass thoughtfully. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

  “If you want out, say the word.”

  He had been an integral part of my plan to find out who was behind the attacks that claimed my father’s life and threatened my family. His actions had nearly cost him his own life, but he was no loyal servant to the crown. An ally, perhaps. I’d never go so far as to say a friend. As far as I could tell, he was a bad guy who’d developed a conscience. I hadn’t fully trusted him until he became involved with Clara’s best friend. I knew better than most that love changed a man. When his role put her in danger, he’d still seen it through. Perhaps he knew, as I did, that he wouldn’t sleep until we’d rooted out this evil.

  “Clara knows,” I warned him. “She may tell Belle.” My instinct had been to keep the news from Clara, but actually telling her was easier than I’d expected.

  “I wouldn’t keep this from her. I thought we’d put this behind us,” he admitted, showing an unusual amount of vulnerability.

  So had I. Only a month ago, Oliver Jacobson had sat in a jail cell levelling impotent threats at me. Now he was a free man. “It’s my fault. I assumed Parliament would see how dangerous he was.”

  “They have a confession,” Smith said. He’d been privy to it. It wasn’t technically ethical to share it, but he’d earned seeing it.

  “They now claim it was given under duress.” I’d followed the rules and been rewarded with accusations. Many times I’d imagined what I would do when I got my hands on the man who had tried to take Clara from me. I wanted to squeeze the life out of him slowly, to enjoy watching it ebb away. Somehow, despite keeping my hands to myself, I was the one being punished. If I’d had it to do over, there would be nothing left of Jacobson to walk free.

  “Parliament was never going to see it for what it was,” Smith said. “They can’t admit that one of them turned. It would make the rest of them look bad.”

  But it wasn’t only Parliament that had failed us. “I thought once the news broke, the public opinion would swing in our favour.”

  I’d been very wrong about that. The press had painted the whole thing as an overreach by the monarchy, and me as a man hell-bent on avenging his father’s death. It might have been my duty to, but my motives were entirely different. “I guess Albert wasn’t terribly popular.”

  “And Jacobson is,” Smith grumbled.

  “You met him before. What was he like?” I’d been completely unaware of the man until we’d uncovered his name. On paper he was the last person anyone would suspect.

  “He made a few digs at your lot, but he seemed alright. Then again, he was doting on Belle’s mother and she’s a heinous woman. I didn’t suspect him, but I didn’t trust him, either,” he added.

  “But did he seem capable of this?” He’d grown up poor and risen through the ranks of Parliament. He’d put himself through University and earned chart marks. He contributed to charitable organizations. Frankly, he was boring.

  “No, and that’s always given me pause. Otherwise he would have a bullet in his head,” Smith admitted, confirming a suspicion I’d had for a while.

  “I’ll admit I was surprised when we took him alive.” I’d done Smith the courtesy of dropping the name before we went for him. I wasn’t certain if we’d find Jacobson dead or alive, but I would have bet on the latter.

  “You nearly didn’t.” Smith’s eyes were cold emeralds as he levelled them at me. “Were you hoping I would?”

  I should deny it. Even now, was I really certain I could trust Smith Price? He’d ratted out one ally and he was no fan of mine. The feeling was mutual. But my gut told me I could, because we both had something irreplaceable at stake in this game.

  Instead, I shrugged. “Sometimes. It would have been an easier mess to clean up.”

  “And now he’s untouchable. There might be ways…”

  “Anything would be questioned. God help us, if that man hung himself tonight in front of an audience, they’d call it murder.” I never thought I’d be a man who coolly discussed such matters, like a business transaction. That it was so easy made me feel uncomfortable.

  “If killing him is out, it would help if we could pin the bombing on him.” Smith appeared to have no hesitation, either, though I wondered if he’d always been that type of man.

  “It won’t matter. He was sitting in a jail cell during that symposium. That’s all anyone sees. But he knew it happened,” I told Smith, recalling the blood-chilling satisfaction on Jacobson’s face when he discussed it. “He asked me what had happened, but he knew. He may not have ordered it, but he knew it was going to happen.”

  And then he had said there were more things to come. I’d chosen to ignore that, but I tried not to think about where Jacobson was right and what he was planning.

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out,” Smith admitted. “The bombing doesn’t make sense. It felt like a—”

  “Distraction.” I rubbed my jaw, shaking my head. It wasn’t a good sign if Smith was thinking the same thing. “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “What does Norris think?” Smith asked. Norris had been Smith’s primary point of contact during the operation. The two had developed a respect fo
r each other that I didn’t understand. Then again, Norris was also a man who would act without hesitation to protect his own. It’s why I kept him by my side.

  But Norris didn’t have any more insight than we did. “None of it makes any sense, which makes it even more worrying.”

  No groups had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Child Watch symposium my wife had been attending in January. No credible groups, at least. We’d had even fewer leads. The source that had warned us in time to get Clara out safely had vanished. “It’s too convenient. The intelligence arrived with minutes to spare.”

  “Enough time to save everyone, but not to stop the device from going off.” He paused, chewing on the thought. When he finally spoke, he chose his words deliberately. “Are we certain Clara was the target? If they wanted to hurt her, they could have.”

  “What else could it be?” I’d dismissed this idea outright before, but that was when I’d still expected answers.

  “Why would you threaten a queen but not take her?” Smith asked.

  “You’d only do that if you were…” My hands gripped the arms of my chair, my nails digging into the leather. Clara might not have been in real danger that day, but she would fall with the rest of us if the other player had us in check.

  “She was a distraction. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” he said in a hollow voice. “Everyone—all your men—were focused on that. What didn’t we see?”

  “You know as well as I do what it’s like to be at war.” Smith hadn’t been an actual soldier like me, but he’d been on the front lines in his own way. He’d been raised by Jack Hammond, one of London’s most prominent crime bosses —an old family friend and an old family enemy.

  “This doesn’t feel like war,” Smith said.

  “Because it isn’t. We’ve been treating it like it is. That’s our mistake. We assumed they wanted us dead.” It was much worse than that. There was an honesty to war—a brutal, violent truth. The enemy wanted to kill you. That was how you won a war. The enemy didn’t play with you. “If this is a game, what is the prize?”