by Holley Trent
“Are you going somewhere?”
“No, but—”
“Actually, I think you should give me the shirt, too.”
Tim held out his hand and locked that take-no-shit stare on her.
“You’re taking it back?” She didn’t even care if she sounded pouty. She’d started thinking of that shirt as her own. Even if it weren’t worth a little on the collector’s market, it was made of the softest, most comfortable cotton she’d ever put against her skin.
“You can have almost anything you want of mine, pretty girl, but right now, I want that shirt off you. I want you nude. It’s hot outside and I want you to be comfortable. Won’t you let me take care of you?”
“I see.” She smirked as she pulled it over her head.
Right. Take care of me, huh?
He tossed the shirt onto the dresser and pressed a hand to the small of her back to get her moving. “Books are in here.”
He pulled her into the second bedroom and nudged open a dresser drawer. He knelt in front it, clucking his tongue as he perused, and she clasped her hands in front of her belly, pondering what he’d said: “You can have almost anything you want of mine.”
What was he offering her? Obviously, not dick.
“This one, I think,” he said, holding up a paperback. “You’ll have to tell me if you like it.” He closed the drawer and took her hand.
On their way through the galley, he grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator along with some fruit and continued toward the front of the boat.
In front of the steering controls, he set everything he’d carried onto a table, had her sit on the comfortable leather captain’s seat, and patiently explained the controls to her. Watching the radar every so often for boats or checking the weather didn’t sound so hard, and if it turned out that she didn’t understand something, she could wake him. He made it sound like it’d be impossible for her to mess anything up.
He nudged the book toward her and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll be up here by lunchtime. Maybe Clay will have responded by then. You should make good headway in that paperback in three or four hours, too. I expect that you will.”
That sounded like an order to Valerie.
Warily, she eyed the thick tome. Finally noticing the cover, she laughed. She hadn’t read that book before, but she’d actually heard of the title. The book was a light urban fantasy mystery series all her book nerd friends had said she should read, but she’d never found the time. Now, she had no excuse to scratch it off her reader’s bucket list.
“Yes, I think I’ll have made good headway by lunch,” she said. “Have you read this?”
“Mm-hmm.” He padded away without another word.
She just sat for a while passing the book from hand to hand and staring out the window at the sparkling blue ocean.
This is nice.
She hadn’t wanted to let herself think it—to put what she was feeling into a congealed sentiment, but there was no denying the setup was pretty sweet. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, because if she liked it, she’d want more of that luxury, and the experience wasn’t meant to last.
She’d made so many hard decisions in the past twelve years and was in the home stretch, working toward the culmination of all that sacrifice. She’d left her sickly grandmother to go to college three thousand miles from home. She’d taken an apprenticeship where she had to scrimp and penny-pinch just to afford the gas to get to work every day. All the long, grueling days had been worth the effort. She’d gotten to work under masters who breathed genius into modern architecture and city planning and helped her plant the seeds of own unique style.
She’d given up having a healthy social life so she could grab every opportunity—volunteering for extra work and taking less satisfying assignments in places like Shora. But she got it all done—workwise, at least. Her continuing education and certifications were up to date, there were awards coming to her in the mail, and her name was on the lips of people who mattered in the profession.
Valerie Lawson did damned good work. She was fucking proud of that and the reputation she’d earned, in spite of giving up having a life outside of work. The only reason she’d gotten involved in BDSM in the first place was that she’d been burning the candle at both ends and needed an outlet. She’d wanted to be desired—wanted to be touched—so she’d gone to the club on a whim, thinking that at least there, she could be discreet.
She hadn’t expected fetish would suit her so much. She might have been Type A professionally, but behind closed doors, she was a willing, eager submissive who preferred to let her dom make the decisions. She’d never let her doms be her boyfriends, and she hadn’t even considered pursuing that level of commitment. They all knew that, even if they didn’t like it, and she didn’t feel any angst about the decision.
But, Tim…
“God.” She weighed the book in her hand and let out a slow, sputtering breath through her lips.
He had her brain all scrambled. When he’d curled around her on the bed while she was using his tablet, she’d felt amazingly secure.
Security was a rare sensation for her.
She pulled her feet up beneath her and turned the book open to the first page, but the words blurred. Obviously, the monkey on her back wasn’t going to let herself get distracted when she hadn’t finished thinking about important things.
“What does he want from me?” she asked the room. Of course, the room didn’t answer back, but she thought she knew the answer, anyway. Tim was, at the very least, looking for a permanent submissive, and if what Clay had said held any truth, even more than that. He was looking for commitment.
“I can’t give it to him. I’m so close to getting what I want. I’m blazing a trail for little girls who don’t think they could do it.”
She’d thought for a long time that she couldn’t do it because he mother hadn’t been able to. But then she learned about mistakes that people made that could totally upend their lives, and her mother hadn’t lived long enough to have her second chance.
Valerie wanted to get it right on the first try, not just for her, but for her mother, too. She wasn’t going to let her career trajectory get cut short by distractions, no matter how enticing those distractions were.
No matter how comfortable they made her and how beautiful she felt when those distractions completely enveloped her.
Maybe for some women, the lifestyle being with a man like Tim could give them made up for the lack of achievement in other parts of their lives, but Valerie didn’t think she was that woman. Even if the pampering felt great at the moment, and though she’d pondered what the worst would be that could happen if she offered Tim a little more than private play, in the end, she wouldn’t be able to commit.
She couldn’t let herself get sucked under his current, grinning like a fool when she went down, only to regret it years later.
She’d made a promise to herself, and to make good on it, she couldn’t make any promises to Tim.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tim woke from his nap feeling somewhat disconcerted. He didn’t dream much during the day, usually, but his nap had been disturbed by an unceasing mental playback of scenes of dissatisfaction.
Something was wrong. He was wrong or doing it wrong. He didn’t know how to do this thing—to win this woman—but was more committed than ever to figuring out how. It didn’t matter how much time he needed to take to court her. She wasn’t a woman he’d convince to give him a shot in just a few weeks. It took longer than that for doms and subs to decide they wanted to play exclusively with each other.
He wanted to drag her, grumbling, from port to port and experience things that didn’t have to do with boats or BDSM.
He found her in the cockpit with her long legs draped over the chair arm, chuckling at something in the book.
Spotting him, she closed it. Her smile softened a bit and then went away completely. “Did you enjoy your nap?”
“What’s wrong?” he d
emanded.
Her brows snapped together in a flash. “Nothing. Why?”
“Really? Because you looked disappointed just then.”
“That’s silly. I don’t know what you think you saw, but I’m not. I promise.” She set her feet on the floor and leaned to set the book on the nearby console. “I was just thinking about too much all at once. I hope you don’t take it personally. It really wasn’t about you.”
He dragged his thumb along the piping on the top of the seat and considered that. He didn’t believe her. She was holding something back. He knew expressions—knew body language because as a dom he needed to be able to make quick adjustments before his partner processed that what they were feeling was the wrong kind of pain. She wasn’t being honest, but he wasn’t going to push her.
Not yet.
“Did you get an email back from Clay?” she asked.
“We could go look.”
“Okay and…um.” Her gaze tracked slowly down his chest and settled near his crotch. Then, sheepishly, she looked up at him. “Did you… You know. While you were resting.”
“Did I jerk off?”
Her posture went arrow straight and cheeks went dark as plums.
He liked her bashful and embarrassed. When she was off-guard and a little uncomfortable, he could tear down some of those sky-high emotional walls around her.
Generally, he wouldn’t have dignified her with a response, but he wasn’t “on” at the moment. Didn’t feel like playing the power exchange game. He really just wanted to sit and do nothing. With her.
“Before I napped, yes, I did. Just keep that in mind for the future in case you ever wonder. I can put some serious strain on my body and withhold pleasure for extremely long periods of time, but generally, I handle business privately if I don’t anticipate having intercourse in the near future.”
“Oh,” she said with obviously false coolness. Her cheeks were still blazing.
Beautiful.
“How about we get a little sunshine?” he asked, rubbing his palms together. He wanted her back out in the light where he could appreciate the way her skin glowed.
“O-kay, but how about you get me a little sunscreen? I don’t want to go back to Shora looking like an over-fried pork rind. Everyone’s going to wonder where I was.”
So tell them. Tell them who you belong to.
The thought came easily, but his tongue was trained well enough not to betray him.
“I’ll meet you out there,” he said instead.
Tim made some quick sandwiches, pulled a couple of bottles of water out of the fridge, grabbed his tablet, and joined Valerie on the deck. He found her raising her arms over her head and stretching her back like a lithe cat.
She was a knockout with clothes on, but with all that lean length and luscious extra in all the right places put so enticingly on display, he wished she’d never put clothes on again. If he could keep her locked in his office all day, naked like that, going to work to supervise a bunch of guys building boats would be at least eighty percent less grueling.
He set everything on the table and embraced her from behind. “You are beautiful.” He skimmed his palms over her breasts and down her belly, lingering at the space over her pubic bone. She was so warm and full of life.
“You make me feel like it, anyway,” she said with a sardonic laugh.
“Sad state of affairs if you didn’t feel like you were before.”
“Most days, I go through life not feeling any particular way.” She rested her hands on his forearms and rubbed them lightly.
“I’ll call you every day and tell you, then.”
She laughed. “Some days, you’d be lying.”
“I don’t believe that.” He didn’t believe for one second that there was ever a moment when she was anything but completely desirable.
“You should,” she said. “Every now and then, I wake up with my face squashed and swollen on one side, hair in frizzy knots because I was too lazy to tie it up before bed, and bloated as hell so I wear whatever clothes don’t make me want to claw myself to death.”
“I’m sure you’re beautiful even then. You don’t stop being beautiful just because you’re not put together. It’s like Clay’s house. It’s a mess. Some parts of it would make you cringe if you were to see them. The paint’s peeling outside and the latticework around the foundation is all torn up, but it’s still a beautiful house. It’s just that folks would pay more attention to it if it had its makeup on.”
She giggled. “Tim, you have a knack for making even bullshit sound like poetry.”
“That’s not bullshit.” He gave her ass a little swat and moved to the deck railing.
She followed along and stared out at the ocean for a while.
He let her.
Watching the waves had always been meditative for him, and if she was finding some peace in it, he didn’t want to interrupt her.
“When I was behind the console when you were napped, I was thinking, Man, we should go somewhere, and I was wondering what the closest port was.”
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Tim said.
“I believe you. I can’t go, of course, but I really want to. When I travel for work, I never really get to see anything.”
“You’ve got to carve time into your schedule for yourself.”
“You must be a lot better at that than I am.”
“I suck at it, but I’ve simply gotten into the habit of it now. It used to be that I literally couldn’t get away. Either we didn’t have the cash, or I had to be there working on a boat.”
“You’ve worked hard to get to the point that you could take time off whenever you wanted, though, right?”
“Haven’t you as well?”
“I…” She furrowed her brow and for a moment just stared at the sea.
She didn’t need to answer. He already knew she thought she couldn’t.
He lifted her hair in the back and dragged his thumb along her nape. “Let me mist you with sunscreen. Wouldn’t do for you to burn the body parts I like touching so much, right?”
“At least I won’t have to worry about tan lines.”
He grabbed the spray-on sunscreen from the table and gave it a shake. “Nothing wrong with tan lines. I actually think bikini tan lines are sexy.” He had her stand with feet spread hip-width apart and made her lace her fingers behind her head.
“Sexy? Really?”
“Really.” He started misting her from the neck on down, taking special care with her breasts and ass—the places he wanted to touch most. “There’s just something about that contrast of skin in the nude, and especially when the lights are out. Draws your attention to the parts that need the most attention.”
“I somehow don’t get the feeling that you need any help figuring out where those parts are.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. Stand just like that until it dries.”
“Tim, with as humid as it is, that could take five minutes!”
He put his foot between hers, nudged her legs a bit farther apart, and brushed his lips against the lovely, tender bend of her graceful neck. “I’m aware of that, pretty girl. Perfectly aware.”
Valerie furrowed her brow, pouted, and narrowed her eyes at him all in the span of five seconds, but then she smoothed out her face and nodded.
“Good.”
He gave all the exposed spots of him a blast of sunblock and grabbed the tablet. He couldn’t wait to see what kind of terse obfuscating Clay had to say about Leah.
As Tim waited for his email to load on the slow satellite connection, he cracked the seal on a bottle of water and carried it to Valerie.
“Are you hot?” he asked her.
“A little.”
“I’ll get you one of those floppy sun hats for the next time and maybe loan you a pair of my sunglasses. Open your mouth.”
She did, and he set the bottle’s mouth against it and poured cool water into her mouth. She swallowed greedily and clamped it between h
er lips when he tried to pull it away.
“Trying to make me work extra hard, huh? We haven’t had a talk about discipline yet. Maybe we need to move that up the agenda. Until then, you’re off the hook.”
She made the tiniest sigh of relief.
“How are your shoulders?” He pressed the capped bottle between her breasts and watched her abs clench and dance as he dragged it down her belly.
“T-they’re burning a little.”
“I bet you’re almost dry. You’re doing such a good job.” He dragged the bottle next down the insides of her clenching thighs. “Are you burning here?”
“No, Tim.”
“How about here?” He slid his fingers between her legs and tucked one into her slit. “I think you’re burning.”
She clenched around the intrusion and rolled her shoulders back, but her feet planted and mouth and hands in place. “I’m hot there.”
“Want me to fan it with the end of my crop?”
Her startled intake of air might have been concerning if she hadn’t clamped down even tighter around his finger.
“I think you’d like that,” he teased. “Do you think it would do the job? But you know, it’d have to get real close. If I accidentally hit your clit and pussy a few times, would you want me to keep fanning you?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation there.
Interesting.
“I’ll keep that in mind for the next time you’re hot, then. Why don’t you take a load off?” He slid his finger out of her, put it into his mouth, and said around it, “We can see what Clay had to say.”
She watched him suck every bit of her flavor off his digit before she moved, and that curiosity she wore so openly on her pretty face damn near killed him. She didn’t know what to expect from him—he knew that—but she really did seem like she wasn’t used to having someone enjoy her body and her company so much.
A pity for her, but no skin off Tim’s teeth. He liked that there were some things he could teach her still.
She took the same seat as the night before and picked up a sandwich. He’d meant what he’d said about the floppy hat and sunglasses. She was so pretty free and natural the way she was, but his urge was to take care of her in every way she would let him, and he didn’t want to be reckless. He hurried down to his bedroom to find her another oversized T-shirt and grabbed a baseball cap from the storage chest.