Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1)
Page 24
But I will be.
You’re getting ahead of yourself.
Lenore.
No.
It’s my grandmother’s name.
Did your great-grandmother read a lot of Poe?
Probably.
You want a bunch of ravens circling the building?
You don’t care.
You want children before your insides turn into cancer.
He pinches your arm.
You like it.
You like him on top.
Your mouth yields in the dark.
The night birds fall away, and he begins again.
I like Olive.
It’s a color.
And a boy can be Oliver.
You’ll agree to anything.
He enters you again. You’re sore.
You like it.
You whisper.
More please.
Chapter 72
PRESENT TENSE – DAY TWELVE
When is love? Is love when your heart swells at the sight of him? Is love when you fall asleep on his shoulder? Or when you fold him into sections so you can fit him in your odd-shaped envelope?
Did you love him when?
Is love when he saved your family’s company, or is it when you twisted your bodies into knots in the middle of the night?
Did you love him when you told yourself it was time to love him or leave him? When you needed him? When you knew he’d give you children before you had to have your womanhood removed?
When he loved you?
When it was convenient?
Did you only love him when it suited you?
My head throbbed. I smelled the sheets. Felt damp human warmth all around me. Heard breathing.
Time folded in my unconsciousness.
It didn’t fold in half, joining beginning to end in a neat jump. It folded in threes like a letter, past lapping tightly over present, tucking together to fit the shock of my senses.
Her voice.
His.
Warmth.
Blackness.
Nakedness.
Light.
His hard dick against me.
His arms.
Her sobs.
The smell of him slowly finding me, teasing me with half-consciousness. The smell of him in our life together. When I believed I loved him and when I feared I never had.
Folding like a letter left on the counter, signed in a shaking hand one day and kept in a drawer out of cowardice for a week. The edges spread and tucked back ten times until it was finally left for him. The man who smelled like the earth and the grass in it. His arms folded like a letter around me, but without the cowardice or malice of my letter folding.
My God, what have I done?
I said it in my sleep, but not out loud. I was only capable of input. The sound of breath and the hiss of the sleet on the windows. The glow of the lamp against my eyelids. The taste of blood in my mouth and the sting of the wound where I’d bitten my tongue.
Spread me like a sheet of paper. Write your life on mine. Fold past and present together like a letter. I am yours.
Chapter 73
PRESENT TENSE - DAY TWELVE
My mind was awake, but my body slept heavily on its side. His form against my back was gone, and she whispered so close I could feel the mist of her spit.
“You don’t respect me. You think I’m some kind of victim. You look at me with pity. At least you did. When you saw me leashed with Stefan, you had this look on your face. I see it all the time. It’s disgust. Like I’m shit on your shoe. Like someone needed to save me but you weren’t going to be the one to do it.
“You know I make fifteen thousand dollars a day to walk down a runway, right? I can stuff coke up my nose. I can drink absinthe with princes and kings. But I don’t. If I did that stuff, I’d lose myself, and I wouldn’t have that thing I get from being a slave. Go look at a magazine spread. When you see me, you’ll see what I mean. I own that page because I’m owned.”
My bottom lip tingled as if she stroked it. I smelled her breath on my face. Her voice was barely audible, but my half-dream wound around it.
“You’re afraid. You’re afraid I’m taking him away from you, or you’re afraid you’re the same as me. Or both.”
She pulled my lip out and let it go, then she kissed it.
“Lady, you should be fucking shaking in your boots.”
Sleep ate her words, digested them, and forgot their specifics, leaving only a vague discomfort behind.
Chapter 74
PRESENT TENSE – DAY TWELVE
I was going to tell him as soon as I got up. Explain everything, probably in one long sentence. As wakefulness came over me, my hands felt warm and dry and the bump on my head felt heavy. I touched where I’d hit it. The throb of it made a rapid smacking sound.
No.
The sound was coming from the next room.
I got up on my hands, shaking off sleep. The storm was fierce. Snow and sleet pelted the rain-rattled windows.
The sheet was warm on either side of me, as if I’d had company. The table night light didn’t illuminate much in its dim yellow glow. The lamp shades were square with stained glass squares and rectangles in deep reds and browns. Adam’s room.
The rapid-fire smacking, accompanied by squeals and cries, was coming from my room. And a man’s voice through the wall. My man.
Fully awake, I sat up straight. My head spun around the hub of the bump on my forehead. The duvet slipped off. I was naked. Adam’s bed was higher than mine, with a bench at the end and high posts with bars up near the top. The frame looked innocuous and decorative enough, but there was a track along the vertical posts to adjust the height of the bar.
I wrapped the duvet around me and dragged it behind as I walked toward the adjoining door. The voices got clearer as I got closer.
“Say it,” my husband commanded.
“I’m sorry,” Serena sobbed right before the smacking sound.
The door to my room was ajar, and though I could only see a slice of what was going on, it was enough of a slice to build a scene.
Serena had her hands on my footboard, bent at the waist with her sock feet apart. Her jacket was hiked to her armpits, exposing the pockets of her designer jeans.
Adam stood over her. “You forgot something.”
He hit her ass with the paddle. Thwack. Because her jeans were on, it lacked the same snap I’d heard at the Cellar, when the paddle hit the skin.
“Sir.” Her tears and groans mixed together. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Thwack.
“Who else?”
Thwack.
“Diana. I’ll say I’m sorry to Diana.”
Thwack.
“I thought you were better than this.”
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
He hit her so hard and so fast I made a noise in my throat, and he turned, paddle in hand, sweat beading on his brow. Our eyes met through the slit of the open door, and when he took it by the edge, I didn’t know if he was going to slam it in my face. He was devastating. This was the man he’d been holding back. The man he’d tried not to be all those years for my sake. He was pure power. Pure control. A fucking god.
Because he’s beating a woman?
I answered my question.
Because she needs it, and he’s a god who delivers it.
The truth of it went against everything I believed.
I took a step back, because I felt another truth.
I envied her. He was giving her a connection I’d refused. Her basest self was on show for him, begging him to put her right. She trusted him. I thought I trusted him, but not the way she was trusting him. Her vulnerability was raw and painful, and as he beat her bottom, so was his. I wanted that intimacy. I wanted to give him every inch of my skin, but I’d locked myself away.
Standing in the hallway, watching his chest rise and fall in that tight, sweaty T-shirt, I was still wrapped up against him in a thick feather blanket.
“Stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done,” he said to Serena while looking at me.
I shuffled back to his room.
When I got to the middle of the floor, I spun and faced the doorway. He was already there with his worn T-shirt stretched over his chest and sweatpants that made no secret of his arousal. His erection—the erection I’d lived with as a matter of course for five years—was now a powerful threat of dominance and beautiful pain.
Something in me purred. I had questions, but I could satisfy my curiosity later. He closed the door.
In two steps, he was across the room. He didn’t reach for me in tenderness but took a fistful of hair and pulled my head back. He looked at the bump on my forehead.
“It’s fine,” I said in a breath that begged him to finish what he’d started. “Take me.”
He threw me on the bed facedown.
“Show me,” he growled.
I reached behind and spread my cheeks apart. He was going to fuck me. Finally. All I wanted was his cock. I felt his fingers in me. Three, pushing in. I shuddered.
“What were you doing looking in the window?” All his vocal control was gone.
“Fuck me.”
He pulled my hair again. “I give the orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
I let go, and he guided himself to my opening.
“You could have died. If I didn’t know you. If I didn’t know where to look. You could have died.”
He didn’t wait for an answer before ramming into me all the way. I cried out in pleasure when he pushed against me, stretching me open. I took my hands off my ass and gripped the bedspread, and he redirected them, bending them so they were firmly and uncomfortably upward, pinned behind my back, circling my wrists with two fingers.
Immobilized, secure yet awkwardly positioned, with him using his other hand to yank my head back, I was thoroughly in the moment. I was his. My husband fucked me as he’d never fucked me before. In our relationship and our marriage, he’d never owned me like this. For the first time, I didn’t feel loved, I felt possessed. And for the first time, I craved his ownership. He turned me on my back, spread my legs out and up, and entered me again. When I put my arms around him, he pulled them off and pressed my biceps into the bed, thrusting so hard and so deep it hurt. Yet I spread my legs wider to take him to the root.
I cried his name. I thanked him, and when I was so close I thought I’d burst, I grit my teeth and focused on the pain.
“Come,” he said through his teeth. “You’re so fucking beautiful. Come.”
I thanked him again before I stiffened and let the orgasm ripple through my body. Maybe I screamed. Maybe I just opened my mouth. I was sure I was near unconscious all over again.
He let go of my arms and took my legs behind the knees, folding them and exposing me. His cock slid out, and he rubbed the slick length along my seam, where I was swollen and bare. The tide of another orgasm rose. I tried to reach for him, but my arms were behind my knees. He’d twisted me immobile.
“God. God, I’m—”
The sentence got lost in another climax. I strained against him and he held my body still as he ran his shaft along me.
“Stop,” I gasped. “Please stop. Hurts. It…”
I came before I finished, surrendering completely to the pain, letting it twist around the pleasure. My screams and my tears echoed both.
Only then did he pull away, and only enough to grab me by the arms and put me on the floor, twisting my loose, pliable body until I was on my knees before him.
I worshipped him. I felt the supplication to a Master in my bones.
This was what it was to submit. To forget. To have my entire world revolve around a single thing. I felt sleepy yet alive. Boneless and ambitious. All the contradictions fused into a simple desire.
Please him.
I put my hands under me, grabbing my ass cheeks and pulling them apart. I bent at the waist, dropping my head between his legs. Without reservation or preference, I lifted my ass to show him his options.
“My fucking God,” he said, almost in awe. His T-shirt landed on the floor, and with more authority, he said, “Straighten up. Hands off the floor.”
I lurched up. He stood in front of me, cock at eye level. I opened my mouth.
“Take it,” he said. “Like I taught you.”
I opened my mouth as wide as I could, tongue out, throat open.
“Good girl.” He fisted the hair in back of my head with one hand, put his dick at the tip of my tongue with the other.
I only tasted myself for a second. With no slow grind or test thrusts, he shoved it down my throat. I didn’t wrap my lips around him. I just kept my mouth open, held back the gags, focused on him and his pleasure.
“Yes,” he said. “Keep your mouth open. I’m going to fuck it.”
He moved me to his rhythms. My jaw ached and my lungs gulped for air. He pushed my head into him and pulled it away when it suited him. I let him. I became his instrument. We moved together, and his tempo changed to something slower and harder. I knew he was close because I knew him.
He sucked in a breath, pulling out. “I’m going to come down your throat and you’re going to swallow it.”
I looked up at him and nodded, then he held my head still and fucked my mouth. Five thrusts. I took a gulp of air, and he buried his dick in my face. The base pulsed against my lower lip.
Even as a Dominant, he smiled when he came.
Chapter 75
PRESENT TENSE – DAY TWELVE
When I tried to stand, I nearly flopped over. He caught me and pulled me up to the bed, folding himself on top of me. Only in that silence could I hear Serena crying on the other side of the door.
I thought his first words after a monster fuck like that would be poems about love and satisfaction. But her voice reminded me of what had brought us to that moment, and he exhaled in deep resignation of everything that was wrong.
He’d been punishing Serena.
He was mine, and he’d given her something that was mine.
And I let him fuck me.
Jesus. What’s wrong with you?
I took my arms away from him and let my legs fall away. He must have felt me draw away, because he rolled off me, rubbing his eyes. I felt naked without his body clothing me, but Serena’s sobs were a third person in the room.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why were you punishing her?”
“She’s topping from the bottom.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I fucked up.”
He stood. I twisted to see him. I hadn’t seen his naked body in two weeks and I wanted a moment to admire it, but he pulled on his sweatpants.
“Should I be hurt?” I asked.
“Are you?”
“I think so.”
Was I? Hurt. Satisfaction. Betrayal. Joy. Warmth. My feelings were a box of puzzle pieces. They were meant to fit together, but it was going to take some work to see the whole picture.
“Are you admitting you care about me?”
“Are you kidding me right now, Adam Steinbeck?”
“Yes. No. Of course not.” He took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the bed. “I lost my shit. Serena broke the furnace to get to me. And when I thought about what could have happened to you, I lost control.”
“Get to you? Like, how?”
He moved hair from my forehead. “You knocked yourself pretty good. Does it hurt?”
“Only when you touch it.” I slapped his hand away. “What does she want from you?”
“Attention. Excitement. Punishment. I think a way out of her relationship with Stefan. It doesn’t matter.” He paused for a second, and her crying came through the door. “She wants aftercare. She’s not getting it.”
I’d seen aftercare in the dark room with the window at the Cellar. I remembered the tenderness and intimacy betw
een Dom and sub.
I wasn’t the jealous type, but if he gave her aftercare, I would skin them both alive.
Maybe I was the jealous type after all.
“Thirty days,” I said. “You’re mine for thirty days.”
We watched each other for a long time. Everything drifted away. Serena’s sounds, the click of sleet on the roof, the rattle of the windows. I didn’t shift my gaze from his blue eyes. This submissive shit was so ten-minutes-ago.
“Diana?” he said without shifting away.
“Maybe the contract says you can share me, but I don’t share you.”
“Do you know you do this thing where you drill into people by just looking at them?”
“And?”
His lips tightened in a smile so slight, I would have missed it if I wasn’t watching every change in his face.
“And.” He leapt forward and kissed me, surprising me with it even though he was right in front of me. “And I admire the same things about you that I did before you left me.” He stood. “Let’s take care of business.”
He opened the door to my room. Serena was standing in the corner closest to the door, her face streaked with tears.
“Stand here.” He pointed at the center of the doorframe.
She stood exactly there. Her legs were closed. She was slouched in a sexless submission.
“What do you have to say?” he asked Serena.
She looked at me through puffy, red, yet strangely satisfied eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Explain what you did.”
“I broke the furnace.”
“I can make this even less fun, Serena.”
She took a deep breath that hitched. “I wanted to come between you and Master Adam.”
“I’m not your Master.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. That bothered me more than Master, because those were my words to him. “My Master is gone and there’s no one to punish me. Adam wouldn’t do it, so I gave him a reason to.”
“If Stefan knew this about you,” I said, “why has he been gone so long? He could have come back.”
They both looked at me as if they knew something I didn’t and they were trying to figure out if I was close to putting together some puzzle. I was outside the circle. I’d always been outside the circle.