by Liz Meldon
I ground my teeth together, releasing Belle’s hand lest I crush it. He had been drowning in work? I was the one who had been doing his damn work, taking hours out of my Sundays just to get through it so hotel GMs would stop sending me panicked emails, so my father would stop demanding I cut my vacation short and come back to fix the fallout of the stupidest decision he had ever made.
“Actually,” I said, forcing myself to release the anger with a sharp exhale, “Belle and I have a lunch we need to get ready for in Saint Croix. It starts in an hour, so—”
“That little dinghy can get to Saint Croix from here?” Richard nodded toward my bowrider, smirking. “I can always give you a lift, if you need it, Deanie. Seas are looking choppy today.”
“They were pretty calm before you—” Belle caught herself, donning that beautiful fake smile again. “—before your yacht arrived. Smooth as far as the eye could see. Looks pretty nice now, too.”
My brother hummed as he offered her the same look he might give a waitress who’d just told him his card had been declined—because it was maxed out. Again.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” I muttered, stalking off, unable to stomach him a second longer. Honestly, the fucking nerve—showing up here and expecting me to, what, offer to take more work off his hands? What the fuck did he even do with his day?
I needn’t ever ask; I knew the answer. I’d known the answer to that question since we were teenagers.
“We’ll talk more at the gala then, eh?” Richard’s voice cut across the soothing rustle of palm fronds. I stilled, then faced him with a scowl. The gala loomed in the very near future, a yearly event I was always forced to attend to shill our father’s next big idea, to network with the upper echelon of the business elite, to be photographed with all the it women in the society pages, and to put a cool, composed face to the Donahue brand name. Given I’d been running the bulk of our hotel empire in the Mediterranean these last seven years, my appearance had been mandatory.
That was Richard’s arena now.
Yet somehow, I was still expected to go.
Belle slowly picked her way along the beach after me, arms crossed, frowning. Behind her, Richard wore a look I knew well—a look the said he recognized he’d just fucked up my day and got some sick thrill out of it. He shrugged, half turned back toward his speedboat.
“I assume you’re going,” he remarked. “Dad will be disappointed if you don’t at least show your face.”
I stuffed my hands into my pockets to keep them from balling into fists. “We’ll see. Belle and I have other commitments that night.”
My eyes narrowed as Richard laughed, slowly backing into the surf.
“Put in the bare minimum, Deanie. I know you’re on holiday, but the empire stops for no one.”
Oh, I could just hit him.
Outrage flashed through me like a dozen lightning bolts cracking all at once across a tempestuous sky. Me, do the bare minimum? I swallowed my rage, forcing my expression to remain neutral as Richard waved us both off and started to push the speedboat out. Belle stood between us, her arms still crossed, and watched him go. Meanwhile, a high-pitched whine had started between my ears, and my jaw ached from gritting it so hard.
I hadn’t wanted Belle to see this side of me—the horrible, petty, childish side of me that reared its ugly head whenever my older brother made an appearance in my life. At family functions, I could avoid him, sometimes using our sister as a buffer. Given I’d been the one managing most of the empire he’d mentioned, we seldom ran in the same social circles, either. Generally, I could forget Richard even existed.
Until he thrust himself into my orbit again, reminding me why I avoided him in the first place.
Scowling, I marched up the beach, not breaking stride when Belle called for me, and headed for the trail back to the house.
“Dean!” She chased after me, my name echoing through the trees, and while I slowed, I didn’t stop. I needed to move. I needed to expend this pulsing, racing energy pounding through my veins, threatening to slam one of my fists into a palm trunk.
Her soft footfalls squished along the path, but before I could tell her to give me space, to just go back to the beach—or inside, or wherever she wanted to go, because technically I couldn’t order her around on Sundays—Belle caught me. Her delicate hand snagged my elbow, the slight pressure behind it making me stop. I huffed, glowering down the trail, palms and shrubbery blocking the house. This needed to be tended to; I hadn’t had the landscapers out since we’d arrived. It was getting overrun.
“Hey,” she murmured. When I didn’t yield, didn’t turn around as she tugged on my arm, Belle darted in front of me, threw herself around my neck, and hugged tight.
Not a word uttered, she just held me, her whole body blanketing mine. She squeezed—and suddenly the need to move, to run, melted away. My heart still hammered in its cage, but I could breathe freely again, the ringing between my ears gone. Burying my face in the nape of her neck, her skin sticky with sea salt and sweat, I wrapped around her and hugged back.
She stroked the back of my head. Her fingers whispered down my neck. At no point did she try to pull away, even though I knew I was holding her too tight, embracing her like I thought she’d die if I didn’t. Only when my pulse evened out did I ease away, my hands still resting on her hips, my jaw aching.
A very real, very breathtaking smile crossed her lips, and she cupped my face with both hands. “Hi.”
I kissed each palm. “Hi.”
“You can talk to me—if you want,” Belle said, eyebrows flickering up, the wind playing with her flyaways. “Remember? I can listen.”
“I want to tell you—”
“So, tell me.” She moved in closer, our hips finding each other. Her hands smoothed down my throat, my chest, then knotted together over my heart. “What’s been going on this month? You’re working so much more than you did before, and I know it’s stressing you out.”
“Work doesn’t stress me out,” I muttered, casting a dark look toward the water. “Richard stresses me out. My father stresses me out.”
“Talk to me.”
And as those royal blues bored into mine—I did. I told her everything. How I had been forced to step in seven years ago, after Richard had almost run four of our most prominent hotels into the ground. Mismanagement of funds. Allowing his enormous circle of leeches to stay for free, to drink resorts dry. Bad publicity everywhere; the Donahue name had taken a serious beating over Richard’s very public shenanigans with women, with alcohol. Our father had spent a fortune paying off the man my brother beat to a bloody pulp in a blackout rage. While he’d never killed anyone, his DUI count was in the double digits across numerous countries; all of those had to be bought out, too.
I had only been twenty-three, barely out of university, barely a man, when my father shuffled the familial responsibilities around like I had thirty years of experience behind me. Suddenly I was responsible for lives. I was responsible for over five hundred staff members across four hotels, and I was desperate to shoulder the burden of Richard’s failures, desperate to fix what my brother had broken for the sake of my mum’s heartache and my father’s headache.
Desperate to prove that I wasn’t just the boy who had spent much of his childhood doodling—that I had more worth than that.
I learned on my feet. I hired smart. I implemented new procedures, effectively erasing the useless ones enacted under Richard’s regime. Meanwhile, my father told everyone Richard had to step back for his health. He shipped him off to rehab clinics around the world, the best and most costly. I understood addiction was an illness, a disease, but my brother could stop. He could go cold turkey whenever it suited him, whenever he needed to sell the lie to someone—a doctor, a therapist, our parents—that he was well again and could be responsible for his own affairs, for his trust fund. When he was in the clear, out came the alcohol, the drugs, the women, the posse of yes-men who lived for my brother’s every word.
&
nbsp; Had I not done what I did, had my father and I not put our heads together and worked seven years ago, our hotels could have gone under. Instead, we thrived.
Then, eight months ago, my father had called me into his office and told me Richard was ready to step into his old job.
“He’s really grown and matured,” he had insisted when I started to protest. “He’s ready.”
Richard wasn’t ready—my brother’s finances had just needed padding, and my salary would add all the cushion necessary to ramp up his lifestyle. I had fought against it. If he really had grown, matured, seen the light, whatever, then I would have welcomed Richard into the business. I had enough going on in my professional life that I could step back and still have a very full plate.
But I knew then that he was going to fuck it all up. Undo years of blood, sweat, and tears that I had poured into our empire.
I’d refused. I wouldn’t sign a damn thing. I threatened to tell our investors, our board of directors, anyone who would listen, the truth about Richard. I’d start a fucking petition if I had to if it meant keeping jobs safe and our hotel reputation untarnished.
And then my father told me that he knew.
He knew that I was a client at Elysium, despite the NDAs all members signed. He knew enough about my preferences for it to disgust him—just enough that when he threatened to out me, to cause a scandal, I had no other choice. Our investors wouldn’t trust some pervert handling their money. Richard might have still been a party boy, but he kept the worst of his vices out of the press. Most accepted his extracurriculars.
Father wanted me to step back. Become a silent partner in the family business. Let Richard take the reins again—let Richard lead.
And if I didn’t, he’d tell the world I liked to spend my spare time at a seedy fetish club in Manhattan, that I was some abusive asshole who hated women, who whipped them, choked them, to get off.
The truth wouldn’t matter.
Deep down, he must have known Richard wasn’t ready; why else would he threaten me? He used the business savvy he was known for, showed me why he was a shark. I’d been fucking blackmailed out of a job that I loved by my own father—just so his firstborn could have the spotlight again.
I’d eventually stepped down without a fuss, told people I wanted to focus on personal projects. I became the silent partner, literally, having barely spoken to either Richard or our father in months. When it was all over, I had Belle. The day we left New York marked the end of my brother’s first month in my old position—and already they had all been clamoring for me back.
My father held out the longest.
Now that I had folded, because, despite everything, I still cared for him, for the Donahue name, he was demanding I clean up Richard’s mess again. He hadn’t apologized either, and like a schmuck, I’d been correcting my brother’s mistakes for the last few Sundays.
Because I was weak. My family had always made me weak.
The only person I wanted to be weak for was Belle.
When I finally finished the entire story, start to end, I was lightheaded, my mouth dry, my throat tight. Belle hadn’t interrupted once, though her incredulousness, her disgust, had played openly across her features. A part of me was ashamed to admit that I had bowed to my father’s wishes again after everything, but I couldn’t keep it from her anymore. She had wanted me to talk, so I did.
Maybe I had just talked myself right out of her life.
The whine returned between my ears as I waited. My hands had slipped back into my pockets at some point, allowing her the space to retreat if she so desired.
Much to my surprise, Belle pressed closer, her arms around my neck again.
“I don’t like him very much,” she said. I let out a breathy chuckle.
“Which him?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Both.”
“Yes, well, I don’t like them much either these days.” Yet here I was, doing exactly what they wanted. Pathetic. Where the fuck was my spine? I looked away, unable to meet her gaze—until she stood up on her toes so that we were nearly at eye level.
“Dean, you are a fixer,” she told me firmly, weaving her fingers into my hair. “You’re a caregiver and a problem-solver. You’re happy making other people happy. I’ve known that from our, like, fourth coffee date.”
I forced a weak smile; I really didn’t deserve her trying to rationalize my lack of a backbone. “Belle—”
“And your dad and your brother are taking advantage of that. They’re taking advantage of you,” she continued, speaking over me, her gaze strong—unflinching. “I don’t want you to be upset with yourself because—because they are playing on these qualities that make you such a good, warm, kind, wonderful man. Okay?”
My eyebrows shot up. Was my submissive really giving me a speech about being too hard on myself? My lips twitched, yearning to stretch into a patronizing smile, but I put a stop to that and swallowed the laugh bubbling up my throat too.
As much as I wanted to dismiss the notion, to call it absurd, to insist I was being just hard enough on myself, I didn’t. Belle wouldn’t have said what she had if she hadn’t meant it. During our scenes, she said what she needed to, what I told her to—only this wasn’t a scene. She was still my submissive, but I wasn’t holding all the reins. She was free to speak her mind, and she always did. Belle had a knack for making her opinion known without hammering me over the head with it.
And above all, I respected Belle’s opinion. I respected her.
So, maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to all this. Maybe I hadn’t just been putting in the hours required of me. Maybe I hadn’t worked myself to the bone all these years because I loved my family—but because they had found a way to manipulate me.
“What they did to you is awful,” she continued, wearing the same expression she had when she’d told me that Richard burning my paintings had been psychotic. My submissive wore her passion, her shock, out in the open when we were alone.
“Yes, well…” I was a grown man. A big boy. In theory, I could have put an end to it. But then again, if we were looking at this retrospectively—a man with a joint business-law degree from Harvard should have seen what was going on all these years. I should have seen what my father was doing to me, my brother, but my love for them and my desire to make them proud, to be the uncomplicated son, had blinded me.
My shoulders slumped. Did that make me a good man—or a feeble one?
“I’m so sorry that they put you through that.” She wobbled a little, still up on her tiptoes. In an instant, all my thoughts of weakness vanished, and it was just Belle and me again, alone on this island. I snaked an arm around her waist, taking the weight off her poor toes.
“It’s all right. I found my balm in you.” My gaze swept across her face—across those sumptuous pink lips, the freckly constellations on her cheeks, the depths of her royal blues. “You have made all this much more tolerable.”
Her cheeks coloured, and she pulled me into a kiss. Before I could deepen it, slip my tongue between those heavenly lips, she broke away, her eyes sad. “I don’t want you to have to tolerate it.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, a handful of snarky comments at the ready. Instead, I set her down with a smile, hands drifting to her hips again, and shook my head. “Neither do I.”
Honesty. I hadn’t been so open in years. Not even to my mum, who had always said I worked too hard, or to my baby sister, who complained that I was never around, that I was always busy, always stressed.
Frowning, I pressed a quick kiss to Belle’s forehead, then pulled her in for another hug. As she gripped me back, arms wrapped around my torso, head nestled under my chin, I couldn’t help but feel as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. When I opened my eyes again, the world seemed a whole lot brighter—and a whole lot simpler.
I didn’t exist on this planet to work. I didn’t deserve to die at my desk one day, the whole empire on my back.
I existed for
this—for the little moments, for the love of a good woman.
For family too, but not a family who shoved me down and swanned across my broken body.
“And this gala?” she asked when she pulled away. We stood facing one another still, but our hands had twined together, hanging between us. Rolling my eyes, I gave her a very basic rundown of my responsibilities at the yearly event, emphasizing that now it was technically Richard’s job, but I couldn’t imagine him doing it. My brother could be a great face for the company, handsome and strong, the kind of man women swooned over and men aspired to be—until he opened his mouth.
“Well, why don’t we just go and have a good time?”
This time, I let my incredulous laugh loose. “What?”
“Yeah,” Belle said, shrugging, her cheeks still stained pink. “We’ll get dressed up, eat some good food, dance—make a date night out of it.”
A date night? We’d had playdates so far, many of them, but a date night—somehow that seemed more intimate, even without the bondage.
“That way, your dad can’t say jack about not showing your face,” Belle continued, sounding giddier by the moment. “You can shake some hands, crack some jokes—but Richard will be the one to schmooze and sell and network and whatever. We can just have fun. Let him know that he didn’t faze you today, that you aren’t doing his job anymore.”
Logic told me to agree. Self-preservation insisted I stand up for myself.
But my heart—it wasn’t quite so eager to jump on board. Leaving Richard to his own devices could spell doom for my family’s hotel empire. I wasn’t sure if I could fully let go of that—if I could step back and watch my brother tank everything that I had worked so hard to rebuild.
Belle squeezed my hand, gently, curiously, and tilted her head to the side as she said, “Come on… It’ll be fun.”
I squeezed back. The night would be much more pleasant if I endured it with Belle. She had a knack for lifting my spirits, making me smile—grounding me.
“So, what you’re saying,” I started, eyes narrowing, “is that you are willingly throwing yourself to the trust-fund wolves?”