by Nikki Sloane
“Please stop saying it.”
“Goddamnit, you are the most frustrating girl . . . Okay, yeah, you had a really shitty experience a long time ago, but we’re going to get past it.” He’d said we’re. Like this was his problem now, too?
And, what the hell? Did he not think I’d tried to get past it? There had been Joel, and a few others, and I’d felt nothing with any of them. In fact, before Dominic, my fucked up relationship with Joseph was the closest I’d gotten to love with a man. My manager certainly didn’t love me, but I knew he at least cared about me.
Dominic pulled me into his lap and wrapped his warm arms tight around me. “Now that I put it out there, it’s out. Get used to hearing me say it.”
“Then get used to not hearing it back.”
I didn’t argue to try to stop him, because Dominic did whatever he wanted. His hands started at the base of my neck and slid up gently until he had my face cradled in his palms, him just a breath away. The pad of his thumb brushed over my lips, pausing at the center.
“I love you.”
The thumb slipped away and was replaced by his kiss, the same one he’d given me at the club. He’d kissed me then as a man who’d waited a year to kiss, but this time it was worse. This was a kiss he’d waited his whole life to give. One that tasted like love.
My eyes stung and I turned away.
“Are you . . . crying?”
I blinked and glared at him. Whatever was going on with my eyes dried up. “No,” I spat out. “I don’t cry.”
A short laugh came out of him. “You know, saying you don’t do something? That doesn’t actually make it true.”
I rolled my eyes and crawled off of him. “You better watch yourself. Your truth serum made me sleepy and bitchy.”
He turned off the light and curled up around me like he always did, but I felt him all around me now. Like he was tattooed to my skin.
“Thanks for staying,” he said. I don’t know if he meant through the holidays, or the fact that I hadn’t bolted from the apartment when the L word came out.
“You’re welcome,” I whispered back. “Merry Christmas.”
Every morning before he left for work, it was the same. He’d take my face in his hands, brush his thumb over my lips and tell me he loved me. That thumb would slide out of the way just as he replaced it with his lips to kiss me goodbye.
It snowed my final week in Tokyo. The city was more beautiful with the fat snowflakes drifting down to melt on the neon. My ticket home was for Monday afternoon, and as the weekend approached, the familiar panic crept in. I didn’t love this place. I’d gotten more homesick in my five weeks here than my entire semester in Amsterdam. But I didn’t know how I was going to get on that goddamn plane.
He’d been late getting home this whole week, cutting deeper into our remaining time together.
“I was hoping we could go to Kyoto for the weekend. You want to?” Dominic asked over dinner on Thursday.
“Well, yeah.” When else was I going to get the chance to go there? “What did you have in mind?”
“We could stay at a Ryokan. It’s like a traditional inn so you get the full Japanese experience. I’ve wanted to stay at one, but it’d be weird to go by myself.” Something suspicious flashed behind the aqua eyes.
“Okay, sure, but what’s going on with you?”
“Maybe I made reservations for us already. There’s a really good one that has an onsen. You know what that is?”
“Yeah, a hot spring.” But the weird expression continued on his face. “That’s not what’s got you nervous, though.”
He gave me a tight smile. “You’re not going to like this next part.” He leaned back in his seat across the dinner table from me, massaging a hand on the back of his neck, giving me a view of the bicep flexing under his T-shirt.
“Out with it.”
“The place I booked, it’s supposed to be really great.”
Okay . . .?
“Because it’s so traditional.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but he delivered the word with so much weight it made me nervous. He sighed, and locked eyes with me.
“The bad news is I changed your last name. The good news is it comes with jewelry.”
My chair squealed as I pushed back from the table and shot up. He leaped to his feet, too.
“Calm down,” he said. “It’s just for show. They won’t take an unmarried couple.”
My heart slammed in my chest and I ripped my eyes away from him. He wanted me to pretend to be his wife. I didn’t hear him come over. It was the thick arms that circled my waist that announced his presence.
“You’re asking way too much.” I said it quietly.
“It’s a lot, I know.” He pressed me against him so my face was buried against his T-shirt and I breathed in the scent of cedar and soap. “I’ll make it worth it, I promise.” A hand smoothed over the back of my head, angling me to look up at him. “I mean, if you fake marry me,” he teased, “you get half my stuff in the fake divorce.”
I pushed out a weak smile to mask the terror inside. Not terror at this idea of pretending. I’d always been a good actor. It was that the idea of actually marrying Dominic someday – it didn’t make me feel empty inside like it had with Joel. Instead I stood in Dominic’s arms and felt lightheaded.
“Okay, so say I do this. What makes you think,” I whispered, “that I’d take your last name? That’d be moving back in the alphabet.”
“Too late.” He grinned and looked thrilled I’d sort of agreed to it. “I already registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ward. But go ahead and tell me you don’t do name changes. It’ll be fun.”
“Asshole.”
He laughed and lifted me up, causing my legs to fold around him. He stormed toward the bedroom. “That’s no way to talk to your fake husband, Mrs. Ward.”
Shit. That sent tingles down my spine. “Maybe you should put something in my mouth to shut it up then.” I slipped a hand between our bodies, rubbing him. “Like this.”
He gave me a wicked, dark look. “I’ll put that wherever I goddamn please.”
Fuck. I might just love him after all.
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
Dominic only made it twenty minutes into our six-hour train ride before asking about the rings. He’d dropped a wad of yen on the table Friday morning, along with a ring made out of paper he’d taped together for sizing, and tasked me with picking them out.
I glared at him as I dug the box out of my purse. I’d gone into a jewelry store and bought two simple silver bands, one for each of us, then bought a gaudy cubic zirconium ring at one of the tourist shops. Trying the rings on had been difficult, but I didn’t suffer the full-out meltdown until after. I’d sat in a coffee shop like a zombie for over an hour, weighing my options and forcing myself to face the fact that I was leaving Japan soon. Leaving him.
He couldn’t go back to America. My half-joking request for him to come home with me had been met with a wall of silence and an unreadable look. Slowly his expression filled with concern. “To where we’d both be out of jobs?”
No, that wasn’t an option for him. He had another year left on his contract.
I almost dropped the box with my sweaty hand. “Hope it fits, darling,” I said.
Dominic ignored me. He took the larger of the two bands, and I followed its quick descent onto his finger. How could he be so comfortable with this?
“It fits. Your turn.”
As I stared at the band on his left hand, my breath caught. A sign that he belonged to someone. To me. It was sexy. Wait, no, I didn’t like this. I grabbed my rings and shoved them on my finger, then balled my hand into a fist, dropping it out of view. I expected the ring to feel like it weighed a ton, but it didn’t.
We watched out the window as we raced through the gorgeous countryside filled with cedar trees and rice paddies. Dominic’s hand rested on my knee, and as we barreled through a tunnel, the light glinted on the new ban
d on his third finger. My eyes were drawn to it like a moth to a flame. What was wrong with me?
It was late afternoon when we arrived in downtown Kyoto, and took a taxi that wound through the city that seemed just as sprawling as Tokyo and yet more intimate. There were temples everywhere, and less neon.
The exterior of the Ryokan was a two-story building with a wooden-carved gate. A woman greeted us at check-in, and escorted Mr. and Mrs. Ward to their guesthouse. We followed a path through a perfectly manicured winter garden, over a tiny red footbridge, and into our private bungalow.
My eyes went wide as she showed us the space after we’d removed our shoes. The interior was classic Japanese with the tan matted floor and paper doors. The back wall of the room was all glass with a view of our own private garden courtyard. In one corner, two narrow mattresses sat side by side on the floor. They were called futons here, not the fold-and-fucks from college that word typically brought to my mind.
A glassed-in room was located in the corner opposite the futons, the bamboo shades drawn up to give us a view of the large soaking tub. The woman explained in English that dinner would be served in our room at seven.
“This must have cost a fortune,” I said to him after she’d gone. “This place is beautiful.”
Dominic gave me a seductive smile. “Want to take a bath? We’ve got lots of time before dinner.”
I followed him into the glass room, admiring the tile work over the tub. A traditional scene with Mt. Fuji and a blue wave cresting beneath Japanese characters. This place . . . it wasn’t just beautiful, it was romantic.
“Dominic.”
He’d yanked off his shirt, but my sharp tone made him freeze.
“I know what you’re up to,” I accused.
He returned to life and went to the tap, turning on the water that flooded the deep, rectangular tub that was the size of a four-man hot tub, and continued to ignore me.
My words were supposed to be strong, but they faltered. “It won’t work.”
I thought maybe he couldn’t hear me over the running water, but he straightened and put his focus on me.
“What exactly am I up to?” He unbuttoned his pants and yanked them down, kicking them away so he was only in a pair of gray boxers.
“You brought me here to get me to say it back.”
His gaze warmed until it was hot as a sauna in the room. The steam rising from the tub didn’t help. I stood my ground as Dominic strolled up to me. There was no denial in his face. His eyes didn’t leave mine as he lifted my sweater up over my head and cast it away.
“It won’t work,” I repeated, this time stronger.
Cold fingers unsnapped my jeans and tugged them off, and he returned to stand over me. The intense gaze bore down, like he was looking for a way into my heart.
“I can’t make you say you love me.” He blinked and the aqua in his eyes darkened. They filled with determination. “But I can make you feel it.”
I expected him to pull me against him and kiss me, but his attack was subtler. He turned, dropped his boxers to the floor, and stepped into the water. He came back around to face me and sank down onto the ledge seat in the tub.
I was aware I was fighting a losing battle. The hour in the coffee shop had been scary as hell, but well spent. Dominic had planned this trip to get the words from me, but I’d made plans of my own. I could make sacrifices to get what I wanted.
“I went to the Imperial Palace yesterday.”
The only sound was the water splashing. The eyes fixed on me through the steam didn’t blink.
He blew out a long breath. “How was it?”
“It was nice.”
I undid my bra. It fell onto the floor silently. My heart raced and the blood rushed loudly in my ears. I hooked my thumbs under my lace panties and pulled them down. “I’m going to need a favor.”
My shaky tone made his eyes go wide with alarm. “What?”
Oh, god, was I really doing this? I’d been flooded with relief when I’d made the hard decision yesterday, but I was still nervous. “I need you . . . to cancel my ticket.”
His expression shifted from alarm, to relief, and to confusion faster than a snap of my fingers.
“You’re giving me another week?”
“No.”
His breathing picked up, faster each second. “Two weeks?”
“No.”
He must have realized I’d said cancel and not reschedule. His expression slowly shifted now to one of guarded hope. “Are you . . . staying?”
It came from me as breathless as he looked to be. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“For you.”
I might have short-circuited his brain. His eyes drifted down to the water pooling around him and he blinked rapidly, as if unable to process it. I couldn’t find the words he wanted to hear, but maybe with time I would. Plus, staying – that made a pretty big statement, didn’t it? I disliked it here, but he couldn’t go and being with him trumped everything else.
“Holy shit.” His gaze snapped back to me. “Get the fuck over here.”
Standing outside the tub, completely naked before him except for those rings, with his gaze on me and so full of love, I’d never felt more powerful. And even though I came running to him, it wasn’t because of his command. It was the crushing need to be with him. I’d barely stepped into the water and he whirled me into his lap so I was straddling him. He buried a hand in the hair at the nape of my neck and yanked me down into his desperate kiss, the hot water splashing around us.
Time slowed down as his lips pressed against mine. My hands skimmed along his strong jaw and my fingers curled in his hair, trapping his head against the tile wall. My tongue dipped into his mouth. Heat and water closed in all around.
“We’re going to flood the room,” I gasped as his mouth trailed kisses down my neck. The water was still running and the deep tub was nearly full. Hands locked on my waist so we could glide through the water close to the tap. He fumbled an arm out and shut it off, and then that arm was back, crushing me against his wet skin.
I couldn’t leave. Every time I imagined going back to my empty apartment in Chicago, I felt sick. It wasn’t much of a plan, staying with him, but it was all I had. It had to be enough. He was better at planning than I was.
His hands splayed across my back while his mouth worked steadily lower to my breasts. The caress of his soft tongue on my nipple was an electric shock of acute desire. I didn’t think I could be any more needy until that happened.
“Please,” I whispered. I shifted in his lap, letting his hard cock slip between my folds. I didn’t want foreplay. The throbbing ache for him was going to consume me.
Like the first time we’d been together, he paused just as he was positioned to take me. Those arms held me steady and his gaze kept me immobile. One of his hands drifted up through the water. He repeated his routine of cupping my face. The wet thumb brushed onto my lips.
“I love you.”
He claimed my mouth and urged me down onto him at the same moment, and I sighed against the kiss. I was trembling. The emotions snaking through my veins were overwhelming.
His slow, gentle slide inside me burned with scorching pleasure. This was like that first time, only so much more. Not because he was sitting and I was on top. It was because what we were doing wasn’t fucking. This was making love. He’d given me a hint of it before, but now he had no need for restraint.
The ends of my hair skimmed the water and clung to me, and I clung to him. I clawed at his shoulder, wanting him closer. My forehead rested against his. The tremble in me grew and stole my breath.
“Payton.” He moaned it in my ear when I went faster. “Slow. Make it last.”
I wanted to, but couldn’t. Each push of his cock claimed me over again, making me his. My hand slapped against the cold wall behind him, and I dragged it chattering down the tile. His left hand seized my breast and he sucked at the pert nipple just above the waterline. The ring on his han
d. Oh, shit. I closed my eyes but the image was seared in my brain. How did I get so lucky? That he’d chosen me that night, and he’d chosen to give me all this.
His heart was pounding in his chest and I could feel it mirroring mine. He approached the edge of his orgasm as I did, threatening to send us over. I’d never wanted anything as much as I did this man who pushed and tested me, but also wanted to give me anything I wanted. There was no demand to come for him. This moment was much deeper than our silly power play.
Yeah, he couldn’t get the words out of me, but he was absolutely right. I felt it.
Dominic’s hands drove me down on him in a final thrust that threw us both into oblivion. His quiet moan echoed off the tile. And me? The bliss was so out of this world I couldn’t find oxygen. My mouth hung open and I barely made a sound. I closed my eyes and banded my arms so hard around his head, surely I suffocated him against my heaving chest.
The water rolled in waves, back and forth, diminishing with each pass, until it was smooth again.
“God, there aren’t words,” he said, muffled against my skin, “for how amazing that was.”
“No,” I panted, “there aren’t.”
I released his head and leaned back in his arms, still trying to catch my breath.
“You’re serious about staying, right?”
I nodded and rose off of him, the water sloshing in the tub again as I sat beside him under his arm. “I’m going to need another favor, though.”
“Just name it. Whatever you want. Anything.”
I gave a pained smile. “I’ve probably got enough to cover another month of rent in Chicago, but that’s it.” I leaned my head back against the tile. “All my money’s tied up in my car.”
“How much is left on your lease?”
“Until April.”
“We can figure out what to do after that, but I’ve got you covered until then.”
I bit my lip. “I’ll pay you back.” Though I had no idea how.
His deep laugh filled the glass room. “Forget it. I don’t want your money.” I scowled, but that only made his grin wider. “Think of it this way, you’re repurposing the money from the plane ticket, and I’ll still be coming out ahead.” His eyes gleamed. “Way fucking ahead.”