“Evening,” he says shortly. “I’m Arthur Brown, from child services.”
I motion for him to come in. He steps inside, making no effort to hide the fact that he’s searching for signs of neglect or of me being unfit to be a parent. “I see you make a lot of money, Mr. Rivers.”
“I do okay for myself,” I say.
“I also see you’re not afraid to flaunt it,” he notes, lifting some expensive looking paperweight the designers decorated the foyer with when they furnished the house.
I rip the paperweight from his hands and set it back down in its place, glaring at him openly as I do.
Stephanie clears her throat and jumps up to put her hands around me as she smiles at the man. “Sorry,” she says quickly. “Tristan has had a long day. He’s just tired.”
“I have,” I agree, still glaring at Arthur. “So you may not want to provoke me.”
Stephanie stomps on my foot and gives me a sharp look.
With an effort, I force a calm I don’t feel. I glance over to see what Cole is doing and catch him digging through the pile of cards on the floor to find the pictures he likes best as he mutters something about pretty fishies to himself.
“Right,” says Arthur, who pulls out his clipboard and starts to write down some kind of note with a disapproving look on his face.
I crane my neck to see what he’s writing, but he angles the clipboard until I can’t see.
“I suppose you were having a long day before you assaulted your father in a diner earlier today, too?”
“What?” asks Stephanie.
My blood runs cold and my fists clench. How the fuck does he know about that? “I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I see,” says Arthur, whose pen is moving furiously now across his clipboard. “So do you often black out and forget your violent episodes?”
“What is this?” asks Stephanie. “I work with child services all the time and this is totally uncalled for. You’re just supposed to be looking at our home and at the basics, not trying to conduct some sort of sting operation.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What I’m trying to do is ensure this young man,” he nods to Cole, “is able to live in an environment where he will be safe and happy.”
“Yet you came in here already deciding this wasn’t that place. Why is that?” asks Stephanie.
For the first time, Arthur’s obnoxious confidence falters just for a moment. She’s close to asking the right question and he knows it. It takes him just long enough to respond that he clearly seems to be grasping for a likely answer instead of giving the truth. “Maybe because of the reported violence earlier today,” he suggests.
“Reported by whom?” asks Stephanie.
As much as I already hate this little rat of a man, I’m thoroughly enjoying watching Stephanie in her element as she grills him and gradually turns the tables. I also feel a kind of warm appreciation towards her for not turning on me when she heard the way he phrased what happened between my dad and I. She could’ve just as easily snapped at me and believed the worst, but she’s trying to defend me instead.
“By an anonymous source,” snaps Arthur. “I don’t know how you think this works, Miss…” he glances down at his clipboard. “Holland. But I’m not the one on trial here.”
“Trial?” she asks. “Is that what you think this is? A trial? What does that make you, the judge and the jury?”
He clamps his teeth together, eyes burning angrily. “I think I’ve seen enough here.”
He rounds on his heel and heads toward the door. Just before he leaves, a thought occurs to me. I take a few big steps to catch up with him and grip his shoulder. “Wait,” I say. “Did your anonymous tip come from a young woman with blonde hair?”
The split second of surprise in his eyes is all the answer I need. The only response he actually gives me is an angry grunt before he pulls away from my hand and storms out, but I know from his face that I was right.
“Go fish!” shouts Cole once Arthur has left.
Stephanie and I distractedly sit back down with him and start playing again, but our minds are anywhere but the game.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
“The look on his face. I think Alice was the one who tipped him off.”
“Alice?” she asks. “The girl from the auction who had a thing for you?”
“Her, yes. But it’s not about her having a ‘thing’ for me. She just doesn’t want to lose. That means she’ll be happy if she can spoil something good for us.” I don’t need to spell it out for Stephanie to understand. Her eyes immediately go to Cole, who is humming happily as he randomly grabs cards and adds them to his hand from the pile.
“What did happen at the diner?” asks Stephanie carefully.
I sigh, giving Cole a careful look to see if he’s paying any attention. “He grabbed me and I may have punched him once.”
She nods, but her eyebrows are drawn in thought. “Why were you meeting him in the first place?”
“I thought I could work out some kind of agreement with him. Stupid thought, or so it turned out.”
She gives me a sad smile. “I know how hard that must have been.”
“It wasn’t hard,” I say. “I know how badly you want this all to work out. I did it for you.”
She bites the corner of her lip and smiles at her cards. “Keep up the sweet stuff and you may have trouble getting rid of me when this is all over.”
Cole looks up curiously, but clearly doesn’t grasp what we’re talking about because he goes back to talking to his cards.
I raise an eyebrow at Stephanie, grinning. “Maybe I’m not so sure I want to get rid of you anymore.”
“Flattering,” she says.
I chuckle. “I can’t spill all my secrets. I don’t want you getting a big head.”
Cole looks up sharply at Stephanie’s head like he’s expecting it to literally start growing before his eyes.
“It’s a figure of speech, bud,” I say.
“What’s that?” he asks.
Stephanie watches with amusement as I try to explain.
“It’s a thing you say that… well, it’s something you say that doesn’t really make sense. But everyone knows what it means so it makes sense. Even though it doesn’t.”
Cole’s face scrunches up and Stephanie gives me a round of applause for my terrible explanation.
“Have you considered getting out of the business world and into homeschooling?” asks Stephanie. “You really have a way with words.”
I give her a dirty look, but can’t help from cracking a smile. “I’ve got a way with something else, too. And if you keep pushing your luck, I’ll make sure I remind you of that.”
She smiles back, but there’s an uneasiness in her expression. I feel what she’s feeling too. This thing between us has become so confused and it has happened so quickly. To make matters even more confusing, I’m starting to wonder not just if I’ll be able to let Stephanie go when this is all over, but I’m also not sure I’ll be able to let my little brother go. For the first time in my life, it feels like I’m part of something good. My reflex was to push it away and to deny it, but day by day I can feel it breaking through to me. Stephanie and Cole… They are good for me. Hell, maybe I’m even good for them.
15
Stephanie
“Wow,” I say as Tristan leads me out of the elevator we just rode to the top of a huge skyscraper downtown. He let me get the best babysitter money could buy for Cole, even though this late at night they are just going to be sitting on the couch and waiting through the night to make sure he doesn’t need a cup of water or a bathroom trip.
The room is pure white, almost like something out of a futuristic movie. There’s a bright glow that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, making the walls look like flat expanses of pearl lit by a winter sun. I can see now why Tristan made me wear white. Even he’s wearing white, albeit with black shoes, belt,
and tie.
A woman with her hair dyed pure white and shocking white eye-liner stands behind a sort of reception desk flanked by two tall doors. “Mr. Rivers,” she says professionally as we approach. “Welcome to Purity.”
Tristan gives me a playfully severe look, like he’s poking fun at our melodramatic entrance.
I smirk at him and wrap my arm around his a little tighter. As much as he can be intense and serious and sexy, he can be surprisingly gentle at exactly the right moments. I never thought of myself with such an intense kind of guy before meeting Tristan because I imagined it would feel so stifling, like every single moment was ripped straight out of a romance movie. Yes, that’s all well and good when you’re in the mood for it. But what about when you just want to be a goofball and do something weird? Or when you want to gossip about your co-workers or complain about a belly ache. It never seemed like the prototypical bad boy on a motorcycle who wears leather jackets would be compatible with those moments.
Somehow, Tristan is. He’s sexier than I could’ve ever imagined a man being, but part of that sexiness is how he is always thinking of me first. If he can sense that I’m uncomfortable or afraid, he knows exactly how much to tease me or what expression to make. Being around him is… It’s good. It feels right in a way I never thought I’d find. It feels so right it scares me, because nothing this good can possibly last. Can it?
When Tristan came into my bedroom to invite me on another date, I was pleasantly surprised. With everything going on between us, I still haven’t been able to get a real pulse of where we stand. I’ve stopped lying to myself, for my part. I know I want to be with him.
The only real reservation in my mind is the worry that giving in to Tristan is some kind of betrayal of Cole or even a betrayal of the memory of my little brother. On a logical level, I know that’s stupid. My little brother, if he’s still looking down on me, probably doesn’t care what I do so long as I’m happy. It’s my own mental construct to think that he would expect me to fix some other kid like him or that he’d want me to sideline my life to find a convoluted sense of redemption for how I let him down.
Still, logical or not, there’s a pit of doubt in my stomach. I can’t just look at Tristan and the amazing life he seems to promise as the blessing it probably is. Instead I’m stuck seeing myself as some kind of selfish creature who is spitting on the memory of her dead brother.
“You okay?” asks Tristan. He splays his hand across the small of my back, giving me the slightest tug toward him. It’s a subtle gesture, but it makes a warm sense of safety and happiness blossom inside me.
I press my lips together, nodding but not meeting his eyes because I don’t want him to see how much my mind is wandering. He pulls me even closer, kissing the top of my head in such a tender way that it melts my heart.
It has been almost a week since Arthur from child services came to harass us at Tristan’s house, and this date is the first real official outing he and I have had since. We’ve both been busy, but it’s not like it was that first week in his house. We may not spend much time around the house talking, and we’re still sleeping in separate rooms, but there has been a definitive change between us. It’s mostly just in the way his eyes follow me when we’re in the same room, or the way he seems to find any excuse to brush against me or touch me, no matter how innocent the touch.
There has been a palpable electricity hanging in the air between us, and I’ve known for days now that it was only a matter of time before a chance contact made that electricity spark to life. Maybe that chance will come tonight.
The club is not what I would ever expect of a BDSM club. Even the boat Tristan took me on last week didn’t quite fit my image of a dark, dungeon-like space full of whips and chains and dark music. This place though… The entire room is a sharp palette of white with small, crisp accents of black from men’s ties or the occasional extreme makeup on a woman. A faint mist rises from the floor so that it feels like we’re walking inside some sort of vision of the afterlife where an endless party rages inside a cloud.
I smile at Tristan. “I have to admit. Corny name or not. This is amazing.”
“I hoped you would like it,” he says. “Come, the atmosphere is only half the reason I brought you here. The food is actually incredible.”
He leads me through a much more tame, but no-less sexual, main lobby area than the one we saw on the boat. Instead of the overt nudity and touching I saw on the boat, this club seems to harbor a more restrained atmosphere, but the sexual tension in the air is so thick I can practically feel it pressing in on me. Men hold frighteningly intense gazes with women, hands roam bodies, and couples walk with purpose between rooms and hallways that are no doubt places where the sexual tension can come to fruition.
I thought Jamie would lose it over my stories of what the BDSM boat was like, but she’s not going to even believe me about this place.
We enter a restaurant where clear water runs down every inch of a white marble wall. It settles in pools that travel in a lazy current through the room. All the tables are positioned near the outermost wall, where I realize the current from the waterfalls runs through the center of every table. A small procession of bamboo baskets loaded with succulent plates of food float slowly through our table and along the channel running between tables until they reach a group of four who reach over and pluck their plates from the stream, leaving the baskets to circulate back toward the kitchen.
I raise my eyebrows, taking my seat across from Tristan. “Okay. That’s a little bit of a gimmick, but it’s cool enough that I give them a pass. For sure.”
He chuckles. “I thought it was clever.”
A waiter comes a few moments later. He’s tall and well groomed with a white dress shirt and pants. “Will you be dining with us tonight?” he asks.
Tristan nods.
“Very well,” says the waiter, who turns and walks back to the kitchen.
“Uhh,” I say, giving Tristan a confused look.
“Call it another gimmick. The chef picks for you.”
“Oh,” I say. “I guess that’s what all women really want anyway, right?”
He narrows his eyes. “This feels like a trap.”
“It is,” I laugh.
“If I’ve learned one thing about women in my life, it’s that there is no such thing as ‘all women’. Unless you want to say, ‘all women have a frustrating habit of being uniquely different and hard to figure out.’”
“Very diplomatic,” I say with a smile. “But not wrong, either. Still, I’d say you have some kind of telepathic ability when it comes to women. At least when it comes to… Well, you know.”
“Sex?” he asks. “And no. That’s just you. Since that first night, I’ve felt like I could read your pulse.” He leans in closer, lowering his voice. “Like I could feel where your orgasm is and exactly which buttons to press to bring it out, or which ones to avoid if I’m not ready to let you cum yet.”
I clear my throat and rub the back of my neck self-consciously. “I wish I could say I didn’t believe you.”
He chuckles. “Sorry. Where are my manners. We haven’t even had our drinks and I’m already talking about dessert.”
I make a startled, embarrassing noise deep in my throat and can’t help laughing at myself. I chew on my lip, deciding maybe Mr. Rivers shouldn’t get to be so cocky about his ‘dessert’. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was feeling pretty full already. I might pass on desert tonight.” I lift my eyes to his slowly to see how he’s taking my tease.
He matches my gaze with a fiery intensity, lips twitching with a hint of amusement. “I think I could find a way to work up your appetite.”
I’m saved from responding when a small convoy of bamboo baskets floats toward our table. Once they are closer, I see neatly folded papers in each basket that say “Mr. Rivers.”
Tristan plucks the contents from each basket, starting with the bottle of red wine and glasses. The next basket contains an assortment of bread
from white to wheat and a multigrain style. There’s even a platter with a flat pad of butter dusted in thick particles of sea salt.
I regard the butter with appreciation. “Somehow the salt sprinkles make it seem so much fancier,” I say.
Tristan smiles. “I’ve always thought the same thing.” He dips his finger in the butter and licks it off without apparent thought.
“Did you just eat butter off your fingertip like some kind of barbarian?”
He laughs. “Is that barbaric of me?” He holds his finger over the butter again, daring me to challenge him on it.
“Stop!” I say, giggling. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
He takes one more swipe of butter on his finger and licks it off cockily, leaning back to watch me as he savors the bite in a way that is so confident and self-assured I can’t help swoon a little to watch it. I’ve never met a man like him, someone so sure and purposeful and deliberate. He carries himself like he knows how every detail of his day is going to play out and it’s all moving exactly how he had hoped, like he needs no fear because the future is already mapped out.
“Technically,” he says, ripping a roll of bread open with his hands and ignoring the knife. “You didn’t take me anywhere. I’m in charge here. Remember?” he asks, popping a piece of bread in his mouth.
I give him a dry look as I make a show of how to actually use silverware to open up the bread and spread the butter like a civilized human being. When I go to take a bite of the bread though, I am too focused on my little song and dance and end up smashing the buttery end of the bread into my nose.
Tristan covers his smile as I try to discreetly wipe my nose.
“What’s better,” he asks. “A purposeful barbarian, or an accidental one?”
“I’ll show you a barbarian if you keep teasing me,” I say, gripping my knife and pointing it at him.
He laughs. “That’s a butter knife. What are you going to do, butter me up?”
I lean my head back and make a pained sound. “Oh that was bad. You said you wouldn’t make a good father, but you’ve got the dad jokes down already.”
The Dom's Bride: A BDSM Romance Page 11