He smirked. "Yeah, I did. Silly me. Thinking you wouldn't go digging through my bookmarks like you were looking for blackmail material." Leaning back in his chair, he looked at me, his face growing serious. "I know what you saw, Jenna. And I know it pissed you off for some reason, because you tried to sneak away at the crack of dawn. But I don't know why, and I can't know unless you tell me."
Really? Was it not obvious to him?
I was still struggling to find the words to explain something so basic. How could he not get it?
"Was I not clear enough about the strictly platonic nature of this arrangement?" he prompted. "It shouldn't matter to you if I'm into balloon-popping or eyeball-licking." He paused. "I'm not, by the way. In case you were wondering. The point being that even if I was, it wouldn't matter, unless you have a policy against doing business without people whose paraphilias don't exactly match up with your own."
I could feel my lips pulling into a thin, disapproving line. It must look terrible, like I was some kind of disapproving schoolmarm judging him for things that were none of my business. But I couldn't just pretend like it didn't bother me.
"At least licking someone's eyeballs isn't demeaning," I said.
He blinked, but his expression didn't change. After a moment, he stood up, walking into the hallway. I stared after him, wondering if he was really just going to pretend like I hadn't spoken.
I followed him, into the kitchen.
Finally, he turned to look at me. He was reaching for something in the wet bar. "If we're going to talk about this, I'm making myself a drink. What do you want? Lemon drop martini?"
I frowned. "That's not what I ordered at the bar."
"But it is your favorite drink." That wasn't a question. He turned his attention to filling a shaker with ice. "But for whatever reason, you don't treat yourself often. Maybe you think it's too girly, or it's too extravagant, or too sugary, or too many calories. Hell if I know."
There was a knot of frustration in my chest. This wasn't the direction that our conversation was supposed to go. "Okay, Sherlock Holmes. Fine. Yes, I'll have a lemon drop martini. Not that you seem to be giving me any choice."
I sat down at the island.
"It was the menu," he explained, coming towards me with a glass. "The specialty drink menu at the bar. You were looking at it, and you kept your finger by the 'Skinny Lemon Drop Martini' the whole time." He took a sip of his Jack and coke. "Not that you need skinny drinks, mind you."
"I'll drink what I want, thanks." I looked up at him. "Seems like you have a little bit of a sweet tooth, yourself."
"Nothing wrong with that." He sat down nearby, but a few stools away, giving me space. "We can't all drink straight tequila and trap scorpions under the empty glass."
I had to laugh at that. "You think James Bond was into spanking women?"
"Oh, definitely." He smiled. "That's certainly the face of a man who engages in a little rough play every now and then."
"Huh." I was pressing my knees together, protectively, without really understanding why. "I always would've thought that any man who feels really secure in his masculinity wouldn't need to hit a woman."
His face softened a little. "I don't need it," he said. "If anyone needs it, it's them."
My heart constricted. "So that's how you look at it, huh?"
A frustrated sigh escaped his lips. "That's not how I look at it, it's the truth. Do you really think I'm forcing anybody into something they don't want? Do I strike you as that kind of guy?"
"I don't know!" I insisted. "I don't really know you at all. But I do know that people can hide who they really are. It's easy. And the only time I ever met you when you weren't 'on,' you treated me like I didn't matter." I hadn't intended to talk about our first meeting in the store, but it was all coming out in a rush. "You treated me like I was less than you. Maybe your excuses were legit - maybe you really were just tired and out of your mind. Or maybe that's how you really feel, and you just didn't have the wherewithal to hide it."
I expected him to have a knee-jerk reaction - to be offended, maybe even to yell at me. But he just sat back and re-crossed his legs. I wondered how many times he'd had to have this sort of conversation with a woman, and felt slightly chilled.
"Jenna," he said, "if you didn't matter, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. You matter. Disbelieve me about anything else you want, call me a liar, call me insincere, but don't doubt that you matter to me."
His eyes locked with mine, so serious, I had no choice but to believe him. Even if none of this really made sense, I couldn't argue with that logic.
Why I mattered to him was another question entirely - and one that I wasn't prepared to ask.
Taking a deep breath, I fought to hold on to rationality. It was a myth that hurtful, controlling men were just unable to reign in their emotions, that every bad thing they did happened in a fit of passion. Their choices were cold, calculating, meant to entrap and twist the mind into undeserved sympathy. I had to remember that. More likely than not, Mr. Chase was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
"Fine," I said. "So tell me why you're into...that."
The corner of his mouth twisted at my tone. "Is there anything I could say that'll make a difference?" he mused, aloud, not really expecting an answer. "Well, I wasn't always. If that makes it better. A woman asked me if I would do it. She liked the idea of the whole BDSM scene, the dominance and submission dynamic. But the culture didn't appeal. She was sort of...old-fashioned, I guess. She told me that she'd looked into it, and she finally found a version that made sense to her.
"When I started looking into it, my skin crawled, too. It didn't feel right. It was against everything I'd been taught, it seemed regressive, it seemed...well, I don't have to tell you. It wasn't all that different from 'normal' BDSM, but at the same time, it felt like another world. It felt more serious - less like a game. I told her no. It made me uncomfortable. I looked at her, and I just couldn't picture myself acting like some parody of a stern parent. It was distasteful. I respected her too much."
He paused, smiling humorlessly into his glass. "At least, that's what I told myself."
After a moment, he started again, softer this time, his tone laden with the full conviction of his words. "Finally I realized that if I respected her, if I really respected her, I'd trust her to know what she wanted. I was treating her like she was fragile. Like I knew better. She was asking me to live out that fantasy of 'Mr. Chase knows best,' but instead, I was giving her the reality. She was strong enough to understand what she really wanted, to admit it, even in a culture that might punish her for wanting exactly what women were supposed to want, just a few generations ago."
I'd expected some kind of impassioned defense, but he was talking like a women's studies textbook. I almost snorted the last mouthful of my martini. "So domestic discipline is a revolutionary act?"
He quirked an eyebrow at my skeptical tone. "Our culture creates certain desires, cultivates them, and then judges you when you actually want to act them out. You're only allowed to 'know your place' as long as it doesn't bring you any pleasure." His eyes glinted. "I say, fuck that. Fuck them. Take it back."
"Oh, boy," I said, looking down at my empty glass. "I think that's the first time somebody's used that line on me."
"It's not a line," he said, earnestly, leaning towards me a little. "I mean it. Every word."
"Yeah, well." I glanced around, looking for some escape that didn't exist. "I think you'll have to find somebody else to help you dismantle the patriarchy through spanking."
Ben leaned back in his seat, a reluctant smile tugging at his mouth. "I wasn't offering," he said. "I was just explaining. It's not backwards, it's just a lot of harmless fun."
This wasn't really a conversation I wanted to have with anyone, let alone a near-stranger who wanted me to be his pretend-wife. But it seemed I was stuck with it.
"Look, I get it," I said. "I'm not a prude. I get bondage and blindfolds, I get that a little pain can be fun sometim
es. But I just can't wrap my head around making a lifestyle out of it. Actual punishments. Twenty-four-seven crawling around naked in an apron. It's just...it sounds tedious to me."
"Nobody said it had to be twenty-four-seven." Ben twirled his glass around between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, grinning. "I think you might be projecting."
"But that's a thing, isn't it? Twenty-four-seven? Total power exchange?" I was challenging him with stolen phrases I barely understood, but the sickly-sweet vodka had loosened my tongue and I couldn't stop myself. I wanted some kind of rationale. It was easy enough to see why he might enjoy it, why any man would - but why on earth would any woman willingly become a domestic slave?
He nodded, slowly. "Yes, those are all things. But they're all different. What I do is a playful sort of thing. It's an arrangement. It can be stopped at any time."
An arrangement. That didn't sound terribly sexy.
Blowing out a puff of air that caught my too-long bangs and scattered then across my forehead, I glanced at him. He was right. He didn't have to sit here and explain anything to me, but he did. Even if it sounded like he'd just come up with the most over-the-top politically correct excuse he could, whether or not it was based in reality...he was trying.
I frowned at the remains of my drink. Maybe, just maybe, he was being honest. Maybe that was really how he felt. It was hard for me to believe, put together with the whole package of Benjamin Chase. He was a contradiction. I wanted my life to be simple.
And yet, I was still considering entering into a marriage of convenience with a billionaire who wanted to spank me. That was...anything but simple.
Hold up.
I did a u-turn on my own train of thought, examining what had just run through my head. Wanted to spank me.
Me.
He'd never expressed that. In fact, everything that I'd mistaken for genuine interest was apparently just him preying on someone desperate enough to agree to his crazy plan. If he liked me - I mean, really liked me, wouldn't he have side-stepped the whole "I have to marry you" thing and made an effort to actually woo me, first?
I mean, probably. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the best course of action for a situation like his.
He began to speak after a long silence. "Once again, to be clear, I wasn't trying to hide it from you, I just didn't think it was important for you to know. The last thing I want is to make this thing more complicated than it already is. Obviously, we're only going to act as a couple in public. I don't expect anything more from you." He glanced at me. "Which I'm sure is a relief, so I won't bother saying that of course it goes both ways."
Laughing slightly, I set my empty glass down. "So that's it? You don't want me to like...go with you to any of those clubs, or whatever?"
He shook his head. "That wasn't part of the deal."
What he wasn't saying, however, still reflected in his eyes. He did want me to go to those clubs with him. I could hear the hesitation in his tone, like maybe he'd been hoping to ask me about it later, to ease me into it down the line. Once I was comfortable with him, and let my defenses down. Or maybe I was just imagining things.
"I know you said it was a conditional yes," he went on. "But I hope this doesn't count as a condition."
Even after a long sleep, which should have left my mind refreshed, I still felt tangled up in confusion. Exhausted, a little raw, wondering if I thought about him spanking me because I actually wanted it, or because the idea had been planted in my head. Because his tattoos made me stupid, and I wanted him to touch me, even if it wasn't the kind of touch I expected.
The things he'd said made sense. His introduction to the world, his reluctance, creating tension in his relationship because he couldn't wrap his head around it. Not so long ago, he'd been like me, standing on the outside looking in.
My eyes were fixed on the polished hard wood floor in front of me, but I dragged them up to his face with an effort.
"I need to trust you," I said, simply. "And I'm not sure I can."
Silently, thoughtfully, he folded his hands on the desk. His fingers intertwined.
"Plenty of women have chosen to trust me," he said. "None of them ever regretted it."
"Not even your ex-wife?"
It was a low blow. I didn't mean it that way - it just escaped, without permission, dangling in the air while he held his face in a carefully composed mask.
A moment later, he shook his head. "She never trusted me," he said. "But I've learned a lot since then."
I didn't know what that meant.
Two million dollars. Was I really thinking about walking away?
I thought about Maddy. How happy she looked, having reconnected with her husband just days after a blowout fight, touching some deep level of feeling that I couldn't even begin to imagine. The quiet authority in his voice when he told her when she was going to meet me, gave her a schedule like he was actually still her boss. And the way she warmed to it, obviously loving his control.
Because she trusted him.
Trust was key. No matter what, I couldn't get around that.
"This is a different kind of trust," I said, at last. "It's one thing to trust a guy not to physically harm you, but this..."
Ben raised an eyebrow. "You think what I do is easy?" He paused, as if he actually expected an answer, before continuing. "It's not about accidentally hitting too hard. If you can't avoid that, you've got no business being around other human beings in the first place. My responsibilities go so much deeper. And so does their trust. They have to trust me to know their limits, to read their reactions, to understand every little moan and whisper of their body language like I'm reading a book. They have to trust me to know their fantasies before they know them. That's the most you'll ever trust anyone, in this life. It's not one snap decision, one moment, it's a constant balancing act that I can never let go." He fixed me with a look, and it spoke of cool detachment, but there was always something swirling in his eyes. "If they can trust me, you can trust me."
I didn't know about that.
All the same, there was something hypnotic about the way he spoke. It would be so easy, so terribly easy, I thought, to fall under his spell.
Of course it would. I was vulnerable, I was alone, I was looking for reassurance. A place to belong. However enticing certain aspects of these man might be, he wasn't it.
"So what do you think, Ms. Hadley?" His elbows were resting on the desk, hands folded in front of his face, not-quite obscuring his smile. "Don't say no. Not now. I've already bought the ring."
I felt too warm, suddenly, my fingertips tingling with an excitement I couldn't name. "Really?"
He gave a single nod.
"Let me see it."
Lowering his hands, he reached for something on his desk, like he suddenly needed something for his hands to do. "No."
I cleared my throat. "Sorry?"
"No," he repeated. "You're not going to start wearing it yet. We can't announce our engagement right away, that's absurd."
"So? I can still see it." I caught myself before I actually started pouting - what was it about him that brought out my inner brat? "Come on. I want to know what kind of rock billionaires buy for their girlfriends."
"And you will, when it's time," he said, simply. He had the maddening tone of someone who's so used to getting his own way, there was no need to be defensive or to protest. His way was the only way.
Well, one thing was clear. If I wanted to make this work, I was going to have to play along.
"Fine," I said. My tone was full of calm acceptance.
He looked at me with a hint of suspicion. "Fine?" he echoed. "That's it?"
"That's it." I smiled. "Now, are you going to offer me dinner?"
Something in the room had changed. I couldn't define it, but he chilled, palpably, some door inside of him slamming shut with nearly audible bang.
"I think we're going to be seeing plenty of each other soon," he said. "Go home and get some rest. Are you taking c
are of Laura tomorrow?"
I nodded, trying to make sense of his sudden change of attitude. "For the next two days," I said. "Then I'm free until Friday."
Standing up, he started shuffling the papers on his desk. "Good. On Wednesday, I want you to come to the office with me and meet everyone. Keep your schedule clear. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
Yes, Sir.
I answered automatically, without hesitation or question. I thought I saw a slight grimace on his face, but it quickly disappeared.
What the hell did I do wrong?
Chapter Thirteen
Ben
Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a mother flipping cocksucking bitch.
This girl had me so tied up in knots, even my cursing didn't make sense anymore.
How I'd managed to keep my cool for as long as I did, I'll never know. When I woke up to the sound of the front door clicking shut, I figured, worst case scenario she must have had an attack of conscience - or an attack of good sense, maybe, about our plans. But that wasn't right. She'd very specifically changed her tune right after I left her alone with my computer.
A ball of panic started to form in my chest, and I sat there with my hand on the closed laptop for a while before I had the courage to open it.
There was nothing on there. I knew there was nothing on there. It was practically a full-time loaner, just for casual use, and I was very careful not to leave anything personal on it. It was safe. I'd let near-strangers use it a thousand times.
There must be something I was forgetting.
Finally, I forced myself to look. If I wanted to catch her before she got all the way home, I needed to know what I was dealing with - and fast.
When I spotted it, my stomach leapt into my throat.
I'd completely fucking forgotten bookmarking that site on this fucking thing. Not that it usually mattered. But I must've been drunk. Did I think I was being subtle, naming it some random string of letters? It stood out like a sore fucking thumb. I should have called it "Carpet Repair" or something.
Carpet repair. Jesus Christ.
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