“But you loved her so ….”
“Yes, I did, but I love you now. And if you start acting like a wounded waif again, I’ll be sure you feel wounds, new real ones.” His eyes looked threatening. “You’re Eden and you’re very much alive. You don’t need to wear a dead woman’s clothes or be that dead woman for me. I want you wholly as you are. Seems to me you’ve said as much to me.”
“Then I did please you?”
“Of course you did, you wouldn’t have spent the night in bed with me if you hadn’t.”
“I was just afraid ... the way you spoke of her and spoke of love ... that I wasn’t even close to measuring up?”
“This isn’t about measuring up to anyone. It’s about being yourself. Now you’d better stop sounding like a timid mouse.”
She smiled, chagrined. “Maybe you should punish me for doubting myself,” she said feeling very silly.
“Yes, I should and I probably will, when you’re ready to feel it worse than you felt last night.”
“Worse?” Her eyes widened.
“Yes, maybe worse?” he told her sternly.
“I really am sorry, Adam. I have to tell you this because it’s been in my thoughts for days, and I’d be dishonest not to ….” He waited for her continue not saying a word. “I was jealous of Leanna, even more after you told me about her. She seemed so perfect for you, and, I was feeling inadequate, like I could never be enough.”
He still looked stern and a little peeved. “Hear me now, I’ll say this just once more. I don’t want Leanna or anyone like her. I’ve had the kind of woman she was and I loved her madly. But she’s gone and the need for her has vanished. You are not her replacement or some attempt to relive the past. I don’t deal with the past well, I’d rather have the present. I chose you because it was you that I wanted to master and you that intrigues me. After last night, I know for certain that I’ve fallen in love. You’re bound to me and you’d better get rid of any jealousy, because your life won’t be pretty if you don’t. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, yes, sir, you have,” she answered instantly.
She waited a moment for the dust to settle, for Adam to calm and her own heart to stop beating like an engine out of control. She half expected him to take her across his knee and spank her, but he remained motionless. Taking another sip of coffee he seemed as tranquil as their garden surroundings.
“Then can I see them now?” she finally broke the silence. “The clothes.”
He laughed at her. “They’re in your closet, have been hanging there for days.”
“For days? And you didn’t tell me?”
“No. I wondered how long it would take for you to find them.”
“Then you bought them before last night?”
“Yes, silly. That should be obvious.”
She jumped up about to leave.
“Did I dismiss you?” he asked.
“Oops. No, sir.”
“I want a kiss,” he said.
Eden practically fell into his arms, wrapping them about him and holding him tightly. “I’m so in love!” she gushed as her full wet lips covered his mouth with dozens of kisses.
“Just one kiss will do,” he spoke through the barrage.
She held him still and gave him that one deep open-mouthed kiss, then backed off his lap.
“Can I go now?” she asked.
“Yes, and prance before the mirror in your room all you’d like. But I’ll decide what you’re going to wear, if anything at all.”
That was just like him: buy her clothes then insist she remain naked. Still, it was a beautiful gift and she couldn’t wait to see what his vision for her looked like.
chapter eleven
After two weeks with him at her side every minute of the day, sleeping with him since the night she was whipped at the foot of his bed, Adam resumed his commute to the city. A half dozen legal matters were pressing and their halcyon sexual vacation came to an end.
With the change Eden would see him only two or three days a week when he returned to the country house. The time she spent without him she poured into her song writing and her book. However when he was at the cottage she put all her work aside so she could be with him.
In the summer weeks that followed, they took the long journey into her places of submissive nothingness and his places of cruelty that seemed to always bring her to heaven. She could tell he was happy having her submit to him. Reopening a once painful door he avoided for some time—where he thought there might still be the painful memories, he walked through finding fresh flowers and a sweet fragrance and an unspoiled landscape to feast in. In return, Adam could tell his Eden was content and in love. Her music became less morose, just as her attitude changed when she stopped wearing black. She was a sprite of many colors and moods, delighted to be an utter slave to him for the way it made everything in her psyche blossom. And to his surprise that expected failing did not appear after the first week, or the second. In fact, much to his delight, it showed no signs of appearing, though he thought it wise to remain wary. Other lovers in the past had surprised him with a nasty rebellion when he least expected it.
Sexual darkness poured from them in heavy measure as she willingly submitted to the crop, the lash and the cane. So too, moments of fierce intimacy left them breathless, times when she was empty and open, and he cleansed of his demons. They spoke quietly, in subtle powerful whispers as they cuddled beside each other in bed. She was free to talk, and he demanded to know everything about her. There were her fears of Jacob to confess to, those still gnawing her inside. The threat of him appeared in her dreams. She told him of the years before she found her sexual submissiveness, when she battled between promiscuity and abstinence. Adam was right, she had a crazy mind, and yet he found her as sound in her thinking when she was with him as he could imagine a woman being.
In reply to her naked honesty, he told her many things about himself, like what it was like to be the youngest child of seven, to put himself through eight years of school and graduate with honors, his law degree in hand; how he felt about his clients past and present—the scoundrels, bums and those that were down on their luck; and then how he mourned his mother’s passing, cried when his father died a drunk, and then a year later when he mourned his lover’s death …
What burned in him, burned in her. What he felt, she felt with her heart. What joys and triumphs made him the man he was, in those simple times when sex made them infinitely open, became the seeds of love that bloomed into great vines in the garden of their making, just as his summer vines at the cottage had grown dense and savage by the end of the season. Their love was savage and sweet, violent but not stormy, gentle and at peace.
They remained at the cottage in the country until October.
***
The day Adam announced they were returning to the city for the winter, Eden cried.
“Why would you take me back there when we’re so happy here?” she asked him successfully holding back her tears in his presence.
“Because my work’s picking up and I won’t have time to be here more than one night a week, you have to meet with some record producers, and I refuse to have half a relationship with you, that’s why. Besides, I don’t like you out of my sight.”
She liked the sentiment but hated the thought of leaving—too much to let the matter rest.
An hour later she was throwing her clothes into a suitcase with an abandon that suggested she was pissed as hell. Approaching her from behind, he stood for a moment watching her tantrum initially amused.
“Good lord,” she shrieked turning around to find him right at her back, his expression stern.
“Upset about something?” he asked.
“No, not really,” she tried hiding the truth.
“You want to start with the truth now or do I have to remind you that I hate even the smallest fib.”
“But I . . .”
“Don’t even think about lying, Eden.”
“I was
n’t,” she snapped at him, feeling defeated and hateful and whiny and too angry not to let it show. “I can’t help myself, I don’t want to go to the city, I love it here. I know your reasons for bringing me along, but …” She was banging on his chest with her fists though not hard enough to hurt. It only added to Adam’s amusement. Unfortunately, he wasn’t about to let her get away with theatrics that he scolded her into giving up weeks before.
“What are you so afraid of, Eden?” He stopped her in mid-tirade holding her by the shoulders with a tight grip.
“It has nothing to do with fear,” she retorted unhappily.
“You want to lie again?” he asked.
“I’m not lying!” she blared.
She was asking for a confrontation, running full speed ahead into it. His eyes flashed fire, looking like real anger.
“Get your ass end over the end of you bed while I get my belt.”
“Please, Adam!” she moaned as tears formed in her eyes.
He was highly unamused. Eyes glaring, she shrunk back. Adam left the room returning minutes later with his heavy work belt in his hand, though his submissive had not submitted. She stood trembling in the center of the room, defying him to spank her ass.
“You don’t want an all out war with me,” he warned her.
“And I don’t want to move to the city!” she shouted.
“Yes, and you don’t want to be honest, and you don’t want to face what you’re afraid of, and you want life simple and sweet right here with me to protect you all the time.”
“And why can’t I have it that way?”
“Because that’s not the way life is and it’s not what’s real. You’d be avoiding half your life. Now you’d better have your ass over the end of the bed, or you’ll be in the woodshed so quick you’ll think you flew there!”
Instantaneously obeying in face of his threat, Eden’s skirt was up, her ass-end bared and Adam was laying the heavy belt across her white rear cheeks with a blistering rain of strikes. She was all tears and woe, inside herself fighting the horror of returning to Jacob’s world. Her nightmares of him appeared in her mind as a torrent of pictures, rushing wildly to fuel her inner fight. The belt stung from the first strike and then every one thereafter. He was hell-bent on knocking the life out of her mortal dread, and knocking some sense into her crazed thinking mind.
Knowing how she struggled with herself, Adam didn’t give her a moment to think. Raising the burning pain on her behind to a fiery blaze, it was just a minute and there was no other thought running through her head but the one that focused on her present agony. He switched sides to be sure both cheeks took the same furious beating and strayed low to blister her thighs with a rash of torturous smacks. Then he blared at her to thrust out her ass when in self-defense she drew in the burning cheeks. By the time he was finished, she was calm, wiped clean of all traces of fear. Reducing her to compliance by force was not Adam’s favorite method of behavior modification, but it was necessary in this case.
“I’m not going to entertain your fears and let you think that they’re important. You’re going to the city with me, you’ll be living in my apartment, and your groundless concerns over Jacob, which is what this is really about, are going to end now. Unless, of course, you really have some unfinished business with that man. If so, there’s no time like the present to face it and move on.”
“No, there’s nothing I want from Jacob,” she said. “Nothing.”
“I hope for your sake that’s true,” he said. “If it’s not, well then you may have a tough ride. But being afraid certainly won’t help. Now behave yourself and get ready to leave. I want to get out of here by one.”
Eden sank down on the bed letting her warmed posterior feel some cooling from the cotton comforter underneath. She had more fear than she ever let on to Adam. Dreams of Jacob were vivid reminders of the man and the power he once had over her—and perhaps still did. To compare her relationship with Jacob to what she had with Adam was a silly exercise. Yet, despite the other man’s great failings, when Adam mentioned unfinished business with him, she knew some lingered.
Perhaps that was why when she mentioned the subject of her branding to Adam the night before, he was evasive about when that final insignia of her covenant with him would be burned into her ass. She thought about it often. Each time they plumbed the intimate depths of their sadomasochistic desires, she was certain their closeness would warrant this measure. Still, Adam sensed that she wasn’t ready, and his instincts were sharp. That gave her even more to fear.
chapter twelve
Eden arrived at the law office about six on the evening of October 30th. The day before Halloween, she didn’t like to think of the season, the cold, the thought of winter and how the vines at the cottage were now shriveled. They closed the place the weekend before with such sadness in her heart. She was afraid she’d never return. Adam had caught her in the frost-bit garden crying. He wasn’t happy she was planning to keep her tears from his sight. Even if he didn’t like seeing her unhappy, he insisted on knowing all her moods. There wasn’t much to say, just a moment filled with bittersweet reminders of a summer she’d never forget. He held her while she cried, and then kissed the salty tears away when they were over.
In the law office all was bustling and officious. Adam in his lawyer garb looked pragmatic and grim when she walked into his inner sanctum.
“I’m here,” she announced trying to draw him from the stack of papers on his desk.
“So you are,” he said, looking up at her. “How was the recording session?”
“Went great,” she replied with a sunny look on her face.
He scrutinized her just one second. “It did not,” he countered. “What happened?”
“Damn! You know me too well,” she said.
“I should, I own you,” he replied with some mirth.
“Rye was there.”
“Didn’t you expect that? He’s the head of the recording company.”
“Why did you have to choose this one?”
“Because they gave you the most money and they have a contract with Nancy McCormack. She’s singing a sweet blues these days, and she’s who you want for your song. Do I have to name more reasons?”
She pursed her lips pensively.
“Did Rye bother you?”
“No.”
“How was he with you?”
“Friendly, kind. Like he used to be, at least most of the time.”
“And did he mention Jacob?”
“Yes. He said he wanted to see me.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said I didn’t see any reason why we should meet.”
“Sit down,” Adam ordered her. “You’re looking like a nervous Nelly.”
Eden obeyed, finding herself sitting daintily on the edge of one of Adam’s leather office chairs. Wearing the red suit, one of Adam’s many choices for her wardrobe, she looked business-like and sexily sophisticated. It was hard however to draw her legs under her the way she did the first time she was in Adam’s office being the coy waif. Now she crossed them like a lady, and her skirt pulled up high on her thigh, revealing the lace tops of her stocking and black garters. The lean line caught Adam’s gaze for several seconds before he looked her in the eye again.
“You do want to see Jacob, don’t you?” Adam conjectured.
“No, no I don’t,” she answered.
His eyes glowered.
“Well, maybe I’m curious, but that’s all. Besides, you were right, coming back here hasn’t been so bad, all my fears were groundless.” She tried smiling genuinely and it almost worked. The only thing I’m not happy about is what’s going on for you.” Gently changing the subject, she hoped it wouldn’t return to Jacob. “Is that case you’re handling getting any better?”
“No, it’s not,” he replied grimly.
She took a deep breath watching his eyes turn dark. He was in a foul mood about his work. One of his current cases was defending a
real asshole, who’d turned out to be a liar. The fact that the defense was such a success was his concern. Having a crisis of conscious made every night for the past week a prickly hell. He was restless, moody and silent. Usually their morose nights ended with great sex for Eden—Adam using her well as a toy to let off steam. But as much as she offered herself to him, she couldn’t take away his dilemma and ease the ache. Another client was about as bad as the scheming liar. Though this one had dug his own grave and there was no defense. There was little to say in answer to the charges, and to be truthful, though Adam vowed to wage the good fight, his heart was not in the battle. He could ask for little except mercy from the court, when no mercy was warranted.
This was his life, a season of unpleasant business. He needed Eden’s listening ears when he was ready to talk, her patience when he was unnecessarily gruff, and when he didn’t want her to abuse her, he needed the use of her fragrant loins and sensuous kisses which she was glad to give him.
***
One night in early December Eden woke screaming, jerking hard on the chain that tethered her to the bed. She nearly choked until she dropped back into Adam’s arms in a cold sweat. He soothed her until she fell asleep and then confronted her in the morning.
“So, tell me about your nightmare?” he said, when she started the day with a sunny smile as if nothing happened the night before.
“I don’t remember much, you know how nightmares are.”
“Then tell me what you do remember.”
He could see the strain on her face. Her eyes were puffy. She’d been crying in the shower. She wouldn’t get around this explanation no matter how hard she tried.
“It’s more than the nightmare,” she began. “Oh, there’s that too, but Jacob came to the recording studio yesterday.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“No, it was late when you got home.”
“So tell me now.”
“I had this creepy crawly feeling while I was working with Nancy in the booth. When I turned around to see if there was a ghost climbing up my back, there he was with Rye, staring at me.”
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