The Submissive's Last Word (The Power to Please, Book 4)

by Ward, Deena

  The pressure mounted and I didn’t want to hold it back, to make it wait. The music demanded now. The time was now. I was ready, and so I let it crash over me, the rolling thrill of climax.

  My cry was lost in the howl of the sax, the triumph of the piano and the throbbing beats of the bass and drum, the final crescendo. And in the groan of my lover, my beautiful, beautiful lover, who held me as I trembled and supported me when my knees went weak.

  Then the song was over.

  Silence.

  The only sound in the club was the combined rhythm of ragged breath from the band and the dancers, even perhaps from the spectators too.

  Nothing but breath. The release, released.

  Gibson turned me around to face him, wrapped his arms around me and held me tight against his chest. He laid his cheek on the top of my head, and I squeezed him hard, my hands clasped around his waist.

  We breathed.

  Together.

  And then, as if nothing at all extraordinary had just happened, the band began to play again, a light, breezy tune, upbeat and pleasant. Happy. A satiated expression.

  Gibson steadied me on our way back to the table. The waitress, wearing a nonchalant expression, delivered a pair of fresh drinks which she said were on the house. I took a long drink of the tangy concoction and enjoyed my warm afterglow.

  Gibson leaned back in his chair and took slow sips of his own drink. He was losing himself in the music again, I knew. I marveled at his control, was more than a little surprised that he didn’t haul me out to the town car and take care of matters.

  But no, that wasn’t Gibson’s way.

  It occurred to me that he had gone above and beyond in more than one way that evening.

  “So, how was that?” I asked.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me, his expression content. “You’re perfect, as always.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. You doing what you did. That was something you don’t usually do, wasn’t it? You don’t like public displays.”

  “I generally don’t like being in the limelight. But Nonnie, no one was looking at me out there.”

  I smiled. “You’re wrong. Really, though, I hope you don’t feel like you have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable, just because I’m ... whatever.”

  “I don’t. I thought it would be good for me, trying something new.”

  “And how did you like it?”

  “I think you know the answer.”

  I did. I let him be, allowed him to fall back into contemplation of the music. I savored the moment, myself. Returned to watching the crowd.

  New people were on the dance floor and in the cage now, the others having disappeared into the crowd somewhere. Current focus appeared to be settled on the people stretched on the couches and loungers. There was a big bowl of assorted fruit set on a central table, and the people appeared to be having something of a sexy eating contest.

  At the bar, small groups of people chatted and flirted idly.

  I looked at Gibson, proud of him for pushing his limits. I knew he did it for me. I respected his gesture, and considered giving him one of my own.

  Why not. I was ready, I thought. And it was time, wasn’t it, in these days of letting go.

  I made my gesture. I reached behind my head and untied the mask, catching it as it fell away.

  I laid it on the table, fluffed my hair into place. Touched my cheeks. Asked myself if I was okay. And I was.

  I looked around the room again. No fears. The worry only a small, insignificant thing that was easy to bully away. No one looked at me any differently than they had before. Except Gibson. He met my gaze, smiled at me. Nodded.

  And I knew he was proud. A warm sensation bloomed in my chest. I smiled back at him.

  I was going to be okay.

  Chapter 12

  That night, Gibson slept at the cottage then slipped away early in the morning without waking me. I was disappointed not to see him before he left for work, but I appreciated his thoughtfulness in letting me sleep. I was growing seriously sleep deprived, and was in awe at how well Gibson managed it.

  I stumbled into the kitchen late in the morning and found a note on the counter. Gibson wrote: “I sacrificed breakfast with you, but I’ll require a lunch in return. Be ready at eleven. I’ll send the car for you.” He signed it simply “G.”

  Now this was something to look forward to, lunch in the city with Gibson. I glanced at the clock. Yikes. Ten a.m. I made a pot of coffee then headed off to the bathroom to get ready.

  The rushing was for nothing. Gibson called me at ten-thirty, cancelling our lunch date. He said something important had come up and he had to leave the country for a few days. I heard the disappointment in his voice, and his concern for me, so I assured him I understood, that this sort of thing was bound to happen.

  He repeated that he wouldn’t leave right now if it weren’t extremely important, and once again I assured him that I understood. I asked if he needed me to pack some clothes for him, but he said Xavier had already done so and was sending them to the office as we spoke.

  He told me he’d call every day, keep me updated on when he’d be home.

  The last thing he said to me was, “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” I replied, a thoroughly inadequate response if ever there was one. We seemed to be forever declaration-weak in our relationship.

  I looked out over the estate and wondered how I’d spend my time for the next few days without Gibson around. I felt at loose ends, restless. Here I was, all ready to go somewhere, and instead I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I didn’t ask myself how I’d dealt with the empty time for the weeks before I reconnected with Gibson. That part of my life already seemed like a distant memory.

  I called Elaine Hoyte and invited her out for lunch. She accepted. I drove into the city and met her near her office building at a quaint sandwich shop, a departure from Elaine’s usual dive bar favoritism.

  I no sooner sat down and said hi before she pounced on me about Gibson. Somehow, she saw it in my face. Maybe it was happiness she saw there. I knew I hadn’t worn that particular expression in a long time.

  I told her that Gibson and I were together again, that we were working things out and it was going well. Her pleasure was effusive.

  I also told her about my job offer, and like Xavier, she suggested I give it careful thought before accepting.

  “This is your chance to do what you want to do. The whole world is open to you now,” she said.

  It was strange to me how people assumed my being with Gibson automatically conferred his wealth onto me. I wasn’t married to the man, and I still had my own way to make. I couldn’t understand the assumption that I suddenly had a silver spoon in my mouth.

  I confessed those feelings to Elaine, and with her usual down-home candor, she told me I wasn’t looking at the situation correctly.

  “I’m not saying you should be his kept mistress or somethin’ like that, honey,” she said, “but there’s nothing stopping you benefitting from the circumstances you’re in now. If it means you can take your time and pick and choose the career you want, then I don’t see anything wrong with you doin’ that. Gibson would want you to.”

  Maybe she was right, and I needed to shift my thinking, learn how to be less practical and more idealistic. After so many years of struggling to get by, this wouldn’t be an easy task. My habits were soul deep and purely pragmatic.

  Not wholly focused on myself, I shifted the topic and made a few allusions to Paulina, all of which Elaine brushed aside. I angled for information about whether she and Ron had only stayed the night because they drank too much, but Elaine didn’t give up the goods on that angle either. She never even admitted that they did stay the night.

  The only thing she would say was that they enjoyed the picnic and thought the Martins were excellent hosts. Not exactly information overload there.

  I mentally sighed and decided not to
press it. When she was ready, she’d talk about it. In the meanwhile, I’d have to tamp down my curiosity.

  After I parted from Elaine, I had an urge to visit my old apartment, to take stock of the place. I turned my car in the direction of my former home.

  I felt wistful standing in my old living room. It was half-ransacked from the hurried packing I’d done weeks before. The same was true in the bedroom and kitchen. It looked like someone half-lived there. And I supposed that appearance was correct.

  After spending so much time at Gibson’s gorgeous estate, the apartment seemed dingy and small. I remembered Gibson telling me I was too good for this place, and how I felt insulted. Now, I could better comprehend what he meant.

  It wasn’t so much that the apartment was cheap and tiny, which it was. It was more that it was dismal, colorless, without character of any kind. Blank. Nothing in it said anything about who I was, who I wanted to be.

  Didn’t I deserve more than this? More than an expressionless existence? I realized that was what Gibson meant, though probably even he didn’t understand specifically what it was.

  I got it though, standing there in that place, on that day. Yeah, I was too good for this. And it was time for me to let it go.

  I’d adapted enough to my new lifestyle that I took advantage of the ease of requesting help. I placed a short call to Xavier, asking if he’d send over a few men from the estate, and a truck, to help me pack up and carry away whatever I decided was worth keeping.

  Within an hour, Xavier himself arrived, with two young men and two young women in tow, and together, we made quick work of the job. The men mostly carried, while the women packed and cleaned until even the pickiest of landlords couldn’t have complained about how we left the place.

  I called the landlord and he offered a fair price for my furniture, which made the whole affair simpler than it might have been otherwise. He instructed me to leave my forwarding address in the apartment and to drop off my keys with the building supervisor.

  It was shocking that after so many days and weeks of worrying over what to do with my apartment, the decision was finally made and in the course of one afternoon, the deed was accomplished. I thanked my helpers, Xavier in particular, for making such easy work of it.

  After the last box was carried from the living room, and Xavier and his helpers were headed back to the estate, I took one last look around the place.

  I could have thought about the day I arrived there, how it was emptier then than it was on this day. Back then, I’d owned no furniture, nothing but what I could shove into a pair of suitcases.

  I could have recalled my mixed sensations of freedom and fear of discovery. I wasn’t sure how my husband would respond to my departure, wasn’t confident that he’d let me go without a fight, hoped he wouldn’t find me for a while.

  I could have remembered lying on the sofa, watching sitcoms night after night, the laugh tracks and phony, happy families filling a void in my life that I wouldn’t acknowledge.

  I most assuredly could have recollected the discovery of a silk tie in the bottom of my purse, and how I debated what it meant, and what my next move should be. More loneliness? More nothing? Or something with an enigmatic businessman?

  I could have called up the memory of another time I stood there in that doorway, ready to leave, thinking of Michael, his betrayal, what he stole from me.

  But I didn’t think of any of that on this day. I took my final stroll around the apartment and I recognized it for providing shelter when I needed it. If I didn’t make more of it, then the place wasn’t to blame.

  It was time to move on.

  The next day, I sorted through the packing boxes, sending most of them to one of the storage buildings on the estate. Later in the morning, Lilly called and asked me if wanted to go with her to visit her foster mother, Rose.

  I was surprised at the request, not that I didn’t wish to meet Rose, but that Lilly chose me to accompany her. I accepted and later that afternoon found myself in what had to be the nicest nursing home in the state, if not the country.

  It wasn’t only scrupulously clean, but also homey. It seemed more like a comfortable, old-fashioned resort/hotel than a professional nursing facility. It was charming in all ways and didn’t even have the give-away antiseptic smell of a hospital. It smelled of potpourri and furniture wax.

  Considering the connection between Lilly, Rose, and the owner of the place, Gibson, it wasn’t unexpected that the staff was uncommonly attentive to us when we arrived. They were friendly without being cloying.

  One of the nurses accompanied us to Rose’s room, which as it turned out, was more like a small suite. In the Victorian-style sitting room, Rose was ensconced in an ornate and comfortable easy chair, leaning over a carved walnut table and piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with another patient, an elderly lady.

  Rose was a pretty woman, in her late fifties, though she appeared much older than her actual years. Her hair had already gone grey, but it was beautifully styled and twisted into a knot at the back of her head. She wore a cheerful, floral dress with simple lines. The only make-up on her face was a hint of pink lipstick.

  When she looked up and smiled to see Lilly, it was like a flashback of Michael. Rose and Michael. Mother and son. They shared their smiles. There was something about the shape of Rose’s eyes that reminded me of Michael, too, but her eyes were green, unlike his pale blue wolf eyes.

  After Lilly and Rose hugged, Lilly introduced me as Gibson’s “special friend.” Rose appeared pleased, though I wasn’t sure she understood what Lilly meant. Then the elderly friend in the room quickly excused herself, saying she didn’t want to intrude on visiting time.

  We settled around the table and since Rose resumed working on the puzzle, we worked on it, too. Lilly chatted about simple things like the weather and how the trees would soon be changing colors, how she met a new guy who was handsome and funny. Rose listened and hummed, nodded, and patiently tried to place one piece after another in a single hole, regardless of size and shape of either.

  A nurse arrived with a tray of tea and cakes and this delighted Rose no end. She cheerfully filled our cups and loaded our dainty plates with treats.

  And so we passed our time with gentle, sweet Rose. I couldn’t but wonder how different this meeting might have been had she never been in that car accident, never suffered the brain damage that kept her in this place.

  Before we left, Lilly took her hand and said kindly, “Dear Rose, come home with me today. I miss you. We all do. Come back to the estate and be part of the family again.”

  Rose sighed softly. “Pretty Lilly flower. You know I have to wait for Lyle. He’s sure to come any day and then we can all go home together.” She smiled a dreamy smile.

  Lilly nodded sadly, gave her a hug, and we said our goodbyes. We left her contentedly working on her puzzle.

  Once we were outside and inside Lilly’s car, she turned to me and spoke in a harsh voice I never heard from her before. “Of all the things Michael did, that’s the worst. Every time I come, I hope she’ll have forgotten his lie so she can come home and let me take care of her. I hate him for this more than anything else he did.”

  I blinked back the moisture gathering in the corners of my eyes, thinking of the sweet lady and how her own son had told her a terrible lie. Michael tricked her into staying in the rest home by telling her it was the only way her dead husband would return to her. At the time, the facility was a cheap hellhole, a place for Michael to dump his unwanted mother while he went off to fritter away his inheritance.

  Gibson had turned the nursing home into the palace that it was now, rebuilding around his Aunt Rose, all done to make her as comfortable and well-cared for as possible, to make the best of Michael’s wrong.

  “At least she appears happy there,” I said. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but that’s all thanks to Gibson. I didn’t know that until after I left Michael all those years later. He convinced m
e he lied to Rose to make her happy, so she’d think Lyle wasn’t dead. And Michael said he paid for the repairs to the place, but that he let Gibson take the credit because he didn’t want publicity. Lies. All of it.”

  No surprise there. Michael and lies were practically synonymous. “Does she ever ask about him? Michael, I mean.”

  Lilly considered the question for a moment. “Now that you mention it, no, she doesn’t. He never visits her. I’ve heard her say before, to others, that her son is an important businessman who is very busy.”

  “Then she’s created her own reason for why he doesn’t visit. It’s her way to make it okay. That’s good, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. I wish you could have known Rose before the accident, though. She was wonderful, so caring and kind and sweet, funny too. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t understand how her own son treated her so badly.”

  “I wish I had answers for you, Lilly, but I don’t.

  “That’s okay, Nonnie. You listened.”

  She gave me a funny little pat on my leg and then she started the car. Together, we drove away from Rose’s home, from her life-sentence in a prison created by her own son.

  I ate dinner that night with Lilly and the Martins at the Martins’ home. Paulina was on her best behavior, as she usually was around Lilly, so I didn’t have to put with too much lip from her bossy self. Not that I minded it too much. I had to admit that sometimes she got off some good ones.

  I briefly spoke with Gibson on the phone before I went to bed. He sounded tired, stressed, and when I asked what the trouble was, he said it didn’t matter, that he just wanted to hear my voice. I told him about my day, about visiting Rose and dining with the Martins.

  I had already told him, the night before, about vacating my apartment, noting the satisfaction in his response, and the relief, too. He wasn’t as enthusiastic about my visit with Rose. He hoped it didn’t depress me. When I told him it hadn’t, he said he was glad; he didn’t believe that his Aunt Rose was unhappy overall.