Oh, a spanking. I understood now.
He cupped my mound in one hand, massaging my aroused body with tenderness that mocked the pain he would inflict soon. With one hand tucked between my leg and my body, his thumb spread to stroke over my hipbone. “Who does this belong to?”
“You, Sir.” I wriggled my bottom against him. As far as punishments went, he should have picked one I didn’t like.
Maybe that was the point. It was our wedding night, after all, and he’d said we wouldn’t go hard.
He still tortured me, though, lifting his hand sharply then languidly petting my vulva. Or, raising his palm then letting it fall fast, without ever actually hitting my flesh.
“You’re so jumpy,” he teased. He smoothed his other hand over my pubic bone and pulled back my skin, exposing my clitoris. The air brushing across my skin made me moan, and that’s when he brought his hand down, the tips of his fingers, to slap it.
“Motherfucker!” I screamed, curling up from his chest. I hated such rough, direct contact on my clit, but paradoxically, enjoyed the aftermath. We’d used rubber bands, a flogger, his hand, all sparingly, because it was easy to do too much to such sensitive nerves. His rule, whether we were playing together or I was doing it to myself, was no more than five strikes.
As the stinging pain faded, throbbing pleasure blossomed, and I leaned my head back. If he intended to punish me for the profanity, he would have already. He moved the hand at my mound to my throat, closing over my neck above the collar.
“This is mine,” he growled against my ear, and he slapped me again, hard, across my open, dripping flesh.
“It’s yours, Sir!” I gasped under the pressure on my throat.
Another slap, and I struggled not to close my legs this time. “And every orgasm.” Another slap. “They belong to me, too.”
“Yes! Yes!” I had lost all control now, whipping my head back and forth, scrabbling my pinned feet to find some leverage.
“Who decides when you get off, you filthy little slut?” he demanded.
It was nearly a moot point; the way his stubble brushed my ear and jaw, and his low, wicked voice said such dirty, wonderful things—I could have gone over at another rough word. I cried, “You! You do, Sir!”
“Then, do it again. Come for the man who owns you.” His teeth sank into my shoulder, and his fingers found my clit. It took barely any pressure—just the slightest pinch and roll—and my legs shook, my body bucked. My thighs locked around his hand, but he wouldn’t let me force his fingers away, and I writhed, trembling against him.
When my body relaxed, he eased his hand from between my legs and propped my limp body up to slide from beneath me. I lay against the mound of pillows, breathing heavy, my legs spread, droplets of sweat beading on my brow. He rose from the bed and gazed down, admiring me with open, unabashed desire.
“May I take a picture of you?” He slipped a hand into the pocket of his trousers, adjusting his obvious erection, but in no way disguising it.
I nodded in fervent agreement, but he held up a warning hand. “Don’t move. Not an inch. Not so much as a deep breath. I want to capture exactly this.”
He went to the armoire and retrieved a digital camera. I’d expected him to just use his phone, but I should have known that he wouldn’t have overlooked such an important detail in stocking our special retreat. He stood beside the bed, and I wet my lips, trembling with nerves and excitement. We’d taken plenty of pictures and videos of ourselves in the past. The feeling of vulnerability and exposure was more thrilling than the first drop on a roller coaster, and we loved to look at them later. Maybe we were a little vain, but we looked fantastic fucking each other.
He paused to take me in before framing me in the screen on the back of the camera. He took a long time fiddling with the settings, longer, I thought, than necessary. As in all things, he liked to draw out the suspense. I waited, breathless, and finally, he pushed the button, grinning down at me the whole while. “I want to remember this night forever.” He corrected himself, “I want to remember every night forever, but this one especially.”
“May I offer a suggestion, Sir?” I asked, my fingers flexing, stroking the silk bedspread as though it were my own skin.
He raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Go ahead.”
The permission to speak freely spiked want through my veins in anticipation of his answer before the question was even spoken. “I could touch myself, and you could make more mementos.”
He leaned his head to one side in mock consideration. “All right, Sophie.”
My hand slid down my chest, between my breasts, skimming the bottom curves of them. He snapped another photo, his eyes darting between the viewfinder and me. I circled the nipple of one breast, wet my fingertip on my tongue, and did it again. I could have teased myself longer, but I gave in and let my fingers travel down my stomach, over the rise of my pubic bone. One fingertip brushed the tip of the hood of my clit, which was swollen and protruding from the slaps Neil had given me. My sore, weary nerves sent conflicting messages to my brain, and in my struggle between feeling too much and wanting to feel so much more, my hand seemed to slip into autopilot. I moaned and tipped my head back on the pillows.
The camera quietly snapped again. “Open your legs. Wide enough for me to see every grasp, every quiver of that beautiful cunt.”
“Oh god,” I whimpered. I pinched my nipple between my thumb and forefinger and molded my palm to the curve of my breast.
The bed shifted. Through heavy-lidded eyes, I watched him settle between my legs, the lens intimately close to my vulva. The camera whirred.
I was almost there, pleasure building and spreading, coiling tight in my groin. Neil tossed the camera aside and hooked his arms beneath my knees, jerking me down the bed. He knocked my hand aside and buried his mouth between my labia, lapping my clit with speed that had me convinced that Neil’s tongue was the strongest muscle in his body. I shouted, “I’m coming!” and my thighs squeezed his head. My climax left me jerking and shivering. He sat up and wiped his hand down his shining chin.
He reached down to unzip his pants and kick free of them. I was still floating back down when he covered my body and the wide tip of his cock parted me. He took the camera from beside me on the bed and pointed the lens at my face. “One more. So, I can remember what it was like the first time I fucked my wife.”
The light on the camera flickered, and he threw it aside, moving to guide himself farther inside me. My vagina was snug and pillowy, and though I was dripping wet, it caused him a moment’s trouble to penetrate me. He slipped in an inch then withdrew to slick my fluids over my vulva, painting a wide stripe over my clit and down again. He filled me with every thick, rigid inch while I bucked and babbled. His hand sank into my hair as his cock sank into my body, and he tilted my head back to look me in the eyes.
“Your wife,” I repeated, reveling in the words. “I am yours, Sir. All yours.”
He kissed me then released his hold and rested his forehead against mine, whispering, “No, Sophie. I’m yours.”
Mine. God, no wonder he loved hearing me say that to him. It was intimate, and powerful. In saying it, Neil made himself vulnerable to me in a way that he’d never done as my Sir. Granted, we weren’t playing hard, but I was still lying there, under a man to whom I willingly surrendered my body and mind, a man whose name was inscribed inside the collar I wore to mark me as his, and he was giving himself to me.
Tears sprang to my eyes. “It’s happy crying,” I blurted, before he could worry that we needed to stop. He sat up, pulling me with him, our bodies still joined as he sat back on his heels. He adjusted me in his lap, guiding my legs to wrap around his back as we rocked together. I pressed my face into his neck, weeping with the pleasure and joy I felt.
He caught my wrists and held them behind my back, and with a few more gentle strokes, he stilled inside me, hot and throbbing as he groaned beside my ear. He released me, and we clung to each other, sweaty and out
of breath, our mouths meshed hungrily together, our hands in each other’s hair.
Sure, ours wasn’t a traditional love story. My handsome prince occasionally turned into the big, bad wolf, but I jumped whole-heartedly into the jaws of his Dominance. Neil had awakened my senses in a way no one else had, rousing me from my slumber with a kiss of pain and a gentle hand.
This was our fairy tale, at the beginning of our happily ever after.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After two weeks of sun, sand, and way too much sex, going home was a vacation unto itself. I jumped back into work and enjoyed the bliss of returning relaxed and refreshed, for three whole hours. Granted, at least one of those hours was dedicated to showing Deja and Penny the safe-for-work honeymoon photos I had. With the wedding out of the way and a conflict-free schedule stretching out before me like a limitless horizon—that was probably just a hyper-realistic mural on the brick wall of reality that I would inevitably run into—I got to stress over life at work, instead of stressing over how to make work fit into my life.
Home life was so much better than expected. Neil and I had known that we would come back to the problems we’d left behind, but things just seemed different. Maybe the “boring” part of boring married life was why people found the union so appealing. There didn’t have to be any doubt, you were just kind of in…and that was it. No drama.
Until Saturday afternoon.
Splitting time between Manhattan and Sagaponack had turned the house into a kind of retreat, and we found ourselves becoming lazier every day we spent there. Neil and I were in comfy workout clothes we’d put on, but hadn’t any intention of exercising in, lounging in bed. Neil lay back on the pillows, one arm behind his head. I was crouched over, painting my toenails, when his phone chirped.
Of course, right when I was trying to catch up on season three of Hannibal.
“Oh, come on. Leave it,” I groaned, tearing my eyes from the screen. Damn. I’d way overshot my pinkie toe during the gory part.
He frowned at the screen and moved his thumb to pick up the call.
I exaggerated my sigh, hit pause, and grabbed a cotton swab to clean up my mistake.
“Neil Elwood,” he answered, still frowning. He listened for a moment. His body tensed, and he sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “How did you get this number?”
My ears perked up.
“Baby? Who is it?” I asked, carefully screwing the lid back on the nail polish remover. I’d already ruined one duvet, and for that reason, Neil hated me doing my nails in bed. This time, I’d promised not to spill a drop of anything smelly.
“No,” he said firmly. Then, more forcefully, “I have no comment at this time.”
What the hell was going on?
“May I have your name again?” Neil strode from the room, his repeated, “How did you get this number?” fading down the hall.
I jumped up to follow. Hobbled by my wet toes, I had to clomp along on my heels. By the time I caught up with him in his study, he was practically shouting into the phone, “If you or anyone from your publication phones me again, you’ll hear from my attorneys.” He ended the call and tossed his cell onto the blotter on his desk. It immediately rang again, and he snatched it up, threatening no one in particular, “If it’s that same bloody—”
His expression turned to stone, like Medusa had snuck into the iOS operating system.
“Different…bloody…?” I tried to guess at the extremely English word he would have spat next. “Tosser?”
Nah, not extreme enough, for the way he looked at the moment.
He actually answered, “I have no comment at this time,” and hung up without a further word. Before he could turn off the ringer, email alerts began exploding like microwave popcorn.
“What’s going on?” My arms crept around my stomach, as though I could hug myself safe from whatever was happening.
Weary, defeated, he said, “It appears Stephen has said some rather shocking things in an interview. There are members of the press looking for my comment on our ‘love affair’.”
“’Love affair?’” I choked back my revulsion.
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to change this number.” He regarded the phone on the desk with his hand wrapped around his chin.
How could he just sweep those horrible words under the rug? How could he ignore this? Stephen was outing Neil and framing what had happened between them as though it had been romantic. “I think you need to do more than just change your number.”
“I’ll contact Joe Davis at Elwood and Stern. They’ve helped me with damage control before.” He almost picked up his phone, then turned to me and asked, “May I use your phone? If no one has ferreted out the number yet?”
“Why would they—” Because I was his wife. I was public knowledge now; our wedding had been in the papers, and we’d even profiled it in the August issue of Mode. Oh god, with this out, people would definitely have questions for me. “We have to do more than just change our numbers and get some PR guys.”
“Like what?” he demanded. “What would you have me do?”
His mood had understandably changed, but his anger now focused on me, so ferocious that it shocked me. Worse, I didn’t have an answer for him; I didn’t know what I wanted him to do. I wanted him to fix this, somehow, so it would all go away. And I felt selfish for wanting that, because I couldn’t decide if I wanted it to go away for his sake, or for mine. What I’d experienced during his chemotherapy and transplant had been so similar. I’d had moments of private crisis during which I couldn’t tell if I wanted him to get better because he was in pain, or if I wanted him to get better because I was tired of seeing him in pain. That kind of confusion is hard to deal with, and I was out of practice. I’d put myself on the spot, now, and I didn’t know how to back out.
“I want to know, Sophie, what you would have me do to handle this situation, over which I have no control, and which does not affect you!” he shouted, raking a hand through his hair.
“I’m not affected?” My breath exploded from my gaping mouth in a hoarse puff of disbelief. “First of all, I’m going to be affected when people start trying to trick me into saying stuff about you. Second, do you think it doesn’t affect me when you’re hurting?”
“I’m not hurting! I’m annoyed to have my private number given out to a pack of vultures who want to, to…revel in my public humiliation.” His voice cracked, and he turned away from me, a hand over his eyes.
I wanted to go to him, but he was so angry, it wouldn’t have done anything but piss him off more. He hated feeling helpless. But I couldn’t just leave him like this.
“Neil…this wasn’t your fault.” My heart ached for him. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Stephen raped you. He’s the one who should be embarrassed by all this.”
Neil squinted and rubbed his forehead. “Will you please stop calling it that?” he scolded, trying to sound reasonable above the weariness in his voice.
“Why not?” How could he not see that this was an injustice being done to him? How could he not understand that any freak out he might have over this would be totally understandable? “Why are you sitting here, diminishing what he did? Protecting him? Why can’t you just call it what it was?”
“Because that’s not who I want to be!” he shouted. “I don’t want to be a victim or a survivor or whatever the hell you expect me to call myself. I don’t want it to have happened to me. I don’t want to know exactly what it was. I’m not stupid, Sophie, I know what happened that night! The man I trusted, the man I believed I was falling in love with, had no regard for my safety, my feelings, my body… It was emotionally damaging, and yes, it has made me wildly suspicious of my romantic partners for years after, but it’s what happened to me. You don’t have a say in what I call it!”
Shame shocked through me like electricity. My fingertips tingled, and my heartbeat sped up. I would never be able to grasp the enormity of the violation he’d experienced; Neil would nev
er rip apart my trust and abuse my body. I would never have to go through the fear and betrayal that he’d experienced, and I’d lectured him on how to feel?
Now, I couldn’t even think of how to apologize without it sounding like I was making it all about me.
Struggling with a way to phrase it, speak it without sounding like I was asking to be excused, I said cautiously, “You’re right. It’s not up to me to tell you how to react to this. I haven’t been respectful to you.”
“No, you haven’t.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. He looked upward and blew out a breath. “At this point, Sophie, all I want is for this to be gone. I don’t want this hanging over me anymore. I don’t want to be afraid, when I’m with Emir, for example. I don’t want to worry that every new partner we’re with could do that to me again. Or do that to you.
“This thing… It’s ruined a part of me. I’ve been talking to Doctor Harris about how to confront that. But I can’t. I can’t acknowledge what Stephen did. It feels like he’s winning. It feels like he’s doing that to me all over again.” His shoulders sagged, and he dropped his arm, all the defensiveness bleeding from his posture. “At the same time, I want him to acknowledge what he’s done. I want… This sounds so contradictory.”
“No, come on. You can tell me anything,” I promised, when it seemed as though he wouldn’t continue.
Neil took a breath. “I want to confront him.”
That did sound contradictory, but I understood. On that score, it was kind of how I felt about my dad. I didn’t want to see him, but I wanted to, at the same time. One part of me wanted to scream and shout and tell him how much he’d hurt me, while another part wanted to go on with my life, pretending he didn’t exist. Yet another part wanted to pretend he didn’t exist, but wanted him to yearn for a relationship with me, so I could reject him. Though our circumstances weren’t the same, I could definitely sympathize with Neil wanting to hide from someone and still wanting to call them out.
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