On Her Master's Secret Service (29 page)

“You’re already pink, angel.” Just the slightest pink, but pink.

“I want more.”

It was his call.
Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.

“Where are you?”

“I am so green.” Her words were sweet, sultry.

Another quick ten smacks. He could smell her arousal. “I need to talk to you.”

“Yes. But touch me first, please, Master. I missed this so much. It’s different now.”

Because he was giving to her, not because she’d dictated it, but because she’d asked. They were in a sweet harmony.
Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack.

She moaned, her ass wiggling a little. She needed this, but he needed something, too.

He needed to make sure she understood a few things. “Stand up. It’s my fun time now.”

Eve’s eyes were soft and wide when she obliged him, but her mouth curled up. “Yes, Master.”

“Arms folded in a U.” He let out a long breath when she complied, folding her arms behind her back, forearms touching, her fingers pointed toward opposite elbows. The position thrust her breasts out. He secured her arms with a double column tie and passed it around her waist. In the low light of the room, her skin practically glowed. He’d missed this so badly. Any time he’d tied her up in the last few years had been strictly for her comfort, but now he could be a little selfish. Now he could take his time, enjoy every knot, revel in the connection.

Do the work it really took to get his wife back.

He worked carefully. The rope was soft, deserving to be against her skin. He secured the rope with an overhand knot in the front.

Eve sniffled a little, a shiver going across her skin.

“Are you all right?” He didn’t want her scared.

“I was just wondering.”

He started to route the loose ends up her torso, between her beautiful breasts. “About what?”

“If you still think I’m pretty.”

He’d dealt with this. “I told you you’re lovely. I believe I promised you punishment if you denigrated what is mine again. Are you trying to get more spankings?”

“You said you still wanted me. But you’ve also mentioned that I’m too thin.” Her voice had gone quiet, vulnerable.

He could fix that. He worked another overhand knot halfway between her breasts and throat. He brought the ropes over her shoulders and around her arms, but he started kissing her, paying special attention to those scars that used to make him feel like shit, and now he could see them for what they really were. They didn’t have to be a symbol of his failure. They were proof that she had survived. “I think you’re gorgeous big or tiny. The real reason I have a problem with your weight is that you never indulge. You never enjoy. I love your curves, but most of all I love knowing that you deeply enjoy the life we share. I adore stuffing you with chocolate.”

“I miss chocolate,” she admitted in a husky voice.

“I want you to enjoy it again. Now, we’re going to talk, angel. We’re going to get to the heart of everything.” His hands worked slowly, methodically. By the time he was done, she would be wrapped in a beautiful tortoiseshell pattern, and even once he got her out of the ropes, the pattern would be left on her skin for a while, proof of her trust, her love. Because she still loved him. He just knew it.

There was a long pause, her body slumping slightly. “Alex, what do you want me to say?”

He found the rope work so calming. He passed the rope under her arms and back around to her breasts. Her nipples were sweetly puckered. “I want you to stop placating me and talk to me. I want you to stop making excuses and coming up with a million logical reasons for what I did.”

He continued to move the rope across her skin, skimming it with his fingers, tightening it just so she would feel it. He made sure it wouldn’t cut off her circulation, just leave a pretty pattern on her skin for a while.

Eve remained perfectly still, relaxed under his ropes. “But I’m right about this. That was why you did it. You withdrew from me because it was easier to focus on more active things.”

“No,” he commanded. This was exactly what he wanted to avoid. “Stop the shrink talk. I want plain English. Tell me what I did. You’ve danced around the topic for years. This situation we’re in is just as much your fault as mine.”

He wound the rope around her breasts, forcing them up and out. He knelt down as he moved the rope lower.

Her eyes flared as she looked down at him. “Really?”

She wasn’t willing to admit it yet, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with it anymore. “Yes, really. Why did you have me sign a new contract, Eve? You didn’t negotiate with me. You went to Ian and had him write a contract that outlined how I was supposed to behave in the coldest terms possible. As soon as our divorce was final, you shoved that contract in my face.”

And he’d taken it because he’d been so desperate to have any kind of contact with her. He’d lain down during the divorce, giving her everything she wanted, praying she would change her mind. When she’d tossed that contract in his face, he’d signed it before he’d even read it. He just couldn’t stand to lose her.

“My behavior was outlined, too.” She frowned at him, but it wasn’t an angry expression. She seemed more thoughtful than anything else.

“Why did you make me sign that contract? We could have gone on with the one we had before.” He should have done this a long time ago. Some people needed to sit in an office setting and talk out their problems with a third party, but he needed this. He needed her naked, his hands working to bring her comfort and pleasure.

“Because we were divorced. We needed to rethink how we acted.”

He tied off the design. She looked so fucking gorgeous wrapped up in his ropes. The tortoiseshell design formed a sexy pattern around her breasts, showing them off. Her whole torso was in a gorgeous pattern. If they were at Sanctum, he would spend the next thirty minutes showing her off. She was a work of art. But tonight, he simply made his plea. “Eve, be brave. Please. Don’t be logical. Don’t be kind. Tell me what I did to you. You were hurting and you needed me, and what did I do?”

He heard her sniffle and looked up. Her brown eyes were sheened with tears. “You ignored me.”

He placed his head to her breast because they had finally come to his true crime. A deep sense of peace came over him as he finally admitted what he’d done. He’d been a bastard, but he sensed forgiveness was a heartbeat away. “I ignored you. God, Eve, please forgive me.”

* * * *

Alex held her, his head soft against her skin. His words were whispered against her flesh.

She’d always known why he’d done it, but she’d only just realized that she’d punished him. If it had been anyone else, she would have seen it easily. She’d told herself that she wanted that contract to protect them both, but now she could see why it had been important to her. She’d been punishing him, forcing him to see her, to deal with her in the only way he seemed willing to. She’d been like a child who would take any attention she could get. “I never just told you how I felt.”

“I want to hear it now, angel,” he said. “I need to hear it. I need you to get it all out.”

She was tied up, unable to walk out of the room, and that was what she really wanted to do because the truth was so close to the surface and she was afraid to let it out. She’d held it in for so long, terrified of what really confronting that time would mean. “You don’t want to hear it all.”

He was on his knees in front of her, his head nuzzled between her breasts. “I do. I need to. We need to. I don’t want to hear the logic. I want to know how you felt so I can ask your forgiveness. I can’t ask for it unless I know. Angel, you had to have been so scared when he kicked the door in.”

She closed her eyes. God, she didn’t want to do this. She’d told the police and her therapist the bare bones, simply reciting the story over and over again, but the real memories were still inside her. Those moments of terror were deep in her veins, and Alex was trying to pull them out. The problem was she’d held on to them so long, she wasn’t sure who she would be when she’d given them all up.

She couldn’t be who she was back then. She’d been weak and completely submissive. She’d been dependent and then she’d been so alone. And now she was strong, but she was still so very alone. Could she find a way to be herself and have Alex, too?

“Please. Be brave, Eve. Talk to me.” His hands tightened as though he wouldn’t let her go.

But he had let her go. He’d agreed to the divorce without a second glance. He’d signed the contract without a word. Could she trust him now? Did she dare to try again? “I thought we agreed to stop doing this. We agreed to move forward and let go of the people we used to be.”

His head turned up, his eyes pleading with her. He was so gorgeous, her big bad Dom in a supplicant position, on his knees for his sub. “I can let go of the twenty-three-year-old idiot who didn’t realize just how much he could love you. I can. He’s gone. I can let go of the man who was so tied up in his own guilt that he didn’t really see you for years. But I will never let go of the eighty-year-old man who will hold your hand until the day he dies. I will fight for that old man. I will never let go of him.”

Tears blurred her vision, and she knew she was at that fork in the road she’d been terrified of for so many years—that place where she had to finally decide where she was going to go and whether the road would include the love of her life.

And in that moment, she saw him, really saw him for the first time in years. She saw him without the filter of her own pain. She saw him as that young man who had reached for her, who she’d learned with and grown with. She saw the Alex who had been sitting at her bedside when she woke up, his eyes haggard and guilt in every line of his body. She saw the Alex who had given in to her for five years, placating her, giving her only what she told him she needed while his eyes begged her for more. And she saw him as the old man he would be, lined and weathered and still so beautiful to her eyes. He would be there if she let him. He would reach for her hand, their lives so entwined that there was no way to disentangle them.

They had made a mess of things, but he was still here, still reaching out for her. And if she was brave, this time he might never let her go.

If she was really brave, she would make damn sure of it.

“I let him in.” She closed her eyes as she said the words, the horror of that day washing over her again.

Alex’s arms tightened, an anchor keeping her in the present. “Why would you do that, angel? I left two guards with you. They should have opened the door first.”

Alex wasn’t the only one who felt guilty. “I thought it was you or Warren. Tommy even told me not to open the door, but I was so sure that I knew who it was. I just wanted to see you. I was scared. And then I was even more scared when Evans was there. I tried to slam the door in his face, but he kicked at it and I ended up on the floor. He had two of his men with him, and then I heard glass breaking and two more came in from the back. I got Tommy and Leon killed.”

She could still see them as they fought. They managed to take one of Evans’s men but there were too many. They had died in a cascade of bullets, and the last thing she had seen before Evans had shoved a needle in her neck was Tommy, so young. He’d just joined the Bureau and she watched his eyes glass over as he died.

“Eve, you can’t blame yourself.”

Oh, but she could. Every time she ran a hand over her scars, she remembered the two men who had died trying to protect her. None of them had taken it seriously. Not even Alex, really. He’d left a six-pack of beer to pay his buddies back for babysitting his wife. Warren had been the one to insist on the guard. Alex had been so sure that Evans would come after him.

“I should have been more careful.”

“He had four men with him, maybe more. He would have gotten in whether you opened the door or not,” Alex said gravely.

She felt hemmed in. She usually loved to be tied up, felt safe. Though now she realized why she loved it. Because Alex never took his eyes off her when she was tied up. He wouldn’t turn his back on her. She’d gravitated toward more and more hardcore play because it focused Alex’s attention on her. But now it was starting to bother her. She couldn’t move. It felt like the walls were closing in and she was alone. She didn’t need his ropes. She needed him.

“Keep going. I know he raped you.”

“I want out.” She couldn’t be in the rope anymore. She couldn’t. Tears were streaming down her face.

Alex paled, and he was on his feet in a second. He reached into his kit and had a knife in hand. “I’m sorry, angel. I’m so sorry. I won’t make you do this again.”

He cut through the ties that bound her in quick, economical movements, and she was free within seconds. He took a step back, pain plain on his face, but she couldn’t try to soothe him. She needed him.

She threw herself into his arms, wrapping her body around his. She wasn’t satisfied with just hugging him. She jumped on him, curling her legs around him and burying her face in his neck. This was home. She breathed in his scent. This was what she’d missed for so many years. The tears came easily now. She wept into his shoulder.

“He hurt me.” The words didn’t even begin to describe what had happened, but there was more truth in those three words than anything she’d said to him before. He’d hurt her. He’d hurt her so badly, she’d gone into a shell and was only now starting to come out of it.

“I’m so sorry.” He moved with her in his arms. “I love you so much.”

Now that she was being honest, she couldn’t stop herself. “I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to get back to you, but after a few days, I started to wonder.”

He fell onto the bed, his weight coming down on her. She found it comforting. He was still fully clothed, but it didn’t matter. She held on to him because those memories were so close to the surface it felt like she was there again. “What did you wonder about?”

“I wondered if you would want me after what he did.” She closed her eyes because it was the question that had haunted her. “It was awful. It was a complete perversion of everything I loved about us. How did he know? How did he know exactly how to hurt me?”