Shame (Secrets and Lies Book 2)

by Ainsley Booth

  “I’m going to—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Grace—”

  “I’m there, too. Come with me. Deep. Fill me up.”

  He shudders as he thrust all the way in, restraint evaporating as I begin to clench around him. I’ve never come this fast before. It’s a freight train of need, and now I’m shaking, the orgasm rioting through me as he bucks his hips. His left hand clenches in my hair as his right blindly grabs my calf, then my ankle, bending my leg up and open.

  His fingers tighten around my ankle as he shouts my name again.

  I close my eyes and sink into it, floating in the pleasure of my husband reclaiming my body. Finally. Yes.

  Grace.

  Yes.

  28

  Luke

  I’m starting to think I might never return to the office, and I don’t mind that idea at all. I’ve gotten used to working from home. Grace and I can have leisurely mornings together, and then when she goes to the studio, I’m able to think about the big picture finance decisions without constant interruptions.

  I know why Sam likes it so much now.

  But it also raises the question of whether or not we’re still the right people to lead this firm. Just because we founded it doesn’t mean we need to stay there forever. Maybe I just want to be an angel investor for the rest of my career.

  There’s certainly enough money in that, and it would give me more time to devote to Grace.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about our relationship as a long-term project. Trips I’d like us to take together, hobbies we might take up.

  “How do you feel about tai chi?” I ask her as I browse the YMCA’s website one evening.

  “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” she asks with a laugh.

  “Who, that guy? What does Taylor Swift say? He can’t come to the phone?”

  She giggles. “You truly are a different person. But no, I don’t think super slow is my preferred speed. What are you looking at?”

  “The community classes at the Y. They seem…wholesome. I dunno. Just an idea.” I hand her my laptop. “You have a look, see what you think.”

  She clicks on adult karate classes first, then the masters level swim club. “They have an information night next week, I think we could go to that. Let me check my calendar.”

  She opens a new browser tab and types in a webmail address. But instead of it going to a login page, it opens an email account I haven’t looked at it in months.

  That I had every intention of deleting.

  Her face goes ashen. “Luke, what is this?”

  “That’s nothing.” I want to throw up.

  It’s the burner email address I used to communicate with Caitlyn. There’s nothing in the inbox, but she’s smarter than that. She clicks on the sent folder and finds the last email I wrote. “You emailed her the day after I found out about the affair.”

  “And then I blocked her. You can see for yourself, she hasn’t replied to it.”

  “You said just a few weeks ago that you had no more contact with her.”

  “I, I had no more contact with her. I didn’t.”

  “But you emailed her. Here I can see it in this email account that I'm looking at right now that you left logged in on your laptop.”

  “That's not contact with her! I didn't speak to her.” My heart is pounding as I desperately try to fix this. “She called and left a message for me at work, the morning after you found out. When I went into the office, Cameron gave me a message that she had called my office, and that was unacceptable. So I sent her that email—that single email—and then I blocked her. She can't respond to that message and you can see, there is no response.”

  “But you lied to me, Luke. I asked you if you had any contact.”

  “I didn't have any contact with her.”

  Grace jumps up. “You emailed her. And more to the point, you should have told me she called you. You don't get to keep secrets from me, even if you don't think they're secrets. I need you to be transparent with me on my terms, using the meaning of words as I understand them. Not your convenient-for-you definitions. I don't think we are at a place where you can be that callous or thoughtless about how I might feel.”

  “That was months ago. I haven’t had any contact with her since that point. My phone is yours to look at, my computer is yours to prowl through. You’re mad at me right now about something I did in the past. That’s fine. But I’m not doing it now, so you’re mad at Past Luke, not Present Luke. I’ll do my best not to get defensive, but—”

  She cuts me off. “But it’s not you who I’m mad at?”

  “Exactly!” I stand, too. “Do you want to take a shot at me?”

  “No.” She pauses. “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “What can we do right now to reinforce what we have right now?”

  She looks small and vulnerable and sad. “I don’t know.”

  “Can we start with a hug?”

  She paces away from me. “I need a minute. I just need to…” She lets out a rough breath and turns away from me.

  I try not to panic, but it’s hard.

  Then I hear her counting to ten, and my heart breaks. That was fucking stupid, an unforced error, and she’s right. I should have been more upfront about that bit of contact.

  I tentatively move closer, and she sways, as if she wants to lean back against me.

  And for what feels like the thousandth time, I whisper an apology to my wife.

  29

  Grace

  The next week, we start couples counselling. Our therapist is someone Luke’s counsellor recommended. She begins by using his favourite word.

  “When we talk about repairing a relationship after an affair, it’s important that we don’t focus on the affair itself at first. That’s an issue that isn’t going to be solved, per se, because there’s no changing the past. Repair is more about focusing on the future, and finding a softness, a peace in which you can move forward.”

  I nod along. I agree with all of that in principle.

  “So this means we need to be able to have moments, like what happened last week, and learn to just sit with them.”

  “That stillness thing again,” Luke mutters to me.

  I smile at him, then explain the reference to the therapist.

  She nods. “Can you sit with that pain now? Can you look at it without having a big reaction?”

  “Yes.” As long as I don’t need to do anything about it. Pretend it doesn’t exist.

  She looks at me.

  I stare right back. That’s all she’s getting. Yes, I can sit with it. I’m not giving her anything else to dig into right now. It’s Luke’s turn, and this is going to be hard enough as it is on him.

  We both turn at the same time to give him our attention.

  He’s coiled tight. “Yeah,” he says stiffly. “I can sit with it.”

  “It’s okay,” I say quietly, almost under my breath. “I know it’s hard for you.”

  His jaw flexes. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” He swallows. “I hate what I did. I hate why I did it. I don’t like to look at it.”

  Panic rises inside me and I breathe deeply, trying to stay in the moment. Just sit with it. Just look at. Don’t react.

  It’s harder than it fucking sounds, that’s for damn sure.

  “Now I want you to both focus on this moment. And if I were to ask you to make a decision, a micro decision, what would your next move be? What would you do to shift yourself, in the smallest of ways, out of this pain.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m not ready to get over it.”

  “I hear that. That’s okay. I’m talking about micro moves. Imagine there’s a string dangling in front of you, leading you out of this pain. Where does it go? If you take hold of it and take the tiniest of steps, what happens? Do you move towards Luke? Away from him?”

  “Do I need to move?”

  She purses her lips for a moment. “Can yo
u tell me more about that?”

  “I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “You can choose to stay where you are. Are you holding the thread?”

  I shrug. “Sure.”

  Luke leans forward. “I’ll move towards Grace.”

  She nods. “Okay. Then do that.”

  I give her an alarmed look. “What?”

  She smiles. “A micro move. Luke, shift your chair a centimetre towards Grace. No more. Just the tiniest of shifts.”

  He nudges his chair infinitesimally closer to mine.

  “And now let’s sit with this for a moment. Find that stillness.”

  Even though Luke and I have an in-joke about sitting still being scary, this is genuinely intense for me in a way I didn’t see coming. Maybe because it’s not just the two of us. For all our problems, we are a unit, and we see each other in every way. This therapist is a stranger. A professional, sure, but a stranger all the same.

  And I’m letting her see that I struggle with giving my husband even an inch after what he’s done. I’m not being defensive about that, I’m just being in my true essence.

  Grace Preston, tired bitch.

  “Now, if I were to ask you again…”

  We repeat the exercise a few times, Luke moving closer to me by fractions of an inch each time, me not moving at all, feeling more and more settled and at peace with my decision to just hold on to the thread.

  And then, on the fifth time, when she asks if I’m willing to make a micromove, I surprise all of us by saying yes.

  Both of us move our chairs together a little tiny bit.

  Then the therapist gets out a ruler, measures the distance between our chairs, and tells us we’re out of time.

  “That was weird, right?” Luke asks me as he holds the passenger side door open for me.

  “Yeah.”

  “But a little good, too?”

  I push up on my toes and kiss his jaw. “Yep.”

  30

  Luke

  That night, we sit down and I finally take Grace’s BDSM personality type quiz. Neither of us are surprised to find out that I’m as much a Daddy or caregiver as she is a Little or Middle.

  And for the first time, we talk about safewords. We’re going to start with just using stop and ouch, because Grace doesn’t think she’ll ever want to say stop and not mean it.

  I’m fascinated by the layers there.

  “So this class that you took,” I ask her as she gets ready for bed. “This was at the kink club that Alex goes to sometimes?”

  “Yep.”

  “And he knows about it?”

  “The class? Or me taking it.”

  “That part.”

  “No, I don’t think he does.”

  I rub my jaw. “I think I prefer it that way, if I’m allowed to have a preference.”

  She looks at me sideways. “You’re allowed. One of the things I learned about caregiver kink is that it’s often quite private.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Speaking of that club…” She presses her lips together, then picks up her hairbrush. “Your brother might go there with Hazel.”

  I can feel storm clouds gathering in my head, and I’m not sure why exactly. It’s a possessive thing, for sure. “Did you see him there?”

  “Oh, no. He’s a Preston, he would have combusted on the spot. But I found the card at his apartment, and that was bad enough.” She hands me the hairbrush. “Would you brush my hair, Daddy?”

  The storm clouds immediately recede. “Of course.”

  I watch her in the mirror as I centre myself, then I turn my attention to her hair. There are a few glints of silver at the crown. In a week, she’ll have them covered up again with dye. She’s fastidious about that, and only that, and I realize it’s something we’ve never talked about.

  I’m not about to tell her that I love her grey hair. Not yet. But I do, and I’ll find a way to bring it up when she’s not mad at me.

  “Well go on,” she whispers. “Brush my hair.”

  “Is there a…” I wrap my fingers around a section of hair, holding it so the brush doesn’t tug her scalp. It goes through the strands like a knife through butter, so I relax and release the locks, and do it again.

  She makes a pleased sound as the bristles make contact with her scalp. “That feels good.”

  “For me, too.” I carefully pick another section of hair. “So if I wanted to learn more about how to do this, without running into my brother or my best friend…”

  I get a smile in the mirror for that. “We can figure it out together. And there’s a lot of good reading online.”

  “Is there? Bedtime story reading?”

  “That, too.” Her lips quirk. “Also more scientific stuff, if you wanted to assign me a book report or something like that.”

  “I like that idea.”

  She straightens her spine, her eyes flashing, and now it’s all Grace. “Hey, speaking of Alex. I know he’s been handling some of your work for a while now. Have you thought about going back to the office?”

  “I’ve been thinking more and more about maybe not. We could sell the condo. Move out of the city. Explore subsistence living and non-stop orgasms.”

  “Lumberjack life?”

  “You want me to chop wood for you without a shirt on?”

  “Yes.” She gazes at me with such soft longing it makes me desperate.

  Again.

  I crowd her against me, holding her tight with my arms, and press my mouth against her neck.

  Her breath hitches as I graze her skin with my teeth. “Ah…” She gasps as I bite harder, an urgent whine that sends blood pumping to my dick. Fuck, that’s so filthy.

  “Remember your words,” I growl.

  Then I pick her up and carry her to our bed.

  “I know…” she promises.

  “Stop, or ouch.”

  “I didn’t say any of them,” she whispers.

  No, but I’m never going to stop reminding she has outs if she wants them. That I’ll only hurt her as much as she wants, only give her the pain she desperately craves.

  “Good. Daddy likes how you put up with his hunger for your skin.”

  “Oh…” She writhes in the tight vice of my arms. “No, please…”

  “Please mark you? Please sink my teeth into your flesh so you’ll remember this when we can’t be alone?”

  She whimpers again. I haul her on top of me, my hands hard against her forearms. She’s light as a feather as I manhandle her, pliant and perfect.

  “Is that what you want, you little slut?” I hold her above me, arms pinned against her side, and use my mouth to rip her negligee down her torso, baring her breasts. “God, Grace. Your breasts are perfect.”

  She cries out for real as I latch on to one nipple. Her flesh is hot and swollen in my mouth, and I forget I’m supposed to be biting her because all I want to do is suck and lick and consume her in the softest way.

  As her legs fold up on either side of me, her bare slit brushes against my belly, slick and soft, and I groan at the contact.

  I shove my boxers down, low on my hips, bringing my cock out to play. She gasps when it makes contact with the sweet, lush curve of her bottom, and I grind us together.

  Then I flip us over and loom big above her.

  She’s soft beneath me, her arms stretched wide like she’s floating on water. I touch her reverently, carefully, just my fingertips to start. Then my whole hand, wanting more contact with her skin. Lust churns inside me, but there’s another clawing feeling competing to direct what I do next.

  Adoration.

  There is a laundry list of feelings I didn’t allow myself to properly feel for my wife in the past, and lust has been top of that list most often. Showing Grace how much I want her has been my mission for weeks.

  Tonight is different. And I’m honestly surprised at how this feeling dominates the lust. Yes, I want to fuck her. Yes, I want to be buried inside her. Yes, I want her scent imp
rinted on me, again. Yes, yes, always yes.

  But that’s about me.

  I’ve let myself run wild with that because she needed to see it.

  But she needs more than just that, too.

  She needs to be adored, worshiped, honoured.

  “Daddy loves you so much. Wants to keep you safe. Do you feel safe, little bird?”

  She beams at me and nods. “And do you want Daddy to make you feel good?”

  Another nod.

  “Maybe a bedtime kiss, mmm?”

  Her lips part, her eyelids fluttering half shut, and I give her a long, sweet kiss there, on her mouth, but that’s not what I mean.

  I crawl down her body, kissing each precious bit of her good night.

  “Good night, Grace,” I whisper against her neck. “Good night to your sweet, lovely breasts.” She giggles as I lave her nipples, sucking the puffy points into my mouth. “Good night to your sweet belly, and this adorable little belly button, and the sweetest of good nights to your perfect pink pussy.”

  She gasps as I press her thighs apart and settle in, flat on the bed, for a very long, very filthy devouring of my wife’s cunt.

  She tastes perfect, musky and hot, and her flesh is already blooming for me as I lick between her folds, then suck her clit.

  “Daddy can’t wait to fuck this little pink hole,” I growl. “One day soon, I might even go without a condom. Wouldn’t that be nice, baby? Feel me inside you? Bare? Just you and me, nothing in between us?”

  “Would you come inside me?” she asks in her dreamlike, fantasy voice.

  “Deep inside you.” I lap at the arousal spilling from her now. She likes that idea, and fucking hell, so do I. “Fill you with seed.”

  She cries out and tangles her fingers in my hair, pulling my mouth fully against her clit, and I suck her through her orgasm.

  Then I sheath myself and thrust home, fucking her with abandon. She comes again, clutching at me, and I growl in her ear one more time.

  “Just like this. This is how I’ll do it. Fill you all the way up with Daddy’s seed.”

  “Fuck, Luke, yes…” She gasps and I lose it, my hips jerking out of control as my climax darkens the edges of my vision.