“Well,” he winked, “Not all the things I put in my mouth.”
Piper scowled and poked him in the arm. “I’m serious.”
“Piper, what do you want me to say? It has never once occurred to me to psychoanalyze myself about either my allergy or my bedroom predilections. Some things just are the way they are.”
“Huh.”
“That’s it? Huh?”
Another casual shrug. “Yup.”
This was absurd. “Piper?” he asked. “Did I hurt you? Before, I mean.”
With studied carelessness, she said, “Not really, no.” But again, from inches away on his pillow, she wouldn’t look him in the eye.
“But maybe a little?” Red prodded.
“Well, you smacked my ass pretty good. So, yeah,” Piper admitted. “That’s fair to say. Did you intend to?”
Red was dumbfounded. “I…no. You liked it that way last time, so I thought...”
“So, it wasn’t some kind of twisted punishment for what happened with the guys in the bar earlier?” Now she stared at him, accusation heavy in her expression. Still, Red could tell it took something out of her to say it.
“Of course not,” he objected. But when he added, “What those assholes did was not your fault,” he had to wonder who he was trying to reassure.
“Figured I ought to check anyway,” she countered.
“Just so I’m clear. You’re telling me you didn’t like the spanking this time.”
“Not really, no,” Piper reiterated. “It was different than last time. You were different.”
Which made Red feel…how, exactly? He was floundering, searching for the solid ground beneath this slippery situation.
“Then why’d you let me do it? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
Piper frowned off into space. “Well…I’m not sure, to be honest. If you’d asked me two weeks ago about any of this, I probably would’ve thought I knew everything there was to know. But, as it turns out, I don’t know shit.”
Coming from an erotic romance author, that was fascinating. “You’ve truly never even been spanked before?” Red asked.
Her mouth twisted ruefully to the side. “Only by you. I made up what I wrote in the books, of course.”
Red turned his face into the pillow and groaned, but that wasn’t going to fix this. He made himself face her again. “Piper, honey, I’m really sorry. I should’ve…asked you if it was okay this time, too. Or whatever you needed.” Whatever. Like he was in middle school, and not a grown man with a gorgeous naked woman in his bed.
He was on thin ice here, and not entirely sure of his next move.
“It’s okay,” Piper murmured. “We both got caught up in the moment.”
“That’s the truth.” Red considered his next words carefully. “Listen, can I ask you something?” He didn’t want to, precisely, but he had a feeling if he didn’t, he might never be able to repair what had been broken tonight.
“Okay.” Piper was still so wary, and it scraped across his nerve endings like sandpaper.
“I know you said I didn’t hurt you, and that you didn’t love it. But what did you feel, just now?”
Piper’s brows drew together thoughtfully. “Well. I suppose it…I just felt kind of depressed. Sad, almost.”
“Seriously?” Now Red was outright alarmed. Sad was probably the last thing he wanted her to feel while she was in bed with him.
“Yeah. You know, like, if this guy actually cares about me, why on earth would he want to hit me? Especially, like that. Intimately. When you were grouchy.”
Red took a slow breath in and let it out. This was awful. He was, quite possibly, just as bad at relationships as people had always said he was. Unfortunately, his latest victim wasn’t done. Not nearly.
“It made me feel like there must be something wrong with me.” Piper gestured spastically between them. “Something deficient, if you need to spank me to get motivated. Look, Red—”
Oh, good. She had more.
“I don’t often feel like I’m not good enough, you know? But when I do, it always seems to be at the hands of a guy who’s supposed to care about me. So, yeah. That saddens and depresses me.”
Red was well and truly speechless. Entirely bereft of a single helpful word. But he had to say something, if only so Piper wouldn’t continue to believe that she was less than what she was.
“That is not at all what I thought you’d say,” he began, scrambling to come up with the rest of it on the fly.
She peered at him. “What did you think I was going to say?”
“I suppose I expected you to wonder what the fuck was wrong with me for wanting to spank you. You’re over there making connections with my allergy and shit. Why not?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she soothed automatically.
“Oh, so it must be you?” he scoffed. “You can’t tell me you think you’re somehow inferior to me.”
“I guess. In this, at least. I write about kink all the time, Red. Isn’t it kind of lame that I don’t actually know what I’m talking about?”
Red had read her books. She knew what she was talking about.
“Piper, please believe me when I say that just because you don’t want to be spanked every time we hit the sheets, doesn’t mean you’re deficient in some way. Honestly, look at you!”
She sniffed, like she was a troll laying there, instead of a goddess.
“Don’t give me that,” he warned. “You’re pretty, soft, and sweet.” He ran a hand down her arm, then cupped her jaw. Piper’s amber eyes watched him, wide and dubious. “You’re kind and smart, funny, open…and you have faith that life will work out the way it’s supposed to. That’s rare. Also, you’re so damn pretty.”
“You said that already.”
“It’s true.”
“I’m not sure I’m that open. I’m actually a very suspicious person,” she told him.
“I don’t believe you,” he smiled.
Piper smiled, too, and Red relaxed, just a little. “Maybe I just don’t get why—when you could clearly have any woman in this town—you would want me. I feel like a fraud, like at any moment you’ll discover the real me and run screaming for the hills.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he balked. “Have you met any women around here?”
“Some, yeah. They were beautiful, elegant, refined, sophisticated, accomplished…”
Red cut Piper off before she could go much further. “The women I have dated recently were grasping vipers focused wholly on forwarding their own agendas. They couldn’t have cared less about me as a human being. Ergo, far bigger frauds than you could ever be.”
They had seen him only as a youngish man with a tolerable face and nice, large wallet. Red’s forays into domination probably had way more to do with that than with any poisonous little legumes.
Piper huffed, “They couldn’t have all been like that.”
“Trust me. There were enough that I was able to turn repelling the repellant into a pretty legit side hustle.”
“And you say I have a way with words.” She rolled her eyes.
Red snorted.
“Anyway, what makes you think I’m so different? Maybe I’m just like all the others.”
“Seriously?” This part, at least, was easy. “You have fought me literally every time I’ve tried to do more for you than open a damn door. Besides that, you are a caring, compassionate human being, with the ability to express interesting thoughts and opinions that may or may not coincide with mine.” Red stared her down. “You can hold a conversation, Piper. You can cook. And, you have a terrific bedside manner.”
“I could say the same for you, aside from the cooking. That’s still TBD.”
“I have a limited kitchen repertoire that you will quickly tire of. But you truly are the first woman in recent memory who seems to have looked for, or found, any of that other stuff in me. Hence, my clinging to you like the whole ship is going down.”
Piper shifted toward him then and pressed a gentle kiss of forgiveness on Red’s lips. “If we keep talking about the important stuff, I swear we won’t drown.”
“Not if I can help it,” he told her. Ironically, he even believed it.
SEVENTEEN
LATER, WHEN THEY’D gone back downstairs and Red was trying his hand at making flan from a box, he brought up the men in the bar again. Piper was expecting it, but she wished he hadn’t had quite so much time to brood about the subject.
As it turned out, though, he had set aside his anger at Jim and his buddies for the time being. Now, Red had his executive hat on and wanted to question Piper about the general work environment at Trident.
While he mixed a vivid yellow powder with hot water in a bowl, Piper told him how some of the male authors had viewed the romance writers as a trollopy harem—amusing as potential hookups, but not respectable as colleagues.
Because of that, Piper explained that the occasional conferences and holiday parties the Dentons engineered could be uncomfortable.
“I tried to stay as aloof as I could,” she told him. “Some of the women went along with their crap, but I didn’t want to incite the guys any more than necessary. With Jim especially, nothing I did seemed to help, though.”
Red bristled at that, turning from the oven he was attempting to turn on and demanding, “What did HR do?”
Piper pushed off the barstool where she was perched and went over to help him turn on his oven. She liked that Red didn’t even bother questioning whether she had pursued the HR angle, and thankfully she didn’t have to disappoint him.
“They told me that, since the guys hadn’t actually gotten physical with me, I should lighten up and try to laugh it off. That it would be too much trouble to file an official complaint about something so minor.”
Red was aghast. “Just because they didn’t lay hands on you doesn’t mean it wasn’t harassment.”
Piper took the pan of uncooked custard he was holding before he could spill it. “I realize that,” she said, and carefully set the flan onto the counter until the oven heated up.
“So?” Red had stuck his hand in the oven, presumably to make sure it was warming as expected, but now he slammed the door shut with a bit more force than necessary and wheeled to glare at her.
“Well, Perry and I were considering whether we wanted to pursue litigation or just find a different publisher when PKM swooped in and took over.”
“I see.” That settled him down nicely. He clamped his lips together, grabbed a bright red timer in the shape of a rooster from the counter, and focused on setting it. It was an oddly homey touch amidst the sea of industrial modernism surrounding them.
Piper smirked, “There I was, biding my time, waiting to see what would happen. And, look—a fancy new contract for me, and terminations for half of the jerks. I do love karma.”
“Well, I can assure you that a reorganization of the HR department just got added to the transition team’s list, too,” Red laughed.
“How very gallant of you.”
“We at PKM aim to please.” He kissed her quickly, but thoroughly, then asked, “Do you know how bad it might have been for the other female writers? Do you think Denton and his buddies crossed the line with anyone else?”
“You’ll have to ask to them directly,” Piper said, “But as far as I know, the other ladies only had experiences like mine.”
“You say only like what they did wasn’t a big deal. Maybe you’ve already forgotten that I saw them in action earlier,” he growled, bracing his hands on the counter.
“Red…” Piper sighed. “Don’t be dense. That kind of shit goes on all the time, for most women, everywhere. It’s not that it isn’t a big deal—it’s that after three decades of it happening pretty pervasively in my life, I’ve realized that I can’t fight every damn battle. No one can. We’d never have time to get anything else done, otherwise.” The oven chimed, so she edged past him to slide the flan inside.
He stared at her. “That’s sick, Piper. You can’t just…not stand up for yourself.”
“Don’t I know it.” Piper walked around the island and parked herself back on her stool. “But sometimes life requires turning the proverbial other cheek.”
“Not anymore, it doesn’t.” He grabbed the small cardboard box the dessert mix had come in and pitched it angrily into the trash bin in the corner of his kitchen.
“Oh, really? And what are you going to do about it?”
He shook his fist in the air. “I shall destroy them all.” At least he grinned at her afterward, or she might have wondered at his sanity.
“I’m not sure that’s necessary,” Piper smiled back.
“Okay, fine. Some of them, then.”
“If you insist.”
Red came around the counter and leaned against the counter beside her. He ran a finger up her side, pulling up her t-shirt so he could trace the black lines of her tattoo. “Let’s change the subject. Is this the tattoo you told me about the first time we went out? The one you added on to later?”
Piper nodded, twisting around to see the gnarled tree that stretched from her hip to her ribs. “It is.”
His soft touch, up and down each root and branch, raised goosebumps on her skin. “What did you change?”
“It used to just be a tree from my grandparents’ yard, the one where they hung my swing when I was a kid. When I graduated college, I brought a picture of it to the tattoo parlor near campus for the artist to copy. I never thought the real thing would be mine someday.”
Red made a pleased sound, studying it.
“Then, a few years ago, I hit a rough patch.” Piper paused, startled by her casual description. Could Kyle’s infidelities and betrayals really be reduced to such an anemic phrase? It didn’t seem possible after what she’d gone through, and yet here she was with those words exiting her mouth.
“What happened?” Red prompted, looking up at her.
Piper had to clear her throat a couple of times before she could be sure her voice wouldn’t falter. “I was engaged to this guy, but it didn’t work out. I realized after a while that it was for the best but, for a time there, I needed a tangible reminder that I wasn’t unique—that everything in the world goes through fallow and fruitful periods. So, I added flowers to the branches.”
“You made barren winter into hopeful spring,” he said, understanding her imagery immediately.
“Exactly.”
“Like you did with me,” Red pointed out, lifting his hand to her hair. “You’re like a modern-day alchemist, Piper. Turning lead into gold. Desolation into…potential.”
Piper winced. “Don’t get carried away. It’s just a tattoo.”
Red shook his head with a smirk. “Agree to disagree.”
She knew if she let him think too long about what she’d said, an interrogation about Kyle was sure to follow. To distract him, Piper pointed quickly to Red’s own arm and the curling parchment on his bicep, like the flyleaf in an old pirate story.
“What about yours? It’s a treasure map, isn’t it?”
“Of sorts,” he agreed.
She leaned to the side to take a closer look. “Let’s see. There’s an old ship, some whiskey casks, and…what’s that thing? A wine carafe?”
“Nope,” Red grinned. “It’s a beaker.”
Understanding dawned. “Oh, my God—boats, booze, and biotech, right?”
“Right.” He was proud as could be.
“That’s so cute. But I think you probably need to add some books now.”
He explained, “I want to. But the guy I use went to a tattoo convention in Amsterdam last month and never came back. I figured I’d give him a little more time to return before I find someone new. I think it’ll look better if it’s all done by the same artist.”
“True.” Piper traced the red dotted line that wound through the tiny icons, then sat straight as another thought occurred to her. There was no X-marks-the-spot. “What about the personal th
ings?” she wondered.
Red’s easy sprawl against the counter turned almost imperceptibly stiff. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve got all this work-related stuff. Don’t you think you ought to add something that’s just about you?”
Red stared out the huge factory window over her shoulder. When he asked, “Like what?” his face was a mask she couldn’t read.
“I don’t know,” Piper shrugged. “That’s for you to decide.”
He nodded, then turned to prop both elbows behind himself on the counter. “I’m sure something will come to me eventually,” he said.
Several feet away, the rooster timer began crowing. Red stepped quickly into the kitchen to remove the flan from the oven, then busied himself trying to invert the pan onto a large plate. Piper wanted to go help him, but he seemed to need his space.
She stayed put and was soon rewarded with Red’s obvious pride and satisfaction when he finally lifted up the pan to reveal a perfectly-caramelized custard underneath. He dug in a drawer for two spoons, then carried his offering back to her.
Once he and Piper had taken a few bites, he shifted and took her free hand.
“Listen, I had an idea,” he said, almost physically shaking off whatever had been bothering him before. “I know you have that water thing going on at home, but do you think you could stay another day or two?”
Piper had known he was disappointed when she left to spend the day with her friend. She should have realized his orderly brain would find some way to rebalance the scales.
“Maybe,” she said, thinking about the week ahead. “My dad’s probably been over to turn off the water by now. It’s too late to call the cat sitter, but I could call her in the morning and see if she’s free. My train ticket would be easy enough to change, too. Why?”
“There’s somewhere I’d love to show you before you go back. And honestly, I could really use the mental health day,” Red said.
“Dreading Monday already?” Piper joked, even though he suddenly seemed exhausted. Before getting to know him, she’d never thought about how hard someone in his position might have to work—or the toll that would take on their personal life.
The Titan Was Tall (Triple Threat Book 1) Page 19
