The Deep End

by AM Hartnett

  Please don’t come before me, she thought. She needed to see what she did to him. She needed to see that weakness pass through him, but, as her orgasm tore through her, her vision blurred and she lost him to the sensation. Bouncing and grinding through the torrent, she crowed through every pulse that rocked her. His sudden bark announced his climax. He clenched down, his grip as vicious as hers, and jetted against her.

  It never seemed to end. She remained on a precarious perch over him, quaking with one aftershock after another. She instantly regretted her determination to send him careening with pleasure. No lethargy overtook her. She wanted more. She wanted to press down upon him for another ride, but his dick was quickly softening and shrinking away from her. Even the promise of another soon couldn’t sate her hunger, and she suspected that this man would leave her wanting him always.

  His hands fell away from her, signalling the end, and Grace groaned as she rolled to his side. Taureau dragged her close, both arms around her, and in the strength of his arms she found calm and peace, and sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  When she awoke again, she was alone in the bed.

  She couldn’t bear it for even a minute. She got up and dragged her discarded nightgown over her head, then ventured into the hall. Everything was silent. Had her lover retreated to his sanctuary now that he’d had her?

  Her answer came with the glug of the coffee maker. She wasn’t far behind him, and as she pulled two cups from the cupboard she heard the creak of his weight coming down the stairs from his bedroom.

  Apparently oblivious to her, he paused at the bottom of the stairs with his index finger pressed across an eyelid. He had put on a T-shirt and plaid pajama pants.

  A queer feeling struck her as the thought that he might have been crying passed through her mind like a cold wind, but he lifted his head and squinted. Only one eye was teary and blinking.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, moving to the refrigerator in search of milk.

  He shook his head and shambled forward. ‘Dry.’

  ‘You sleep with it open.’

  He didn’t look at her as he moved into the kitchen with her. She’d embarrassed him, she could see, and though she found it endearing she wished she hadn’t said anything.

  ‘It’s been like this since the accident,’ he explained after a moment. ‘I have nerve damage. I wear a patch over it at night, but last night … it was low on my priorities.’

  ‘Accident.’ Is that how he referred to it?

  She let it drop, and poured milk into her cup. ‘How do you take your coffee?’

  ‘Cream and two sugars.’

  He climbed onto the stool next to her and folded his hands in front of him. He was quiet while she prepared his coffee, and when she passed him his cup he fidgeted with the handle.

  He was nervous.

  Grace should have been crippled with anxiety, yet she went through the motions of taking things from the fridge and cupboards and putting them in order on the counter.

  She put butter in the pan. ‘Eggs?’

  He didn’t answer, and she glanced up to see him looking slightly taken aback by the question. He pulled his cup closer. ‘Two. Fried, yolk broken.’

  ‘Toast?’

  Now he looked truly flustered. The beginnings of a scowl appeared and his cheeks went pink. ‘I don’t usually eat breakfast.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I also never had a kitchen like this, and I don’t care to eat in front of someone else.’ She broke four eggs onto the pan and stabbed the yolks, then dug into the bread bag. ‘Toast?’

  ‘Two.’

  She pursed her lips but lost the battle to keep from smiling. ‘It’s bothering you now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Having someone in your space. You look like you think I’m going to shank you any second now.’ His face turned blank, and she laughed it off. ‘You like what I do when I have a partner, but have you never watched me get one? I read people. I can tell with just a look whether a man is for me. I can tell if he wants to pull my hair while he fucks me, or if he’s simply wondering what I taste like. I can tell when he just wants to get his dick wet. I can tell when he’s lonely and wants more than I’m willing to give him.’

  She returned to the pan and loosened the eggs from the hot surface. ‘Up until now, I had nothing on you. Now it’s clear that you want me here, but you don’t want me disrupting your order.’

  ‘I like things the way I like them,’ he returned with a defensive snipe, ‘and this is my home. You’re here to work for me.’

  Her eyes narrowed and she looked straight at him. ‘Did you only watch me when I was with a man, or before you put me out of my job did you bother to see what sort of assistant you were getting?’

  He didn’t answer, and she turned her attention back to breakfast.

  ‘I got the job with Caroway because he paid attention to what I was doing when I worked for Chuck Ramsay. He saw that I took information and treated it like a piece of machinery. I took apart what was broken, I examined every piece, and I put it back together again for him. Yes, I type. Yes, I answer phones. Yes, I even get coffee, but anyone can do that. I have a degree in business and I’ve been working in the corporate world since graduation. Mont Carmel isn’t Bay Street, but that office upstairs is where I’m going to be Jacques Alain Taureau. I require my autonomy and I require confidence. You can be heavy-handed with me in bed, but if you try and push me around while I’m working, I’ll cut your balls off.’ The toast popped, and she put eggs on a plate and turned. ‘Cheese?’

  He grunted. He wore the expression of a naughty five-year-old whose nanny had just come in to set him straight about who was boss. She doubted anyone ever spoke to him like this. Before Jacques Taureau had been turned into a recluse, he had been a party boy with a fat wallet.

  He arranged her own breakfast, joined him at the island and took her first glorious sip of coffee. She closed her eyes and savoured it, at the same time tasting the footing she’d found with him that morning. She felt more in control, not of him but of herself.

  She opened her eyes in time to see him shovel a forkful of egg, cheese and bread into his mouth. He speared another before he had swallowed the first, and Grace raised her brows.

  ‘When was the last time someone cooked for you?’

  His mouth was too full to answer, so she dug into her own breakfast. Taureau, unsurprisingly, finished well ahead of her. He sat with the empty plate in front of him and sipped his coffee, his expression turning wary whenever she stared at him too long.

  Her bravado faltered as a spark of nervousness ran through her, but nonetheless she called him out. ‘You don’t like being stared at.’

  Without thinking, she reached for the scar on the side of his face.

  He jerked back out of his seat. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘I didn’t mean –’

  His expression changed from surprise to confusion, and then to red-hot anger. He grabbed the hand she still held up in front of her and pressed it to his groin. He was soft, but his grip on her was like iron. ‘If you want to touch me, touch me here. That’s what I brought you here for.’

  Before common sense could make it from her brain to her hand, she struck out. The crack of her palm connecting with his cheek seemed to shake the stone house around them, and the sting in her palm threaded along her arm like she’d stuck her fingers into a socket.

  Taureau reared back, but his grip on her didn’t break. With his free hand cupped over the mark on his face, he yanked her round, between the island and his solid body.

  Grace felt some of the same terror she’d felt the night before when she’d first noticed him in the dark. She wanted to push him, but worried he would push back.

  ‘Don’t touch me without asking. Don’t put your hands on me unless I tell you to,’ he said in a growl. ‘Don’t make me regret bringing you here.’

  ‘I wasn’t being –’

  She stopped talking when he released her
and turned his back.

  There was no point in explaining that she had meant no disrespect when she’d reached out. He didn’t look at her as he walked out of the house, and he didn’t look back as he crossed the lawn to his cottage.

  * * *

  A second cup of coffee had done little to warm Grace after the ice had formed in her blood, and it made her nerves worse. She dressed quickly in shorts and shirt, then went to his library. She plucked a book off of the shelf without even looking at the title and left the house.

  She wouldn’t stay inside for him to peer at her comings and goings on a screen. She suspected he had cameras aimed at the grassy corridor between the cottage and the house, but she preferred the outdoors to being a hamster in an aquarium.

  Grace found a seat on a stone bench and leaned back. She opened the book but instead of reading she replayed the explosive scene at breakfast.

  He shouldn’t have grabbed her like he did, but she shouldn’t have just presumed she could do what she did. After the previous night and after that morning, she’d forgotten that he was broken.

  No, she thought, you just wanted to pretend he wasn’t broken.

  It was true, she realised with a rush of guilt. Sleeping with Taureau hadn’t been mere cock-in-pussy or cock-in-mouth. It had been like the fulfilment of a prophecy that began when she first answered his call in the boardroom. Now that she’d had his hot skin beneath her hands and pressing against her, it was real. She recognised the security he clung to in hiding away. With slick skin against skin, the rush of blood and the ecstasy of not being able to draw a breath at the moment the world evaporated in the pleasure, there was no hiding.

  Not from her.

  Not from him.

  She closed the book and tucked it under her thigh, and wished for a cigarette as she looked out on the lawn.

  It had been a long time since she’d had an actual relationship. She didn’t miss it. She didn’t miss the irritation that went along with reading signals in the early stages. She didn’t miss the inevitable bullshit she had never been able to put up with. She didn’t want a relationship.

  Then what did she want with Taureau? To be his toy, like she was some ingénue in a dirty book? To be his girlfriend? His wife? No, she didn’t want any of those things.

  His woman.

  She liked the sound of that. His woman. It suited the dynamic she already had with him. It had the possessive quality she revelled in, and yet it suggested something fierce and meaningful and singular.

  His woman. Not one of his women, but his woman: the one he craved when he woke up in the morning, the one he could hold down to do what he wanted, and the one upon whose lap he wanted to rest his head when his world crushed down on him.

  But what she wanted and what she would get weren’t necessarily in sync. This was a man who enjoyed watching her fucking other men. She could live with that, but only as a compliment to the fiery thing that had manifested between them the night before and this morning. This was a man who didn’t trust people. This was a man who pushed people away.

  She left the book on the bench and rose to her feet, then stared long and hard at the guesthouse when he had hidden himself.

  Whatever she wanted, whatever she would get, she wouldn’t get it alone. She wouldn’t coax him again.

  No, she would go to him.

  She strode to the wooden door. With the bushy shrubs on either side stretching in all directions, she had the sense that this was a little like the gateway to another world. Her breathless feeling of trepidation was akin to what she had felt when she was very small and sat on the floor of the family rec room, book in hand, prepared to follow her hero or heroine into the wardrobe or the secret garden beyond.

  She touched the latch and the feeling changed as fear trumped her excitement. Now, oh, now she was about to discover the wives hanging by their hair in the cellar. For the first time, she worried there might be something she wasn’t meant to know. Perhaps he wasn’t merely broken but twisted beyond imagination. Perhaps the dark recesses of his mind weren’t a place one wanted to be. Perhaps his hungers were far more deviant than he had shown her.

  The ice in her blood returned, but now biting rather than numbing. It was fear that forced her thumb down to open the old door. It was fear that wrapped around her as she stepped inside.

  ‘Oh,’ she said once the interior was revealed to her. ‘Oh … my.’

  So much for Bluebeard’s dungeon. The guesthouse really was just a guesthouse, a long open space that was practically a miniature of The Convent House in its decor. A wisp of movement drew her attention to the kitchenette and she moved towards it. An electric kettle was still steaming on the butcher block next to an open box of green tea. There was a small room off to the side, and through the open door she saw the gym equipment that accounted for his current breadth.

  A creak from above drew her. She didn’t linger to explore but went directly to the loft staircase and climbed up. Taureau hadn’t locked the door, and she doubted that it had been an accident; his movement was no doubt an attempt to let her know where he was.

  He confirmed this, as she entered the space above, by turning away from his workstation to face her.

  She crossed her arms over her chest as she reached the top step. ‘So, I shouldn’t have just reached out like that. I don’t know why I did it, except I was so busy telling you how I expected to be treated that it didn’t occur to me that you might have some boundaries.’

  Taureau made a sound a little like a grunt and steepled his hands in front of his face. ‘Boundaries. That sounds so benign compared to an irrational fear of being touched.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it irrational,’ she said, and decided to let the subject go. If he wanted to open up to her, he would. She wasn’t going to put pressure on him about his past. Instead she gazed around the room.

  ‘You’re kind of a geek, Jacques.’

  The entire space was dedicated to Taureau’s electronics. Each side had a floating desk jutting out from the wall, and on top of each was a neat collection of equipment: multiple computers and monitors, winking boxes and panels. At the end farthest from the stairs was a loveseat placed in front of a large television hooked up to multiple game consoles, their controllers arranged on the dividing table like spiders dangling from webs.

  ‘Definitely a geek.’ She looked over his shoulder to the triptych of screens lit up by an artificial aurora borealis. ‘Were you watching me just now?’

  He moved enough to nudge the keyboard with his elbow. The clock disappeared and was replaced by three scenes from the property: her bedroom, the kitchen and the door just outside the guesthouse.

  ‘I suppose there’s no way to surprise you as long as I’m here, Mr Taureau,’ she said, and moved down the line of computers. She tapped each mouse as she came to it and revealed different locations under surveillance. She only recognised the Taureau-Werner building, but there were many others, like warehouses and offices and …

  She leaned down to peer at the screen before her now, a screen divided into four featuring the exterior of a house, front and back.

  ‘What is this?’

  He appeared next to her in a flash of movement and touched the side of the monitor. The screen went blank, and, though his mouth had a playfully sardonic twist to it, there was a hint of warning in his eyes.

  ‘I have a few side projects you’d best not be aware of.’ He remained close to her, moving closer by the second until he had pinned her against the edge of the desk. ‘Are you going to expect us to be together every second of the day?’

  ‘Do I really strike you as the needy kind?’ she answered, though she grew hot at his nearness. ‘I’m a little off balance because of your antics, but rest assured there’ll be no tantrums. I just don’t like leaving question marks in the air. I was in the wrong and you were in the wrong, but I think we can forgive each other and move along.’

  ‘Agreed,’ he murmured, his gaze on her mouth and his mind clearly deviating
from her apology. Then he glanced away. ‘This is where I watched you, except for the other night with Reeve. That was in the house.’

  ‘I know. I recognised the curtains in the living room.’ She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth as the pressure of his body through the layers of clothing created a delicious throb. She pushed back against him and grinned. ‘You’re not hard.’

  He grasped the desk on either side of her and boxed her in. ‘Make me hard.’

  Tempting, she thought, as he moved against her, but in the end she shook her head. ‘Not now. I want you to tell me about this place. Those, specifically.’

  He didn’t follow her gaze to the shelf above the opposite desk. He tilted his head and that near-grin widened a little. ‘What do you think they are?’

  ‘DVDs with names on them. Men and women. Your playthings?’ She pressed her hands against his hard chest and pushed him away. ‘Where are mine?’

  ‘The ones behind me are old. Yours are new and still on my hard drive.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘I already did. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, I remember.’ She moved down the desk and took the seat he had vacated. ‘I didn’t get to enjoy them at the time.’

  Taureau leaned back, pure sex on legs, with one leg crossed over the other and his big arms folded over his chest. ‘Hit ESC to get out of the surveillance camera. There’s a folder with your name on the F: drive.’

  Grace smirked and went for her fly. She loved having his entire attention on the dancing movement of her fingers as she freed the button and tugged down the zipper. She lifted her hips and shoved shorts and panties down. She parted her legs for him, and as he turned his attention to her wet slit she blossomed for him.

  ‘Amazing,’ he murmured, and brought his hand to his lips.

  ‘What is?’ The motion of his fingers tracing his bottom lip was so evocative, she almost forgot what had put her in this chair to begin it.

  ‘I had you so good just a few hours ago, and yet you’re so wet and swollen.’ His fingers stilled. ‘Are you going to touch yourself for me while you watch?’