He drew another card, and this time it was a diamond. He got to pick the next action, though I had an idea what it would be.
“Lie on your back. Hang your head over the table.”
I smiled to myself and did as he ordered, reversing my position and leaning back so that the base of my skull tipped over the edge of the tabletop. I spread my legs wide and planted my feet on the seats on either side.
Unbuckling his belt, he stepped up close. I suppressed a giggle as he pulled his erection free and tapped the massive head of it against my lips; I’d been right, I had known what he wanted. I opened up and took him in, undulating my tongue against the top of his shaft and relaxing my throat as the head of him passed my gag reflex.
He growled appreciatively, his hands bracketing my stretched neck. “Touch yourself while I’m fucking your throat.”
Well, when my Sir commands…
I had never tried any drug, any drink, any experience that made me feel the way sexual submission to Neil made me feel. Every sight, scent, taste, texture was like gasoline on my already burning body; the hard, cool tabletop against my back was a caress, the familiar smell of his skin a potent aphrodisiac. I wanted to please him, above all else, and I knew that in pleasing him, I would have pleasure, myself. So, even though the flesh between my legs ached and touching my clit was like brushing against an electrical current, I did as he ordered.
Slowly, he withdrew, and a flood of my saliva sputtered out around his cock. He groaned and pushed back in, and I half-gagged, half-moaned as I got closer and closer to the edge of another orgasm. I needed this one. I was miserably turned-on and still disappointed from having my release spoiled before. When I could breathe, I whimpered high-pitched mewls around his cock. The building shock of my anticipation locked my legs rigidly against the table.
“Oh no, Sophie. You won’t like this one.”
My heart dropped to my stomach. I sped my fingers, but he grabbed my wrists. It was his dumb luck that he got my hands away from my body just as I reached the peak, and though I humped frantically at the air, there was nothing—no extra little nudge—that could bring me over the edge. My muscles ached from straining up, straining against his hold, and a tear leaked from the corner of my eye. I tried to beg him, but my words didn’t make it past the thick column of his cock, and I sputtered and gagged.
He pulled out gently and brushed a tear from my cheek. “Where are we, Sophie?”
I sniffled and tried to ignore my aching clit. What he was doing to me was torture…and I loved every demented moment of it. There was no way in hell I was stopping. “We’re still green, Sir.”
He tucked himself away and drew another card. He looked at it, frowned, and flipped it over between his fingers to show me the image on the reverse.
“What does the joker do?” I asked, mesmerized by the ends of my hair brushing the tops of his bare feet.
“We never set a value on the joker,” he said with a note of dismay. “I suppose I’ll have to think of something.”
He gave me a hand to pull me up and held me for a moment while I regained my equilibrium. Then he scooped his arms beneath me and lifted me from the table, setting me on my feet in the aisle.
“Bend at the waist,” he ordered, and I did, gasping when his hand closed on my upper arm, just above my elbow. Bent far over with no way of balancing myself, I had to trust him not to let me fall face forward onto the floor.
The parting of his zipper’s metal teeth seemed incongruously loud in the low hum of recirculating air. It was always like this when I submitted to him. My senses heightened in strange, intoxicating ways.
The tip of him brushed over my opening and I moaned; for the first two years of our relationship, we had used condoms all but once—and the odds had not been in our favor. After I’d had the abortion, we’d been diligent about condoms, but since the high-dose chemotherapy Neil had undergone had most likely killed any chance of us ever conceiving again, we’d decided it would probably be safe just to rely on my newly installed IUD. Though we’d been going bareback for about a month—after my gyno had assured me that the IUD was way more idiot-proof than the pills I’d messed up—I was still reveling the newness of it. Before Neil, I’d never had condomless sex, and it was incredible to me how different it felt. Not necessarily better, just…different.
He pushed into me, all hot and hard and rough, and I gasped; he’s a big guy, and not gentle with me when we played like this. Though I was incredibly wet and my whole body trembled with need, my cunt opened reluctantly around him on that first deep thrust. He gripped my other arm as he withdrew, and the slow glide of his foreskin as it rolled with his motion made my eyes flutter closed. Then, without mercy, he rammed into me again, holding me captive at the point of the greatest pain, and my tortured nerve endings sang out in pure joy. A sob of mingled agony and pleasure tore from my throat. There was nowhere to move, no option but to let him fuck me as he held me immobile.
He released one of my arms, but when I reached back to touch him, he slapped my hand. “If you want to touch anyone, touch yourself.” His fingers sank into my hair, and he jerked my head back, adding a growled, “slut,” to the end of his sentence.
That forbidden word did something to me every time he used it. My pussy contracted along his length as he pounded me, every hard thrust bringing a louder and louder exclamation from me, until he had to let go of my hair to clamp his hand over my mouth.
“Do you like this cock, Sophie?” he asked, and I mumbled my affirmative against his palm as he stilled inside me. “Then I suggest you keep it down, or I’ll take it away. Do you understand?”
I nodded, my eyes squeezing shut. The last thing I wanted was to be punished in that way. Once he was inside me, I lost all sense of reason. I used to really push it with him—I’d thought that when he threatened to stop fucking me, he would eventually have to give in—until he’d stopped during one of our play sessions to teach me a lesson about being a bratty sub. And despite the superb emotional and physical aftercare he’d given me, he hadn’t fucked me again that night. So I knew he was talking serious business.
After our first year together, Neil had gotten more confident of my ability to know my own limits. He took me at my word—or, lack of safeword—that I was okay, and I was discovering that he had a little bit of a sadist in him. While he’d always been slightly amused by the way I got off on pain, nowadays he seemed to get off more on causing it. Like there had been some part of him he’d held back from me until he knew I not only could take it, but that I truly wanted it.
Oh man. I wanted it.
He slammed too deep, and I bit my lips to hold back my cry of pain. He did it again, and again, and I broke, wailing, unable to control my response as the pressure inside me burst. My pussy clenched and gushed, wetness pouring down my thighs. Neil’s hand still clamped over my mouth. His fingers dug into my arm so hard I was sure they would leave a mark, but I couldn’t hold myself up at the moment, anyway, and I needed him to keep me upright. He buried himself in me with a feral growl, his cock jerking in my sopping cunt.
“Fuck,” I panted when he released my mouth. He slipped from me, and I staggered forward, wobbling on my feet. “Okay, I just had a thought.”
“What?” He slumped into one of the seats, his eyes squeezed shut as he struggled to catch his breath.
“We can’t exactly go roll into your brother’s house for family Christmas smelling like sex, can we?”
He looked up at me, then down at his jeans, which were liberally smeared with my gushing orgasm. Then he laughed, reached up, and pulled me into his lap.
CHAPTER FOUR
We cleaned ourselves up as well as one can in an airplane bathroom and settled in for the rest of the long flight. After we ate a quick dinner—Neil surprised me with a vegan version of the ubiquitous Upper Peninsula pasties—the flight attendant assembled the berth so I could nap. Neil stayed up, claiming he intended to read, but I knew he would be working. Even going throu
gh chemotherapy, the man hadn’t been able to keep himself away from his job, and now that he was planning to go back to work, he seemed determined to sneak in the odd five hours here or there working from home. The most adorable part of this delusion that his companies couldn’t run without him was the fact that he thought he was hiding it from me.
I slept longer than I’d expected, something I found myself doing more and more after intense sex. Though Neil always took care of me after we played hard, I felt less of an obligation to be “on” the way I had earlier in our relationship. My need to sack-out post-sex worked for Neil, as he found he needed some alone time to decompress afterwards, too. He woke me for our landing, and I buckled in and snuggled up beside him in the forward compartment.
Reykjavik was absolutely nothing like I’d expected. I’d been picturing something like Paris, with old stone buildings standing majestically side-by-side with newer architecture. Instead, the plane windows had revealed a milk carton town from a second-grader’s school project. The bright colors of the houses stood in contrast to the blank white canvas of snow. The place reminded me more of my small UP town than a major city, no matter their disparate sizes. I fell immediately in love.
After we landed, a customs official boarded the jet to ask us questions and stamp our passports. We deplaned and I got my first breath of the cold air.
“Everything smells like the sea,” I said, still all dreamy and swoony from our mid-air activities. “What time is it?”
Neil checked his watch and did a quick mental calculation. With businesses that spanned continents, he had to be sharp about time zones, but that was a magic that completely eluded me. “Three-sixteen in the morning.”
“And what time were we supposed to get here?”
“Two o’clock in the afternoon.” He brightened up. “You’ll get to the see house first!”
Neil’s home in Reykjavik was a hip-looking three-story building of gray concrete and glass. The roof slanted like the top of a parallelogram, and plate windows of uniform size and shape dotted the exterior in a seemingly random pattern. The house had already been “opened,” a phrase I was getting used to; before we arrived at any of his residences, Neil’s people would give the house a good cleaning and airing out, run the taps, and stock the kitchen and other supplies. When we stepped through the front door, a gleaming black vase crowded with bright orange poppies greeted us on the glass and steel table in the entryway.
That was another thing I’d noticed about Neil in the past year. Everywhere we went, there were fresh flowers. At first, I’d assumed it was a holdover from Elizabeth, but I was starting to suspect otherwise.
Especially when he said, “Ooh, poppies!” in the same way some people would say, “Ooh, birthday cake!”
“This place is spectacular,” I said in a reverent hush as I looked up and up, all the way to the ceiling of the third story. In front of us, to my right, stood a freestanding staircase with a glass panel half-wall topped with a brushed steel railing. Open-backed concrete steps rose in a precise line to the second story; another set reached from the left of the second floor to the third, and both of the upper floors were open lofts with glass partitions. From the foyer, I could see a small grouping of a rust-colored couch and two matching armchairs on the second level.
“Thank you. I quite like it,” he agreed with me. “Let me take your bag upstairs.”
“By yourself?” I scoffed. “Hell no, I need to see what this place looks like.”
“Don’t become too attached,” he warned as we made our way up the truly freaky and vertigo-inducing staircase. “I don’t spend much time here. I’ve almost sold it a dozen times.”
“Don’t you dare!” My eyes boggled as the living room at the top of the stairs was revealed. A huge, sinfully plush white rug covered the dark polished concrete. The rust-colored sofa and chairs surrounded a low glass coffee table. The flat-screen television on the wall was easily over seventy inches, but I couldn’t imagine anyone actually watching it when a wall of two-story plate glass displayed a truly dazzling view of the bay and the snowcapped mountains beyond. A sliver of the city stretched off the right, and a blanket of white turned every streetlamp, taillight, and illuminated sign into a hazy sort of fairy glow.
He was right. The light was different here.
A short hall led off past the second staircase, the walls painted a lovely deep reddish orange.
“Down there are a bathroom and some guest bedrooms. I hardly ever use them now that Emma doesn’t stay with me as often,” Neil said as we started up the next flight. “I’ve thought of turning them into a fitness room. Running outdoors here can be quite brisk in the winter.”
“And you’re probably ten times more likely to bust your ass here, too.” Though I didn’t notice a huge difference in temperature between Calumet and Reykjavik, the cold was different seemed predatory and hostile because it affected the pavement and sidewalks differently than I was used to. I’d nearly slipped a dozen times just walking from the car to the front door.
“Why not turn it into a kinky sex room?” I suggested, and he laughed.
“Do we need a kinky sex room? I thought we made the most of our environs just a few hours ago.” He reached for a switch and flipped it on, and the upper floor flooded with light.
The bedroom was on a wide bridge of the same polished concrete as the floors below. The glass partition railings gave an unobstructed view of the water and mountains on one side and on the other, tall windows at the top of the open foyer displayed more dazzling city lights. The enormous bed had no head or footboards, and was made up with crisp white sheets and a black duvet. Two sleek, black nightstands stood beside it. A super modern, free-standing concrete fireplace and chimney rose in a tall rectangle to intersect with the sloped ceiling, and skylights on either side of the loft would light the entire house during the day.
It was absolutely beautiful.
“Oh, baby. I am begging you to never sell this place,” I said, wheeling my suitcase to rest against the wall. I unzipped my blue parka and shrugged out of it, then walked around the loft, pulling down my sweater and straightening my hair. The place wasn’t homey, by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t imagine living here full time; it would feel like living in an art museum. It was like a little oasis: we were away from our jobs, away from friends and family—not that we didn’t love our friends and family—and truly alone together, out of our usual element. I wished we had more time to spend together in it.
Neil was visibly taken aback. I usually never expressed an opinion on what he should do with his money or properties. At least, if it didn’t concern me. He wanted to retire at his country estate in England, for example, and while I thought it reminded me a little too much of a horror movie version of Downton Abbey, I wasn’t about to ask him to revise his plans. I’d just asked that he close the house to tourists when that time came, and warned that if ever an antique doll turned its head to look at me, I would burn the entire place to the ground.
But I didn’t usually weigh in on this stuff. As much as I wanted to protest that I wanted to stand on my own two feet and be independent and a full partner in our relationship, where money was concerned I was kind of along for the ride, because my income didn’t match our lifestyle. I still had a twinge of guilt every time I used his money to go shopping, or when he bought me an occasional present. I wasn’t going to say, “Hey, I know you pay for most of my clothes, my food, the roof over my head, and you take me on trips all over the world, but let me tell you how to make major financial decisions.”
This time, though, I totally was, and it had come as a shock to him. Not an entirely unwelcome one, I saw from his hesitant smile. “You really like it that much?”
“I do. This place could be our little escape. We could fly out here on weekends or something.” The thought of getting away from New York—or wherever we ended up living—for the sole purpose of being alone together—made my heart flutter. “You’re always saying that
your money makes our lives more flexible.”
“I’m strangely touched by the fact that you’re asking me to keep a very expensive home just because you think it’s pretty,” he teased.
“Don’t pull that misogynist sugar daddy shit on me,” I warned him with a laugh. “Just admit it, you’re thrilled that I’m telling you what to do, for a change.”
It was late. Neil started the gas fireplace and I headed to the ultramodern master bath to take a quick shower. Three tiers of natural wood decking surrounded the sinfully deep, two-person rectangular Jacuzzi tub. A plant with tall green shoots grew happily from a silver oval urn on the floor. I lifted an eyebrow at the square toilet and bidet.
Seriously, they were square.
I would deal with that mind fuck at a later time, I decided, plopping my beauty bag down on the counter beside the square vessel sink. I fished out my shampoo and soap and put them in the shower—a polished concrete and glass room with iridescent black tiles—and fiddled with the taps. Then I went back to the sink to brush my teeth. When I rinsed, I smiled at myself, flashing my braces-straight whites. I was going to look so good on television.
If you have the job, I reminded myself, puncturing my vanity bubble. I was trying not to get my hopes up, but I really, really wanted the gig with Wake Up! America. I knew it was an extreme long-shot; I’d only gotten the interview because of strings that India Vaughn had pulled with her beauty journalism clout. A producer on Wake Up! America had once worked as an intern under India, and would do anything for her, including granting an audition for a job I would have normally had no chance in hell of getting.
But still, I wanted to hope. Believing something would happen was supposed to make it happen, right? At least, that’s what The Secret had said. I tilted my head back and forth, imagining how poised I would be on camera. Then I snapped myself out of it and got into the shower.
* * * *
After a few hours in bed—I had to force myself to sleep after my epic pass-out on the plane—Neil and I got up and had a light breakfast. We’d made out a grocery list to cover our three-day stay in the country, and the people who’d opened the house had stocked the fridge and cupboards.
The Bride (The Boss) Page 5
