Submit and Surrender

by Chloe Cox

“I’m ok,” she said. “I am, really. This was…this was perfect, I meant it. I feel kind of amazing. You may have killed a whole bunch of brain cells, but they were all the bad kind, so I think it’s a win.”

  “Is that how that works?” Ford said, and snaked his hand up her stomach to play with her breasts. Adra sucked in her breath but couldn’t fight a smile. “I’m going to have to kill a whole lot more.”

  “We’re outside a scene,” she said in mock disapproval.

  “We are well into cuddle time,” Ford said, gently rolling a nipple between his fingers. “And you are mine, anyway. I’m gonna do this whenever I want.”

  God, that sounded good. How could she fight that?

  She bit her lip.

  “You keep doing that, we’re going to be in a scene again pretty quickly,” Ford said.

  “Oh my God, you’re going to kill me.”

  “We’ll die happy, though.”

  “Hush,” Adra said.

  He smiled at her.

  And then they sat like that, together, Ford holding Adra, the two of them wrapped in a blanket. Together. And it was…it was comfortable. It was peaceful. It was nice.

  No, it was beyond nice. It was—

  “I have to call it,” Ford said softly.

  “Hmm?” Adra said.

  “The cuddle clock.”

  Had it been ten minutes since he’d first asked her if she was ok? Really? It felt like…it felt like nothing.

  Then Adra remembered what he’d said. “The cuddle clock?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Of course I’m making fun of you.” Ford smiled.

  Then he kissed her on the cheek and lifted her up, gently setting her on her feet.

  Adra got to keep the blanket. Which meant that Ford didn’t.

  She let her eyes wander.

  Jesus Christ.

  “Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping,” he said, and took her by the hand.

  Adra didn’t take her eyes off his perfect ass even once. She kind of just…couldn’t believe it. That he was real. He was one of those mythical people who actually looked better naked. Better than “better,” even—he was perfect. He was her ideal.

  Adra shook her head. That was not a helpful thought.

  “Here you are,” he said, opening a door to a large bedroom that was, objectively, lovely. Soft lighting, white on white high-thread count sheets and a comforter that looked like an actual cloud, a sitting area with those plush chairs that made you want to take a nap. And a bathroom. A beautiful en suite bathroom with a standing tiled shower and an oversized hot tub.

  “This is your guest room?” she said.

  “Get used to it,” he said. “Hey, did you actually remember to pack any comfortable clothes?”

  Adra tore her gaze away from the bathroom and was confronted with Ford’s nudity again. She lost her train of thought.

  “Eyes up here,” Ford said.

  “What? Um, no, now that you mention it,” Adra said. “I was just kind of…”

  “I’ll put something out for you,” he said, smiling down at her while she made every effort to make eye contact. “I thought we could do a movie.”

  “Nothing sappy,” she said, perhaps a little bit too quickly.

  “Really? You think I’m gonna pick out a sappy movie? Me?”

  “I’ve seen your DVD collection, you bleeding heart.”

  “You know I’m gonna remember that, right?”

  Adra smirked. “I was hoping.”

  “Get your ass in that shower before I regain my strength,” Ford said, and whisked away the blanket. Adra ran into the bathroom laughing.

  And when she got out, the first thing she saw was a pair of Ford’s sweatpants and one of his t-shirts, both of which she would be swimming in—and she didn’t care. They smelled like him, and they were the most comfortable things she’d ever worn. And when she wandered back to the TV room, she found that Ford had fixed them some food and had the movie all set up.

  “Here,” he said, handing her a bowl of stir-fry. “You like spicy beef, right?”

  “When did you learn to cook?”

  “I didn’t. I learned to dial.”

  “Well, good job dialing,” she said. It smelled amazing, and Adra realized she was starving. She took her bowl and a fork and plopped down on the world’s most comfortable couch, ready to relax.

  “So what are we watching?” she asked.

  In response, Ford sat down on the other side of the couch and picked up the remote.

  It was Clueless.

  Adra stared at him. “You own Clueless?” she said.

  Ford looked at her haughtily. “It’s an American classic,” he said. Then he smiled. “Someone told me that.”

  Yeah, Adra had.

  The thing was, Ford had never seen it before she’d made him go. And she really had gone through his DVD collection back when they used to hang out together all the time. Ford definitely hadn’t owned Clueless before they’d had their…little mistake, and stopped being friends for far too long.

  She was still staring at him.

  “You want something else?” Ford asked, frowning. “It’s this or Die Hard.”

  “No, this is fine,” she said, blinking back the world’s stupidest tears. “This is great. It’s perfect.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Ok, then,” Ford said, and leaned back in his corner of the couch, his feet up on an ottoman.

  Adra suddenly had no idea what to do with herself. It was obviously very important to observe the rules of the cuddle clock for mental health and general sanity reasons, but she found that she was almost terminally conscious of the physical distance between them. She wasn’t watching the movie; she knew it by heart anyway. She was watching Ford out of the corner of her eye.

  It was torture.

  It was worse than not being allowed to come.

  Why couldn’t she think about anything else but how far away his leg was from hers?

  She must have been sitting up ramrod straight, the tension obvious in every line, because when Ford looked over at her he kind of laughed, reached over, and pulled her into the crook of his arm.

  “Friends are comfortable with each other,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. “You watch movies with Roman like this?”

  “I’d watch movies with Lola like this,” Ford said.

  “And then you’d be dead,” Adra said.

  “I didn’t say it would be a long-term plan. Are you gonna relax?”

  Adra sighed, heard it turn into laughter, and shifted down until her head was in his lap.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  She lay like that through one and a half movies, with Ford’s hand in her hair, alternating between a kind of nervous, aroused tension and utter contentment, until finally, finally, she fell into what must have been the least restful sleep ever.

  Only when she woke up she was in that beautiful bed, and it was morning. And she was alone.

  She felt enormous relief paired with a vague kind of grief. She didn’t know what to call that weirdo feeling, but felt certain that there must be a word for it.

  Staying with Ford was going to be interesting, to say the least.

  chapter 13

  Ford allowed himself a smile as he walked through the Volare compound on his way to Adra’s office. He’d left her a surprise there, and he wanted to be there to see her reaction. It had been a good couple of weeks for both of them.

  Well, not entirely. The tabloid fascination with Adra and Derrick hadn’t let up, fueled by Adra’s apparent disappearance and Derrick’s refusal to talk to the press. That part sucked, in theory. In reality? It didn’t seem to bother Adra too much. Or maybe she just didn’t have time to think too much about it.

  Possibly because Ford was doing his best to make sure she didn’t have the time to think much about anything.

  They’
d managed to keep their arrangement a secret, too, though Lord knew how. The sex was fucking insane. Each and every time Ford thought they couldn’t get higher, couldn’t get any closer, and then they did. It was a miracle it wasn’t stamped on their faces every morning.

  Nights were another matter.

  Ford was being careful. So, so careful. He was so attuned to Adra that reading her was easy for him, and he knew when to back off. He could feel her boundaries. And one of them came up every night.

  She needed her own bed. Ford didn’t push it. He didn’t like it, but he understood it, and he didn’t push it. She would come around. She hadn’t even tried to find another accommodation; she didn’t want to go anywhere.

  And Ford was damn grateful for that.

  Because he’d been around long enough to know when he was falling in love. Whether that was a good idea or the stupidest thing he’d ever done was another question entirely. They both kept their distance, Ford because he was being careful with Adra, Adra because she was scared. They danced around the biggest facts of their lives, of their pasts, almost as if their pasts—and the scars that came with them—were the final frontier. After that, what the hell was left to keep them apart?

  Ford wasn’t even convinced it mattered now, at least not to him. The time he spent with Adra was so special that it was like all that other crap, the stuff he’d carried with him for years, it just ceased to exist. Boom. Gone. Like the past was some long forgotten country that he’d finally gotten to leave.

  He was smart enough to know that it was crazy, in a way. But he’d be damned if he questioned it too long. And he fervently hoped that it would be his privilege to give her the same gift, if she’d let him.

  If she’d talk to him.

  Because there was something still getting to her. He knew. He could see it eating away at her.

  But he wouldn’t push. He cared too damn much to push. Adra would come to him when she was ready.

  If that woman only knew how much effort that took…

  Well, she was about to find out, in a way. Ford knew she was stressed, even if she wasn’t talking to him about what was upsetting her, and that she needed a release. And she was about to get it.

  Time to see if she’d found the present he left on her desk.

  Ford smiled again.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Fucking Charlie.

  Adra could swear she had actually felt the stress building over the past few weeks. Like she was directly tied to the pressure cooker that was Charlie Davis’s head and she knew, just knew, when he was about to blow. It had set her on edge lately—it was like when animals knew there was an earthquake coming and the dog just started whining and hiding under the kitchen table. Only Adra had tried to talk herself out of it, because, let’s be honest, that was the sane thing to do. It was so irrational, there was no way, she was just making it up.

  And then Charlie called her.

  “I’m just calling you so you don’t freak out,” Charlie said. “But I’m going away for a few days, up to Big Sur. Just taking a break. Nicole knows, and her parents are coming down to help out with the kids, so it’s not…I’m not doing a runner. Ok?”

  What could she say?

  “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for checking in, and planning, and…thanks for doing it the right way.”

  “You were right, little sister. Safety valve, you know?”

  Adra smiled into the phone and told him to have fun, but really, what she was thinking in the back of her head was this: The itch doesn’t go away. He still has the itch. Having Nicole’s parents come down to help with the kids wasn’t a long-term solution, either.

  It shouldn’t have been such a big deal. A long weekend away was not abnormal or anything. And it wouldn’t have gotten to her if Charlie didn’t have that habit of just disappearing, sometimes, and if it didn’t seem like he always had one foot out the door, but what was she going to do? It wasn’t even really her right to get upset about it.

  It just made her sad. She wanted at least one of them to manage to have a family.

  It really just made her sad, was all.

  And she had collapsed into her comfy, oversized chair, feeling sorry for herself and her brother, when she saw the box.

  A nice little black box with a red ribbon and a card.

  And then she couldn’t help but smile just a little bit.

  Slowly she pulled on the ribbon, watching the red curls unfurl, and then she gently lifted the lid of the box. She was never about reading cards first; the anticipation always killed her, and she wasn’t able to really appreciate sentimental words until she’d opened the present itself.

  Which, apparently, Ford knew.

  Inside was a silver bullet. A vibrating bullet. Larger than normal, with a cord—something that attached to underwear?

  She’d never seen this particular one before, but she was a lady of the world. She knew the basic idea. And it made her…

  It made her a lot of things.

  She sighed, and rubbed her legs together, unconsciously trying to get at some of that want. Ford made her crazy. Every day, every night, he made her absolutely crazy. He was the only thing in her life that was constantly good, even if sometimes the intensity of what went on between them frightened her, and even if she sometimes wished she could tell him about Charlie and Derrick and all her personal fears, the way she might have done if they hadn’t been sleeping together.

  Well, no, that couldn’t entirely be true. She’d had plenty of time when they hadn’t been sleeping together to tell him about all that stuff, and she hadn’t done it. And they weren’t sleeping together, technically. They were having sex; sleeping together didn’t have anything to do with it, Adra made sure of that. She had to. Maybe for the same reason she’d never confided those things to Ford: there had never been a time when she hadn’t wanted him, and confiding in him, showing those parts of herself? It would erase the last boundary. She’d be over the edge. The man would have all of her then, wouldn’t he?

  So here she was. Stuck “only” having the most amazing sex anyone had ever had, in the history of ever, with a man any woman would kill to have. The kind of man who would leave surprise sex toys for her with the most exquisite timing, just when she needed something to take her mind off things. The kind of man who could dominate the hell out of her and then go another ten rounds just as Adra thought she’d pass out, then make her dinner later.

  And the card?

  All it said was, “Keep your door unlocked.”

  Goddamn, was she grateful for that man.

  She didn’t have to wait long for him to arrive, either. In only a few minutes Ford strode in like he owned the place and closed the door behind him, while Adra was still sprawled across her chair in a mild daze, checking out her new toy.

  She looked up at him through her eyelashes and smiled.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Ford was silent. Watchful. He got that look on his face when he was doing his Dom thing, but also when he was studying, considering. It was part of what made him such a good Dom, and part of what made him so terrifying as a guy she couldn’t let herself fall in love with—he really saw her. He did it purposefully. He paid attention.

  It always made her feel so naked. And she was always afraid he’d see too far into her.

  This time he came around her desk and sat on the corner, bending down to take her ankles and lift her legs onto his lap. Gently, he stroked the delicate skin on her ankle—her ankle—with his thumb, and it sent small waves of pleasure rolling up her leg.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Damn it, how did he know?

  And he didn’t ask to know what was wrong, he demanded. It was Dom voice. It was the only context in which Adra felt ok being taken care of—a scene. Being dominated. It was actually being with Ford that had taught her that, because he was so good at it, and because he was so careful to curb his natural instincts to keep doing it outside of a scene since that wasn’t part of their arr
angement.

  Which, on its own, was amazing. She’d gone her whole adult life without knowing this fairly important fact about herself—that BDSM provided her with the only framework in which she could let herself be taken care of without having an anxiety attack—and Ford had figured it out and showed it to her in a manner of weeks.

  It would be infuriating if she didn’t enjoy it so much.

  But this wasn’t a scene. Not yet. This was still personal.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “It’s not nothing,” Ford said.

  “Ok, it’s not nothing,” Adra agreed. “But it’s not something I can do anything about, and thinking about it just makes me sad, so I don’t want to think about or talk about it if I can help it, I just…I want to think about something else.”

  Adra was afraid to look at him at first. She hadn’t even acknowledged that something was up with her until now; she’d just kind of let it go, let him treat her with kid gloves, because that’s what she’d needed to do. Saying it must change things somehow. Right?

  She looked up.

  Ford had that face, that concerned, intense face, those hard lines and those soft eyes. It was how he looked when he checked in in the middle of a scene. And now he leaned forward, outstretched his hand, and gently, so goddamn gently, cupped Adra’s face.

  He brushed her cheek with his thumb, leaned over, and kissed her forehead.

  Then, in that unmistakable Dom voice, he said, “I can arrange for you to not think at all.”

  Adra closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

  She felt his other hand slide between her ankles, still on his lap. Felt him lift one of her legs and place it on the other side of him, spreading her to him.

  Felt him take the silver bullet out of her hand.

  Adra shuddered as Ford’s hand lightly caressed the inside of her leg, his fingers dancing on her skin, spinning a trail of sensation that threatened to overwhelm her. The teasing—he knew it killed her. Like the anticipation of wondering what was in the box, it drove her insane. Only without Ford, she would never have the discipline to ride it out.

  “Eyes open,” Ford said.

  She obeyed.

  “Eyes on me,” he said.