The Companion Contract
Page 29
“Marriage. A close marriage. My first wife and I...we grew apart. I traveled. She stayed. We became different people. I want us to grow together, not apart.”
“You won’t get sick of my jokes?”
“I love your jokes. Your jokes are very much in your favor. But Amy, I’ll be legally blind by the time I die. That’s more important for you to consider. I—”
“Yes!” I clapped my hand over my mouth, rested my elbows on my knees. “Oh shit, I’m supposed to wait until you officially ask,” I said in a muffled voice, through my hands.
He laughed and rested his forehead against mine, our bodies forming a protective triangle. “There’s no script. Or we’ll write it together, perhaps. Would you like an emerald for Colombia on your ring, or a pearl for your islands? Should I ask your mother for your hand?”
“I don’t know!” I beat my fists lightly against his shoulders. The vibration of the airplane was doing strange things to my body, resonating in my blood.
Even though the flight was smooth, what started as a kiss soon turned into a collision. Our triangle collapsed. His weight bore me down in the small space, crushing me in all the right ways. I writhed upward against him, moaned into his mouth.
“Shh.”
“Oh God, I want you now. Can’t we—”
“Wait.”
He pressed my chest down with one hand, paused, and rose up to look cautiously over the wall. “It’s still dark. They’re resting.”
The vibration, the engine hum, folded in on itself, becoming rich as a song. Not just a song, a symphony for our ears only, except it wouldn’t be dark for much longer, and the music urged me to seize advantage of time. Now. Now.
Of all the arts, music is the most tied to time, Emanuel had told me during one of our long, sweet nights in the mansion. It unfolds in time, lives in time, cannot be frozen in time.
He moved fast, jerked my panties down from around my hips, and pressed them into my mouth.
I bit down.
“Shh,” he reminded me again, a crooked grin across his face, looking every bit as wicked as Miles.
No. More. He was always my more.
I nodded feverishly, my teeth grinding against my cotton gag, and tried to grind up against his thigh as well. The cabin air was so cool and dry that any heat felt divine in contrast, whether radiating from his body or the friction of my restless movements or the maddening music-driven fire in my blood.
He didn’t let me rise. He pressed me down effortlessly, and then he spread my legs and tied my thighs to the swiveling armrests. I couldn’t fucking believe he was doing this, but then, he was good at improvising. The belts worked nicely. The one around my right thigh was a silky-strong seatbelt while the one around my left was his own leather, biting into my flesh much harder.
Good. Good. I dared the tiniest muffled whimper, so quiet that the frantic scrabbling sound of my sheet-clawing fingernails drowned it right out.
I didn’t care what he wanted anymore. Not because I didn’t love him, but because my own desire was too overwhelming. I squeezed my eyes closed and quivered and clenched every muscle I could, my spread pussy flooding with a wetness that was also divinely warm.
He buried his face between my legs.
I fought against the bonds. Fought not to scream. I loved fighting because fighting always made the pleasure cleaner for me, clean and fresh and pure. The glide of his tongue was velvet soft, up and down, pushing-licking me open.
Love my pussy.
Fuck my clit.
Make me come.
I jerked upward against his hungry lips, every part of me straining into the air except my heels and shoulders. And God, he sucked at me so fiercely...
So close.
Almost time.
I opened my eyes and saw the sun rise in its naked glory, miles above the Pacific, saw the violet sky exploding into daylight.
Now.
I came alive.
* * *
The attendant served us breakfast and politely informed us of the local time in Manila. Emanuel talked with her about music for a little bit, music in general, because she sang in a choir. She didn’t seem angry at us. We’d been quiet, and Emanuel had gotten back to his seat very quickly.
My family was waiting for us. I’d arrive at Emanuel’s side and fall into their arms. We’d have time, on the customs line, to decide whether to introduce him as my fiancé.
I pressed my forehead against the window and drank up the sight of the land. There were rice paddies like a matrix of emeralds, shantytowns, skyscrapers, wharves, spiraling fractal patterns of streets, little crawling ant-cars and beetle-buses. I came close to imagining myself as a conquering queen, a celestial being descending from the sky.
I halted my thoughts.
I wasn’t a beggar or a queen. I had room in my heart to love everyone who stayed behind.
I was only myself.
And that was enough.
* * * * *
About the Author
Solace Ames is a Japanese-American woman with roots in the southeast U.S., although her heart lives somewhere along the Pacific coast of Mexico. She’s worked in restaurants, strip clubs, academia and the corporate world and studied everything from the philosophy of science to queer theory to medieval Spanish literature. Rejecting neat categories, her writing sprawls across genres and genders and swings from high art to low art, marching with the erotic avant-garde, tongue sometimes in cheek and at other times…well. Along with writing, education and political activism are her passions. Family and community service take up most of her time, but she loves to keep learning.
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ISBN-13: 9781426899522
The Companion Contract
Copyright © 2015 by Hannah Hawkins
Edited by Deborah Nemeth
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, n
ow known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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