Rules to Live By

by Lisa Henry

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Rules to Live By

  Copyright © 2015 by Heidi Belleau, Anah Crow, Dianne Fox, Lisa Henry, Cari Z, Anna Zabo

  Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  Editor: Sarah Frantz Lyons

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at marketing@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-251-6

  First edition

  February, 2015

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-252-3

  ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED:

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  Four intimate tales of power exchange, discipline, risks taken, and pleasures earned.

  A cage that means freedom.

  In Master Key by Anah Crow and Dianne Fox, Marquis offers Navin the key to the most intimate of locks, hoping it will help them to prioritize their relationship. And it does—until work and insecurities threaten to drive them apart again.

  A list of rules to live by.

  In Cari Z’s House Rules, jealousy leads Jonathan to break the rules his lover has established. He can’t decide which he enjoys more: his punishment, or the reward afterward. Good thing he gets both.

  A lesson in humility.

  In The Harder They Fall by Heidi Belleau and Lisa Henry, spoiled college boy Tad hires a prostitute, but “Daddy” couldn’t care less about what Tad wants. Instead, he’s going to give his spoiled little boy exactly what he deserves.

  A spool of rope and a desire to be bound.

  In CTRL Me by Anna Zabo, a night out between friends turns hot and tempting when Gabe deliberately pushes Tom’s submissive buttons. Then Tom discovers rope in Gabe’s glove box—and not the type for securing luggage.

  About Rules to Live By

  Master Key

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  House Rules

  The Harder They Fall

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  CTRL Me

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Dear Reader

  Also by...

  About the Authors

  More like this

  To our patient readers: we’ve missed you.

  “This isn’t a funeral.” Amrit elbowed Navin discreetly while passing him a glass of champagne. Navin was tempted to drain the glass all at once, but being drunk at release parties and press conferences was his brother’s thing. “Don’t tell me Mummy gave you a hard time about Marq. He’s a workaholic architect making six figures—what’s not to love?”

  “No fear of that. He didn’t make it here.” Navin couldn’t even get Marquis on the phone. Across the room, their older brother Dev, the family golden boy, caught sight of them. He shot them a sharp look and gestured for them to mingle. “He’s on a deadline. On a Friday. Again.”

  “For Chrissake,” Amrit muttered. “I warned you about that when I set you up with him. Keep him far away from Mummy and Dev until you have him better trained. They’ll eat you both alive if he can’t show up on time, even if he is working.” Amrit put a hand between Navin’s shoulder blades and shoved none too gently. “Look, there’s the client’s daughter. I think she likes you.”

  “I hate you right now,” Navin said sweetly, smiling over his shoulder at his brother.

  “Mummy said I had to stay away from her.” Amrit held up a hand helplessly as the client’s daughter closed in on them. With that, he was gone and Navin was alone on socializing duty. Bastard. Now he did finish off the champagne so he could trade the empty glass for two full ones and have something to say to the young lady in front of him.

  “Champagne? I’m Navin,” he added awkwardly as she frowned and made no secret of looking about for Amrit. “We, uh, met last week at lunch. I don’t know if you remember.”

  Fortunately for Navin, that was when Mummy caught up with them. “Navin, don’t just stand there. Both of you, enough talk.”

  Mummy herded them into the boardroom for the client’s unveiling of their new product—an app for business networking on smartphones—in front of the press. The daughter excused herself to do her filial duty by looking pretty next to her father.

  “Have you seen your brother?” Mummy slid her arm through Navin’s. No need to specify which brother. As always, Dev was already where he ought to be, at the front of the room with the client. As always, Amrit was absent when he was needed.

  Navin glanced at Mummy. It was almost like looking in a mirror, the same cinnamon-toned skin, straight black hair, and sharp nose. What he lacked was her carriage—she might as well have been queen instead of simply the CEO of their company. Her shimmering pink sari and pink diamond jewelry only heightened the effect.

  “I saw him just minutes ago. He stuck me with the daughter, said you’d banned him from speaking to her. You look lovely tonight.”

  “Don’t try to distract me.” She glared at him before she returned to frowning at doorways as though she could summon Amrit that way. “You didn’t see him leave? What is wrong with that boy? And don’t tell me he’s bored.”

  “Well, I won’t say it if you don’t want to hear it, but . . .” Amrit was always a step ahead of everyone else. Two steps. Amrit got in trouble because there was nothing else for him to do.

  “It’s time that stopped being an excuse.”

  “There he is.”

  Amrit popped up from behind a tech blogger and waved, then sprawled in the press section, gabbing merrily as the client got ready to speak. He looked decidedly worse for wear. How anyone could get stoned that fast was beyond Navin. It was hard not to think how much happier he’d be if he could bring himself to be more like Amrit. Being a disappointment wasn’t a problem if you didn’t care, from what Navin could tell.

  Mummy snapped her fingers. “Phone.”

  He handed it over. His pockets were overflowing with lipstick, compact, blotter paper, phone, and more. Mummy didn’t like to carry an
ything when she was entertaining, leaving him to play the role of ambulatory handbag in addition to wrangling Amrit.

  “Something wrong?” He kept his tone light, though he caught Dev’s eye from across the room and shared a worried look—Mummy contacting someone during an event was usually reserved for server meltdowns. “I can go check on . . .”

  “Dida better have her phone on,” Mummy said, tapping rapidly against the touch screen. “Or she’s going to be very surprised when your brother shows up to open our India offices.”

  “We don’t have . . .” Oh. Hell. They’d talked about expanding for years. If Amrit pulled it off, which he probably would, great. If he fell on his face, lesson learned—or it’d be learned if it were anyone but Amrit. “Mummy, Amrit just took on that new gaming app account, and—”

  “You’ll do it,” Mummy said briskly.

  “That’s really not . . . My work is . . .” He was good at testing code and managing resources. Amrit was the thinker, the planner.

  “Nonsense, Navin. It’s about time you had more responsibility.” The little chime of Mummy’s text message going through sounded like a prison door sliding shut.

  He needed to get out, to find Marquis and hear his voice. Marquis made him feel as though he was more than just Amrit’s keeper and Mummy’s accessory. But it would be rude to leave now, rude and it might remind Mummy that he’d mentioned—in passing—that Marquis might be here tonight.

  So he did the next best thing to actually fleeing. He simply let himself fade into the background.

  “You didn’t think?”

  Marquis jerked his head up at Silvia’s question. She hadn’t raised her voice, but she didn’t need to. Her tone of disappointment was more effective at getting people’s attention than the fire alarms. No one wanted to make Silvia angry or, worse, late on a deadline. “At what point did thinking become optional?”

  This wasn’t even Marquis’s project and he was cold to the bone. The project lead looked nauseous, the rest of the team was almost huddled behind him. Marquis already had his phone out, texting a friend at city hall as fast as he could move his thumbs.

  “It’s not a major alteration, I’m sure that—”

  Big mistake. Marquis had been in this job long enough to know—

  “There are no minor details.” Silvia’s words cut like diamonds scraping glass. “Get out. I’ll fix this.”

  Marquis’s phone hummed in his hands. This was going to cost him his symphony tickets for the rest of the year, but it wasn’t as though he got to use most of them anyway. “I can run to city hall,” he offered. “Get the original documents for the whole block so we can compare the foundations.”

  “This isn’t your project, Marq.” Silvia turned to look at him and, behind her, the development team scattered. Marquis wasn’t sure how many of them would have jobs by the morning. “And it’ll be well after hours by the time you get there anyway.”

  “I know a guy.” Marquis waggled his phone at her as he got up to pull his jacket on. “He’ll let me in.”

  “You know a guy.” Silvia winked at him. “I guess we’re all lucky you’re cute. I’ll call the contractor, you get the originals, we’ll make sure ground can actually be broken on this project tomorrow.”

  “Not ‘know him’ like that,” Marquis protested. He didn’t mind the teasing—it was nice to have an office where he could be out. That hadn’t been the case most of his life, most of the places he’d been: school or work and even home. He tried to balance the quiet blessing of being able to be out at the office by never really attracting attention in any other way except the good ones, like saving the day.

  “Get me some antacids on your way back,” Silvia ordered even as she started up the espresso maker. “And don’t dawdle. I need this to go through, Marquis.” Her voice followed him to the elevator. “I don’t want to look back on tonight as the night that lost me the Jefferson Medal.”

  Silvia was that good. She wasn’t even ten years older than Marquis and already her body of work was well-known. It wouldn’t surprise him if she won one of the field’s most prestigious awards. The last thing he wanted to do was let her down.

  It took Marquis hours of digging through a mess of files at city hall, then more hours digging through the mess of files back at the office, but finally he had what he needed. Crisis averted. Sometimes, the only times he felt good about himself were times like this. Hours of happiness with his focus narrowed to doing exactly what he needed to do and nothing more.

  “I think we’re good,” he said to the empty room, just to hear the words aloud.

  “Thanks for staying late to clean up this mess,” Silvia said. Marquis looked up from shutting down his computer to see her standing in the doorway. She’d stuck it out tonight too. It was what she did, why she was so good at her job. She never put anything else first.

  “No problem,” Marquis said. “I’m glad I could help.” It was true.

  It wasn’t until he got to his car and the clock on the dash lit up that he realized the time. Shit. When had it gotten so late? Navin had probably been home for hours already . . . No, not home. At the launch party. And Marquis was supposed to have met him there. Hours ago.

  Shit. Oh. Shit. Should he call? Or would that just make things worse? There was no fixing this, he didn’t have a time machine. Calling would only interrupt Navin if he was talking to someone, and that would be terrible.

  He threw the car into gear and hoped for good traffic on the way to Navin’s place. He always went to Navin’s. Navin was the one who was home on time. Marquis was too unreliable. And when he thought about it like that, he had no idea why Navin had stayed with him this long.

  If he didn’t stop fucking up, he was going to lose Navin. And he didn’t want to lose him—not today, not ever—so he had to get his shit together tonight, come up with something, some way to convince Navin that he was worth keeping around.

  The whole drive there, he racked his brain for some kind of solution. He had to come up with something, some way to make this up to Navin. Some way that didn’t feel like he was taking advantage of someone he cared for more than anything else going in his life. Anything else but work.

  Maybe the only thing to do now was to throw himself on Navin’s mercy entirely.

  He grabbed his bag and briefcase, locked the car, and headed for the door. Hitting the doorbell, he put on his most charming smile and hoped it didn’t come off as anxious as he felt.

  When Navin answered the door, he was looking sharp, if rumpled. Tie undone, white shirt open at the throat, tux jacket still on, black hair mussed as though he’d been running his hand through it. He was on the phone, speaking to someone in Hindi, maybe his mother. He stepped back and gestured for Marquis to come in.

  God, he was pretty. When Marquis was with him, actually there with him, he couldn’t imagine anything being more important. If only he could get his dick or his brain—any part of him at all—to remind him how amazing Navin was when Navin wasn’t there.

  I’m sorry, he mouthed, but Navin wasn’t looking at him. He was too busy on the phone.

  Marquis set his bag and briefcase on the floor by the front closet and went through to the living room, dropped onto the couch, and let his head fall into his hands. Shit.

  He rubbed his palms over his eyes again. He’d missed so many dates with Navin that, by all rights, he shouldn’t have a boyfriend anymore. He peered between his fingers at Navin, who was still on the phone. Maybe he didn’t.

  The front door thumped shut, and Navin came into the living room, only to go to his desk and check something on his computer. Marquis didn’t know a lot of Hindi, much less Gujarati as he thought he was hearing now, but he knew the patter of Navin saying good-bye to someone. One of his uncles, Ajay Masa, it sounded like.

  Navin tossed the phone down and snapped the computer shut.

  “Hey,” he said, as though Marquis weren’t in the doghouse. He seemed indifferent to Marquis’s lateness—his total failu
re to even make an appearance at the party—which was worse in its way than anger. Not that Navin had ever really got angry as long as Marquis had known him. “Did you eat? I’ll get you something. You want some tea?”

  “I had— Navin, wait.” Marquis surged to his feet, all his tiredness gone in the wake of Navin’s disinterest. He had to fix this. God, please, let him find a way to fix this.

  He followed Navin into the kitchen and took his jacket from him as he shed it. Anything to help. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to your event. Was it—” He couldn’t remember what it had been for. Christ, he was an asshole. He hung the jacket over the back of a chair. “How did it go?”

  “Client project launch. Amrit got stoned with some bloggers. Mummy blew a fuse. Now she’s sending him to India to open a new set of offices for us. I don’t think she even gave him pocket money. That’ll keep him busy, finding the funds.” Navin pulled out a covered catering platter and began to put together a meal of sorts for Marquis. “I’ll have to take on his projects. I’ll have to do his hiring. Me, Marquis. Hiring people. I don’t have people. Amrit has people.” As the quick, efficient motion of his hands stopped, so did his words, but Marquis didn’t know what to say to fill the silence. After a painfully long moment, with his back still to Marquis, Navin said, “When you don’t show up, I never know whether to assume work is going well or badly.”

  “It was—” He didn’t want to talk about work, not even enough to explain what had happened. Staring at the straight line of Navin’s spine, the curve of his bent head, Marquis could finally see how bad things had gotten: Navin had expected him to blow it. That was why he wasn’t mad. Marquis was as bad as Amrit. Talk about a low bar. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t even me. It was just . . . other people, you know? It won’t happen again. What can I do to make it up to you?”

  “Don’t.” Navin held up a hand. “I’m not saying that to be difficult. I just don’t want to get into this cycle. I know you feel terrible, you always do. But it’s not enough to make you remember the next time. It’s better to just deal with what’s here than for me to make you do penance. The consequences are what they are.”