Sexy as Hell Box Set (78 page)

We’d replaced sin with satisfaction. By consenting to the act we’d given permission for it to be enjoyed, celebrated even, certainly used it as a tool to heal, to draw us closer, to finally rip a bandage from an old festering wound and set about cleaning it, treating it properly.

Oh, I knew very few people would look at the dirty, disgusting things we’d done as healing, but they were, to Zara, and I understood that. I understood it completely.

I pushed my hand through my hair; it was getting long, could do with a cut, and even in this golden lamplight I could make out a few more grey hairs at my temples.

Yes, I was still Victor Partridge, successful architect, son, friend, cousin and businessman. But I was also Victor Partridge, the lover of the fucked-up
Domme, Zara Watson, for now at least. It would have been easy at one point in my life to think that would never happen, but that was when I wasn’t being true to myself. That was when I was bothered what other people thought of me.

I only cared what Zara thought of me now.

The bathroom door clicked, and I turned.

Zara walked into the bedroom, her hair brushed in a sleek curtain and hanging down over her shoulders, her face a little shiny as though just washed, and she was wearing a tight black T-shirt and black knickers. Her knees were red, the left quite scratched too. I suspected mine would be the same when I could be bothered to look.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked, gesturing to a kettle on a tray and a selection of teabags and coffees. “Or something from the bar, maybe?”

“Something hot, I’m cold.
Coffee perhaps.”

“Coming right up.” Quickly
, I set about making her drink.

“Do you need to take your tablet?” she asked, shoving at the covers on the bed and then slipping beneath them.

“Oh, yes.” I paused and glanced at her. “Thanks.”

She shrugged. “Don’t want you keeling over on me again.”

I nodded and reached into my washbag, pulled out the pack of tablets and knocked one back with a mouthful of water from a bottle I’d been swigging from on the train.

After visiting the bathroom, washing my hands and
dirty, gritty knees, I made tea and set it in a china cup and saucer on the bedside table next to Zara. She was resting back on the cloud of pillows, her hair startlingly black against the white sheets, and her cheeks almost as pale as the linen.

She smiled up at me. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Not for the tea.”

“Oh.” I sat on the bed so I was level with her and reached for her hands. “For what then?” I needed to hear her say it, that I’d done okay, that it had worked. Instinct told me it had, but still, it had been extreme and certainly an unconventional way of dealing with trauma, but then again, there was nothing conventional about this woman of mine.

“For back there, in the shed.” She paused. “It was hard and so scarily the same at times.” She shook her head, looked down at our joined hands. “But you made it right, Victor. With you it was sexy. It was still dark and humiliating to a point, but you got rid of those emotions, those thoughts, just by being there, being you, taking me and bringing me back from somewhere I didn’t want to go but had to.”

I lifted her hands to my mouth, kissed her knuckles. “It was on the edge for me, to be honest.” I wanted to tell her that I’d hated seeing her acting like a dog, knowing they’d done that to her, too, but I didn’t. Zara would only blame herself for my experience, and I couldn’t have that, not if I was going to truly get to the bottom of all the things she kept locked up inside that box of memories of hers. “But honestly, I’m happy to help in anyway I can, especially if it makes you see that we’re so right for each other.”

In the shower
a few minutes later, I pondered what had happened since we’d been in the lean-to. Zara had smiled, if a little tightly, when I’d said I’d help in any way I could. I hadn’t let that bother me, hadn’t let insecurity seep in. If I had, it would have been the end of me and her for good right there. I’d have convinced myself that I couldn’t persuade her that we were meant to be, because, hell, it was easy to let her know best, to allow her to call the shots.

This time, however, I wasn’t prepared to do that. No, I knew she was the one for me and vice versa. It would just take a bit of time and patience—all right,
a lot
of patience—to get her to believe the same. I imagined, due to what had happened to her in the past, that accepting love from someone when you’d never been loved before—not in the true sense anyway—would be an incredibly difficult thing to do. Incredibly difficult to even contemplate.

Had she just accepted her lot in life? Told herself that she was one of those people who had to float through the years, lingering on the fringes of love without ever really experiencing it properly? That she didn’t deserve to love or be loved because of the way she acted, or for some misconceived idea people in her life before I’d come along had planted inside her head? And God knew what her mother had made her believe as Zara had been growing up. For all I knew, she could have had it ingrained in her that she wasn’t worthy. If that were the case, I had a big job on my hands. Oh, I knew I did anyway—how could I not; Zara was a complex ball of insecurity masked by mule-headed arrogance to cover up the hurts—but trying to get her to see herself as
I
saw her and believe the same when she looked inside…yes, a bit of a difficult task, that one.

A task I was prepared to see through until the end.

I rinsed off then stepped out of the shower to dry myself, wondering what lengths I would go to in order to fix my woman.

I’ll go anywhere, do anything.

Of course I would. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t, if I gave up at the first hurdle? I chuckled. The first hurdle? Bloody hell, we’d jumped over so many already. We had grazed knees and sprained ankles, tired bones and muscles, but completing the race was paramount in my mind, and I’d make sure we kept on running and hurdling until we broke through the finish line tape and raised the winner’s cup in victory.

I left the bathroom to find Zara dozing
and gently touched her shoulder to wake her. She opened her eyes and looked directly at me, and God, how I’d love it if I had the chance to wake her like this every day, that the first thing she saw as she roused from slumber was me. She smiled, a genuine, happy-to-see-me smile that had hope bursting inside me. We were on the right track, I was sure of it. Then she quickly erased that expression, replacing it with another, more guarded one. That of someone who had always had to disguise how she felt.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

She frowned, narrowing her eyes either in suspicion or because she didn’t like being told what to do. “Do what?”

She sat up, her action making my hand fall from her shoulder, and I stood there feeling a tad bereft, out of sorts for a second or two before I reined in those damn doubts of mine and shoved them to the back of my mind.

“Change your initial reaction,” I said. “Just be happy to see me and go with the feelings it brings. Don’t let the past interfere with the now.”

“That word…” she said on a sigh, getting out of bed and breezing past me towards the bathroom door. “I’ve always had a problem with it.”

It was my turn to frown, and I turned to face her. “What word?”

“Don’t.” She smiled tightly, a replica of the one she’d given me earlier. “It makes me want to do the exact opposite.”

“Ah.” I scrubbed my stubbled chin. That she had psychological issues I had no doubt, and even though I’d known they went deep, cutting and gouging every bit of her inside, I realised then that they went far deeper than I’d imagined. Fathoms deep.

“So, you might want to stop saying it, Victor.”

She schooled her features into a totally blank canvas so I had no chance of interpreting what she was thinking or feeling. Damn, she was good at that, but then I supposed she had to be.

“You don’t have to be like this with me,” I said, resisting the urge to go to her, to fold her in my arms so she melted and felt the love pouring out of me and into her. So she understood that with the right person in her life, everything would be all right.

“I know that.” She leant against the doorjamb, raised her arms and crossed them over her stomach. “I know that, but…”

“But what?” I felt cruel, pushing her to actually say things, but if she didn’t learn to tell me what she was feeling, we’d never get through this easily. And her defensive gesture there…that was something. Whether she realised it or not, her hugging herself told me more than she ever would with words.

“But it’s difficult.” She bit her lower lip. “You don’t understand.”

She shoved off the jamb and went into the bathroom.

“Oh, no,” I said, following her inside. “You…” I’d been about to say don’t or can’t and had to take a moment to think about how to rephrase. “It isn’t like that with me. You might think that just telling me I don’t understand will make me give up or go away, but I won’t. I’m here for the long haul, whether you want to accept that or not.”

She was busying herself sorting out the shower, looking for all the world as though I wasn’t even there.

“And you could do with accepting it, you know that, don’t you?” I went up behind her, pulled her back to rest on my chest, slipping my hands around her front to cross my arms over her belly much like she’d done to herself. I realised it was a gesture for myself, for my own peace of mind, that if at any time she felt defensive and had the need to hug herself, I would be there to do it for her instead. I wouldn’t be able to do it all the time, but if I could just do when I
was
there, maybe her burdens would be eased.

“I know.” She dropped her head back to rest it on my collarbone. “But what you’re asking, what you’re expecting…”

“All I’m asking is that you trust me—and you do that already, so what you need to do now is build on it. Let me help you, please? I really don’t want to do anything else except that. My business, my life, it can all fuck right off. All I want is to fix you, to have you love me, to be able to see you grow into the person you were always meant to be before other influences wrecked you. Do you see what they’ve done?” I hugged her tighter, brushed my lips over her hair. “Someone as stubborn as you, well, I’d have thought you wouldn’t want them winning.”

“What do you mean, winning? They’re losers, all of them. They didn’t get me to do what they wanted, not totally. I might have done as they’d asked, but I didn’t hang around to take more of their shit. I left home, left that bastard of a town, and never went back.”

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves before I plunged in with what could be some killer lines, ones that would cut deep. But she needed to hear them, and if I had to be mean in order to get her to see, then that’s what I’d do. Skirting around the issue, me walking on eggshells so I didn’t hurt her could work for the majority of time, but at this moment I felt she needed a short, sharp slap of the truth.

“But you did go back,” I said. “In a sense you never left.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

She stiffened, tried to break free, but I held her fast.

“You took them with you,” I said, closing my eyes to steel myself for a blast of anger from her. When she sagged a little, I went on. “You allowed them to still control you by carrying them around with you since the day you left. Yes, I’m well aware you put them to the back of your mind, but they were still there, still a part of you—and
you
allowed that.” I paused. “You’ve been allowing them to win all this time, even though you’d swear you haven’t.”

I waited for her reaction. Kissed her hair, held her closer. Breathed in her scent.

“I…” she began.

“You know you did,” I said. “All this time you’ve been telling yourself you’re in control, when really, it’s bullshit.” God, I could possibly have gone a bit too far there. In for a penny… “They’ve been directing the course of your life. Still calling the shots without ever needing to do a damn thing. They’ve determined how you behave, the life you live now.”

She made a sound—it could have been a snort of anger or a sob, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t react to it. Instead, I said, “Look at how you were when I first met you. A woman out on the prowl for a man to fuck, a man to order about. Remember how shocked you were that I wouldn’t lick your cunt when you ordered me to? Threw you for a loop, didn’t it? And because I wouldn’t, whether you realised the reasons for it or not, you only agreed to teach me about sex because you needed to be in control, needed to
make
me want to lick your cunt just so you had the satisfaction that you’d got me to do what you wanted—that the control had been taken from me and given back to you.”

“Piss off,” she said, her tone weary. “All this psycho-babble is enough to make a woman run.”

“Is that a threat?” I asked. “Is that supposed to make me back down, to not say anything further because I’ll be afraid of losing you?” I laughed lightly, even though I didn’t find the situation funny at all. “It won’t work anymore, Zara. Your tricks won’t work. Listen, there’s something you need to know about me. When I want something, I work fucking hard to get it. Nothing gets in my way, do you understand? Nothing. So if you’re thinking that you can manipulate me into giving up, that you’ll make yourself so wretched to be around I won’t want to continue, you’re wrong.”