Of course he would be. Of course he would understand and care. How did he ever manage to convince her that he didn’t actually care? She bent her head and gave him the kiss he asked for. “You’re incredible,” she murmured to him, and he shivered.
“Don’t be too gentle with me,” he begged, and this time almost all the laughter had leached out of his voice, this time the sincerity was showing through as if the laughter was threadbare cloth.
She framed his face with his hands and smiled down at him, stroking his cheekbones with her thumbs – gently. “No, see, Patrick, this time
I
can do whatever I want.”
He stared up at her a moment, as if he couldn’t figure out whether she was his safe harbor in a nightmare or the nightmare itself. And then he closed his eyes hard. “Sarabelle,” he protested, laughingly. His laughter was all ragged. “You didn’t give me a safe word.”
“I know, Patrick, but I bet someone with as clever fingers as you could undo those knots” – she sank in a slow slide of her body and her mouth, her lips trailing over his stubborn chin and then bit that strong, gorgeous cleft – “if you concentrate.”
He drew a little gasp and tried to catch her mouth again with a quick twist of his head, but she was already lowering, letting her softly parted lips trail over his throat and caress the strained muscles there.
“Concentrate,” he said shakily. “Concentrate – on what?”
His voice held genuine blankness, the first half of her sentence already shattered out of his brain. She smiled, an unfamiliar, sleepy, intense smile into his breastbone, and drew her mouth down over his stomach.
An incredible sense of power grew in her, unfamiliar and heady. She didn’t know if she could wield power over him correctly, but right at that moment her power felt thick and hot and good.
“On whatever you want to concentrate on, Patrick,” she murmured, sliding her hand ahead of her mouth to tease back and forth along his waistline, refusing to slip under. “Where is your concentration heading?”
“Sarabelle.” He yanked at the cord and then curled his fingers around the wooden slats and forced himself to hold his arms still. “Damn, I
knew
you wouldn’t let me get away with anything. You’re so, so” – he lifted his head to watch her face pressed below his navel, tightening all those ab muscles against her cheek deliciously – “pretty,” he finished helplessly, letting his body fall back on the bed.
She kissed his stomach for that, right above the line of his pajama bottoms.
His belly sucked in hard. “Come kiss me,” he coaxed. “Come here, Sarah.”
She smiled secretly at how he kept trying to take back command of the situation and stretched the waistband of his pajamas up just enough to peer into the darkness there. Pursing her lips, she blew a thin stream of investigative air.
His stomach went so taut under her arm she could have bounced a coin off it. “Sarah.” He deepened his voice into that command that vibrated all through her. “Come here.”
It was deeply, headily arousing to buck her own urge to do as he told her, a curling, charged eroticism.
She nuzzled her nose under his pajamas, laughing a little where he couldn’t see. He made her so happy.
“Sarah.” The bass warning chased over her body until all the fine hairs rose to that sense of ionized air. Of lightning to come.
She grinned suddenly, an unaccustomed expression, headily reckless. Slipping her hand under the pajamas, she touched his lightning rod.
She forgot to care whether she could get him wrong. Instead, she rubbed her thumb up his erection with fascinated curiosity, every hair on her body begging for lightning to strike.
But she was the one who held lightning chained. Unless he did use those clever fingers and free himself, even now while her concentration was elsewhere, falling on her, punishing her deliciously. The sense of imminent danger aroused her all over, and she wanted to tease him some more, to make him truly, madly, deeply crack for her. Just let her in, just let it all out, just give himself up to her and fall asleep afterward in that mad, boneless, trusting release that he had so often given her.
She pushed the pajama bottoms down, baring his erection, naked and jutting and so very vulnerable that way, for something so aggressive, for something that was made to impale, to take. He twisted his hips, trying instinctively to angle himself
away
from her, oh, how interesting. She closed her hand around him like a promise of shelter, rubbing him gently.
“Sarah, I–”
And she slipped her mouth over him, before she could lose her nerve or he could call this off. Damn, this was awkward. She had kind of gotten the impression that the whole mouth thing was supposed to be a natural talent. Trust her to need practice. She couldn’t even imagine having ever tried to practice it on anyone else, and she couldn’t quite figure out how to practice on him without him noticing how bad she was at it, and–
“Sarah,
no
.” His voice cut like a whip, his hips bucking so hard he knocked her from him. The tone shocked through the air. He had never spoken to her like that – to Hervé when his molten caramel had almost spilled over her face, yes, but not to her.
“I want a safe word,” he said flatly, his fingers twisting impossibly to worry at her knots. He cursed as he discovered how tight he had jerked them. He genuinely couldn’t get free.
“Patrick,” she said reproachfully. “You can’t get off that easily.”
“You have
no fucking idea,
Sarah.” He lost his patience with the knots and yanked at them again, undoing any progress he might have made. Patrick
never
lost his physical patience. He could work with delicate things indefinitely, precisely, under any kind of intense pressure, to get exactly what he wanted. “You never have. I can’t do this. Let me loose.”
She hesitated, looking from his face to his straining penis.
But you’ve almost cracked for me. I’ve almost made you mine.
“I mean it, Sarah. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand to have my arms tied like this. Let me go.”
Really? She liked to have her hands held still by him – helpless and protected and unable to do one single thing – so very much. Was he really growing as frantic as that tension in his body suggested? Like some phobia?
“It’s all right,” she said slowly. “You’re safe with me.”
He flinched all through him, his body cording worse than when she had put her mouth on him. “Sarah,
my God.
Let me go.”
She hesitated one more moment, her palm rubbing his skin soothingly. Almost absently, she realized she was rubbing in part the curls around his sex, that the side of her hand was brushing the base of his penis with each caress. He gritted his teeth and glared at her.
She got up and went to the kitchen, coming back with shears to cut through the cord. He swept them out of her hands as soon as he was free, setting them on the nightstand as he grabbed her and rolled her under him.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered roughly. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I thought I could do it.”
“It’s all right,” she murmured, petting his chest soothingly. It had been so little, to drive him over the edge so easily. She tried a smile. “I think I need more practice at that anyway. I’m not sure on what. Is it kind of like sucking on a really big Popsicle?”
“Oh,
bon sang
,” Patrick swore. “Sarah.” He kissed her suddenly, savagely, his hands locked in her hair so that she couldn’t get away from the invasion. “Sarah, can I have three hours off my promise?”
To wait twelve hours before he made her come again. She slid her arms around him and pulled herself up into his body, braced above hers. “Just take me,” she whispered into his ear. “Don’t worry about me. Just do it.”
He cursed again, incredibly tense. “Sarah, you can’t–”
“I want you to,” she told him, pressing her hips up into his. “I want you to.”
He buried his face suddenly in the side of her neck, hiding himself in the spill of her hair. “Sarah.
Chérie, chérie, chérie.
”
She wrapped her legs around him, using all her muscles to lift up and rub him with her open, willing sex. “I want you to.”
“Stop, stop, stop,” he whisper-ordered into her hair. “Sarah,
stop
for a second.” His hand plunged into the nightstand drawer, and he pressed her belly down until he was pinning her body to the mattress. Arousal stirred in her, a low, thick thing just a few inches below his hand’s pressure. “Hold on,
bébé
. Hold on.” He caught the corner of the condom packet in his teeth, working one-handed.
She had forgotten arousal; her body might have been softening all this time, readying itself for what was so obviously to come, but her mind had been on other things. But
this
aroused her, to watch him so frantic, while she was pinned down by one of his hands, her body all one hungry, yielding anticipation of what was about to plunge into her.
Oh, do it hard. Break for me.
He came back down over her, and she could barely breathe from wanting it, wanting that first hard plunge.
He pressed her hands back to the mattress on either side of her head, linking his strong fingers with them. Arousal surged through her, turning her into utter yielding hunger for him, for this, the dominance of his hands, that strong, protective, controlling hold that left her nothing to do but be his. He saw it, too, the way she lost all focus, swamped in her own desire. “You like that, don’t you?” he breathed, rough. “You love that.”
Her body arched up to him, delighting in the way her hands could not follow, in the imprisonment – he didn’t
like
that, when his hands were bound and safe? God, she liked it
so much
.
This wasn’t supposed to be about me. This was supposed to be about him, him yielding to me. But it feels so good.
“Open to me, Sarah.” That command of his had grown all roughened, low and fierce.
Flooding with desire at the tone, she bent her knees to either side of his body, arching her hips up. “Hard,” she said, with her eyes closed, drowning. “Hard, hard, hard.”
She remembered to open her eyes again just at that second when his breath came in harshly, that split second when he poised, all tension about to be released, and his own eyes glittered as he stared down at her.
He surged into her so hard her body jerked against the hold of his hands, and she had to remember not to cry out, because he would stop if she cried out. She had to arch her body and breathe and let it yield, let it relearn the size of him, taking so completely.
It shattered her that even as driven as he was, even as over the edge, he still brought his hand down to make her come convulsively, in time with him, one strong arm gripping her to him too tightly. It shattered her even more to realize, as she slowly drifted back to night and mattress and soft lights and the world, that her arms were wrapped around him. That she was holding him.
As if he was hers.
Chapter 28
Patrick was thinking quite seriously the next morning of doing something he had never done: taking off for the week of Valentine’s Day. Dumping all that manic week on Luc and Noë and Grég, and taking Sarah somewhere romantic where it could be just the two of them, with all the time in the world, and also in a nice, large suite with a door she could close against him when she needed to. A ski cabin? He
loved
skiing. At a wild guess, she probably couldn’t hit the double black diamond slopes the way he could, so they could spend some time apart during the day, giving her that space she needed, and at night she would want to cuddle up against him for warmth every time she got cold. Or would she rather go to Martinique? Could she handle the beach? She’d have to
relax
all day, and in a bikini, too. It might be rough on her.
Come to think of it, if Sarah had done any skiing at all, she probably could take double black diamond slopes. She wouldn’t have stopped until she could master them perfectly.
He grinned, thinking about what a fantastic vacation that would be, racing each other down the slopes.
A far better way to process terror and giddy happiness than trying to sit still for it, struggling to let someone have so much power over his life when he knew how vicious someone else’s power could be. Not Sarah, though. Not his ruthless, straight-gazed Sarah, whose arms wrapped around him so sweetly after he yielded himself entirely up to her and came back to earth.
She wouldn’t be cruel.
She just wouldn’t.
So anchored, so centered in herself, a self to which she was so determinedly true, that it just wasn’t in her nature to focus any of her energy on how she could jerk someone else around. She could do it by accident, yes, but if he told her, if he called her on it, she wouldn’t do it on
purpose.
He was thinking about her and skiing and après-skiing, and maybe some things he could do with hot tubs and snow, when he walked into Luc’s office the next morning and checked. Luc was supposed to be doing accounts, which was, granted, enough to make any man regret he was in charge of the place when he could have stayed a much more intelligent
second
. But still…
“Are you sick?” he asked blankly. Luc never got sick. Neither did he. It just wasn’t something they did.
Luc pushed away from his desk and paced the small glass-walled office a step, as if he wanted to escape but had nowhere to go. Just in case, Patrick leaned casually back against the door, feigning such profound fatigue he needed a support to keep him upright.
“No,” Luc said, his voice leaden. As if he just couldn’t be bothered. Luc, who was always crisp, cool, perfect, who could always be bothered, in order to make sure things were just right. “Patrick, go work or something.”
“Did you and Summer get in another
fight?” Patrick asked incredulously. This was getting old. Plus – Luc didn’t look energized, like he usually did after an encounter with Summer, so much of his heart pressing against that iron shield of his that he practically filled the kitchen with desserts just by flicking his fingers. No, he looked dull, as if his skin had aged and his hair had lost its gloss.
“No,” Luc said.