He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I’ll be sure to tell Dawn that you approve. Perhaps she’ll ease off a bit.”
His personal trainer, Dawn, was a loud, scary former Marine drill instructor who looked like Barbie and employed some pretty tough methods. Bringing a body back from the ravages of cancer had been harder than Neil had anticipated, and I knew that secretly, he was grateful to have found her.
I’d worked out with them once. Once was enough. I like being able to walk too much.
I stretched my leg above the water and rotated my ankle. “Remind me not to wear those shoes ever again.”
“Oh, the eight hundred dollar pair that I told you not to buy because they were shaped similarly to the other pair that you hate?” He raised his head to smile at me. “Thank you, Sophie.”
“For what?” I dropped my leg and snuggled down in the water farther, letting it rise to my neck.
“For being exactly the way you are.” He moved closer to me, until our naked skin brushed under the water. “Very little could raise my spirits today. You’re one of the few people who have cheered me. And you’ve looked after me; I appreciate that.”
“Well, you refuse to look after yourself.” I reached behind me for the bottle of 2002 Le Pin. We’d opened it, but we hadn’t bothered to bring glasses. I took a long drink and passed it to him.
He contemplated the bottle in his hand. “That’s too true. I don’t believe I thanked you for your help yesterday. With…” He gestured vaguely then took a drink.
“If we can’t rely on each other, who can we rely on?” I leaned my sweating head against his shoulder. “Do you want, like, a condolence blow job or something?”
Neil jerked forward, sputtering wine everywhere. He choked and coughed and wiped his mouth, still laughing. “Not while I’m taking a drink, Sophie. That’s really not fair play.”
“Sorry.” I giggled. “But the question still stands.”
“I’ll take you up on that, perhaps, in the morning.” He leaned his head back again. “I’m so tired I wouldn’t stay awake long enough for the pill to kick in.”
“In the morning, then,” I promised. “Is there anything else I can do for you, though?”
He thought for a moment. “Be with me. That’s all I need, right now.”
I leaned on him again and kissed a drop from his collarbone. “That, I can do.”
* * * *
I woke to the feeling of a freshly showered, still slightly damp body beside mine in the bed.
“I hate when you do that,” I mumbled into my pillow. “You get the bed all wet.”
“No, you hate it because it makes you self-conscious that you haven’t showered.” He had me there. I felt gross when his skin was all clean and soft and mine was sleep funky. Still, a promise was a promise. I slipped from the bed. The lovely blue Carine Gilson nightgown, the one he’d bought me for our first Christmas, fluttered to my ankles to puddle on the floor, and I gave him an arched brow over my shoulder.
“You’re not going to make me wait while you shower, are you?” he asked, sounding disappointed.
“No, but I don’t want to go down on you with a dirty mouth.” I dashed into the bathroom, quickly brushed my teeth, swished some mouthwash around then came back.
“You are the only person I know who brushes their teeth
before
performing oral sex.” He threw the covers back and patted the bed beside him.
“I can’t believe you’re horny the day after your mother’s funeral,” I said, and then, I wished I hadn’t. “Sorry, that was meant to be funnier than it was.”
“I don’t fault you for trying.” He reached for me and pulled me in. His skin, warmed by the blankets, felt so good against mine that I moaned. He chuckled against my neck. “Oh, we’re already
there,
are we?”
“Hey, we’ve been a little stressed-out this week. Any small relief I can get, I’ll take.” I trailed my fingertips through his chest hair.
“Believe me,” he said as I kissed my way down his stomach. “You’ll get it.”
“You first, though.” I gazed up at him as I rolled to lie between his legs. “Are you my Sir, this morning, or are you my boyfriend?”
“Fiancé,” he corrected, reaching down to cup my jaw. “And Sir is far too tired to make an appearance this morning. Although, his sub is very enticing.”
“Even with bed head, huh?” I stroked my fingers down his hardening length then curled my hand around.
He sighed and crooked one arm behind his head. “Especially with mussed hair. And smeared eyeliner. In my opinion, women always look best if they appear freshly fucked.”
“I’m not sure women care how men like them to look.” I slowly pumped him in my fist and gave him a quirk of my lips. “But, if that’s what you want, then why do I bother getting all dolled up for you?”
“Mmm. Because I like making a mess of you.” He shifted his hips and relaxed into the bed. I sat up and grasped his thick erection in one hand. I rolled the foreskin up and over the head, then back again, and ran my nails lightly over his scrotum.
He gazed at me with a blissfully content smile, and my vagina clenched tight. I got so much pleasure from making him feel good, I almost felt guilty. But our sex always seemed cyclical; I got pleasure from giving him pleasure, and he took pleasure in mine.
With every stroke of my hand, Neil lifted his hips a little more. His breathing quickened, and he turned his face to the side on his pillow. I leaned over and let a thin stream of drool trickle from my mouth onto the head of his penis, stroking him all the while. When I parted my lips and let my open mouth hover over the head, he opened his eyes and smiled, the halfway one that would have been panty melting had I been wearing panties. I slid my mouth down about halfway and released him with sucking pressure. Then, I nibbled my way lightly down his shaft. He bobbed against my lips, twitching impatiently as I made my way back up to the tip to slip my tongue between his foreskin and glans.
“You’re a tease, Sophie,” he scolded in his sex-roughened voice.
I didn’t answer him. Instead, I gave him what he wanted, closing my mouth around him and sucking him down until I gagged. What I couldn’t get into my mouth, I manipulated with my hands, circling him and squeezing as I slid them up and down his wide cock. His breath caught; he moaned. I maintained eye contact with him and lifted my mouth, strands of saliva bridging the gap between my puffy lower lip and his rock hard erection.
“I want to make you come, Neil,” I moaned. I shifted position, straddling his thigh and rubbing my sopping pussy against his skin as I tugged his cock. “I want you to come in my mouth and splash all over my face.”
His hips jerked. “Come here,” he growled, reaching down to dig his fingers into my hips. “I want that beautiful cunt on my face.”
It used to freak me out to let Neil go down on me when I hadn’t showered immediately beforehand, but that was always the time he most wanted to do it. I turned to face away from him and almost laughed at the desperate way his penis twitched, begging for sensation. He groaned and sniffed deeply as I lowered myself over him.
“You smell like heaven.” He pulled me down and sucked at my labia then pushed his tongue between to run it around my engorged clit. He sucked it, releasing me with an obscene slurping sound that made my thighs quake.
“I love that sucking my cock gets you wet,” he murmured against me. His dirty talk could get me to the edge faster than any sex toy ever could. I leaned forward, an elbow on either side of him, and took his cock in my mouth again. Now, sucking him off wasn’t the only thing getting me wet. Neil knew every sensitive spot to lick, when and how to increase pressure. He was the best thing that had ever happened to my cunt, oral sex-wise.
“Oh, fuck,” he groaned, pulling me harder against his face. His hips jerked upward, and he shot stream after stream into my mouth, panting and rubbing his face against my slick, wet vulva the whole time. His chin bumped my clit, and it was the very last straw; my orgasm pushed a long, shuddering moan from my throat, and I choked on his cum. I swallowed some, and some ran down my chin.
Exhausted, I rolled off him and reoriented my position to snuggle at his side. We kissed with the taste of each other on our mouths, and I rested my head on his shoulder.
“Thank you. I needed that more than I realized.” He rubbed his hand over his glistening chin.
“What time is it?” I asked. My phone was charging on the bedside table, but I was too loose-limbed and comfortable to reach for it.
“It was eight-thirty when I got up. Then, I ran six miles on the treadmill, took a shower, and got a fucking incredible blow job from an utter sex goddess, so…eleven?”
I had to take a shower and call Valerie. She’d said she needed to speak with both of us, though about what, I had no clue. It seemed like that meeting, whatever it was about, would go so much better if I didn’t show up with semen in my hair.
I yawned. “I’m going to go get ready. Find us something for breakfast?”
“Don’t you need to be conscious to eat breakfast?” He traced the shell of my ear with one finger.
“Killjoy.” I pushed myself up reluctantly and yawned.
I was halfway to the bathroom when Neil said, “Thank you for the diversion.”
“The condolence blow job,” I reminded him.
He chuckled. “Yes, well. Thank you for that.”
“My pleasure.” I grinned and wiped my chin. For the first time in a while, Neil’s smile in response was spontaneous, not forced, and I was so relieved to see it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Neil seemed to have the same theory. When Valerie arrived, he went downstairs ahead of me in an R.E.M. tour shirt and gray sweatpants, so clearly we didn’t need to make an impression. I put on a green long-sleeved tee and black yoga pants, pulled my shower-wet hair into a sloppy braid and followed him.
I found them in the sitting room. Valerie was dressed smart, but casual, in skinny jeans and a long black sweater. The loose sleeves were pushed up her arms, and her elbows were braced on her knees. She sat back in her chair when I entered and said a quiet, “Hello, Sophie.”
“Hi?” I said as I looked to Neil. He was on the sofa across the coffee table from her. His jaw was tight, his eyes utterly humorless. I glanced between them. “Did I miss something important?”
Valerie’s gaze snapped to Neil, her expression wavering somewhere between uncertainty and shame.
What the fuck has she done?
“It’s all right. Sophie knows everything,” Neil told her. The coldness in his voice could have frozen water off the coast of Miami in August.
I sat beside him, my entire body suddenly tense, like I was watching someone trail a thumbtack over the surface of a balloon. Whatever was about to blow up, I wanted to brace myself for it, but covering my ears was also an attractive option.
I couldn’t read Valerie’s reaction. If I had to put a name to it, it would have been a combo of wariness and surprise and unpleasant shock. Warpriseock?
Even my gift for portmanteaus had deserted me.
“Then, you know…” She cleared her throat. “Sophie, your book was very popular, wasn’t it?”
You know it was popular, bitch. It was on
The New York Times
list.
“Yes… Is this something to do with me?”
“In a way.” Valerie glanced at Neil again, like she was asking permission to do something horrible. “You know that my brother, Stephen, was…involved with Neil.”
“Yeah, he told me.” This conversation sure was jumping around. “He said he was with Stephen before he was with you.”
“We were never ‘with’ each other. We had sex on occasion. There was no romantic relationship.” I’d only heard Neil use his current tone on a few occasions, and they’d all been serious as fuck. Like when I’d casually dismissed his worry over his cancer. And when he’d found out that I’d been kind of double-crossing his company.
So, this was really bad.
“Neil. You know that’s not true. You—” She stopped short at the murderous expression he cut her. To me, she said, “Stephen is a television presenter now, and he’s somewhat well-known here. And, as such, he’s an object of some interest to people.”
“I’m following,” I assured her.
With one more glance to Neil, she told me, “He’s planning to write a memoir. It will include some chapters about his involvement in the BDSM lifestyle. A large portion of that section will cover the time he spent with Neil. There are details—”
Neil exhaled an impatient breath. “He’s going to reveal intimate details of our brief sex life,” he finished for her.
“Neil, if I had any control over this—” Valerie began, and it seemed like they’d already covered this part.
Neil interrupted her again. “You had better find some way to control this. He’s your brother.”
“And it’s not being published through an Elwood and Stern company. My hands are as tied as yours.”
I snorted, but my unintentional mirth was quickly silenced by two nasty glares. “Sorry,” I tried to explain. “Tied hands, BDSM…”
“Yes, Sophie, I understood your joke.” He turned his ire on Valerie. “He is your brother. This is your mess to clean up.”
“How does he even have enough to write about Neil?” I had struggled to flesh out my book, and I lived with the man. “All these years later, what could he possibly have to say? So, people will know that you’re into the whole domination and submission thing. So, what? Aren’t people okay with that now, what with that spank-me book that was everywhere?”
“With the concept of it, yes,” Neil said. “But it is still humiliating to have your personal proclivities described for an audience. Especially when those descriptions won’t be entirely accurate.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, but he gave me a slight shake of his head, as if to say we’d discuss it later.
“I’ve tried to reason with him on this point, but he won’t budge,” Valerie explained apologetically.
I still wasn’t grasping why it was such a big deal. I mean, I wouldn’t shout to the rooftops that I liked to be spanked and slapped during sex, but if someone found out, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. “Neil, there are like four unauthorized biographies about you already. None of them seem to have hurt you. Why would this one?”
“This one will have a wider readership,” he explained tersely. “The only people reading those four books you’ve cited are likely biography enthusiasts or young professionals who think they’ll learn the secrets to my success.”
“This one has celebrity buying power behind it,” Valerie continued. “Stephen is in the public eye, more so than Neil. The salacious memoir of a television personality will sell much better than a cancer narrative about a rich man who’s only slightly on the radar.”
I suppose I should have arrived at that conclusion on my own. But it wasn’t until Neil said, “And that rich man is about to get married. Perhaps his fiancé’s family wouldn’t be thrilled to imagine their young relative being tied up in the bedroom.”
I almost argued that he was overreacting, that his relationship with Stephen had been years ago, and people would naturally assume that he’d been going through a phase. But before I could say it, I knew how wrong that was. People never forgot stuff. People never assumed that others could change.
If someone—my mother, for example—read that book…
“We’ve got to do something.” My eyes grew wide as I stared at Valerie. “You have to get him to take those chapters out.”
She shook her head. “I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried, Sophie. Stephen says that I have to stop ‘clinging to the past.’ He chalks my objections up to a matter of decades-old unrequited love.”
“What about… Could we sue him? For libel?” I looked from Valerie’s grim expression to Neil’s.
“It’s only libel if it’s not true,” he reminded me. “And I did sleep with him. A lawsuit will only bring more attention to this.”
“Our best course of action would be to buy Splendor publishing, if we can, and put a halt to the book entirely,” Valerie explained. “I’ve already put the lawyers on it.”
“Reynholm Media will never part with the publisher.” Neil rubbed his hands on his knees then stood. Sitting was inertia, and he wanted action. The tension vibrated off him.
I also hated the feeling that nothing was being accomplished. “Okay, let’s take a look at the situation. You’re going to try to buy the company. If it works, no problem, the book gets squashed. How does that happen? You just don’t publish it at all?”
“There’ll be a clause in the contract guaranteeing the return of rights if the book isn’t published in a certain time frame.” Valerie sighed, as though all of this was too much to explain to an outsider. I was pretty sure she’d forgotten that I used to work in the media—at least, in an arm of the media—and had relegated me to official trophy wife status. But she went on. “If the rights are returned, he can simply sell it elsewhere. But we could draw it out, reject the manuscript, demand revisions, and remove the chapters.”
“Okay, then…problem mostly solved, right? If it doesn’t work, we go a different route?” I asked.
Neil had paced to the window. He looked out as though he could see all manner of my enraged relations marching down the street toward our house. “Our problem, right now, is that it takes a long time to buy a company. It might take them considerably less time to put this book on the shelves.”
“And, once it’s out, the only thing left to do is damage control, which runs the added risk of calling more attention to it,” Valerie said. “Public perception is important to our jobs. We’re not celebrities, but if a business rival or potential partner forms an unsavory opinion of Neil, it could damage the company.”
“Even if he’s not working there anymore?” I didn’t understand. Neil had retired. He didn’t need to worry about his perception in the business world, right?
“It appears that if we make this possible purchase, I may need to come out of retirement. At least for a time.” He swore under his breath. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.”
“Call him,” Valerie urged, and it didn’t sound like the first time she’d suggested it. Was that why he was so angry when I’d come downstairs? “I’m sure if you talk to him—”
“Talking to him never did any good for me before!” he shouted. Neil didn’t like losing control in front of people. This seemed to be shaking him up more than it should. Not that I knew how upset one should be when discovering that their former lover was writing a tell-all about them. But a cold chill crept up my back, a feeling that this wasn’t all about our upcoming wedding and how my family might view him.
My stomach turned over. I think I knew what was upsetting Neil. Pure horror replaced the blood flowing through my heart at the thought that I might be right.
I stood up abruptly. “Thank you, Valerie, for letting us know about this. Neil will be in touch.”
She didn’t even acknowledge me. “Neil, do you want me to go?”
My back teeth ground. This was my house, too. I could kick her out if I wanted to.
Before Neil could answer, I said, “We need to have some time alone to discuss this. How long will you be in London?”
“I’ll be here through the week.” She sounded bewildered that I would presume to make a decision for Neil.
“We’re leaving the day after tomorrow. If we need anything, we’ll call.” I wasn’t mean, but firm. I had to talk to Neil right away, and I didn’t want Valerie to be here for this conversation.
She stood awkwardly and reached for the black wool coat she’d tossed over the other armchair. “Neil, you will call me, won’t you?”
He turned from the window. “Of course I will. At the moment, though, it sounds as though you have things in hand.”
As I walked her to the door, I could tell that she really did feel badly over what was happening. She cared about Neil—more than I was comfortable with, that was for sure—and I understood feeling helpless and wanting to help at the same time. But, aside from the business aspect and her possible intervention with her brother, this wasn’t about her and Neil. It wasn’t even about me and Neil. It was about Neil and Stephen, and I was pretty sure I knew exactly what had happened between them.
When Valerie was gone, I went back to the sitting room. Neil wasn’t there. I went to the kitchen and found him already finishing off one of Michael’s beers.
“Hey,” I said cautiously. “You know it’s, like, one, right?”
He grimaced and set the empty bottle on the counter. “It’s not before noon, Sophie. And I am in no mood.”
“You seem really upset,” I began, wondering how I would broach the subject if he was “in no mood.” I leaned against the refrigerator and crossed my arms. I didn’t say anything when he opened the beverage cooler and pulled out a bottle of red wine.
At least it wasn’t whiskey, although I was sure that would come into play at some point later.
“I am upset.” He paused to twist the corkscrew in. “Please don’t patronize me, Sophie. Anyone would be upset at this news.”
I nodded in agreement. “But you seem…shaken. Is there anything you want to tell me that you couldn’t say to me in front of Valerie?”
The look he gave me was one of dark understanding. I knew, without having to ask. But I did, anyway. “Neil, was Stephen the Dom who raped you?”
He made a noise of disgust. “Don’t use that word. It’s so melodramatic.”
“Fine. Was he the Dom who wouldn’t stop?” I didn’t know why he felt there was a distinction between the two. “He was, wasn’t he?”
He took a wine glass from the dishwasher and filled it. “He was.”
I was pretty sure the feeling in my chest was what it felt like to get shot with a paintball gun at close range. “He can’t do this,” I blurted, as though saying it would undo it.
“He can.” Neil swallowed half the wine in his glass in one gulp. “Stephen never admitted to any wrongdoing.”
“But, if he writes about it, people will know—”
“Do you believe he’ll write about my experience, or his?” Neil demanded. “Stephen believes he’s an excellent Dom. He never believed his behavior was abusive. He told me the problem was that I was naturally dominant, and I didn’t understand what it was like to be submissive.”
Neil’s hand shook as he lifted the glass again.