Training Her Curves - London (A BBW Billionaire Domination & Submission Romance) (7 page)

I slid out of my bra and tried the gown on, intent on strapping myself back into the bra if the chiffon was too transparent. I studied my appearance in the mirror, worrying that wearing the nightgown, even with my panties still on, would send the wrong message.

He promised not to touch...

I sucked air into my lungs, a fresh case of anxiety threatening to suffocate me.

You don't want to sleep in your bra, Ree...

"Shut up," I whispered at the mirror.

You want him to break his promise...

"Do not," I replied petulantly, my denial a little louder. I was staying because his voice had seemed so vulnerable when he had asked me to spend the night. Desperate, even. I needed to know why and I needed to not leave him more vulnerable than when I had first encountered him.

Exiting the bathroom, I found the lights down low in the bedroom and my clutch on the center of the bed. Simon, if he was still in the suite, was out of sight. I listened for a few seconds but heard nothing. I approached the bed, my shorter frame stretching so I could reclaim my clutch. I couldn't even remember when or where I had set it down.

I opened the bag to look inside. Phone, lip gloss, room card -- nothing missing or added.

"I thought you might feel a little more secure with it near you." Simon slid into the room as quietly and as graceful as he had left. He had slipped into a pair of black silk briefs while I was in the bathroom. "London's emergency messaging is 999, in case you're wondering."

I heard a hint of his customary humor as he finished, but his face was a polished mask of neutrality. I could understand why. I had accused him of trying to trick me, treated him as Rick's accomplice when it was beginning to seem far more likely that Simon had been innocent up until New York.

"Thank you." I fished my phone and started texting a message as I spoke. My eyes kept darting from the keyboard on the phone's screen to the bottom half of Simon's body. He had the same burnt gold dusting of hair on the front of his muscular thighs as he had on his arms. I kept mis-keying my text and started explaining to cover my embarrassment. "I need to text Marjolein. There's...she may need to message me in the middle of the night on...something -- something that is..."

I stumbled around my explanation, hating that I couldn't say anything about our lost Russian, both because the secrecy was oppressive and I didn't want Simon to think that I was texting Jo-Jo to look at Simon as a suspect should my headless corpse wind up floating down the Thames.

"You've had an edge to your voice for weeks, pudding." Simon turned the bedding down on both sides but made no move to get into bed. "It seemed to start a few days after your return from Geneva. Are you expecting a text on what's been bothering you?"

"It's just business," I lied, my chest tightening at the casual dismissal of Mishka that such an ugly word as "business" implied.

Finished messaging Marjoelein, I stuffed the phone in my clutch. Feeling Simon's gaze on me, I looked at the bed. We were at an impasse, it seemed, neither of us wanting to be the first to crawl under the covers -- the first to capitulate.

Simon braced one knee against the edge of the mattress. "You had a question you wanted to ask me earlier."

My eyes jumped in his direction before I looked down at the robe's sash tied tight around my mid-section. Simon's hand drifted toward the base of the bedside lamp. He gave it two quick taps and the light disappeared from the room. I heard the rustle of linen as he moved all the way onto the bed.

"You don't have to ask, Riona. It's something you can answer on your own."

I didn't understand what he meant, but his voice hooked me, the undercoating of pain tugging me toward him. Sitting on the bed, I untied the sash, slipped out of the robe and placed it folded on the nightstand atop my clutch.

Simon was on his side so that he faced the center of the bed. I rolled so that I was on my side facing him. He captured my wrist and brought it slowly up to his head. When my palm cupped his ear, he released me, leaving my fingers free to explore.

My stomach started to twist as I detected the large divot hidden by his hair. My hand tensed but I resisted the urge to snatch it to my chest. Slowly I withdrew. Neither of us spoke for a full minute. I didn't want to blurt out an unthinking question, but I did need to understand what was going on.

"Why me?" I asked at last.

Part of me rebelled with an unvoiced question to myself -- why not me? I had a beautiful face with symmetrical features and pampered skin. A lot of men had convinced themselves they didn't like my body type, but I knew other men did. I had a talent for dressing a woman's curves, particularly my own. I might practice being a bitch, but I had a kind and giving heart. And even though I had slept through many a college class after a night spent creating something I found beautiful, I wasn't dumb and I wasn't lazy.

I catalogued my positives, looking for the one thing that made me different from other women in the same way Simon seemed different from other men. The comparison tripped me up, made me doubt my desirability.

"Why me?" I repeated. He seemed determined not to answer. I started to sit up. "You can't even think of one thing?"

"I like your work."

His voice had an uncomfortable sound of bone grinding against bone -- dry and on the verge of shattering.

"The work you're always correcting?" I shot back.

"How else could I have kept you talking to me all these months?" His hand floated across the top of my thighs to secure my opposite hip, the tightening grip of his fingers telling me I wasn't going anywhere without a struggle. "I also find the cadence of your speech soothing."

"Great!" I pried at his fingers. "I'll send you a recording."

"I made my own already. Listening to you is the only thing that helps me sleep -- after twenty years, Riona." He slithered closer, repositioning his hold on me and snaking his other arm behind my back so that he could lock his hands together. "When I had my first dream after two decades, it was of the two of us talking in the dark because I hadn't seen your face."

His head butted gently against my side. "And then I saw your face and a few months after that, I saw the shots Rick took in Dallas and I didn't have to dream about us in the dark anymore."

At some point while Simon was talking, I had started crying. I wanted to toss more sarcasm at him, like how the only compliment he'd given me was that my voice put him to sleep.

"I like your sass and intelligence." He pushed up onto one arm, half releasing me but keeping me thoroughly pinned by the press of his lips against my neck. He knew right where to kiss, right where to place his free hand so that I turned into him.

I pushed at his chest, my entire body burning with the need to press closer to him, knot my fingers in his hair and crush my lips against his. "You need to stay on your side of the bed."

He nipped the lobe of my ear but retreated. The last of him to leave my body was his hand, his palm sliding across my aching breast. A moment's squeeze and then he pulled away to the far edge of the mattress so large it could fit four bodies.

"Why the ropes?" I asked. I had more than my fill of talking to him on topics of design, our many skirmishes still a sore spot despite his confession that at least part of his critiques were meant solely to keep calling me. At least I hoped he had only designed a room to look like Snow White's dress as some nefarious plot to get me on his side of the Atlantic.

"You don't want to know, pudding."

Simon slid closer to the center of the bed, stopping when he was close enough to stretch out his arm and capture a lock of my hair. He wound it around his finger and gave it an almost imperceptible tug and then another.

I wiggled my way closer, protesting his answer before I had a chance to consider that I truly might not want to know.

"There are many reasons to want to tie a woman up, many ways to do it," he explained. "A length of silk rope, velcro straps on a hospital bed..."

In an asylum, I thought, my imagination curling around the words he seemed reluctant to voice. I thought of him at twelve, visiting his mother before her death. Pre-teen, hormones just beginning to rage, a mind that didn't even have the comfort of sleep as an escape from obsessive thoughts.

I wrapped a hand around his wrist. He released the lock of hair.

"Here in the west," Simon continued. "People use
shibari
and
kinbaku
interchangeably. But the first ties a woman in place, the second sets her free, but only after it strips away all her pretenses."

On his side as he spoke, Simon rolled toward me. His right arm and leg crossed over my body, their weight settling against me. His hand began to massage lightly at my neck near the curve where it joined the shoulder. He moved the rest of his body so that it was flush against my side.

"Beautiful women are full of pretenses." His lips found the same bend in my neck as his hand massaged on the other side of me. "Otherwise the world would shred them. The ropes hold her tight, secure, makes her, if only for the moment, property to be preserved and protected. She starts to sweat, to squirm..."

Just as he had in New York, Simon stopped what he was doing to pant in my ear, signaling to me that I had lost control of my breathing.

"Don't make me break my promise, Riona."

I exhaled, the sound of the air leaving me harsh and prolonged. Once again Simon had soaked my gray lace panties through and through. I sucked another breath in, helpless to stop the way my body surfed the top of the mattress in needy waves.

Pushing the bedding out of the way, his hand slid down the front of the chiffon nightgown to find the curling edges of the bottom hem. He cupped my mound and squeezed.

"Make me break my promise, and I'm taking you into The Vault."

Throat tight, I struggled to respond. "Then stop talking dirty to me, damn it."

Withdrawing his hand, Simon chuckled. "I intended for you to do all the talking, love."

"Right," That had been his suggested compromise: the two of us in bed, in the dark, with me talking. "Let me think."

Not that thinking was possible after he ended his reminder with that particular term of endearment. I started babbling to fill the silence before he repeated the word or said something else that rendered me equally senseless.

"I still can't believe you are Baku--"

"Babu? Like in the Jungle Book? Really, Riona, I almost feel insulted."

In the dark, I couldn't see if he was pulling my leg or really thought I was calling him an ape or something. Reaching behind me, I tapped the base of the lamp, bathing his body in light.

Big mistake. I was in bed with an Englishman who looked like his veins were filled with Viking blood. I could see it in his face, in the seafoam green eyes that had stolen their color from the waves his ancestor's boat had cut through centuries ago. I could see it in the tousle of dark blond hair that looked a pale ash brown by night when the room was half shadows.

I rolled quickly away, tapping again at the base of the light only to find him tapping on his lamp so that the room remained gently lit. I glared at him over my shoulder. "You're not helping!"

He grinned at me and then his eyes darted toward my bottom. "I'm a man, pudding, and the view I'm getting right now demands I keep a light on."

My hands darted to the hem of the wisp of a nightgown he had provided and then to the bedding. "I thought you were interested in seeing if you could sleep?"

"I'm interested in many things." Pretending to be a gentleman, he helped me tuck the blanket under my chin and then he brushed the back of his finger against my cheek. "But, above all things, I'm interested in you -- anyway I can have you. Conversation..."

He moved closer, the folds in the blanket ensuring there was no flesh on flesh contact other than his hand cupping the side of my face.

"Snuggling," he continued before his lips ghosted along the edge of my jaw. "Kissing, or just resting here in quiet and basking in your body heat."

"Let's try that last bit," I whispered. "It's the safest."

Taking a moment to turn off the lamp on his side of the bed, Simon repositioned himself along my body. His leg rested over my thighs and one arm across my chest to have his hand curl around my shoulder.

"And just a bit of a snuggle," he said, planting a soft kiss just below my ear.

********************

I fell asleep with Simon holding me like that, his thumb stroking hypnotically across my collar bone. I woke a little after dawn to his deep, peaceful breaths, our positions little changed. I tried to will myself back to sleep so that I wouldn't wake him. But the feel and smell of him sparked my imagination, changed the rhythm of my own breathing so that I roused him.

He slid on top of me, his arms braced at my sides and none of his weight bearing down on me. "Good morning, beautiful."

I smiled up at him, my nose feeling the sting of joyful tears. I had been with men in the past, fucked them, but never woke up next to them. I had been the one out the door with the desire to put the man in my past, my body and heart dissatisfied.

Knowing my smile was stretching into a full, slightly demented, grin, I tried to force a more sober mask in place.

"None of that, pudding," Simon admonished. His head dipped down for a sedate kiss against my forehead. "Whatever you're feeling, I want to see it."

My hands slid from the mattress to capture his narrow waist. The urge to run my fingers elsewhere almost overtook me. My nails dug lightly at his skin before I planted my palms against his chest and gave a light push. "All I'm feeling right now is my bladder."

His chest flexed against my hands and his shoulders gave a light jerk as a short laugh erupted from him. He rolled off me, stealing all the bedding so that I had only the thin, sleeveless, and nearly skirtless nightgown to protect me against air that had chilled overnight.

"Off with you then." He gave my thigh an understanding pat and then a little push. "I'll order morning tea while you're away."