Chapter 3
Three
Mark
I sneak in through a window on the north side, easing through the messy slush of grass and snow to a window my grandfather added to the house as a younger man.
It has a catch hidden in the frame, invisible unless you know it’s there, and it allows one to unlock the window from the outside—perfect for paranoid spies.
Or spurned husbands.
I don’t realize how cold I am until I’m inside, and I take a moment to warm myself before shucking my wet shoes, coat, and gloves and moving into the depths of the house.
The flagged floors hide the weight of my steps, and I know exactly how to slip past the library doors to avoid being detected—even by Isolde.
Her senses might be sharper than Tristan’s, but my wife has never had to sneak cookies past a Cold War spy with a twin sister in tow.
The lovers have closed the library doors to keep in the heat, but no matter.
The warped Jacobean paneling in the far corridor doubles as the back of a bookshelf, and a gap in the wood gives me a view into the room.
It was how Melody and I would check to see if Grandad had fallen asleep in his chair before we crept into the kitchen, and now it shows me Isolde in that very same chair, although she’s not asleep.
Her borrowed linen pants are off, and my bodyguard’s shoulders are wedged between her fair thighs.
Dancing firelight makes flashing glimpses of the scene. The strong grip of Tristan’s hands on her knees; the dark curl of hair at the nape of his neck; Isolde’s erect nipples poking through the white T-shirt.
Her pearl-colored hair is up in a messy knot on top of her head, fallen strands brushing against a shoulder that’s been bared, and her throat is in a long arch as Tristan runs his tongue along her core.
He’s taken off the wool coat from earlier, wearing just a henley and jeans, but his boots are still on, like he didn’t have the patience to take them off before going down on my wife.
Even with his clothes on, there’s no hiding the shift and pull of his muscles as he moves at his work, as he spreads Isolde’s thighs farther apart. As his hips flex unconsciously.
Heat thrums through me, blistering and shapeless, as I watch Isolde’s fingers moving through Tristan’s hair. His jeans are stretched over his hips and the firm curves of his backside. It’s harrowing to see. Dangerous for me and for him.
It was in this very library that I had him for the first time.
I’d tried to avoid it, I really did—because he’s my sister Blanche’s stepson and also for the sake of my plans.
For the sake of the innocence still shining from his bright eyes, an innocence he’d clung to despite war and death and the stubborn belief of an entire country that being a hero is the best thing a person can be rather than the loneliest. It was bad enough that I’d hired Tristan at all, but to use him like a concubine felt wrong even to me.
I just…hadn’t planned on liking him so much.
And when I’d been fucked up over Eliot, drunk and lost in the memories of marrying under falling magnolia petals—to have Tristan Thomas kneeling at my feet, lips parted, eyes greener than jewels?—
I am only mortal, you understand. And I’ve never claimed to be a hero.
On the other side of the bookshelf, Isolde is having an orgasm against Tristan’s mouth, a long, shivering climax that has her back arched and her eyes closed.
Tristan has a thumb buried in the muscles of her thigh, and I can see the pain sizzling through her like a current.
She believes she deserves it, the pain, and because she believes she deserves it, it’s the only thing that sets her free.
Makes her clean of her sins (and she has so many of those, even I won’t argue about that).
Tristan lifts his face to hers, his lips wet and shining in the fire, and says, so I can barely hear him, “What you did last night…can you do it again?”
Isolde opens her eyes and slides both of her hands down to cup his jaw. Her expression is tender—Tristan is so hard not to be tender toward—but I see a new tension in her body. I don’t think Tristan is aware of it, because he gives a relieved shudder when Isolde nods.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
I’m genuinely curious now—more than the morbid curiosity of a betrayed husband, more than the abject lust of the spying cuckold—and I watch as Isolde leans back in the chair.
Pantsless, in a too-large T-shirt, her cunt still exposed, she suddenly looks like a queen.
All five foot two of her, with her doll face and her faint freckles.
Her chin is lifted, and her upper lip holds the barest hint of a sneer.
“Undress,” she says.
The change in Tristan is immediate, heartbreaking almost. His head drops, and his chest heaves, and how many times have I seen this before? The grateful submission, the mindless ache that only a firm hand can soothe?
With his eyes down, Tristan gets to his feet and efficiently pulls his shirt over his head and then toes off his boots and socks.
The jeans and boxer briefs come last, worked off and then folded neatly with the shirt and socks, the boots perfectly parallel on top of the pile, like it’s awaiting a sergeant’s inspection. My darling West Point boy.
The clench deep in my gut becomes painful as I watch Tristan step in front of Isolde.
It’s not only the nakedness of him—the heavy limbs and flat navel, the dark hair on his thighs and the beautiful part of him stretching out in swollen offering—but the space between the two of them, the vulnerability and authority rendered into a firelit silhouette.
Isolde and Tristan are playing Dom and sub, and I’ve never imagined this, never even considered its possibility, and yet I am completely riveted by it, by Tristan’s bowed head and Isolde’s curled lip.
She’s more than playing a dominant. She’s doing it and doing it well, although I can see what Tristan cannot: the twitch of her fingers on the arms of the chair, the swallow before she speaks again. But when she does speak, her voice is level and a little hard.
“On the floor,” she says. “Flat on your back.”
The instruction—tame enough on its own—drips with disdain, and Tristan trembles.
But he complies immediately, the quick, utilitarian movements of a soldier, and soon he’s supine on the imported carpet in front of the fireplace, his hands by his sides, his cock lifting up from his body and leaving strings of precum caught between its tip and his stomach.
He sucks in a breath as Isolde stands and moves so that she’s next to him.
She lifts a dainty foot, and even though I can’t see it from here, I know the motion exposes the secret pink flesh between her legs.
He can’t breathe properly at all now, his fingers scratching at the carpet as she lowers her foot and presses it to his erection.
“Please,” he begs. “Please.”
“Look at you, pleading for this,” she says. “You must need it so badly.”
She grinds her foot against him as she speaks, and he arches into the humiliating friction, throat straining.
“I can’t imagine how much it hurts,” she tells him, grinding harder.
“Craving something so much, especially after you were so good to me.” Her voice is still cool, but the praise is sincere, and she’s doing a marvelous job with him, threading the needle between stealing the power he wants so badly to be stolen and actual debasement.
Like all good soldiers, Tristan wants to obey.
He wants to do a good job. He wants to be made to do a good job.
Humiliation, punishment, pain—they are all in service of that one need, and it takes a perceptive dominant to see the subtle distinctions inside a submission like Tristan’s.
He craves the raw clarity of helplessness, of smallness, of being forced, but it doesn’t mean he can go without seeing his top’s satisfaction and pleasure in him.
The used feeling only feels good when it’s inside a place where he belongs, whether it’s because he’s signed some papers or because he’s—however foolishly—surrendered his heart.
Some people want to have their dick stepped on but not be called a disgusting piece of shit while it’s done to them. What can I say? The taxonomy of fucking is endless.
à chacun son go?t and all that.
Tristan’s thighs are splayed as his heels rub against the carpet, and I can see the space under his testicles, the shadows and firm curves of his ass.
I’m hard inside my trousers, but I curl my hands into fists and press them against the paneling, refusing to touch myself.
It was bad enough when the two of them were on the yacht, fucking every chance they got, and I could watch Tristan screw like a soldier on leave whenever I wanted.
I could watch Isolde in all those pretty clothes I’d picked out for her, just as breathtaking during a thalassic romance as she’d been when I’d broken her hymen on her father’s desk.
For those strange ten days, I’d barely recognized myself, excusing myself from business, from the hall, sneaking off to watch my bodyguard and my bride fuck all over my yacht like Adam and Eve before the fall, like they’d never fucked before, even though I’d historically fucked both of them within an inch of their lives.
I nearly jerked myself raw that week.
Tristan is close to climax now, has probably been close since the moment he tasted Isolde, and he’s twisting on the carpet like he’s being tortured with hot coals.
I can’t see Isolde’s eyes or even her face; from here, I can only see that her neck is curved, that her attention is completely on him, that it’s effortless for her to balance on one leg while she chafes his erection with the sole of her foot.