Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
Sage
The bed dipping behind me startles me awake.
“Shh. It’s just me.” Barrett whispers over my neck while his hand slides up my thigh. “Go back to sleep.” He tries to pull me hard against him, but I sit up and turn around.
“Is everything all right?” I never asked him what he left to do tonight.
The question is on the tip of my tongue.
Part of me is enjoying the ignorance, but the more dominant part of my personality wants every detail.
The same part of me that demanded he tell me what he’d involved me in when I worked for him.
“Everything’s fine.” He pushes on my chest, but I brace my arms.
“What … Did you …” I can’t form the words. The room is dark, but I make out his features with the help of the moonlight shining at just the right angle through the crack in the curtains. His chin lifts and his lips tighten.
“No. I didn’t kill anyone tonight.”
“What was tonight about? Something to do with Dorian?”
He sighs. “Not tonight, pet. Go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
I stay where I am for another heartbeat.
Barrett sits up. “Sage. Lie down and go back to sleep or Daddy is going to find another way to make you forget about your questions.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a threat.”
He growls, wrapping his hand around my throat. My arms give out and I fall back to the bed. “Be a good pet.” He nips my lip before soothing it with his tongue and sucking it into his mouth.
I instantly melt into the mattress, giving him the opportunity to roll me over and tuck me in against his chest. He still has a hold on my neck, but it isn’t tight.
It’s calming the way his thumb slowly strokes up and down, easing the flow of blood through that artery.
My heart slows and my eyes close to focus on his touch.
He has me pinned, and before I realize it, I’m drifting back to sleep, warm and safe in Daddy’s arms.
The alarm makes my phone buzz on the nightstand, the vibrations against the wood loud in the room. I reach out to turn it off, but I’m trapped with Barrett’s heavy arms tightening around me.
“What the hell is that?” His sleepy grumble is almost adorable. I hold back my smile.
“It’s my alarm.”
“It’s loud.” His teeth sink into my shoulder. I moan and arch my back.
“Well, let me go and I can turn it off.”
He grunts, but releases me. When I turn around, he’s already sitting up and looking much more alert than he sounded.
“I need to take Nova to her therapy appointment today, and I promised to spend the day with her.”
“No work?” His eyes are narrowed and entirely focused on mine. I don’t know if he’s asking about my decision regarding Dorian and the ultimatum my boss gave me, and if he is, I don’t have the answer to that. Ultimatums are assholes.
“Not today.”
“I’ll drive you.” Reaching out, Barrett tucks my hair behind my ear.
I lean into his touch even as I deny him. “No, you won’t. I’m going to see my sister.”
“I’m driving you because I need to drive you, pet.”
“Why do you need to drive me?”
I barely have time to squeak as he pushes off the headboard and pulls hard on my ankle to force me down the bed. The next second, he has me pinned beneath him. “Because you belong to me.”
“Barrett, it’s …”
His rough fingers push through my folds and he thrusts two of them into my core. “Try that again.”
“Daddy,” I whimper, arching my back and pushing my breasts into his chest. All of my nerves are instantly on fire, only proving his point. I belong to him. “It’s not that simple.”
“Seems simple to me.”
Me too.
“Okay,” I whisper.
The kiss he gives me sends me into a spiral, a happy void that has me imagining what it’s like to give in to every one of his demands and belong to him in the way I know he wants. But that’s when I realize I’ve done exactly that. And I’m still me.
An hour later, we’re both showered, dressed, and ready, after having eaten breakfast together sitting at the table. He looked at me with heat in his eyes and glanced at the floor beside him several times as we ate.
I realize it isn’t just a kink—he enjoys the things we do. I don’t question what makes my cock hard.
Not even a little.
He parks his black AMG in my sister’s empty driveway. “Stay here.” I’m already facing the door, my hand hovering near the handle.
“Sage.” My name carries a warning.
I turn back to him. “Please. Stay here. She’s still so …” I don’t know what she is. I want to say fragile, but that seems wrong when I know she has strength buried in her somewhere, begging to be let free.
“Okay, pet.” He presses the button to unlock the car doors.
“Thank you.”
Nova opens the door before I knock. “Oh, you’re ready.
” This feels like such a huge step for her.
Every other time, I’ve had to coax her into going, but this time she’s at the door with a small smile raising the corners of her lips.
“You look nice.” She’s wearing a soft green colour I haven’t seen on her for years.
Adam preferred pinks and blues, two colours I remember my sister avoiding with disgust through her teen years.
“Thanks.” Less of the shy softness hushes her tone. It’s not gone, and I don’t expect it to be for a long time, but I’m filled with hope at the sight of my sister in front of me. My sister, not the image of a woman Adam created.
“Let’s go.”
Barrett is leaning against the car on the passenger side, looking devastating and dangerous.
Nova slows beside me. This is why I didn’t want him to come.
He’s intimidating and I don’t know how Nova will react to other men now that Adam isn’t around.
She steered clear of them when out on her own, but with Adam beside her, she never noticed anything but him.
She’s tense as she takes in Barrett and his Mercedes. For a moment, I think she might bolt, but then I realize she’s slowly analyzing what’s in front of her.
“It’s okay.” I hook my arm in hers. “Nova, this is a friend of mine.” I stop with my mouth open and stare at him for help.
What do I call him? At the gala he had me introduce him as Ben.
If I knew for certain this thing between us is fleeting, I wouldn’t have a doubt. He’s Ben. But I can’t say that.
“Barrett.” He sticks his hand out, moving in a way not to startle a spooked kitten. “Nova. I’m sorry for your loss.” Genuine empathy bleeds into his words. The irony isn’t lost on me that he and I are the cause of that loss, but his show of empathy goes deeper.
Nova doesn’t answer him, but he nods anyway as he opens the back door.
I urge Nova inside and Barrett sets his hand at the small of my back, silently telling me to join her.
I intended to, but knowing he won’t try to force me to sit in the front with him, shows me the kind of support I have from him.
The fact he hasn’t put me back in the stockade to keep me from going to work is a show of support.
What does it really look like to belong to him? The intrusive question is never far from my mind.
“Barrett offered to drive us today. I hope that’s okay.” I squeeze Nova’s hand.
“And take you both out to lunch. Don’t forget that.” There’s a smile in Barrett’s voice as he tilts his head back to speak to us.
I meet his grin in the rearview mirror, but when I look back at Nova, she’s frowning.
“I didn’t know you had a friend.” She drops the description with an odd hesitation and I know that the answer to this matters to her.
Another reason I didn’t want Barrett to come.
I don’t want to flaunt a relationship in front of her after losing her husband.
She viewed Adam as the love of her life, despite the way he treated her.
Any answer I have for her will sound fake, aside from the truth. I’ve jumped feet-first into a possessive, obsessive, kinky relationship with the man I hired to kill your husband.
Best not to say something like that.
“Where did you two meet?” Nova looks between the two of us.
“Sage came into my club several weeks ago.” Barrett sounds different—cordial and soft in his tone.
“You own a club?”
A club I haven’t been back to and one he hasn’t taken me to. Is that odd?
“I do.” He smiles in the mirror, showing a bit of pride.
Nova adjusts in her seat to glare at me and inch away. “You don’t like clubs.”
“I don’t not like them. They aren’t something I usually indulge in.
” The club scene isn’t my idea of a good time.
They’re fun once in a while and with the right friends.
But it’s something I never did with my sister in that small window where both of us were of age and she wasn’t yet trapped with Adam.
“Right.” She sets her gaze out the window, ignoring us entirely. That spark of her true personality that greeted me at her door is gone.