Chapter 1
Manhattan crawls,seethes, in a summer haze below me, glass and metal and hot concrete choking the leafy tangle of Central Park.
It’s home, but it doesn’t feel like home. I feel like I’m still on the waves, untethered. Still on a yacht, being brought from my family’s ancestral seat to the home I know best, for a wedding I never asked for.
Maybe it doesn’t feel like home because of where I am—a slick high-rise stocked with blindfolds and rope and custom furniture. Or maybe it’s because of whom I’m in this high-rise with—Tristan Thomas, the man who stole my heart in the shattered moonlight of the Atlantic. Along with another man, the man who broke that same heart three years ago with the blood from my hymen still drying under his fingernails.
Mark Trevena. My fiancé.
I look down at the railing of Mark’s loft. My hands are pale and slender, the left hand glinting with rubies and gold. They are hands that have stolen, maimed, and killed. I try to keep them steady.
I have so much to do as Mark Trevena’s bride.
“You crawled to me here. Do you remember?”
Too late, I become aware of the presence in the loft, and I turn to see Mark coming to the glass half wall separating the space from the rest of the penthouse. Rather than stand beside me, however, he braces his right hand next to mine on the railing and stands just behind. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I’m thinking of touching now. Close enough that I can feel the measures of his exhales.
Our hands are less than an inch apart; his is an expression of power next to my own. Its size, its placement. Two of the fingers on it have been inside my body.
“I remember,” I say. A neutral tone is second nature to me, a by-product of growing up the princess of an Anglo-American banking empire. And even if it weren’t second nature, I would be a fool not to be careful right now. Not to see that the board is set and Mark is ready to move the first piece. He’s been ready since we met, I think, ready for four years.
Four years.
Can it have really been that long? Four years of his ring on my finger, three years since he made me bleed while I panted and begged for it.
Three years since the morning when I made someone else bleed their life out onto the sun-baked Roman cobblestones…a loss of innocence that cut much, much deeper than the loss of my virginity.
It feels like it’s been a lifetime. It feels like it’s been no time at all.
At any rate, I have to be mindful what I show him now that we’re together. I have to make him believe that I am reluctantly besotted. I have to show him the submissive wife he craves.
Stolen victories don’t come from playing fair, after all.
With that in mind, I turn to face him fully, having to press my back against the railing in order to look up at his face. He keeps his hand planted where it is, not stepping back to give me room.
My immediate thought is that he’s not playing fair either, looking like he does. His dark-blond hair is swept away from his suntanned face, exposing a high forehead and the harsh curves of his cheekbones. His jaw, even relaxed like it is now, is strong and graven, with the first hint of a five-o’clock shadow coming through. His eyes are the sky just after dusk, just before dawn. Dark but undeniably blue.
Elemental.
He looks every bit of his thirty-six years, a man fully in his prime, and for a moment, I feel the full fourteen years between our ages. I feel it like a thrill, a jolt, a challenge.
Which is nonsense. He has had so much longer than me to become dangerous, and that should only make me wary. Not…excited.
“I remember,” I repeat, and this time I let the memory seep into my words. For a year and a half while I’d been in college, he’d trained me. Not in submission, but in the pretense of submission. Our marriage had been arranged from the start, a transaction between him and my family, but it was crucial that it still appeared real, and that appearance hinged on my playacting as Mark’s submissive.
Except pretending is a blurry thing when it comes to kink. There are some things that must be done, must be ceded.
And I am willing to cede a lot to get what I’m here for.
Mark studies me. He has a way of looking that feels like I’m being pinned in place, an insect to a board, but I let him pin me. I let him look. He won’t believe that I’m easily won, so I let him see my skepticism warring with my desire. I let him see a young woman determined to play a part even as she’s slowly seduced by it.
And if it is almost too easy for me to pretend, if it’s too easy to call up the memory of his hands on me, of how I felt on his yacht wearing the clothes he’d picked out for me, I don’t think about it. Genuinely craving him and the things he will do to me will make me better at playing the game. And I can play without losing myself.
Mark finally nods, as if he saw what he expected.
“How is your shoulder?” I ask. He hadn’t been able to fetch me from Ireland as planned because he’d been stabbed in his own club right before, and the wound had struggled to heal. He doesn’t move like an injured man, though. The last three weeks must have done the wound some good.
He lifts a hand to it, like he’d almost forgotten. “Much better. Just another scar to add to the collection, if a memorable one.”
And then he says after a moment, “Now that you’re here, we will have to resume. But it’s been some time since we entered into our arrangement. We should discuss our new rules. Your new limits.”
I hadn’t ever wanted to stop, and here he is talking about resuming, as if I’d been the one to cry off. He’d been the one to end things years ago, to wedge his fingers inside me and give me an earth-shattering orgasm only to leave before daybreak, having gotten what he came for. My virginity, the warranty my father demanded to make sure I wouldn’t back out of the engagement.
But in those hours between Mark pushing his hand up my skirt and the break of morning, I’d believed—or hoped?—
It doesn’t matter now. He’d been using me. And now I’ll use him.
“I know we’ll need to resume,” I reply. “But my rules are the same. My limits are the same. Have yours changed?”
There is one long blink, dark-gold lashes sweeping to his cheeks and then back up again, and I realize that I’ve surprised him.
“Your limits have not changed,” he says. His voice is as expressionless as his face, and it’s filled with nothing but the cool huskiness that troubles my dreams, but I sense disbelief there nonetheless. “So you are still comfortable with, to use a likely example, being restrained by me?”
I lift my chin. “Yes. If the situation calls for it.”
“Punished by me?”
Heat seeps down my spine and pools in the cradle of my hips. I remind myself to be reluctantly besotted. “For the sake of selling our marriage? Yes.”
“Fucked by me?”
Between my legs, my clit pulses. Just a few days ago, it was against another man’s mouth. “Yes,” I whisper, and I’m not pretending anything right now.
Mark is closer now, his eyes hooded as he looks down at me. We’re still not touching. We wouldn’t be, when selling the appearance of our marriage was always about just that—the appearance. Yes, he might tie me up, mark my flesh, fill my mouth and holes with whatever he wants, including himself, but only while we are around other people. There’s no clause for what will happen between us in private; no provision for when it’s just the two of us. If I want him to trust me, I’ll have to breach that wall. Like we breached it three years ago on my father’s desk.
The thought makes my skin prickle and my belly swim. Half lust, half miserable nerves. There’s no room for me to fuck this up.
And despite what happened on the yacht on the way to Manhattan, there’s no room for me to feel anything for Tristan Thomas, Mark’s bodyguard, either.
“And your safeword is still hyssop?” Mark asks.
“Yes.”
“Use it for anything, even when we’re not performing for the people around us. Even when we’re alone. You understand?”
Yes, siris on the tip of my tongue, without me having to remember that he’d like to hear it, without me remembering that it’s only supposed to be a line for my part.
Oh God, this is so dangerous.
I force myself to nod instead. And for a moment, we stay just like this, with him so, so close and our eyes burning against each other’s.
With a flare of his nostrils, Mark lets go of the railing and takes a step back. He turns away, walks over to the leather-upholstered table in the center of the loft.
The table is meant for bondage, punishment. Sex. There’s a hole in the middle that Mark once told me allowed a cock through. I wonder if Tristan was ever on it, if his erection had ever bobbed dark and needy through that very hole.
I don’t have to wonder if Tristan would have loved it, though. He would have because I would have loved it, because we are both sick with the same disease.
“So no new rules of your own,” I say to his suited back as I cut away every feeling about Tristan that’s still rooting and blooming inside my chest. Mark cannot know about Tristan and me and what’s happened since we set sail from Ireland.
Above all, Mark cannotknow.
Maybe later, maybe after the marriage. Maybe there will be a time when I can explain that I spent half the trip to New York spreading my legs for his bodyguard. That for some reason I can’t explain even now, I left the door between my room and Tristan’s unlocked. That I’ve spent the last three nights wishing I could scratch my own eyes out for the tears they’ve cried, all because I begged Tristan not to quit his job, to stay at Lyonesse for me, and Tristan’s price was a high one. But—perhaps a wise one. He knew severing ties and ending things before we got to Manhattan was the safest choice, at least if we wanted to hide what happened on the yacht from my future husband.
As it is, I’m still concerned we won’t be able to hide the truth. Mark isn’t stupid, and it used to be his job to slice the truth out of much more treacherous people than Tristan Thomas.
I’ve become plenty treacherous over the years, unfortunately.
Mark turns, but only partway. His fingers run over the top of the leather table, and I remember how it felt to be cuffed to that table, his finger trailing down my naked stomach and circling my navel.
“No,” he finally says. “No new rules. The same one remains.”
I know which one he means. “I remember,” I say. “After the wedding, there can be no perceived wedge between us. Total fidelity.”
“Yes, my bride,” he says, and then faces me. The sunlight pouring in through the double-story windows catches the gold in his hair, on his eyelashes. He is gilded against the metal and leather and wickedness behind him. “After the wedding, I’ll be as faithful to you as you are to me.”