Chapter 8
Mark escortsthe planner out of the boutique, offering to drop her by her next appointment on the way to his, and as he guides her out of the door, he sends me a look. I’m to mind the directions he’s just given me, it says.
I could almost be wounded. When have I ever refused him? Only once, when I ended things between us. In everything else, including fetching his bride to him, I have been the picture of obedience.
The tailors have disappeared back into the fitting area to help Isolde out of her gown, and it’s only after they return and tell me that she’s dressed again that I step back into the fitting area with the bottle of water I’m supposed to give her.
She’s standing in front of a mirror, her eyes glassy and her lips swollen. I can see a smear of pink lipstick at the corner of her mouth and her shaking hands as she’s struggling with a button on her blouse.
I don’t think as I close the door and set the bottle down. As I come between her and the mirror and replace her hands with my own.
“Are you okay?” I ask quietly. With a knife she is vicious, and in her armor of expensive clothes and even more expensive manners, she’s untouchable. But I’ve seen the way her shoulders curl when she thinks she’s alone; I’ve heard the misery in her voice when she’s spoken of this marriage and her future husband.
Like me, she is broken for him. And I don’t trust him not to break her even more.
“We had to,” she says. Her voice is dazed, and so are her eyes when they meet mine. “The planner, she was watching Mark and me.”
“I saw her.” I’d been standing by the door, hoping the storm of feelings in my chest didn’t show on my face. Hoping that if anyone looked at me, they’d see an expressionless bodyguard and not someone in love with both people inside that room.
I’d almost been more jealous of the wedding planner than the bride and bridegroom because at least she’d been able to see what was happening inside.
“We had to,” Isolde says again, closing her eyes. Her shoulders are lifting with fast, heavy breaths, and when she opens her eyes, I am reminded of a soldier after a battle, nervy and burning with an inner fire that will take hours to douse.
“I know,” I tell her reassuringly, even though I don’t know, not really. I don’t know what they did. I don’t know if Isolde loved it or hated it. All I know is that her lipstick is smeared and she’s breathing like she’s just run a race.
I cup her shoulders, meaning to comfort her, meaning to comfort myself. She belongs to Mark, but I can still see her. I can still touch her…innocently.
She shivers as I hold her shoulders, and her cheeks are red, and when I drop my eyes, I see her nipples pressed against the silk of her blouse. Her thighs rubbing together under her skirt.
It’s like someone yanking back a curtain. I’m not looking at shock at all—I’m looking at lust. Abject, miserable lust.
“What did you do?” My words are filled with hunger and jealousy both, but they might as well have been layered with promises of undying love because I’m rewarded with a beautifully vulnerable look.
“I sucked his cock,” she tells me. I can hear a new huskiness in her voice, the proof of how Mark used her throat. “He had me stick out my tongue to show him his cum before he told me to swallow it down.”
A punched noise leaves my throat. Fuck, how I remember sucking him, tasting him. His hands on either side of my face as he pleased himself.
I know very well what she’s feeling, that intoxicating cocktail of humiliation and arousal, and I also know very well what he felt with her soft, hot mouth because I’d felt it plenty on the yacht. There’s a deep and heavy ache in my balls as I recall it.
“He had to leave before—” She presses her eyes closed. “I guess I don’t know if he would have done more even if he could have stayed. It was all a show, all for the planner. She’s reporting back to Drobny, I guess.”
The businessman with Carpathian ties who tried to have Mark killed. The name alone sends adrenaline washing through my blood. And for the planner to be working with him? Goran told me yesterday that the man outside Mark’s penthouse hadn’t pulled any matches from U.S. law enforcement databases and that a friend was working on the international ones next—but if he ends up being tied to Drobny, too, it’s hard not to feel like the shadows are creeping closer to our feet.
Why hadn’t Mark told me about the planner at least? Unless he’d just discovered the truth and come straight here to send a message—a very Mark kind of message.
This is when I should let Isolde go. When I should hand her the water I was sent in to hand her and then bundle her into a car to leave. This is when I have to remember everything I’ve told myself and that we’ve told each other.
We can’t be together. We can’t risk Mark finding out. Hell, we can’t risk even this wedding planner finding out.
We can’t we can’t we can’t.
And she’s still trembling in front of me, neck flushed, thighs pressed together, miserable with unmet need.
Battles hinge on moments just like this, the moments when you feel yourself approaching a choice that can’t be unchosen, the dizzying stretch of a single second into profound awareness that you are about to act.
But I cannot do otherwise. The reasons why I should hand her the water and step away are fading fast, and whatever happens after this moment doesn’t matter. There’s only now, and there’s only her.
I slide my hands to her elbows. To her waist. She is lithe muscle and high-end fabric; she is all shivers.
“Let me help,” I hear myself say.
Her eyes open but remain hooded, and agitation marks a line between her brows.
“We can’t,” she says, but her gaze flicks to my mouth and to my throat. Down to where my hands are slowly moving from her waist to her thighs. I slide my hands back up to her hips, dragging her knee-length skirt up with them.
“Just this once,” I whisper. “We’ve been so good. And you need it.”
Her lashes are so low now, and her lip is caught between her teeth. I can see her warring with her self-control.
“We’ll be fast,” I say. “We’ll be quiet. No one will know.”
What am I doing? Why can’t I stop myself?
She looks like she’s been drugged. Her cheeks flushed, her pupils dilated. The swollen part of her lips.
“Just this once,” she echoes faintly, and that’s all I need. I drop to my knees in front of her, holding her skirt up with one hand and working her thong down to her ankles with the other. My stomach drops when I realize she’s wearing seamed stockings, the kind that hold themselves up without garters, and?—
“My God.” I groan as I behold her cunt. The golden curls I’d once kissed and petted are gone, leaving only sleek, naked skin behind, and I can see everything. The rigid pink pearl of her clit, the glimpse of more pink between her legs. And slick arousal all over her.
She flushes. “At Lyonesse, so many of the people I saw were waxed, so I thought…”
I cup her with one hand, and she’s so soft and wet and hot. My thighs are tight; my testicles are pulled hard to my body, aching, aching.
“Mark will love it,” I say hoarsely.
“How do you know?”
“Because I love it.” I lean in and kiss the swell of her pubic bone and then her clit itself. I don’t know how Mark could have left her like this, so slippery and inflamed. It was cruel of him, but then again, when isn’t he cruel?
I moan when I get my first good taste of her. Honey and salt and heaven, and I find her hips with my hands to pull her tight to my mouth, to angle her more, her skirt falling over me until she grabs it and holds it up, her head falling back.
“Fuck,” she whispers, and that word in her rich-girl voice is almost as delicious as her pussy. I’m licking along her petals and into the tight secret they keep inside, and she parts her thighs to ride my mouth.
To think I’d never done this until the yacht, that I hadn’t known until I was twenty-nine the scent and taste and silk of this—but then, of course, I hadn’t met Isolde until then. Perhaps no other cunt is like this; maybe I’m ruined forever.
The sickness inside me, the blossomed obsession, doesn’t mind.
She’s grinding her clit against my tongue, fast and hard, fucking my mouth almost like Mark would, and then I seek out the little bundle and suck. She gasps, hunching over me, still trying to fuck, and my chin is wet and my erection is pushing against my suit trousers. In the middle of it all, our eyes meet.
The world falls away, it’s gone, it’s gone. The planner and Drobny—gone. The wedding gown hanging somewhere nearby, her engagement ring—gone. There is only us, only my open mouth and her wet hole and the slick noises of her using me like she has a right to me. Like a medieval lady using one of her knights while her lord husband is away.
I find a stocking-clad thigh and search out the nerve buried under the muscle—a small push will give her the flare of pain I know she’s secretly craving. Her hips buck the minute I press my thumb into her flesh, her ensuing exhale broken and stuttering, and then I feel the sex-tight muscles shudder and give way. I shove my fingers inside her as I keep my mouth on her clit and give a broken breath of my own when I feel her channel flutter and squeeze around them.
God, if only it were my cock, my bare cock, and I could fill her up until I was dripping right back out of her…
Her body shudders wetly and then, eventually, relaxes around my fingers.
We are still for a moment, and then I withdraw my hand, suck my fingers clean, and pull her thong back up around her hips. She trembles a little as I settle the fabric between her legs and lightly sand my fingertips over where it rests on her hips, her sides jerking a little. She’s ticklish after she comes sometimes.
I muster the strength to stand, to step back as she reaches for me, for the stiff rod beneath my clothes. “We can’t,” I say, even though my entire body is in tumult. “We’ve been in here too long as it is.”
Her chest is flushed under her blouse, and her pulse is still hectic, but I see more of the Isolde I know in her face now, like she’s coming back to herself, to the bladed elegance that normally edges her demeanor.
“You’re right,” she admits in a murmur. She looks away and takes a breath—not deep but controlled. Steadying. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
It is the truth, and still it hurts. Almost as much as it hurts knowing that she doesn’t love me. But Mark doesn’t love me either, I guess, so I should be used to it.
She smooths her hair and her clothes, and I scrub at my face with the back of my tie before buttoning my suit jacket again.
When I hand her the bottle of water and tell her to drink it, she hesitates. Even though she’s clawed back something of her composure now that she’s come, there’s something troubled in the set of her jaw, in the unconscious lift of her eyebrow.
After a moment, I ask, “Is everything okay?”
“I suppose it should be,” she answers. Her voice is pitched low, so it’s hard to tell, but I think I hear uncertainty laced through her words. “Tristan…was Mark married before? Someone named Eliot, maybe?”
I stare at her. Of all the random things she could say…but then again, haven’t I wondered this exact thing? Haven’t I also wanted some kind of insight into the dark fog of Mark’s past?
“Well,” I start slowly, “Sedge said no when I asked, but Mark keeps two rings in his bedside table, and they look…they look like wedding rings. And at Morois House?—”
“Morois House?”
“A family place in Cornwall, buried in the woods. He goes there every year, and there’s a picture of a man who looks like he’s wearing the same watch that Mark wears now.”
Isolde’s forehead creases faintly. “But he’s never spoken of this Eliot to you?”
I shake my head. “Everything I’ve found has been by accident.” Or snooping. “Has he spoken of it to you?”
“No. I overheard him talking to Melody at the engagement party. I think Eliot died. A while ago.” She unscrews the water bottle, staring at the floor. “But why wouldn’t Sedge know? Why wouldn’t there be records of the marriage?”
“I think it was a long time ago. And if you’re worried that it will change anything about your and Mark’s arrangement, I don’t think it will.”
She finally drinks the water, and I shamelessly watch her throat, the working muscles there. That’s what Mark saw when she swallowed down his cum.
When she finishes, her expression is back to its mannered coolness. “No, you’re right. Even if he was married, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens next.” A pause. “Do you think Sedge has stayed quiet about the yacht?”
“I do.” Although I don’t know why. I don’t think Sedge likes Isolde or me. “I think he loves Mark. I don’t think he’d want to hurt him.”
Isolde’s face gives nothing away when she speaks next. “Loving and hurting are the same thing. If Sedge doesn’t know that, then he doesn’t know Mark at all.”