Chapter Eight #2
She passed the paper back to the middle of the table.
Made him stand up, and walk over to the center of the table, where she watched him closely, every line in his body, the way that the suit fitted him.
He slid the paper back with him, back to his seat at the table.
He read what she had written and looked up at her. “You want me to beg?”
She nodded. “Yes. I will require begging. For what you want.”
His lips curved into a smile. “And praise.”
“Seems fitting.”
“I thought so. That is of course, if we decide to pursue a sexual relationship inside marriage.”
“Yes,” he said. “Inside marriage. That is precisely what the paperwork covers.”
That hung heavily between them.
After they got married, if they were to touch each other then the agreement changed. Then it became all of these paragraphs, all of these amendments. Punishment and begging.
But if they didn’t touch each other then they were free to pursue other parties.
But all of that was only when they were married. It wasn’t now.
Crucially. It wasn’t now.
He stood up, and began to walk toward her, loosening his tie as he did so, and then, shocking her entirely, he began to slowly lower himself to his knees in front of her. He put his hands on her thighs, and began to push her skirt up her hips.
Electricity struck her, like a wave. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might sit. Except…
She was hot. Dizzy. Desperate.
“Is this what you had in mind?”
She had on thigh-high pantyhose—because she couldn’t stand full-on types; it wasn’t because she was trying to be sexy—but he lowered his head and licked the place where the lace met her skin.
She gripped the edge of her chair, watching her stepbrother’s face as his tongue glided over her skin.
She gasped when he reached up, gripped her panties and pulled them to the side, exposing her as he pressed her legs wider, and dragged his tongue through her slick folds.
The light shone bright through that window, and she felt scalded by it.
So connected to what was happening. To the fact that it was him between her legs. This was happening again.
But it was okay. Because they had paperwork, but they hadn’t signed it yet. It was okay, because it was paperwork meant for after they got married, and they weren’t married yet.
Later. Later they could practice keeping their hands off of each other. Later, they would focus entirely on their child. Later.
But right now she was desperate for him.
Right now, he was pleasuring her with such intensity that she didn’t think she would ever recover from it.
He sucked her deep into his mouth as he pushed two fingers inside of her and brought her closer and closer to the edge.
It was happening so embarrassingly fast. She couldn’t have resisted him if she wanted to.
It was like it was inevitable. When the wave crashed over her, she cried out his name.
And when he looked up at her, there was a satisfied smile on his face. “There was one.”
Then he lifted her up out of the chair, brought her down on the boardroom table.
Funny that it was the second time she had had sex, and also the second time on a table.
Well, maybe there would be something funny about it later.
Right now, she was just desperate. Tearing at his clothes and trying to get his skin underneath her hands.
She tore his tie off, tore his shirt open and pressed her palms against his ridged abdomen.
He was unbuckling his pants, as quickly as possible, freeing himself and thrusting deep inside of her as he unbuttoned her shirt so that he could palm her breasts.
It was completely savage and lacking in finesse. It was wild and hard. It was wonderful.
She cried out his name right before he lost control, and the two of them went over the cliff together.
His forehead was pressed against hers. “There. You had two to my one. I’m already practicing keeping your commandments.”
She couldn’t believe it happened again. Except of course it had. If they could think about it, they wouldn’t be in this place. If they could control themselves, they wouldn’t have been here to begin with.
Now that they had acknowledged it, now that they’d done the paperwork, it seemed like there was no more restraint left.
She looked at the paperwork sitting there at his end of the table. They would sign that, and she had a feeling there was almost no point pretending that it wouldn’t end up here again. But those amendments wouldn’t matter. But maybe they…
Maybe she could find someone else. Maybe this was just the discovery of sex. As she lay there on the glossy boardroom table, with that place between her legs still throbbing, it felt entirely disingenuous. But she wanted to hope that it was possible. Wanted to believe that it could be true.
But then the obverse would also be true. He would have other women.
And just the thought of that made her feel violent.
“You look angry. Which is not unusual when you are around me, but it is unusual for a woman I’ve just thoroughly ravished.”
“I’m just thinking about logistics,” she said, getting up off the table and putting herself back in order as he did the same.
“Then I didn’t do my job correctly.”
“You did just fine. It’s only that we find ourselves in an extraordinary situation.”
“Is there any chance you’ll ever speak to me like I’m a human being?”
The question, asked with such gravity and sincerity, shocked her. She met his gaze. “I…didn’t think you wanted that.”
“It isn’t a matter of wanting—it seems that it would be a better way for us to be.”
“We have a zero percent success rate not shagging each other’s brains out when a table is near recently, and I’m not really sure what to do with that. So being human or not human is sort of the least of my worries right now.”
“Understandable.”
She had the sudden, disorienting thought that they had done absolutely everything backward.
She hated him, down to the very marrow of her bones, but it didn’t even come from a deeply realized place.
She had sex with him, but she didn’t really know him.
They had negotiated this entire marriage on paper.
She understood why they needed it. She had even been part of insisting on it.
But they had always had something between them.
Whether it was the baggage of what had happened in his parents’ marriage, or the reality of their relationship because of their parents’ marriage.
Now the baby. She didn’t know what it was like if they were just Heather and Romeo. She had no idea at all.
He looked…not softer now, but perhaps a little bit more human. His hair was a mess now, his tie loose…
“When I called you, you hadn’t just had sex with another woman, had you?”
“Excuse me.”
“Did you? Because you looked a lot like this.”
“I haven’t touched anyone since you and I were together. How could you think that I would?”
“I don’t know you. And even more crucially, I have no reason to believe that what happened between us meant anything to you.”
He moved over to the boardroom table again, and rested his knuckles on the top of it.
He looked down at the surface of the table.
And then up at her. “What happened between us was more than ten years in the making. What happened between us stole my ability to think critically. And I am not a man who— Of course you don’t even know that.
Because you think of me as someone who is driven by emotion, because when I’m around you it is nothing but sparks and anger, but that is not how I am in my life. ”
Well, that didn’t fit her narrative and she didn’t like it at all.
“How would I ever know that?” she sputtered.
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “You would never know. Just as I know nothing of you other than your petulance, your vindictiveness. Your…softness when you are naked. The way that you taste.”
It made her want to kiss him. There had been no kissing this time. Funny how they fell upon each other with such ferocity, but didn’t engage in any of the tenderness. Or perhaps not funny at all.
She moved to the end of the table, and grabbed hold of the nearest pen, signing the paperwork with a flourish. “This agreement suits me. I will honor it. Down to every last detail.”
“I sense a caveat in there.”
“I think that we need to get to know each other. I think that we should practice abstinence while we…get to know one another.”
“Excellent. I propose we get to know one another after we announce the engagement.”
With that, he walked back to his briefcase, and took out a ring box. He held his hand out, and she went and took it from him. She opened the box slowly, and examined the ring inside. “It was your mother’s,” he said.
The realization of that hit her square in the chest. “My mother’s.”
Of course she hadn’t had it all this time, because Giuseppe had kept it. She hadn’t even thought of it in the aftermath of his death. “Will you wear it?”
It felt like such a double-edged sword coming from him, because he had never warmed to her mother, and had never accepted the relationship between her and his father. And yet for her it held great significant meaning. For her, it mattered.
She took the ring out of the box and slipped it on. “Thank you,” she said.
She decided that she was going to take it the way that it had meaning for her, rather than the way it had meeting for him.
He was silent for a moment. “Your mother was very kind to me,” he said. “Almost unfailingly. When I was not kind in return.”
There was something so heavy about the admission. An olive branch that she hadn’t seen coming.
“She thought you were a very brilliant mind.”
She had been kind to Romeo, but she had concerns about his strained relationship with Heather. But he was Giuseppe’s son, and even if he was difficult, her mom had felt affection for him because she loved Giuseppe so much.