Chapter 11 #2
It had to be. He’d clearly seen my chains from the comments he’d already made, and there was no doubt when he and his staff undressed me, they’d all seen the kind of intimates I’d been wearing.
None of that was particularly incriminating on its own, but together, it painted a pretty clear picture on what I liked to do in my free time behind closed doors.
Dressing pretty for not just a partner but myself, too.
“What would I be digging at, Bishop?”
Running my tongue along the back of my teeth, I held another comment back and simply said. “Terran.”
His eyes snapped to mine, freezing as he hovered over me.
Déjà vu hit like a train, the almost uncanny parallel to us in the hospital throwing me for a second. The only difference was that here, we had no one to break us apart if things pulled into that same tension-filled position.
Not unless Amelia suddenly stomped through the door, demanding to know why there was a hundred thousand dollar car sitting in our driveway.
Swallowing, I said, “You’re making fun of me.”
Without having him this up close, I never would’ve noticed the way his eyes narrowed slightly, just enough for the muscles under them to twitch from the motion. His pupils were pinholes, glaring into mine with enough intensity to steal the breath from my lungs.
“What would I be making fun of exactly?”
“You know what,” I muttered, my voice gruff.
What would happen if I reached out to touch him?
Ran my hand along his cheek to see if his skin was as smooth as it looked this up close?
Would he slap my hand away before shoving back and disappearing out the door to my room as quickly as he’d come, or would he lean into it, curious to see where things went?
My heart was latched on to the latter like a fool, sick with desire for a man I hardly knew but for some reason continued to pull me in despite his terse attitude.
What was it about a personality that clashed with mine that I found so attractive?
Maybe the small glimpses of who he was past it were what was making me cling onto this attachment, hoping for another hit that I was sure to ride on until I saw him again.
My lips parted in surprise the second he pushed back my shirt to cup his long fingers against my waist.
“This, you mean.” He squeezed. “What I took.”
“What you threw away,” I countered.
At this point, the sting of losing my chains had long since passed, shifting toward acceptance and moving on. There would be a time where I could buy another set, maybe even two as a fucking backup.
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
My heart stuttered.
Did he even know what that meant?
Gifting that kind of jewelry to someone was practically a declaration of love, or at the very least interest.
“As an apology for breaking the first one,” he amended.
Holy… fuck.
My mouth had no way to form a single sentence to reply to that.
All I could do was swallow tightly and nod, having no idea how serious he was being, given how little his expression moved.
Outside of his pupils slowly dilating, Silas was as calm as ever—calculated in the way his hand shifted from my hip and then plunged down to the hem of my pants.
“A matching set, perhaps.” He was speaking slowly, deliberately matching how measured his fingers were in working the button at the front of my jeans apart.
I was rapidly growing hard, had been the second he’d helped me out of the car, with no way to brush it off as anything outside of being turned on with us being so close together like this.
He grabbed one half of my jeans and yanked on them, splitting the zipper down to reveal what I had on underneath it.
Today, I’d gone with something silky—a dark green that complimented my olive skin tone. There was a small, diamond-like gem that dangled from the pantyline, stitched there with a thin amount of thread that made it able to move around with a subtle shift of my hips.
He pulled in a sharp breath through his nose, sitting back on his leg as he took his hands off me. Just the barest hint of my panties were peeking out from my jeans, but it was enough to know they weren’t some kind of fancy style boxer briefs that were worn by half of the male population.
There was no mistaking the feminine flare to what I wore.
His expression switched in a dizzying array of emotions—surprise, confusion, and then finally settling on the half-hooded look of lust.
At least, that’s what I hoped it was. He was so damn hard to read.
My heart hammered hard in my chest, my words feeling thick in my mouth.
“Like what you see?”
Instead of answering me right away, Silas hooked two fingers each on the sides of my jeans and ripped them down my thighs, completely freeing me and my hard on from the confines of the stiff material.
My thighs fell apart instantly, parting enough to let him get a good view of me in the hiphuggers I wore, the back of them riding up just enough from the motion of him stripping me to reveal a slight sliver of my left cheek if I leaned farther on my side.
He cursed softly under his breath, one hand coming up to ghost along the inside of my thigh. “You like these things?”
Disgust?
Acceptance?
I was desperate to know what was going on in his head. “You want to take a look in my top drawer and find out?”
His eyes snapped to mine again, nostrils flaring slightly with every controlled breath coming in and out of him. He seemed consumed with something, fighting against its magnetic intensity that was drawing me in the longer we sat here in silence.
Everything was amplified, coiled like a spring ready to pop the moment one of us moved and broke the tension.
Who would be the first one?
The first to shatter the spell of whatever this was?
“Or maybe….” The piercing intensity was almost too hard to focus as I spoke. “You’d like to take a look in my closet.”
His gaze darted over to it immediately.
Without warning, he rose from my bed, steps measured while approaching the twin double doors folded neatly closed. He paused in front of them, lifting his hands to brush along the brass handles, not yet pulling them apart like I thought he would the moment the suggestion left my mouth.
If he thought I wasn’t being serious, he was in for a rude awakening.
My collection had been growing since I’d discovered the beauty of lingerie at the young age of sixteen.
My pieces were carefully chosen and never cheap.
I favored the expensive investments, much like my body jewelry, over something cheap and easy to get from a chain store that charged too much for their quality of products to justify the costs.
Artisans were my favorite to buy from and almost exclusively all I owned. There were a few that weren’t custom, though still just as beautiful.
“Left. In the back,” I instructed.
He grabbed on to both handles and yanked the panels apart, the doors creaking from the motion.
In the front of my closet were my uniforms and street clothes, typical of a man my age that left nothing to be suspicious of upon first glance.
Without needing to tell him, Silas tugged the string light on overhead and shoved his hand between hangers, dragging them along the bar until they were shoved to the side.
He did that once more before pausing again, reaching the long coat I kept in the back to separate my ‘normal’ clothes from everything else.
Pushing that out of the way as well, all that was left were the lingerie sets I kept hung on silk hangers, all of them clipped with enough care not to damage any of the fabric while they waited for their turn out from the recesses of my closet.
There weren’t many occasions I got to whip them out outside of retrying them all on in the wee hours of the morning while the rest of my family was fast asleep.
Coming into this small town, I had yet to check out the gay scene or if there was even one to begin with.
No doubt once I did, I’d be dealing with the closeted fifty-something’s down at the country club, trying to sneak behind their wives backs.
Silas grabbed the first one, fishing it out and holding it up in the light.
Dark navy, a garter and panty set that was mostly silk fabric with lace touches around the edges.
Small crystals were woven along the garter’s straps, a set of stockings I’d found to match them from another artisan were draped over the bar that held the panties clipped with the garter.
It was a nice set, one of my first, actually. It did fantastic with accentuating my thinner waist and fuller thighs. I’d gotten plenty of compliments on it over the years on the rare occasions I actually found myself at one of the gay bars and let myself be taken home.
It would look even better with my waist chains.
“Terran.”
I sat up slowly, fear trickling through the surge of lust flowing through my veins. “Silas.”
In the blink of an eye, he was at the edge of my bed again, tossing the set down next to me and then shoving me back until I was lying down again. I gasped the second he crawled on top of me, trapping me with one hand on my chest and the other wrapping around my throat.
A stab of panic washed over me, cutting through whatever palpable energy I thought was flowing between us that was apparently, so far off from what I originally thought.
His hand was tight around my throat, contrasting completely with the softness of his voice. “Friday. You’re wearing this out to dinner.”
Holy shit.
“J-just this?”
He squeezed, earning himself a soft moan. “Come with something over it so I can enjoy peeling it off you.”
Holy fucking shit.
He was into this.
Silas let go of me then, leaving the set next to me before straightening up and running a few quick strokes along his overcoat to smooth it out. Not a damn hair was out of place on his head, his composure regained in the blink of an eye, unlike me who was left an absolute mess on the bed still.
“Friday,” he said again.
I nodded, ghosting a touch over where he’d held me down.
Oh, I wanted him so damn bad.
Fuck my recovery plan.
“Friday.”
Without another word, he spun on his heel and headed out of my room. I listened for the slam of my back door and the sound of his expensive car roaring to life through the thin walls of my house, grinning the second the vehicle peeled out of my driveway and onto the main road.
He’d asked me on a fucking date.
“Terran!” Amelia’s voice called through the house. “Who the hell was that?”
Oh fuck.
Springing up from my bed, I quickly picked the lingerie set up and shoved it back into my closet before pulling all of my clothes back in place. Amelia’s heavy stomping sent panic racing through my system as I ripped a pair of sweats up from my floor and wrestled them onto my body.
Right as I slipped them over my hips, my entire body tilted to the side, completely shifting off of its axis and dumping me to the ground in a heap.
Amelia appeared in my doorway within seconds, her little mini me giggling loudly from down the hall somewhere.
“What are you doing?” she asked, bewildered.
“Uh, nothing.”
Thankfully, from this angle, I had my raging boner trapped between my legs and not at all visible underneath my gray sweats.
Why the fuck did I choose this color out of the dozen I had?
“Who was that guy?”
Shit.
Silas probably completely blew right past her on the way out, too. What a grand first impression.
“My surgeon. Ran into him at the grocery store. He offered to give me a ride home.”
She blinked a few times. “Oh. Did you pick anything up for dinner?”
Fuck me.
Of course I was too distracted to actually do the one thing I went in that shop to do. “Uh, actually I was thinking we could do takeout. Maybe pizza?”
Her nose wrinkled. “Maybe I’ll just make that spaghetti again.”
Oh my god, if I had to suffer through one more night of watery ketchup-tasting noodles, I might actually keel over before my date on Friday.
Date.
“You had a long day. Let’s just order out. I don’t care about paying the delivery fee.”
She eyed me warily. “All right… but don’t you dare complain to me when they charge you half of the total price.”
“Would never dream of it.”
Swinging back up to my feet carefully, keeping my front half pointed toward the closet, I wrenched both doors shut, locking my—and I guess now Silas’s—secrets behind it.
Amelia could continue to remain ignorant to my tastes and preferences until I was long dead and she was forced to toss all of my shit into a bag for Goodwill.
“Mama!” Ainsley called, her footsteps followed up with a loud crash. “Oops…”
“Oh, boy.” Amelia darted out of my room. “Ainsley Mae! What did you just do!”
Smiling, I followed her out.
I couldn’t wait for Friday.