Chapter 1 Daisy #3
"Perfect. Taking me so well. My brilliant, furious wife, clenching around my cock like she's grading the performance review."
"You're… passing—"
"I want honors. Distinction. A plaque." He grinds deep and circles his thumb over my clit again, ruthless in the gentlest way. "Come on my cock, Daisy. Make a mess of the CEO. Make a mess of the man who forgot how to say the easy things and never forgot how to beg for this."
"Adam—"
"Say my name dirtier. I earned the vowels."
The orgasm hits like a dropped stack of hardcovers: sudden, heavy, inevitable. I cry out into his shoulder. He fucks me through it, unhurried now, starving underneath the control, whispering wrecked praise against my temple until the aftershocks make me twitch and clutch at his back.
"Again," he says, almost pleading. "One more. I can feel you fluttering. You're not done. Don't you dare be done."
"Adam… I can't—"
"You can. You're the woman who livestreams to thousands of people and still has room to argue with me about forks. You can come twice on a rug while I hold you."
"That's… a weird sentence—"
"I'm a weird man. Hold still."
His mouth finds my breast; his hips snap sharper.
The second climax is meaner, brighter, dragging a broken sound out of my throat that would scandalize my own book club and probably get me demonetized.
He follows with a groan that sounds like surrender, burying himself deep as he comes, arms locked around my back like the floor might disappear if he loosens his grip.
We stay like that, breathing, surrounded by stories braver than us.
Sweat cools on my skin. His heartbeat thuds against my cheek, steady, the only predictable thing about him.
He deals with the condom before drawing me close again.
Somewhere, a fairy light flickers. Somewhere, Victor Smith is probably leaving another voicemail.
Here, there is only rug and shelves and the wet slide of him easing out of me carefully so he doesn't jostle the paperback he rescued.
I stroke the damp hair at his nape. The words rise the way they always do after he ruins me carefully and incompletely, after he shows up in a doorway and still can't say the three syllables I keep handing him for free.
"I love you," I whisper.
He doesn't say it back. He never does. But his arms tighten around me, and his lips press against my hair, and for a few minutes I let myself believe that's enough.
Later, we lie tangled on the reading room floor. I'm wearing his dress shirt, which swamps me ridiculously. He's in his undershirt and suit pants, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling like it holds answers to questions he hasn't asked yet.
"Tell me about the book club," he says.
"What about it?"
"Tonight. The livestream. What were you discussing?"
I prop myself up on his chest, surprised. He used to listen when I read to him. Somewhere along the way, he stopped sitting in this room with me, stopped asking about the books I love or why I love them.
"Second-chance romance," I say. "A couple who broke up, found each other again, had to figure out if they could trust each other with a second shot."
"And could they?"
"In the book? Yes. Eventually. After a lot of groveling."
"The groveling again," he says. I fight a smile and lose.
"It's important. You can't just hurt someone and then expect everything to be fine. You have to show you've changed. Prove it, over and over, until they believe you."
He's quiet for a moment. "Is that what I need to do? Grovel?"
"Do you think you've hurt me?"
His gaze meets mine. Dark, serious, searching. "I don't know. Have I?"
The honest answer is yes. Every absence, every silence, every time he chooses work over us. They accumulate. They build into a wall I can feel growing between us, brick by brick, until some days I can barely see him on the other side. But we're here now. In my reading room. Together.
"Sometimes," I say. "You disappear, and I don't know where you've gone. Not physically. Mentally. Emotionally. You retreat into something I can't reach, and I'm left out here wondering if any of this is real to you."
"It's real."
"Is it? Because sometimes it feels like I'm just a convenient solution to a problem you had five years ago. Klaus and the signing and your father's expectations. Once that was done, you didn't need me anymore."
"That's not—" He sits up abruptly, dislodging me. I catch myself on my elbows, watching him struggle. "That's not true."
"Then prove it. Talk to me. Stay."
"I'm here now."
"For how long?"
His phone lights up on the rug beside us. The screen glows in the dim room, and I see the name before he can hide it. VICTOR SMITH. The moment shatters. I feel it break apart, all the tentative closeness we'd built scattering like the paperbacks we knocked off the shelf.
"You should answer that," I say.
"Daisy—"
"It's fine." I pull his shirt tighter around myself, suddenly cold. "It's always fine. Go. Take the call. I'll clean up in here."
He looks at the phone. At me. At the phone again.
The ringing continues.