Page 24 of Honey Cut
“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.”
nine
TRISTAN
With Goranand Nat in watchful tow, Isolde decides to spend the night with Bryn, ostensibly for wedding planning reasons, but I think it’s to avoid Mark. And me.
And I can’t blame her. We fucked up today, and I’m wrestling with myself all evening, shy of Mark, shy of myself, wishing I were a worse man or a better liar. Sitting at the dinner table with him and knowing that Isolde’s scent is all over my face is agony.
I half wish hewouldfind out, though. And not even to relieve me of my misery, but so that he would punish me. So that he’d lick Isolde off my face and then use me so brutally that I could forget about everything that wasn’t him.
“Warm, Tristan?” Mark inquires after we finish eating, his eyes on me. “Your cheeks are flushed.”
“Yes,” I reply. I duck my face a little, knowing that I’m terrible at lying. “Just hot is all.”
“You should take off your jacket then.”
“Right. Yes.” I’m at his penthouse at his dinner table, and there’s no one else here. It’s not unprofessional. And yet as I stand up and slip it off, I feel the furthest thing from professional. Maybe it’s the way he’s watching me, glittering eyes and a lazy hand around his gin, the same way he’d watch someone get fisted on stage at Lyonesse.
“I should hang this up,” I say pointlessly, even though what I’m really doing is trying to escape. Those eyes, that mouth. My own body, which has been aching since I went down on Isolde this afternoon.
“Of course. You wouldn’t want it to wrinkle.” Mark’s tone is grave, like he’s sincerely agreeing with me, but I still feel teased somehow. My cheeks are burning the entire time I go to my room to hang up my jacket.
When I emerge back into the main area of the penthouse, Mark is no longer at the table but in the kitchen. Water is running and dishes are clanking, and I pause at the vast kitchen island to watch him. His sleeves are rolled up, exposing the black lines of the tattoo on his forearm, and his hair has fallen free of whatever he uses to keep it styled away from his face. A few loose locks hang over his forehead now, gold and platinum, setting off the high forehead and once-broken nose. The muscles of his shoulders and arms strain the shirt as he works, and from this angle, I don’t deny myself the view of his body tapering into a trim waist and then into narrow hips. Into the hard curves of his ass, with its slight hollows at each side.
Even washing dishes, his body oozes power. Supple power that I’ve felt plowing itself inside me, sinking its teeth into me. Demanding capitulation and sacrifice.
“See something you like, Tristan?” Mark asks without turning around.
Shit. One of these days I’ll get used to these preternatural abilities of his, the way he always seems to know where I’m at and what I’m thinking.
Do those preternatural abilities extend to the yacht? Or this afternoon?I’m still certain Sedge hasn’t told Mark about what he saw, and I’m certain that Isolde and I were quick enough today that no one at the boutique thought twice about it. But what if I’m wrong? It would be like Mark to hold that kind of knowledge close, to carry it in his pocket the way a soldier might carry an extra magazine for emergencies.
“I see my boss,” I say to inject some distance between us. “I see Isolde’s groom.”
Something ripples through him then, briefly. He shuts off the water, turns to face me as he grabs a towel. He dries his hands as his eyes rake over my face, his expression inscrutable. Then he tosses the towel onto the counter and walks toward me.
Danger, breathes some animal part of my mind.Predator. Death.
But the rest of me, the parts that signed up for danger—the parts that even sometimes wished for death—feel nothing but thrill as he comes around the kitchen island to stand in front of me.
“Do you know what I see when I look at you?” he murmurs. Even in a murmur, his voice is cold. Like having ice sliding over the valves of my heart.
I lift my chin, scraping together something resembling defiance. He doesn’t get to be handsome and cold and murmur-y with me. Not anymore. He lied about being engaged, and he’s about to be married, and my heart is no longer his.
No longeronlyhis, at least.
“I see someone suffering for no good reason,” Mark says. His voice is still low, and he’s close enough now that the toe of his shoe is between my own. “I see someone too stubborn to ask for what’s right in front of him.”
He wouldn’t say that if he knew that I could still taste Isolde on my lips. But at the same time…
