Page 5 of Honey Cut
With a flare of his nostrils, Mark lets go of the railing and takes a step back. He turns away, walks over to the leather-upholstered table in the center of the loft.
The table is meant for bondage, punishment. Sex. There’s a hole in the middle that Mark once told me allowed a cock through. I wonder if Tristan was ever on it, if his erection had ever bobbed dark and needy through that very hole.
I don’t have to wonder if Tristan would have loved it, though. He would have because I would have loved it, because we are both sick with the same disease.
“So no new rules of your own,” I say to his suited back as I cut away every feeling about Tristan that’s still rooting and blooming inside my chest. Mark cannot know about Tristan and me and what’s happened since we set sail from Ireland.
Above all, Mark cannotknow.
Maybe later, maybe after the marriage. Maybe there will be a time when I can explain that I spent half the trip to New York spreading my legs for his bodyguard. That for some reason I can’t explain even now, I left the door between my room and Tristan’s unlocked. That I’ve spent the last three nights wishing I could scratch my own eyes out for the tears they’ve cried, all because I begged Tristan not to quit his job, to stay at Lyonesse for me, and Tristan’s price was a high one. But—perhaps a wise one. He knew severing ties and ending things before we got to Manhattan was the safest choice, at least if we wanted to hide what happened on the yacht from my future husband.
As it is, I’m still concerned we won’t be able to hide the truth. Mark isn’t stupid, and it used to be his job to slice the truth out of much more treacherous people than Tristan Thomas.
I’ve become plenty treacherous over the years, unfortunately.
Mark turns, but only partway. His fingers run over the top of the leather table, and I remember how it felt to be cuffed to that table, his finger trailing down my naked stomach and circling my navel.
“No,” he finally says. “No new rules. The same one remains.”
I know which one he means. “I remember,” I say. “After the wedding, there can be no perceived wedge between us. Total fidelity.”
“Yes, my bride,” he says, and then faces me. The sunlight pouring in through the double-story windows catches the gold in his hair, on his eyelashes. He is gilded against the metal and leather and wickedness behind him. “After the wedding, I’ll be as faithful to you as you are to me.”
two
TRISTAN
I stareat my unzipped suitcase, my entire body itching to leave this room and find the two people outside it.
I took the job as Mark’s bodyguard this spring hoping for a distraction—or whatever existed betweendistractionand pinning all of my time, movements, and decisions onto someone else’s—because it turned out that leaving the army had not fixed the ache that came with having killed my best friend.
I had not expected to fall in love with my employer. I had not expected to fall in love with his future wife.
And now I’m in love with two people—two people who are about to marry each other.
We’d arrived at Mark’s Central Park–facing penthouse a few minutes ago in a cloud of silence. Easy silence, on Mark’s part. He seemed pleased to have Isolde with him, and whenever his eyes met mine, I saw the banked heat there that never failed to steal my breath…a legacy of those heady weeks when I’d been his, fully and completely, until I’d learned that he’d never been mine in return.
But the silence hadn’t been easy between Isolde and me. It had been sticky, hot as fresh tar. We made sure that our eyes didn’t meet; I made sure that my gaze stayed on the world outside Mark’s Mercedes-Maybach. But God, how I wanted to look at her. At her delicate nose and her stubborn chin and her eyes the color of dark turquoise. At those adorable freckles and at that mouth, lush and curved with an unusually shallow notch on her upper lip.
At sea, I had kissed that mouth so much that I had the feel of it memorized, the taste. And yet I couldn’t look… If I looked, Mark would see everything in my face.
And the fourth occupant in the car would also see everything in my face. The fourth occupant who knew about Isolde and me.
Maybe. Maybe he knew.
Probably.
Sedge, the quiet assistant who kept Mark’s days productive and ordered, had told me that the yacht—the same yacht where Isolde and I had lost all self-control with each other—had cameras.
Cameras.
Fuck. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Lyonesse, Mark’s kink club, had cameras inside for the safety of its guests and employees. But I’d assumed his yacht would be like his apartment or Morois House in Cornwall. A residence, a private space, away from every concern…
My assumption had been a naïve one, and now someone knew about Isolde and me. And if Sedge knew, then surely Mark knew. Right? Surely loyal Sedge wouldn’t have kept a secret like that, especially when I suspected that Sedge was also in love with Mark in his own wary way.
Except Mark hadn’t acted like someone who knew that his bodyguard had spent eleven days railing his fiancée. After we dropped Sedge at the hotel where the rest of the Lyonesse staff would be staying while here in Manhattan, we’d arrived at the penthouse, and Mark put Isolde and me on one floor together, next to each other. While he would keep his usual bedroom upstairs.
Whether this was some nod to bridal propriety or an acknowledgment of the transactional, public-only nature of their relationship, I didn’t know. It had disconcerted Isolde, though, and her lip had stayed trapped between her teeth while she’d watched me carry her suitcase into her new room. It had been the single time our eyes had met since before we’d left the yacht.
