Page 4 of Honey Cut
Which is nonsense. He has had so much longer than me to become dangerous, and that should only make me wary. Not…excited.
“I remember,” I repeat, and this time I let the memory seep into my words. For a year and a half while I’d been in college, he’d trained me. Not in submission, but in thepretenseof submission. Our marriage had been arranged from the start, a transaction between him and my family, but it was crucial that it still appeared real, and that appearance hinged on my playacting as Mark’s submissive.
Except pretending is a blurry thing when it comes to kink. There are some things that must be done, must be ceded.
And I am willing to cede a lot to get what I’m here for.
Mark studies me. He has a way of looking that feels like I’m being pinned in place, an insect to a board, but I let him pin me. I let him look. He won’t believe that I’m easily won, so I let him see my skepticism warring with my desire. I let him see a young woman determined to play a part even as she’s slowly seduced by it.
And if it is almost too easy for me to pretend, if it’s too easy to call up the memory of his hands on me, of how I felt on his yacht wearing the clothes he’d picked out for me, I don’t think about it. Genuinely craving him and the things he will do to me will make me better at playing the game. And I can play without losing myself.
Mark finally nods, as if he saw what he expected.
“How is your shoulder?” I ask. He hadn’t been able to fetch me from Ireland as planned because he’d been stabbed in his own club right before, and the wound had struggled to heal. He doesn’t move like an injured man, though. The last three weeks must have done the wound some good.
He lifts a hand to it, like he’d almost forgotten. “Much better. Just another scar to add to the collection, if a memorable one.”
And then he says after a moment, “Now that you’re here, we will have to resume. But it’s been some time since we entered into our arrangement. We should discuss our new rules. Your new limits.”
I hadn’t ever wanted to stop, and here he is talking about resuming, as if I’d been the one to cry off.He’dbeen the one to end things years ago, to wedge his fingers inside me and give me an earth-shattering orgasm only to leave before daybreak, having gotten what he came for. My virginity, the warranty my father demanded to make sure I wouldn’t back out of the engagement.
But in those hours between Mark pushing his hand up my skirt and the break of morning, I’d believed—or hoped?—
It doesn’t matter now. He’d been using me. And now I’ll use him.
“I know we’ll need to resume,” I reply. “But my rules are the same. My limits are the same. Have yours changed?”
There is one long blink, dark-gold lashes sweeping to his cheeks and then back up again, and I realize that I’ve surprised him.
“Your limits have not changed,” he says. His voice is as expressionless as his face, and it’s filled with nothing but the cool huskiness that troubles my dreams, but I sense disbelief there nonetheless. “So you are still comfortable with, to use a likely example, being restrained by me?”
I lift my chin. “Yes. If the situation calls for it.”
“Punished by me?”
Heat seeps down my spine and pools in the cradle of my hips. I remind myself to bereluctantlybesotted. “For the sake of selling our marriage? Yes.”
“Fucked by me?”
Between my legs, my clit pulses. Just a few days ago, it was against another man’s mouth. “Yes,” I whisper, and I’m not pretending anything right now.
Mark is closer now, his eyes hooded as he looks down at me. We’re still not touching. We wouldn’t be, when selling the appearance of our marriage was always about just that—theappearance. Yes, he might tie me up, mark my flesh, fill my mouth and holes with whatever he wants, including himself, but only while we are around other people. There’s no clause for what will happen between us in private; no provision for when it’s just the two of us. If I want him to trust me, I’ll have to breach that wall. Like we breached it three years ago on my father’s desk.
The thought makes my skin prickle and my belly swim. Half lust, half miserable nerves. There’s no room for me to fuck this up.
And despite what happened on the yacht on the way to Manhattan, there’s no room for me to feel anything for Tristan Thomas, Mark’s bodyguard, either.
“And your safeword is stillhyssop?” Mark asks.
“Yes.”
“Use it for anything, even when we’re not performing for the people around us. Even when we’re alone. You understand?”
Yes, siris on the tip of my tongue, without me having to remember that he’d like to hear it, without me remembering that it’s only supposed to be a line for my part.
Oh God, this is so dangerous.
I force myself to nod instead. And for a moment, we stay just like this, with him so, so close and our eyes burning against each other’s.
