Page 44 of Bitter Burn
“He’s still just settling in,” Hugo says in my defense. “Not everyone needs to be the life of the party, darling.”
“More room at the party for me then,” Kayden parries, throwing me a wink.
I’m not sure how Hugo and Kayden met or how they went into business together. Hugo founded Armorica, I know, and has ten or fifteen years on his now co-owner, but I’m not sure if they met as kinksters or in the real world. However they met—and despite the differences in their personalities—their partnership is collegiate and frictionless, fed by Hugo’s elegance and Kayden’s good-natured honesty. They aren’t partners romantically or sexually, but intellectually and socially, they are a bonded pair.
“I was restless upstairs,” I say and thank the server after he sets the beer on my table. “I needed a change of scenery.”
Hugo, who, like the rest of the world, knows Isolde’s uncle is a cardinal, asks, “Did you see the news about the conclave?”
“I did,” I say, and I hope I sound like a man whose biggest torment is being reminded of the woman he loves and not like a man who is desperately afraid that woman’s family might try to kill her while he’s gone.
Hugo settles back into his chair, shaking his head. “A sea of red capes and yet not a single drop of red blood between them.”
“Hugo isn’t a fan of the Church,” Kayden says apologetically.
Hugo shrugs. He’s wearing a buttery-yellow suit with a white shirt and cradling a glass of wine in one hand. He has deep brown skin, burnished tonight with a little highlighter on his cheekbones, and a short beard that betrays the few speckles of silver that his shaved head hides. He has dark eyes set behind rimless glasses, and whenever he smiles, his left eyebrow arches a little, as if in mild inquiry.
Kayden is also dressed well, but more like a former soldier’s version of dressed well in a black suit without a tie and a white shirt underneath that’s only been buttoned to his sternum. His brown hair is tousled, his jaw is covered in something more like scruff than a beard, and a tattoo peeks out from his chest, the black outline of pointed leaves. There would be a cluster of bright red berries if he unbuttoned his shirt any farther. The fine wrinkles spreading from his bright green eyes match his winter-paling suntan—he seems like a hard person to keep indoors when the sun is out.
Kayden taps on the tablet to turn it on again, sighs at the spreadsheet, and then pushes it away. “I can’t,” he says mournfully. “I can’t think about math any longer.”
“Any longer?” laughs Hugo. “You never started. Ah, belle! Here you are.”
Isabella has approached the table from behind me and sinks to her knees next to Hugo, bowing her head.
He strokes it fondly, then finds her chin so he can look into her face. “Busy tonight?” he asks.
“Only one session, sir,” she says. “An easy one. The Good MP.”
“Is there a Bad MP?” I ask.
Kayden snorts. “You have no idea.”
“You look ravishing,” appraises Hugo, his entire attention on Isabella. She blooms under it, her cheeks going pink and her lips parting in a smile.
“Sir,” she says happily.
“Did you have one of your old colleagues make this?” Kayden reaches over to poke teasingly at Isabella’s bodice, a sheer corset with complicated boning and emerald dragons stitched onto the cups. With her black pencil skirt and heels, she looks like an office fantasy come to life. “Looks like the designer needed a drafting table just to sketch it.”
“Isabella was a structural engineer before she began working at Armorica full-time,” Hugo explains to me, smiling as Isabella swats Kayden’s hand away. “Which means she’s better at math than you, Kayden. Maybe you should look over the spreadsheets with her.”
Kayden nudges Isabella again, dodges a revenge poke, and then leans back to take a drink. “I tried that, remember? This summer? She tried to make me use something called formulas. It was awful.”
“My genius is wasted here.” She pouts up at Hugo.
He smiles again, that eyebrow-arching smile, like it’s clear to him what she’s doing but also like he doesn’t care. He’s too charmed.
“You’re right, belle,” he purrs and leans down to drop a kiss onto her lips. His hand slips inside the dragon-embroidered fabric of her bodice to pluck at a nipple. “I’ll have to find a way to make it up to you.”
She’s easy, so easy, to make happy, because a small twist of her nipple has her panting and staring up at Hugo like he’s the god of her universe. No wonder she’s so in demand—she’s a Dominant’s dream. A little attention, a little pain, and she’ll make you feel like she’s fallen in love with you, right then and there.
It’s very close to my own sickness, my own quick tumbles into obsession—but not quite. Partly because Isabella has already confided in me that she doesn’t think she’s ever been in love, not even with Hugo, since their fondness for each other is something other than romantic. But mostly it’s because Isabella’s tendency to fall into swift and sudden worship seems to make her happy. It makes the people around her happy.
That can never be said of me and my worship. It’s only ever made things worse.
“Well, apart from the spreadsheets, not a lot else of Isabella is wasted here,” Kayden remarks, nudging at her knee with his toe. She’s still squirming with Hugo’s fingers in her bodice, but she does manage to flip Kayden off with one nitrile-gloved hand, which earns her a slap on the other breast from Hugo for her insolence and then a tender kiss on the mouth because he can’t seem to help himself.
“You should go to your appointment, belle,” Hugo says, releasing her and sitting back. “When you’re done, I’ll play with you some more. I know the Good MP never goes quite hard enough.”
