“As if I scared you.” It was bravado, though.
“Are you sure you didn’t?” I fisted my cock, stroking it up and down once, twice before rubbing the tip against her seam.
“You scared me.”
“You liked being scared.”
“I still do.”
I let a beat pass, let my head dip between her folds, then let myself say the thing that had been between us for weeks now. For months, even. “You like being loved more.”
It shouldn’t have been such a pronouncement, but it was. The shift that had occurred when she’d stood up to me had been named. She was no longer afraid of me like she had been, and fear was what had brought us together. It had been our glue, hadn’t it?
Then I’d fallen in love with her, and that was what she required now from me. My love. And that should have been better. That should have been more than enough. It shouldn’t matter that she no longer bowed to me, that I could no longer bend her to my will. At my side was what I’d wanted, too.
Or so I’d thought.
Celia understood the significance of the statement. Her brow cinched. “Can’t I like both?”
I flipped her around to face the wall, unable to look at her while she asked for what I didn’t know how to give. Lifting her thigh so her foot rested on the bench, I spread her open and notched my crown at her entrance.
My method of distraction wasn’t working. She twisted her head over her shoulder. “Can’t I have both?”
For a split second, it seemed possible, and I tried to imagine myself in that role—the husband that both ruled and equaled. A man who could let his wife win and still be in charge. How did that work?
Even if I thought I could fill that position, Celia would have to yield, and she didn’t do that now. She stood her ground. She fought like a dragon, and a dragon didn’t need a master.
As the possibility flickered away, I shoved into her with one blunt stroke. “I don’t scare you anymore.”
“You still have secrets.” Her words came out choppy as I drove into her with staccato jabs.
Fucking her should have taken my mind off the rest. It didn’t. “Is that why you insist we keep them secret? So that we can have something mysterious between us?”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
No, she shouldn’t have. Because now I was mad, and it was stupid and petty to feel so, and also it wasn’t. The truce between us had calmed the conflict but it hadn’t erased it. The secrets still stood between us like a clear barricade of teflon. There was no getting through them no matter how transparent they appeared, and still the illusion that it was possible kept me beating my hands against the walls.
“There’s good reasoning to it,” I said, pushing her with my words as well as my brutal thrusts. “Because if you don’t know, you can always assume the worst. Then you can still pretend I scare you whenever you want.” I reached around her body to pinch her clit. “Or is it not my secrets that scare you the most, but rather what I’d do with yours?”
She cried out, on the verge of orgasm, I suspected, but she managed to hang on, and a moment later she was collected enough to speak. “Even without the secrets, you scare me.” It was quiet, a confession of sorts. “You’re the only person who has ever loved me exactly like I am. The only person I’ve ever trusted entirely. That means you are more capable of hurting me than anyone who has hurt me before, and that’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever imagined.”
My tempo stuttered as I digested her words. Knowing everyone who had hurt her, knowing the ways they’d hurt her—that was a mighty declaration. It rocked me at my core. Made me off balance. That was a form of submission, wasn’t it? Being vulnerable like that. Making me aware of my power.
Then if the problem between us wasn’t her inability to submit to her equal then it was me who couldn’t dominate mine. All that time ago when she’d said I always had to win? She’d been more right than either of us had known. Because when I’d given in, when I’d dropped my pursuit of her past, and committed to loving our child as she’d demanded, I lost hold of something I’d taken for granted as permanently mine. I’d lost hold of my authority, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
Taking advantage of my slowed pace, she turned around again to face me. She cupped my cheek with her palm and wrapped her leg around my hip, guiding me back into her heat. I pressed into her, all the way, as far as she could take me.
Sighing, she pressed her forehead against mine. “So good,” she said. “You feel so good.” Then, “We’re good too, aren’t we?”
Once again, I turned her around, this time pivoting so I could bend her, and she could brace herself against the bench. I shoved inside her, moving in and out with increasing speed.
“How can you ask that?” I gritted out. “How can you even ask?”
Then I fucked her with savage stabs, over and over and over, until her question was long lost to the friction and the frenzy and the orgasms that shuddered through us both. Until even I could believe that I’d ignored responding because the answer should have been obvious and not because I didn’t know what it was.
Ten
Celia
Hudson: I need to see you.
* * *
The text popped up at the top of the Atlantic article I was reading while feeding Cleo. It was early, still. Just after six, and it was a Saturday. But Hudson was always up at the crack of dawn so that wasn’t the surprising part of the message. The surprising part was that he’d sent it at all.
Of course I’d see him. I’d told him what we wanted, and if he was reaching out, it meant he wanted to negotiate. What else could he want? And he wouldn’t want Edward there. I knew that as sure as anything, so meeting when Edward was at work was my best option.
Before I could overthink it, I typed a one-handed response.
My Monday is open. Where?
His next text came almost immediately.
Hudson: It needs to be sooner. Today. At my office.
“He thinks he’s out of The Game, but he still tries to control every situation,” I said, mostly to myself, though Cleo looked up at me with her bright blue eyes and smiled around my nipple. “Right? We won’t let him do that, will we?”
Tomorrow, I typed, just to hold some ground. In the restaurant at my hotel. Five pm.
The baby was usually sleeping then. A good time to slip away.
Hudson: The Sky Launch. At six.
“Oh, please.” I was not meeting at his nightclub. I didn’t usually care about his turf or mine, but since it so obviously mattered to him, I was reluctant to give in. Though, maybe being amiable was the way to go. I was the one who wasn’t in the position that he was. He was the one with the stocks we wanted, not the other way around.
But if I’d learned anything from the men in my life—my father, Edward, Hudson himself—it was to never take the weaker stance. If anything, that was when to be even more firm. Besides, Hudson didn’t hold all the cards here. I’d meant it when I told him we’d pursue purchasing stocks elsewhere. I didn’t have to be as amiable as he demanded.
I pulled up WhatsHalfway, an app that found a middle location between two spots, and entered in the hotel and Hudson’s office address.
Randall’s, I texted back. It’s a bar halfway between you and me. Six pm will be fine.
His response didn’t come as quickly, which meant he was thinking it through. And if he was thinking it through, it meant he’d come to the same conclusion as I did—we’d have to compromise.
Sure enough, his next text settled the matter.
Hudson: See you then.
I dropped my phone in my lap with a sigh. It had been almost two weeks since I’d talked to him about letting Edward and me buy those stocks. Hudson did like to think things through, and it had been enough time for him to have done that, but it wasn’t like him to have a total one-eighty without much prodding. Had something—or someone—changed his mind?
Or was this meeting about somet
hing else entirely?
No. It had to be about the shares. I wouldn’t know any more than that until we talked. But there was still one issue I had to deal with before then. I rubbed my hand over Cleo’s fuzzy head. “Now we just have to figure out what we’re going to tell Daddy.”
She broke away from my breast so she could smile again. “You’re not really interested in eating anymore, are you?” I pulled her away and reattached the cup on my bra then sat her up on my lap. She was getting strong. Soon she’d be sitting on her own. It felt suddenly like it was all moving too fast, that any second she’d be asking for her own phone and locking herself in her room with her music blaring. I hugged her to me, as though that could somehow hold the moment, as though it might slow time down and keep her mine for longer.
The door between our two suites creaked open, pulling my focus.
“If that’s not an adorable sight,” Edward said from the doorway, wearing nothing but his pajama bottoms. “We need to get a photographer in here. Before she’s too wiggly to pose.”
“I was just thinking she was growing up too fast.” I brushed my lips across her forehead, making her grunt with frustration since the action had blocked her from tugging at the open drawstring on my nursing nightgown.
“That’s how it happens. One minute they’re crawling, the next they’re engaged and moving permanently to the States.”
It was the first time he’d said something suggesting any melancholy at all about his older daughter’s upcoming nuptials, but I’d suspected he felt it. “Good thing you have this one to help lessen the blow of losing that one.”
He came toward me with a smirk. “Yes. Good thing.” He reached for Cleo, and I passed her over, then had to take a second to catch my breath. The sight of a bare-chested man holding a baby had never done things to my insides until it was my bare-chested man holding my baby.
Whoa. It was the definition of breathtaking.
Edward rocked her as he stepped away, running his nose along her forehead. “Good morning, birdie,” he said, the variation on my nickname one he’d adopted for her recently. “It’s too bad you can’t talk yet. You could tell me what it is that Mommy’s trying to hide from Daddy.”
I froze midway from standing up from the rocker, color draining from my face. How did he know?
Dammit, I was an idiot. “The baby monitor,” I said as it dawned on me.
“The baby monitor,” he repeated.
He held out his hand to help me up the rest of the way then used it to pull me into him, wrapping his arm around my waist when I was there. I didn’t mistake it for affection, though it was clearly that too. No, this move was about asserting himself on me. “Do you have something you’d like to tell me?” he asked, pressing his lips to my temple.
I didn’t even consider lying. We were on the same side when it came to the Werner shares, even if we weren’t on the same side when it came to Hudson, but there was no reason for that to be an issue, as far as I could tell. “Hudson wants to meet up. He texted a little bit ago.”
“That’s great,” he said, surprising me. “Did you tell him yes?”
“I did.”
“Good. When are we seeing him?”
I pushed gently out of his arms. “Well. Tomorrow night. But he didn’t invite us. He invited me.”
“I’m okay with showing up without an invitation.” He said it casually, his focus seemingly on Cleo who was suddenly very interested in his beard.
“Edward…” I tried to decide if this was worth battling.
Yes, it was. For several reasons, not the least of which was that the fewer personal interactions that occurred between my husband and Hudson, the more likely I was to keep my secret about him.
Not that I could tell that to Edward.
“If we both show up, then he’ll feel outnumbered,” I said instead. “He won’t likely be willing to negotiate if he doesn’t feel like we’re coming to this on equal ground.”
He knew I was right, but he still considered. “I could go in your place.”
“If he wanted to talk to you he would have reached out to you.” I forced myself not to take a defensive posture. “Look. He didn’t have to ask to meet at all, and he did. I don’t think this is the time to try to turn the tables. I should go and see what he has to say, and if that doesn’t turn out to our benefit, we can change the game plan.”
A beat passed. Then two. I was just preparing to double down on my argument when he surprised me once again. “I suppose I can agree to that.”
“Really? Awesome.” I stood up on my tiptoes and gave him a chaste kiss. “Now, since you’re up...want to make the coffee or change the diaper?”
He pretended to think about it. “Hazelnut or Colombian blend?”
Turned out Edward’s agreement had caveats—he wouldn’t come in with me, but he insisted on waiting in the car.
“It’s not like there’s any parking here,” I said as the driver neared Randall’s bar. “Are you just going to have Bert circle the block until I text you, or what?”
“Works for me.” He called to the front seat. “How about you, Bert?”
Bert shrugged. “Whatever you want, Mr. Fasbender. Doesn’t matter to me.”
I folded my arms over my chest knowing anything I said would be dismissed. We’d already argued about it all afternoon as I’d gotten ready, donning a fitted red dress that I only just barely fit into post-pregnancy and taking extra care with my makeup. All I’d accomplished with the bickering was that I was arriving for my meeting almost fifteen minutes late. Edward wasn’t budging.
Still, I couldn’t drop it. “What’s even the point? I’d call you and tell you everything just as easily.”
“Call me eager,” he said as the car pulled up in front of the bar.
If it were only that, I wouldn’t be concerned. The problem was that I didn’t trust him. There was one reason he’d insist on coming with and one reason only.
I hesitated before opening the door. “Give me at least half an hour before showing up, if that’s what you’re planning. Please?”
The driver behind us laid on his horn, but Edward took his time answering. “Fine. Half an hour.” He looked at his watch. “Starting now.”
I couldn’t decide if I should take that as a victory or a loss. Since I was on the clock, I didn’t have time to ruminate. I opened the door and began to step out when Edward grabbed my arm to halt me.
“You’re a dragon, Celia. Go in breathing fire.”
It shouldn’t have boosted my confidence as much as it did, but I walked into the bar with courage and composure, my spine straight, my wits together.
Until I realized Hudson wasn’t alone—his wife was with him.
I knew right then, whatever I’d thought this meeting was about, I’d been wrong. This was something else entirely. Something I had not been prepared for. Hudson saw me as a threat to his marriage, to his wife. It was why he still held those shares over me. He’d never put us in the same room without good reason.
Unless I was wrong. Unless her presence signaled things had changed.
It was too much to hope for, and a knot tightened in my belly, weighing me down. To counter it, I rounded my shoulders. Lifted my chin. Put on my mask.
My eyes met Alayna’s before I got to the table, and I saw a flicker of insecurity. Should I take that as some sort of victory? Or should I admit that it hurt that she still didn’t trust me?
I stuffed the competing emotions down inside me and activated the safety switch, the one Hudson had shown me—I went numb.
“Hudson, Laynie,” I said, injecting a smile into my tone. They sat at a circular booth, Hudson on one end, his wife pressed so closely to him it was almost as though they were one person. Without being invited, I scooted in at the opposite end and addressed Hudson, mostly because he was the only one of the two of them I really knew how to talk to. I’d only ever been fake with Laynie. Attempting to be genuine now seemed futile.
But also, he’d be
en the one who set me up in this arrangement, and my complaint was meant specifically for him. “I didn't know we were bringing our significant others,” I said curtly. “Should I call Edward? He doesn't have any plans.”
He’s just down the block, I added, silently wondering now if that was a good thing or an even worse thing than I’d originally thought.
“That won’t be necessary.” Hudson was cool, his words clipped. “This conversation doesn't involve him. It does, however, involve Alayna.”
The hair raised at the back of my neck, some strange sense of foreboding that I couldn’t shake.
It was silly, honestly. Probably just PTSD from the last time I’d seen Alayna, when she was still Withers instead of Pierce. When she’d broken my nose with one jab of her fist.
I’d deserved it. But that was ages ago. Why were we all together now?
“I'm intrigued,” I said, studying the woman who had once been my foe. She still hated me. It was evident in her expression, and a few recent remarks from Genevieve had indicated the same. “How are you, Laynie? It's been so long since we've seen each other face-to-face. You look…” Like a woman with one-year-old twins. “Tired.”
It was childish and petty. Mean, even, and I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I meant by saying it when, honestly, I could relate. Maybe that’s what I resented most about our relationship—there could be so much to like about the woman, so much to bond over. I could imagine the friendship that would never be, and it made me ache in strange places. Made me more bitter than I should have been.
Because wasn’t all of this supposed to be over? For me, it was. I thought it was for Hudson too.
His face gave nothing away, his expression stone, still I could feel the glare behind the facade. “What can we get you to drink, Celia?” A tumbler of scotch already sat in front of him, but he raised his hand to signal the waiter.