The Bride (The Boss) (33 page)

“How did you like Ian and Gena?” he asked, with that tone of casual disinterest he could never pull off.

“How do you like Gena?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Lovely woman. Very charming.” He sipped his own coffee and avoided direct eye contact.

“You wanna fuck her,” I sing-songed.

“That I do.” He slid his plate onto the island countertop. “But they come as a bit of a package deal.”

“Swingers?” My eyebrows shot up. “My my, but aren’t we becoming suburbanites.”

“I’d hardly call a thirty-five-thousand square foot house in the Hamptons suburban, but yes. I mention it because they indicated that they would be open to…examining the possibility.”

I scoffed. “I only talked to them for like, three minutes, tops.”

“And in that three minutes, you couldn’t take your eyes off of Ian’s hands.”

Damn. He knew me too well.

“Okay. He was rocking that forbidden, best-friend’s-dad kind of vibe—”

“Oh, please, no,” Neil said with a uncomfortable laugh. He hated,
hated
that I believed my attraction to older men was rooted in some perverse, father-related area of my psyche. And I loved,
loved
to torment him with that.

“What I’m saying is, I’d have dinner with them, get to know them, feel out the situation.” But I wasn’t entirely cool with the idea of Neil having sex with another woman. It was completely hypocritical of me; I’d been fine having sex with Emir in front of Neil, and I’d been fine with Neil having sex with Emir when I wasn’t there. Something about another woman was more threatening, and I was surprised at how much.

Maybe I didn’t understand Neil’s bisexuality as much as I’d thought I had. Or maybe it was internalized misogyny talking. There was definitely an element of it’s-okay-for-me-but-not-for-you jealousy that I wasn’t proud of.

The only way to deal with it was by being totally upfront. “Look, if anything ever did happen… I would want to be there. I wouldn’t be cool with going off to separate rooms or whatever. And that’s not just insecurity talking. I’m also kind of nervous of the idea of being with another partner, alone.”

Neil nodded. “I don’t blame you there. I don’t think I would have been comfortable if you’d spent the evening with Emir in London. I was a bit surprised that you were.”

“Can I confess something? Something pretty embarrassing?” I waited for the subtle shift of the creases around his eyes that indicated I should, by all means, continue. “I may not have been viewing Emir as a threat. Because he’s a guy. I’m sure that’s probably insulting—”

“Not…insulting.” He set his cup down and leaned on the counter. “Sophie, may I explain something to you?”

“Please do.”

“First, you have no romantic rival.” He walked slowly around the island, to the seat opposite mine. “Second, my attraction toward men isn’t limited to sexual attraction. That isn’t how it works for me. I’ve been in love with men. I’ve had relationships with them. It isn’t a kink for me, it’s just how I’m wired. But you have nothing to fear, regardless. I’m in love with you, and I don’t foresee that changing.”

“I’m sorry.” I resisted the temptation to blame my ignorance on my hangover. “Being a straight girl, I’m prone to total ignorance here.”

“Not total ignorance. You just learned something,” he reminded me. “And I’m pleased that you talked to me about this, rather than making wild assumptions.”

“I take it the wild assumptions…” I let my question die away.

“Not all of my partners have been comfortable with my bisexuality.” He shrugged. “I’ve been with women who declared me straight by virtue of our relationship, and I’ve been with men who insisted I was truly gay. It’s quite… Frustrating, I suppose, would be the word for it.”

“I’m sorry that I did the same thing.” I reached over and took his hand.

He looked down, grimaced in distaste, and said, as calmly as he could, “Sophie. You have dried vomit on your wrist.”

Well, so much for our tender moment.

Once I’d convinced Neil that I was dying of my hangover—it required shockingly little acting on my part—I had time to sneak off and make the proper preparations. I wanted to be showered, powdered, shaved and made-up by the time we were ready to leave. And I wanted to be in the right mindset, so I got out my collar. It was really more like a neck-sized platinum and diamond anniversary ring than an actual BDSM collar, and about as useful for collar play as it was for holding a serving of potato salad. Functional or not, just seeing it put me into submissive mode. I propped it up beside the bathtub while I washed my hair and shaved my legs, and yeah, maybe did a little pre-date warm up. I couldn’t help it. The anticipation was killing me. I knew Neil was going to love tonight.

I felt a little guilty about how much I was going to love it, too, since it was supposed to be
his
present.

I had selected my dress carefully. While I hadn’t found anything that matched the dress I’d taken from the
Porteras
closet on that night over a year ago, I had found one that was just as short as the original dress: the dress he’d bought for me in Paris, the layers upon layers of delicate black chiffon, held down by the weight of exquisite beading along the skirt’s petal hem. Two barely-there straps held up the deeply cut bodice. I’d hesitated ever wearing it again, because the first time I had, it had nearly been ruined when Neil had fucked me against a wall. It seemed like there could be a high probability of the same situation developing tonight.

I went light on my eye-makeup. A marker of a really good play session, at least to me, was that I cried at least once. Though I appreciated the aesthetics of runny mascara as much as the next submissive, it wasn’t fun to get a bunch in your eyes. I used a pale cream shadow sparingly over my lids and under the brow bone as a highlight, with a sleek wing of black eyeliner. I used one coat of waterproof mascara on my curled eyelashes, blinked a few times to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and dabbed on some neutral gloss.

“You know, you still haven’t told me where we’re going,” Neil said as he emerged from the shower. Usually when I got dressed up, he complimented me effusively. Tonight, his anxiety over yet another surprise made him blind to my hotness.

“I’ll give you a hint,” I said, swinging my hair to one side as I fastened my earring. “I’m a terrible girlfriend and I don’t support your dietary choices. We’re going for sushi.”

I hadn’t had sushi in ages, and Emma had confided that the restaurant I was taking him to had been one of his favorites before I’d met him. When Neil had been sick, avoiding sushi and sashimi hadn’t just been about not eating animal products. We hadn’t even consumed raw vegetables; they’d been so great a threat to his immune system.

“I’ll be a very bad boyfriend, then, and let you tempt me.” He gave me a sidelong glance as he reached for his toothbrush. “You look lovely.”

“Lovely?” I pouted and squished my boobs together. “I was going for ‘so sexy Neil comes before we get to the restaurant.’”

“You’re very close, I’ll give you that.” He winked at me, and I skittered out of the bathroom to retrieve my collar from where I’d stashed it. I stuffed it in my purse and slipped on the highest, sexiest black heels I owned.

We headed down to the car at eight. Neil looked fantastic in a black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie. I checked us both out as we passed the gilded mirrors in the lobby. We looked so damn good together, I was beginning to doubt we actually
would
make it to the restaurant without tearing the clothes off each other.

“Where exactly are we going? I can’t stand the suspense anymore.” He held my door for me and leaned on it to peer into the car after me.

I ticked my answer off on my fingers. “I told you. We’re going out for sushi. Then, we’re going to do something lavish and romantic. Then, we’re going to do something absolutely filthy.”

“So, just like any other date, then?” he asked with a smirk, and I just smiled back because I knew what was coming.

I’d made us reservations—well, myself posing as Mr. Elwood’s assistant made the reservation, because Sophie Scaife wasn’t going to get a table—at Masa, a Japanese fusion restaurant famed for, among other things, being one of the most expensive restaurants in New York City. The place had been the stuff of urban legend at
Porteras
. Gabriella Winters had once had dinner there with Angelina Jolie, and I’d been desperate to ask her what the food was like and, hell, what it even looked like inside.

Now, I was going to an after-hours dinner in a private room. I was totally psyched.

When we pulled up outside of the Time Warner Center, all Neil said was, “Oh, I rather like this place.”

Well, that wasn’t the reaction I’d been going for. But how did one impress a billionaire?

My slight disappointment lifted when we actually entered the restaurant. We had one of twenty-six tables, set in a private alcove with a bamboo shade. The calm yellow light lifted my mood and heightened my appetite. By the time the first course came around—Masa offered a prix fixe menu only—it took everything in me not to scarf down the ginkgo nuts and baby shrimp heads served.

“I suspect I should not get drunk tonight?” he asked as the waiter poured out thimble-sized glasses of hot sake.

I opened my purse and flashed him my collar, just enough that he would see what was inside.

“But I don’t think you should get drunk, anyway,” I said, quietly, because the restaurant had strange acoustics and was nearly silent, so my voice seemed extra loud. “Not after what you put your liver through last night.”

The food was incredible. I’d eaten at probably seventy percent of all the sushi restaurants in New York, but they would never taste the same again. I wondered if we would come back regularly, then realized that such a thought was the extravagant raving of a newly rich person.

Once a month. Tops. Otherwise, it would just be decadence.

Because Neil has an uncanny knack for reading my thoughts, he reminded me, “Don’t become too attached to this place. We’re not going to get out as often, after we move.”

“I know. I’m going to miss it.”

After the waiter returned with the second course, Neil asked softly, with a hint of uncertainty, “But you still want to move?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I teased, to reassure him. I could imagine that buying a seventy-eight million dollar house might give anyone a need for reassurance. “Do I want to wake up every day with my amazingly hot husband and have morning sex in front of a gorgeous ocean view?”

“Yes, well, I was just making sure. You haven’t talked about the move much, except to say that you’ll miss living in the city. And at Christmas, when you said you didn’t want to make any big changes—”

“That was before I saw the infinity pool,” I corrected him. “And when I hoped I would be working in the city. Now, it just seems restrictive. If I want to go outside for fresh air, I have to share that fresh air with eight-million other people. I don’t want to do that anymore. Yeah, there will be things I can’t get in Sagaponack. But they’re not that far away. And this isn’t as big a risk as I took moving from Calumet to New York—”

“It isn’t as big a risk as you took when you planned to run away to Tokyo,” he interjected.

I was never going to live that bit of teenage foolishness down. “Touché. But what I’m saying is, I’m not afraid to take this risk. I’m not afraid to do it, because I know that if I’m miserable and unhappy, you’ll bend over backwards to fix things. Just like I would for you.”

“I rather like the idea of you bending over backwards,” he said with a chuckle. “Are there classes you can take to learn how?”

“I am sure there are.” I lifted my teensy cup of sake and raised it as if in toast. “But I guarantee they don’t teach them in Sagaponack.”

About halfway through the meal, I started worrying that we would stuff ourselves too much and not be able to move when we got to the hotel. Then I noticed Neil was only eating about half of what was being served, and I remembered his pills.

It wasn’t that I didn’t objectively understand that it wasn’t his fault he needed a little extra help in the getting-it-up department. He’d nearly died a few months ago. Doctor Grant had warned us about the sexual side effects of chemotherapy, and even without all that, Neil was fifty. It wasn’t like he was the only fifty-year-old man in the history of the world who took ED medication, but it weirdly stung my pride that I wasn’t just…enough.

I shook that feeling away. It had nothing to do with me. Obviously, Neil wanted me. I saw it in his eyes every time he looked at me. It was just plain stupid to blame myself for a problem I hadn’t caused, or feel resentful because he was willing to take medication in order to fuck me. Actually, looking at it in that light, it more than proved that he wanted me.

He was a pretty great fiancé.

When they brought us a small, elegantly arranged dish of thin white sashimi, I almost dug right in, until I heard the word “fugu” in the explanation of what he’d set before us.

“Fugu?” The blood drained from my face. “Can’t that kill you?”

“I suppose it could,” Neil said, lifting a slice with his chopsticks. “So could riding in a car, flying in a plane—Bobby Darin died from having his teeth cleaned.”

“You realize how dated that reference is, right?”

The waiter looked a bit annoyed at my doubt. “Chef Masa is one of the most highly regarded
itamae
in the world.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said with a little laugh, hoping to smooth over my faux pas. I didn’t even think about the fact that I was calling the chef’s skill into question, especially when he’d agreed to serve us after normal restaurant hours. “I’ve loved everything so far.”

“Yes, it’s all been utterly fantastic,” Neil added. “And tell Takayama I give my regards. I’m not ignoring him.”

Now the waiter smiled graciously. “You’re having a romantic evening. He understands. For anyone else, though…”

Neil laughed. “I promise, I won’t abuse the privilege.”

When the waiter left, I cocked my head and folded my arms over my chest. “Is there anyone in this city that you don’t know?”