I wasn’t sure of the time, far past midnight. If I hadn’t been adverse to sleeping on the floor, something I hadn’t done since my fraternity days, I could have let my eyes closed. My eyelids were already getting heavy when it occurred to me hadn’t let my submissive reach her own release.
Her mons, so smooth, was still slick with desire as I cupped her with my hand. I hadn’t expected Chloe to pull my fingers away.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, no tone of disappointment in her voice, no patronizing edge. She twisted just enough to look over her shoulder at me, and I came up on one elbow to better look down into her face. The smile she gave me was disarmingly unguarded…and satisfied.
In the past, I had certainly denied orgasm to my submissives, sometimes in punishment and sometimes because that was precisely what pleased them most. I had never been so caught up in my own passion that I hadn’t been in control of theirs. Again, Chloe was the first.
I rested behind her again. “Are you going to tell me about him?”
At any other time, I would have expected Chloe to stiffen and balk. Instead, she breathed out lightly, almost a chuckle. “No, sir.”
“But I want you to. I insist…
again
.” Though my voice contained a low, relaxed rumble, I sounded petulant even to myself.
This earned me another amused sigh, covering a faint giggle. “Who
are
you?”
Who was I? “Your Master?”
“Before that. Besides that.”
“Not need-to-know information, Miss Bloom.”
The small toes of one of her feet trailed along mine and up my ankle, and I wasn’t sure it all if she was conscious of doing it. I rather preferred to think it was subconscious, wholly the result of the fact that for once she wasn’t guarding and planning her every movement. “Tell me anyway,” she said.
“I’m the very bad son of a very bad man at the end of a long line of very bad men.”
“Well, that’s confusing. Does that mean you’re very bad or very bad at being very bad? Now answer the question,…sir.”
“I’m money that comes from money,” I admitted, though I couldn’t fathom why I was being even that forthcoming. Why would I answer this question? Why would I want to? I sighed at myself, feeling the bite of frustration in the ache building along my brow. Because it was Chloe asking, and part of me wanted Chloe to know. Part of me wanted Chloe to believe me a man of value. There was that pesky urge toward honesty, though. “Very old money that we have no business having. We don’t do anything especially good with it.”
“Like eco parks?” she interjected.
“That obvious, am I? Yes, like eco parks. I’ll probably be the first in ten generations to leave something behind that was better off for me having touched it.” The obvious question rushed up then, leaving me feeling just a touch sick. Would Chloe be able to say she was better off for having known me? The man who dominated her, ravaged her twice daily, bent her to his every whim—specifically so he could say he’d bested the man who’d stolen the only thing that had mattered to him, and more than a decade ago, at that?
“Keep going,” she prodded, sounding more than a little like me. I supposed it was unavoidable that submissives would learn their masters’ techniques.
“You work in environmental law, Miss Bloom. You move in moneyed circles. So surely you know my story, sans minor details. But if it’s what you want…” I nuzzled her neck and couldn’t help enjoying the way she cuddled against me when I did so. “And since I didn’t let you come…
“I’m from a wealthy London family. Our money is in real estate, commercial development, international project management, that sort of thing. And in cutting corners best we can, whenever we think we won’t get caught.”
“And that’s what you’re very bad at? Were you born with a moral compass or something?”
How could I not laugh at that? “That depends on who you ask. Nina, Gabriel, Luiz… Especially Luiz.” As an afterthought I added, “My mother’s family.”
Chloe twisted onto her back so she could look up at me, a dangerously thoughtful look on her exotic face. “You’ve talked about her family even less than your father’s,” she observed.
I shrugged and put on an affected smirk. “What’s there to say? She was a second wife and was never intended to supply the
true
heir. Her family had its own wealth, but it was new money. It smells different, you know.”
“Really?” Chloe asked with a suggestion of a careful smile. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“It’s true. My trust fund definitely had that new car smell—hers passing to me. It couldn’t have been more than a few decades old.” I grinned at myself remembering. It wasn’t a mirthful smile but a sour one. “I remember vowing I was never going to use that money. All teenage hormones and angst at the time. I was going to make my own name on my own terms. If her family was too good to have me after she died, then devil take their money. And my father’s family… I couldn’t get away from them fast enough—sent myself to prep school and then college in the States, which, unfortunately, required I spend said reviled trust fund money. Such a scandal. Have I mentioned I was a very bad son?”
I knew I should have been wary when Chloe narrowed her eyes at me, still pensive and prodding. “They didn’t visit you after she passed? You didn’t have grandparents on her side doting on you?”
“There were a couple of visits, but they lost interest soon enough. Maybe it was that I didn’t resemble them closely enough. Or maybe they were just ashamed of the family name I came with.”
“It can’t be that infamous,” she insisted. “I didn’t recognize Knight as a particularly dastardly name when I heard it.”
Hiding behind her shoulder, I traced my lips against her smooth skin and willed this question to go away. “It doesn’t matter, Miss Bloom. You’re capable of judging me in the flesh, and you’ve done so often enough that I know you’re not adverse.”
“I’m just getting to know you. There’s time to change my mind.” That response
should
have broken the sudden melancholy shadowing me.
“Mm, yes. Eleven weeks, isn’t it?” Her limit on our arrangement still galled me, and she still insisted on reminding me of it whenever I drew her considerable ire.
This time, instead of hardening her jaw and nodding in approval at my affirmation of our purely temporary and restricted agreement—lust without love, passion but with finite potential—Chloe looked nearly as dejected as I felt. Small comfort.
***
“I believe someone warrants a spanking when we get back to the villa, Miss Bloom.”
“Correction or punishment, sir?” I asked under my breath before turning to face Gabriel and Luiz amid the greatly improved garden beds of the eco park project site. The dusky, dusty young project manager was still nodding at my suggestions regarding the placement of vertical beds while gesturing wildly in dismissal of Adrian’s argument.
Rolling his eyes, Knight shook his head. “Putting vertical beds there casts shadows on those two beds. That won’t work. And it’s bloody energy-intensive at the rate Luiz works.”
As one, Gabriel and I pointed to the same spot, just outside the utilized space and beside the raised wooden platform supporting the tent the foreman frequently stayed in after long night on the project. “If Luiz moves those beds over there, it leaves us room for multiple vertical beds without the shadow problem,” I explained.
The wiry nineteen-year-old shook his head and his calloused hands so vehemently that his battered straw hat almost flew off with the force. “No. No, Luiz isn’t moving any garden beds anywhere. Do you know how long it took me to build those where they are? How many times he said no? No, too big, too long, too narrow, too short. I won’t do it over.”
“Luiz,” Adrian cautioned.
The boy folded his lean arms and rocked back on one hip in a defiant posture, and I hid my grin behind my hand, trying not to insert myself in this old argument. “No, send me to jail if you want, rich man. The slave boy is not doing it.”
Amid Luiz’s characteristic outburst of rebelliousness and Gabriel’s adamant and steady stream of gesticulated Portuguese, Knight pressed his fingertips to his forehead and muttered under his breath. I was sure I heard my name a couple of times. Moving to stand beside the project manager as a visible demonstration of alliance, I repeated his nods and his gestures, pointing from the existing beds to the new spaces.
“Visualize it, Adrian. It makes sense. It’s a pain in the butt, but you can’t deny it.”
Without lifting his head, Knight grumbled, “I know. I know.”
“Good, that’s settled.” I crossed the few feet between us and took hold of the arm Adrian had folded across his chest, supporting the opposite elbow. “Now, if you’ll indulge me, I really want to see the first dwelling site. I have some ideas…”
This finally got Adrian to open his eyes and peer sidelong at me from beneath the shadowy cover of his fingers. “I bet you do, Miss Bloom.” He grumbled the whole way there, as we trekked on foot thirty minutes down a bare earthen path brushed with the broad, dark leaves of the rainforest.
What I saw at the second project site made me halt mid-step and gape, got me excited the way few things had since my career had left me office-bound. The skeletons of three dwellings balanced solidly on stilts and raised foundations. Though they had only begun to take shape, the lines and spaces were filled with wonder and potential.
“Indigenous designs?” I asked.” Are you planning to incorporate passive energy?” I advanced across the flat pad of cleared earth to view the building site from various angles. “Wood structures with steep roofs and high ceilings,” I said, ticking features off in my head as I noted them. This time when I turned toward Adrian, to continue my rapid-fire delivery of questions, I found his pained expression of an approaching headache replaced by an amused smirk.
“You find my questions funny, sir?”
“No, Chloe, I find them invigorating, even when they’re exasperating. I find
you
funny, and surprisingly excitable, and refreshingly imaginative. But don’t let that go your head.”
I felt the heat of embarrassment vying with the Brazilian sun to toast the apples of my cheeks and bowed my head so slightly. “I want to help you with this, Adrian. If you’ll let me.”
He took his time meandering toward me, letting the suggestion of a rakish grin spread only slowly over his handsome face.” I’d be a fool to turn you away, Miss Bloom, and being a fool is not on my list of shortcomings.”
His praise hit me out of nowhere, sidelong, hard, and unexpectedly. It wasn’t like being told I was beautiful, though such a complement from Adrian Knight carried more weight with me than I would have liked to admit. It wasn’t like being told he wanted me. It was saying he valued my opinion, my expertise, my intellect. And dammit if it didn’t make him twice as alluring to me and so much more dangerous to my pretense of detachment. Even I hardly believed that fairy tale anymore, not after our session in the wee hours this morning and what he’d made me say. How willingly I’d said it. And how completely I’d meant it.
I cleared my throat when Adrian stopped before me, his body just inches from mine, his force of presence touching me, nonetheless. Despite my urge to step up flush with him, to caress his chest and grip the soft material of his shirt in my eager hands in request of a kiss, I turned my back to the man and forced myself to focus on the buildings again.
“Good positioning,” I said. “Raised to avoid flooding and predators. Good ventilation. I have to say it’s coming along rather quickly.” Looking over my shoulder, I asked, “Did Luiz do all this himself?”
Adrian stood next to me, admiring the wooden frames. “No, that’s a little much to expect of one teenager, no matter the lesson I’d like to teach him. For these, I had Gabriel and Luiz and about four other staffers working with me. It might take a few weeks for us to get them done, but we really do need to test how realistic it is for local laborers to reproduce these techniques themselves, without unlimited resources and fancy equipment.”
“You really are serious about sustainability. Enough that you’re actually helping to build these yourself?”
Adrian held out his arms. “You don’t think a hammer fits these hands?”
I couldn’t resist. I leaned close and drew my tongue up along the index finger of his near hand, then kissed his fingertips, before shaking my head in teasing denial. “Too smooth,” I insisted.
His mock indignation raised his brows and bowed his mouth. “Three summers straight with Habitat for Humanity, I’ll have you know. And I did everything from frame houses to install toilets. British tycoons are not the wilting flowers your American robber barons are.”
“Those would be fighting words if I weren’t in your service, sir.”
I cupped his hand in mine, breathing against his fingers. In lieu of a kiss, he brushed his nose against my cheek.
“But you are, Miss Bloom.”
“Yes, I am,” I breathily agreed as I walked backward toward the first of the dwellings, tugging him along with me. We settled side-by-side on the dark wooden foundation, dangling our legs over the edge and letting the midday sun heat the curves of our shoulders and our knees. A comfortable silence occupied us for several minutes before I noticed Adrian was smiling.
“What now?”
“If you’re not careful, Miss Bloom, you might start to approve of me.”
My natural inclination was to deny that, but I didn’t have the heart to disturb the glow on his face when he said it. And perhaps, just maybe, he was right.
“Is this what you always knew you’d end up doing?” I asked. “Because it was your family’s business?”
“Property development? Yes, I guess it was. For all my defiance, it never occurred to me to do anything else. I grew up around it, constant conversations about it, absorbing information about it despite myself. There’s a saying… Apples falling from trees… Should I assume you always knew you would grow up to be…? What was it, an environmental lawyer? Partner at Ferris & Hale?”
I tried not to grin over the fact that he’d remembered this. “Junior partner,” I admitted.
“Well, I won’t hold it against you.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and I stuck my tongue out at him. “But was it really your childhood dream?”