She’d answered well, and he beamed at her. “I think that’s a grand idea. Come here.” He pushed his chair back slightly, and Sabina knew what he wanted. With a deep but subtle breath, she stood and walked to his place at the table.
He patted his lap. “Sit. Straddle me.”
She did as she was told. His smell was still potent from his run, but the sweat had dried, leaving a sticky film on his skin.
“Take off your shirt.”
She did. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gloria back quietly out of the room.
“That, too.”
She took off her sport bra. Her breasts were ample; even for yoga she needed support—not that she’d intended to do yoga today.
His eyes bright, he lifted her breasts in his hands and plumped them gently. “Not as high as they once were, but lovely yet. Still, it might be time to consult with a surgeon.” His eyebrow lifted as he examined the worth of her breasts.
Oh, Mother Mary. She had to find her way out of this before he decided she needed to be surgically improved. One ‘improvement’ had been more than enough.
He leaned forward and pressed a tender kiss to one nipple, then released her breasts and slid his hands down her arms until he could wrap them around her wrists. He lifted them both and brought them between their chests. He then raised each one in turn to his lips, kissing the bruises he’d left there last night. “So beautiful,” he murmured.
Her breasts needed improving. The bruises he’d left on her skin? Those he thought beautiful. How on earth had she found herself married to this man?
Because she had been young and naïve—stupid—and because he had not shown her this side of himself, this real self, until he had made her well and truly trapped.
No, that was wrong. He’d shown her this self, but he’d wrapped it in a cloak of past pain. She’d seen a tortured soul. He’d told her she could save him, that she was the only one who might, and she had believed him. She hadn’t seen a man who took pleasure in giving pain, a man who could only value that which he possessed utterly, a man who considered trust itself to be a grievous weakness.
She’d seen Heathcliff.
Well, now she understood that Heathcliff was an evil bastard, too.
As he laved her bruises with his tongue, Sabina felt him harden between her legs. He looked up at her, smiling, and reached behind her to the table. When his hand came back, he held his knife, and her pulse began to skitter. What was this fresh horror now?
The knife was a simple, silver table knife, but with a sharp point. It was scummed with hollandaise sauce and egg yolk. James pushed the point lightly into the notch between her collarbones. She could tell by the slant of his eyes that he was watching her pulse throbbing in her throat. She could also tell that he liked it. Oh, lord.
The worst thing she could do would be to beg. She could show pain. She could show anger, resistance. Either of these would please him—resistance only to a certain degree, enough to make his play interesting. Either of them would cause her greater pain, but that was not avoidable. But she could never beg.
Luckily, it was not in her nature to beg. She waited.
He dragged the point of the knife down between her breasts, pushing firmly enough to scratch her skin, but not enough to draw blood. Then he made a left—or, for him, a right—turn and dragged the point over her left breast. When he arrived at her nipple, he stopped and pushed harder, his eyes on hers.
That hurt. That hurt a lot. Finally she whimpered and shrank back, unable to stop. His eyes caught fire at that, and took on the dangerous look of a bad boy pulling the wings off flies. He pushed harder still, and she felt blood begin to trickle.
His hips flexed under her. “Ah, yes,” he purred. He took the knife away and cast it aside on the table, then leaned forward and sucked her wounded nipple, drawing all the blood from it he could.
He stood and pushed his dishes away from behind her. Then he set her on the table, pulled her pants off, and fucked her while her head lay in his half-eaten breakfast.
She made sure to come. She always had to come.
~ 3 ~
Elsa rode with her head out the window the whole way, her ears sailing and her jowls flapping, leaving long stripes of drool on the side of the car. When Carlo turned onto Caravel Road, she started to bark, with volume and vigor.
“Elsie wants to see sharks, too, Daddy!” Trey had to shout over the dog’s ear-splitting din, but he was hardly averse to shouting.
Carlo was going to have a little chat with his baby brother. It was hard enough keeping Trey close by at the beach without worrying that he’d go in search of sharks—which, in fact, swam these waters occasionally. In all his surfing years, he’d seen maybe three fins breach the surface, so he wasn’t worried that Trey would actually find a shark. But he was becoming quite worried that his three-year-old adventurer would get himself in trouble looking.