The Bride (The Boss) Read online

  He helped me to sit up and cradled my limp body against his chest as he handed me the glass from before. I gulped it down then collapsed again while he went to get more.

  When he returned, I sat up and winced at the soreness between my legs. “Hey, instead of intercourse, could I like, suck you off? I hate to wimp out on your birthday—”

  “Good lord, Sophie, I’m not going to ask to fuck you after that. This is the first time you’ve ever been fisted, I understand if you need time off.” He unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it from his shoulders, and toed off his shoes. He unbuckled his belt and slipped off his pants, then pulled back the covers beside me and tucked me under.

  “Seriously.” I propped myself on my elbow. “I’m not going to be emotionally well if I can’t do at least something for you. I need that…reciprocation. I can’t stand it when you don’t get off.”

  “Alright,” he agreed after a moment. “Shall I get myself started?”

  I stretched out beside him, luxuriating in the feeling of sweaty skin and overused muscle against soft sheets. I walked my fingers down the narrow line of hair on his stomach. “Mmhm. I love to watch you jerk off.” I snapped the waistband of his boxers. “Get rid of these.”

  He lifted his hips and slid the black silk down his legs. His cock was semi-hard, and he stroked himself slowly as I threw my leg over his. I pressed my body close and kissed as much of his chest as I could reach, then down, trailing the ends of my hair over his skin.

  “I loved that. All of it,” I purred against his ear. “I love it when you control me. When you punish me and hurt me. I love losing control over myself. Losing myself.”

  A deep sigh rumbled from him. He was hard now, his foreskin rolling over the tight pink head of his cock with every pump of his hand.

  I slid down his body, sucking and licking at his stomach. I rose to my knees to straddle his thigh. My wet, sore vulva plastered to his skin, and he groaned at the touch of it. Covering his hand with my own, I leaned down and hovered my mouth over the head of his cock. I didn’t close my lips or suck, or even flick my tongue out. I just let a thin line of drool run from my mouth, directly onto his tip, until he squirmed his hips on the bed. I made him wait as long as I could stand before I closed my lips over him and took in as much of him as I could.

  Bent over wasn’t the ideal position for giving head, but I worked him with a hand that replaced his own, never speeding up, just a slow, lazy suck and swirl of my tongue as I glided my hand up and down his length. When his hips began to pump in time to my motion, and then sped as though desperately reaching for more, I slipped the point of my tongue between his foreskin and glans and swept over the super sensitive spot on the bottom of the head. His hands fell to my head, and he held on, thrusting deep enough to gag me. His body strained beneath me, and he made a noise that could have been either pleasure or pain as he erupted, filling my mouth and throat. I coughed and cum ran out over his cock and my hand, and I used it as I milked the last drops from him before giving a tiny, chaste peck to the head.

  He hissed and laughed at that, and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Oh, Sophie. This was a fantastic birthday present.”

  “Thank you.” I pulled the covers over both of us, taking a moment of sadistic delight in the way he gingerly tried to avoid contact between the sheets and his penis.

  “Did you enjoy yourself? Anything you would have changed?” It was his usual check in, and I loved it every time. It felt nice to be valued, rather than abandoned with a quick cuddle before the snores started. My past partners had been terrible for that.

  I considered his question. “Nothing you did, but something does bother me.”

  “Hmm?” he asked, situating me more comfortably against his shoulder. His fingers skated down my spine and back in long, slow sweeps.

  “I don’t like that you were able to just call up the front desk and be all, ‘hey, there’s going to be a woman screaming, ignore it,’ and they were totally cool with it.” I frowned. Saying it out loud made it even more troubling.

  “When you say it that way, I suppose it is a bit…”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t want to think about it anymore, but the idea seized my brain. “When I think about what someone could do… Not you, but some other guy, some sicko posing as a Dom…”

  My chest felt as though it would cave in, and my throat closed. I tried to gasp for air, and tears leaked from my eyes. Before I knew what was happening, I was in a full-blown anxiety attack.

  Neil sat up and pulled me close as fast as he could, his face pressed to the top of my head as he rocked me. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

  This was, by far, the worst sub drop I’d ever experienced. The thought of someone exploiting me as I was helpless nauseated me and paralyzed me with fear. There was no danger of that happening, and I tried to reassure myself with what little logic I still had left in me. Neil would never hurt me that way, and I would never do this with anyone but Neil. But just the thought of someone being hurt or abused, a young woman, trusting of her partner as I was and having that trust shattered through brutality, crushed me from the inside, until all I could do was sob hysterically.

  “I’m here, darling. Breathe through this.” There was a helplessness in his voice that I knew he was trying to control; if he gave in to it, he couldn’t help me. “Just breathe. This will pass.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. I would never think you’d do anything to me. I just… I thought of what happens to other women…” I hiccupped and the feeling in my chest grew worse. I cried harder, but I had to tell him. I had to get it out. “It was the only thing you’ve ever said to me, ever… It was the only thing that was truly scary.”

  “Oh, Sophie. I never meant to frighten you.” His anguish soothed me, as selfish as it seemed. “I never thought—”

  “It’s okay. It didn’t bother me at the time. And I wasn’t scared of you.” Just saying it made things a bit more bearable. I sat up and pushed my hair back from my forehead, taking slow, deep breaths before I went on. “You thought you were reassuring me that no one would overhear or complain. You couldn’t have known how it would sound.”

  “No, I should have. If I had only thought—”

  I pressed my palm to his cheek. My nose was stuffy from my hysterical crying. “You couldn’t have known. Even with your experience in the past…you’re a man. You don’t think of those things, because they’re not at the front of your mind, the way they are for women.”

  He folded me close again and swayed with me until my breathing slowed and I was calm again.

  “Sorry I sub dropped and ruined your birthday.” I tried to make a joke of it, but it sounded pathetic and self-pitying the moment I said it.

  “You didn’t ruin my birthday, Sophie.” There was such tender conviction in his words, I nearly started to cry again. “In fact, I think you were wrong. Your submission wasn’t the best part of this evening.”

  “What was?”

  He took my face in his hands and tilted it up for the sweetest, softest kiss. When he drew back, his gaze searched my face, soaking in every detail. “Because tonight, unlike the other nights we spent here… Tonight, you’re staying with me.”

  Looking back, I couldn’t understand how I’d ever had the will to leave him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I wish all my moves had gone like this.” I watched, enraptured, as a very broad-shouldered gentleman loaded the last neatly packed box into the back of the moving truck.

  Beside me, Neil was scrolling through texts. It was late April and the sun was shining, but it was a chilly day. “I’m glad we waited until it was a bit warmer to do this,” he grumbled.

  “What happened to ‘I grew up in Iceland, I’m a Viking, I can walk through the snow barefoot?’” I teased.

  “Just because I can tolerate the cold doesn’t mean I like standing out in it.” He frowned at the back of the truck. “Surely this can’t be everything.”
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br />   “I checked and double checked. Everything that isn’t furniture.” My heart squeezed a little bit. We had no immediate plans to sell the apartment; Neil reasoned that it might come in useful if we ever needed to stay in the city overnight. I wondered if his reluctance to part with it was rooted in the same sentimentality I felt toward the place. It was our home, the place where we’d exchanged our first I-love-yous, where we’d made some difficult decisions that had shaped our relationship and made us stronger.

  It hurt more to leave than I’d expected it would.

  As if reading my mind, he peered up at the bright April sky and said, “You know…while I love this place, and we’ve made some very good memories here, it’s never really been ‘our’ home, has it? I’m looking forward to settling into the new house. Making it ours.”

  I supposed I had a different idea of making a house my own. Something about the whole fully-furnished aspect made it seem like there were fewer options available in the customization department. Though I knew Neil wouldn’t bat an eye if I demanded we refurnish and renovate the entire place, that wasn’t my style. It seemed too wasteful, too indulgent, too—

  “Ma’am? This was almost left behind,” one of the movers said behind me, and when I turned I saw, to my horror, that he held the orange Hermés box.

  “What’s that? Could it be a one-hundred-thousand-dollar purse my fiancée has been hiding from me for months?” Neil asked, a hint of humor in his voice. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned close to my ear. “I do read our card statements, Sophie.”

  My face burned with shame, both at being found out and at the openly contemptuous look that had come over the mover’s face when Neil had uttered the dollar amount. I didn’t blame the guy; it was probably an involuntary reaction.

  I took the box and turned toward the waiting car. We had to get the Maybach out to Sagaponack, anyway, where Tony would be moving into the staff quarters. The mover rolled down the truck door and slapped it as he headed toward the passenger seat.

  When Neil got in beside me, I avoided eye contact. I just held the stupid, incriminating box in my lap.

  “Shall I put that in the trunk, with the rest of valuables?” he asked, and I burst into tears.

  “I am so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was in the store, and that weird neighbor put me on the spot, and the sales people were so snotty and it was like I was living in that scene in that old movie—”

  “Dear god, tell me you aren’t referring to Pretty Woman as ‘that old movie,’” he said, seemingly more concerned with that aspect of the whole fiasco than with my transgression.

  I couldn’t stop my shame from rolling out in a wave of incrimination. “I didn’t really want the bag, but I did, and it’s so pretty and my mom is still living in a trailer and I’m about to move into this enormous house and I bought a hundred-thousand-dollar purse, Neil! A fucking purse! I don’t even know who I am anymore!”

  “Sophie, I don’t care about the purse.” He reached for my hand. “Truly, I don’t care.”

  I raised my head and met his gaze through watery eyes. “But you’ve been so stressed out lately about money—”

  “I’ve been stressed because my only daughter is getting married,” he admitted patiently. “And yes, it is costing me a small fortune. But we’re in no danger of becoming impoverished. My companies are doing well, I pay tax, and I have a very diverse portfolio. Unless something truly catastrophic happens to the world infrastructure, we’ll always have more money than we can spend. And your book is doing so well, it isn’t as though you couldn’t afford that bag on your own.”

  He had a point there. I’m Just The Girlfriend had earned out its advance in a month, and when India had given me a projected royalty figure, I’d almost passed out.

  Still, it seemed so wasteful, especially when I considered the long hours my mother worked just to keep her head above water. We’d spent my entire childhood one paycheck away from disaster at all times.

  “I’m just… I’m really ashamed.” I shrugged. “I can’t get used to all of this. Coming from the way I lived, the way my family still lives… It feels wrong.”

  Neil sat silently for a moment, before suggesting, with all the gentleness of a man handling a live grenade, “Do you think perhaps you might simply be reacting to the stress of this move? You’ve never owned property before, and this isn’t exactly a starter home. It’s perfectly natural that you would be nervous.”

  “It’s not that, it’s…” I waved my hand. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m stressed. I can’t even finish a complete sentence.”

  “Can I at least see the bag?” Neil asked with a crooked smile. “It must be awfully special.”

  I lifted the top off the box. Inside, nestled in crisp, carefully folded tissue paper, a drawstring linen bag with the Hermés logo held the purse itself. I was almost afraid to look at it; I hadn’t seen it since it had been boxed up.

  Neil took an audible breath at the sight of the pale alligator leather. “Oh, that is… Well, I can see why it would cost so much.”

  Of course he would. The man knew leather, owing to his ridiculous shoe fetish. He reached out with two fingers—I swear his hand trembled—and stroked the glossy alligator as though he were petting a baby duck.

  “Oh, Sophie. This is exquisite, really.” He shook his head. “If you don’t want it, I’ll carry it. I would not give a single fuck, to borrow one of your phrases.”

  Why was it that he could always say just the right thing to turn my mood around? “You’re really not mad?”

  “I’ll admit, I was a bit upset when I got the statement and saw that you’d spent so much without mentioning it to me. But you’d never been comfortable buying even a pack of gum without some kind of tearful admission after the fact. I thought perhaps it was a particularly expensive form of personal growth.”

  I couldn’t help my tearful laugh. “I am really sorry, though.”

  “I don’t mind if you spend our money, just tell me about large purchases. I may have more money than God, but I do need to keep my books balanced.”

  The ride out to the new house was long and gave me a good idea of how hellish a commute by car would be. I couldn’t imagine a two-hour drive into the city every day, but Neil seemed positively invigorated by the idea.

  “You know, I have the Ferrari out of storage,” he said, almost bouncing in his seat. “This drive would be nothing at all in the Ferrari.”

  “No!” I knew what “nothing at all” meant. It meant he was having visions of blasting down the highway at insane speeds.

  He frowned at me. “Sophie, I’m retired. I have to make my own fun.”

  “Your own fun should never include super cars and speeding tickets.”

  “Then we have vastly different ideas about what constitutes ‘fun’,” he grumbled.

  Since we’d flown in to see the property before, I’d never gotten a look at the driveway and front gate. And there really was a gate. A towering black wrought iron gate set into an intimidating, twelve-foot high, native-stone wall. We stopped at the security box while Tony entered the code, and the gates swung inward. We drove through, and they closed behind us. On the other side of the wall was a guardhouse, with a uniformed security guard sitting inside.

  “Is that totally necessary?” I asked, looking out the back window.

  “On a property this size, with the house as isolated as it is, I really feel more comfortable with some security.” Neil rolled down his window. “The scent of the ocean. I can’t believe I might have retired in Somerset and missed this.”

  “I can’t believe we have security guards.” I was a little uneasy, and I wasn’t letting it go yet. “I mean, do I have to do anything special if I want to leave? What if I want to be spontaneous?”

  “They’re security guards, not jailers,” he said patiently. “You can come and go as you like. I know you aren’t used to it, but you must remember that your life is vastly different now. One of the adjus
tments you have to make, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, is remembering that with money comes a certain amount of caution.”

  “I guess I can see where you’re coming from. You buy a seventy-eight-million-dollar house, you don’t want anyone fucking with it.”

  “There is that, but more importantly, I wouldn’t want anyone fucking with us. Your name will be in society sections when we publicly announce our engagement, and when we’re married. And there are people out there who aren’t stable.” He looked back to me, and his expression softened, so I must have looked completely terrified. “Darling, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Nothing has ever happened to me, or to Emma. Elizabeth didn’t have any troubles. But when Emma was young, there were some letters, some… Well, there were threats.”

  “Against Emma?” I could only imagine how that had made him feel. He loved Emma more than any other human being on the planet.

  He nodded. “I’m a bit more cautious now. But not excessively so, I wouldn’t think.”

  “Nah, probably not.” I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that some of the realities of my new life were a bit more severe than merely having to cope with spending money.

  “Besides, we’ll never see them up near the house, unless there’s an emergency. There are only four of them on each shift,” he reassured me.

  The driveway was lined with tall red pines, the ground beneath them recently churned up.

  My jaw dropped. “You didn’t!”

  He looked smug at his little surprise. “I told you, we were doing some renovations. I thought you might like something to remind you of home.”

  The same trees surrounded the trailer where I’d grown up. The fact that he’d noticed, remembered, and had full-grown trees transplanted onto our property astounded me.

  “You know, you’re really something else.” I grinned at him, and he grabbed my hand and dropped a kiss on my knuckles.

  My legs were grateful for the stretch when we pulled up at the front door and climbed out of the car.

  “We won’t be needing anything else today, Tony. Thank you,” Neil told the driver. “Take some time to get settled in.”