He chuckled warmly. It wasn’t the laugh of derision that I’d feared.
“Tell me more,” he said.
“The stupid little…outfit,” I said. “The one that no actual maid ever wears. I want you to just sit there and order me around. Like I’m really your maid.” My hands were clenched tightly in my lap. “Just watch me, and make sure I’m doing everything right. But then I’ll do something wrong by accident and you tell me you won’t fire me if…”
His voice was right by my ear. “That’s not silly,” he murmured.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.
“I thought it might be,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d be…I don’t know. Not offended, but…” I cleared my throat. “I mean I know you’d never really do that.”
“What, sexually blackmail an employee?” I felt the mattress shift as he sat down on the bed. “No, that doesn’t sound like me.”
“I just think…I like the idea of you being.” I swallowed. “Stern. And choosy. And unforgiving.”
I felt his face very close to mine. Suddenly, I felt his lips brush against my earlobe, and then he nibbled gently. I squirmed.
“Next time I bring you something wrapped up in a nice box with a bow,” he whispered, “you know what it’s going to be.”
I bit my lip.
“A tiny…” He grasped the hem of my shirt, and I lifted my arms without needing to be told. “Little…” He stood up then, coming around to grab my hands and lift me to my feet. “Black…” He pulled my yoga pants off. “Dress.” And then, he was up against me - his arms around me, surrounding me, and I melted. “With little white ruffles. Open your eyes, love.”
I did. I had to blink a few times before they re-adjusted to the light. He was smiling.
“You’ll make such a pretty maid,” he said.
I just looked at him.
“You don’t disagree with me, do you?” he asked, his forehead wrinkling.
“Of course - of course not.” I didn’t know why my voice was shaking.
“Then say ‘yes, sir.’”
I swallowed reflexively a few times. “Yes, sir.” I didn’t think it was possible to blush any deeper than I already was, but apparently, it was very possible indeed.
“I wish I had an outfit for you right now,” he said, sounding genuinely regretful. “Now you’ve planted the idea in my head, I won’t be able to stop thinking about it.”
He stepped back, looking me up and down. “What is it about the idea that you like so much? Tell me.”
“I don’t know. It’s like I said. I like you acting stern. I like it when you pretend to be that way.” I looked down at the floor. “I like the way you look at me.”
“You do?” he smiled, reaching over and lifting my chin up with a gentle touch of his finger. “Sometimes it seems like it embarrasses you.”
“That’s just because I’m not used to it,” I said.
“Still?”
I shrugged.
“I’m sure there’s a store somewhere downtown that sells all kinds of maid’s outfits,” I said, in a halfhearted effort to change the subject.
“No doubt,” said Daniel. “But I can’t wait that long.”
The way he said it sent chills through me.
“We’re going to do this so it’s comfortable for you,” he said. “As much as I want to just manhandle you and throw you down on the bed and take you harder than you ever imagined.” He smiled. “In consideration of circumstances, I won’t.”
I groaned in frustration as he started to unbutton his shirt. Was it in my imagination, or was he going slower than he strictly needed to?
“Just think,” he said, finally letting the shirt slip from his shoulders. “After all this time, when we can finally do it again…”
I just whimpered, pouting at him. He was definitely doing something. He took the time to fold up his shirt carefully and lay it down in the dresser. For some reason, I felt another hot flush of embarrassment creep over me at the thought that he’d noticed how much I liked to watch him undress.
“I’m not breakable, you know,” I said. He was already straining under his jeans but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to take them off.
“I know,” he said. “But I’m going to be careful, all the same.”
I kept eyeing him and licking my lips and I was utterly humiliated at my inability to stop.
“Just think,” he said, with a smile, coming over close so that his bulge was exactly at my eye level. “After all this time, once we’re finally able to do anything we want again…”
“Uh huh,” I breathed. I wasn’t really listening to him anymore.
“Hey.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m up here.”
He was trying to make a stern face but he couldn’t fight the smile.
“You’re very distracting,” I said, looking up at him. “Certain parts of you in particular.”
“I could say the same about you,” he said, running his fingers, very lightly, through my hair. “But you don’t seem to know it, and I prefer you that way.”
I licked my lips again. Stupid reflex.
“Go on,” he said, nudging his h*ps slightly towards me. That mischievous smile just wouldn’t stop playing across his lips. “I can tell you’re dying to.”
We didn’t do this often, I assumed because he preferred other things. But until this moment, with my mouth watering in front of him, I hadn’t realized how much I wanted it.
Still, it was ridiculous for him to frame this as a favor that he was doing for me. Wasn’t it?
I popped the button on his jeans, and the zipper started to creep down of its own accord. I helped it along.
When I enveloped him in my mouth his eyes fell shut and his mouth open, just a little, just enough to remind me what it was I liked about this. The heady heat, the musk, the power. In the spite of the games we played, in this moment, I owned him.
He pulled away after too short a time, stepping out of his jeans and his underwear to lie down on the bed and gesture me over. I stepped out of my panties and straddled him obediently, letting out a satisfied sigh as he slowly filled me up. I rode him, but not like I had in the car - it was slow and sweet. He moved under me, gently, his hands grasping mine and interlacing our fingers, pushing back towards me so I had something to leverage myself against. Even with the obvious swell of my belly on such a clear display, I forgot to be self-conscious.
It felt like forever, slowly undulating together and basking in the feeling. It wasn’t the game I’d missed, I realized. It was just a part of this - this indefinable thing we had together, something that had been so carefully curated and cultivated even when we didn’t realize we were doing it. It was something more than just the two of us individually; together, we were something new.
I grasped his hands tightly. Years ago, when I had first stumbled my way into Plum Tech, when the other big companies were sneering at the startup that was living on a dream and a prayer, I never could have imagined I’d end up here. When I’d walked in that first day in my skirt that didn’t fit right and my heels that flipped when I walked, to the point where I almost lost one on a trip back from the copier, I’d never guessed that Daniel Thorne himself was watching me quietly from somewhere. Going completely unnoticed, sipping his coffee by the water cooler, seeing me - seeing something nobody else recognized. Least of all, me.
He’d seen through the barriers I put up, the way I’d tried to shield myself from “men like him,” or the man I thought he was. He’d seen someone trustworthy, someone he could have imagined himself being with in another life, when we weren’t both too skittish to consider the possibility of love.
It was a good thing, too.
The thought of being without him was too painful to bear. Even as it flitted briefly through my mind now, as the pleasure and tension coiled between us, I felt like I wanted to cry.
But then, his lips parted, and he said my name.
I forgot everything but the way he felt.
When it came crashing over me, I cried out, throwing my head back towards the ceiling. We curled up together afterwards, in the middle of our gigantic bed, and for a moment, I was convinced that absolutely everything was going to be okay.
Fourteen
“This feels wrong,” I said, for the umpteenth time.
Daniel, at least, had the good grace to ignore me.
Box by box, we were watching the entire remaining contents of the Starra Gallery get packed into a truck. Most of it was headed to storage. I’d insisted on coming down to “help” but I quickly realized that not only was no one going to allow a pregnant woman to do so much as lift a pencil, but the whole thing was making me incredibly sad.
Daniel had the day free, and decided to come with me as well. I was pretty sure it was just him being overprotective, but he had some ridiculous justification about “getting it into the paper” so I just rolled my eyes and went along with it.
Oddly enough, a few photographers did stop by. I wasn’t sure what drew them in, but they talked to me and Daniel and Curtis about the gallery and what it had meant to us. I was still having wild thoughts of forcing Curtis to take our money and buy a new place, or secretly buying one for him. In spite of what he said, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was just putting on a brave face.
“So,” I said to him at one point, coming over to lean against the concrete wall and watch some of the last boxes go in. “What do you think?”
“I think we had a good run,” he said, without hesitating. “I think this is something I can look back on, and feel good about.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“Did you end up finding a new job?”
He nodded, sipping his coffee. “At one of the galleries downtown. I’ll be working behind the scenes, mostly. Won’t see the artists much. So it’ll be a bit of an adjustment.”
“I’ll say. So you were serious about not wanting to own another gallery?”
I doubted he was going to be honest with me, if he hadn’t for all this time, but I figured it was worth a shot.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t know if I meant it then. But now?” He took another sip of his coffee, his eyes following another one of the boxes. “For all the fond memories I have of this place, it still has a shadow hanging over it.” He smiled, a little sadly. “Every day I kept this place open after Jill died, it was like her ghost was following me around. Creepy, but…I had to do it, you know? Because otherwise it would be like letting her slip away forever.”
I couldn’t imagine, and so I said nothing.
“All this time,” he went on. “Every year I looked at the books and realized there was no way I could keep on doing this, but decided to find a way to do it anyway…it was something I did out of desperation without really understanding why. I knew I needed this place to stay open. I just didn’t realize that I was clinging to it because it was all I really had left of her.”