Jesus, he was trembling now.
Tristan pulled out and with shaking hands got rid of that condom.
Colleen collapsed onto her side, sobbing with frustration and punching the pillow.
Through the semi-conscious haze, Tristan scooped up the fuzzy blanket from the mattress and wrapped her up in it, and then he cuddled her against his side, blinking as he tried to clear his sight. Damn, his heart was still racing.
She snuggled more tightly against his ribs, and Tristan tightened his arms around her, rocking her. “There, there, little one,” he murmured in a steady, soothing patter. “Such a good girl, taking your punishment so well. I’m so proud of you.”
He continued praising her and stroking her hair for what felt like hours as the room darkened with the sunset outside the blinds.
“You’re my good girl now,” he told her. “You’re my little. Mine to touch anywhere I want, and mine to show the world. Mine to take, and mine to adore.”
She had opened her eyes and was watching him, listening intently, her dark eyes as fathomless as the deepest part of the ocean.
He asked her, “What do you say?”
Her lower lip trembled. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ll take you to Paris and Rome and Monaco, and I’ll take you to Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney. We’ll dance at Carnival in Venice and Rio, and we’ll ski in Gstaad and Argentina. And everywhere, I’ll bend you over the couches and take you, and I’ll tie you to beds in New York and Cape Town and Cairo and have you.”
She was blinking as she listened, and she whispered, “Yes, please.”
He ran his fingers down the side of her face. “You’re mine now. You will speak well of yourself at all times. You are precious. You are mine to cherish and protect. When you speak badly of yourself, it reflects on me. I won’t allow it. No one will ever speak badly about my good girl again, not even you.”
A tear swelled on her damp eyelashes, and she whispered, “Yes, sir.”
“And if you defy me again, I’ll deny you orgasms for a week and lend you to my friends to use, and then I’ll take you to a club, tie you to a St. Andrew’s cross in the middle of the main floor, and torture you with thirty orgasms in a row until you are sobbing and begging me to stop.”
Colleen’s eyes had brightened, and she bit her lower lip. “Yes, please.”
Damn, that had been supposed to be an empty threat. What was it that Micah had said? That happiness was a woman two notches freakier than yourself?
Tristan had better get a personal trainer and do some cardio. This woman might be the death of him.
But what a way to go.
He stood up and carried Colleen to her tiny bathroom, where he washed her body, and then he took her back to bed. Their supper had arrived, so he wrapped her up in another fluffy blanket and fed her bites of steak with an excellent pan sauce, potatoes, and more.
And wine. He held the wine glass as she sipped the Bordeaux, and he kissed her wine-pink lips.
They slept entwined, exhausted, and Tristan put the thoughts of coding out of his mind for the night.
Good girls weren’t brats, but all subs needed focused attention, and Tristan loved turning his laser focus to a soft, flower-scented woman. He slept so well, drifting in and out of sleep and rearranging her lovely, curvy limbs to wrap himself around her.
At eight o’clock, pounding on the door slammed through the apartment, sending shock waves through his very cells.
“What’s that?” Tristan grumbled as he sat up.
Sunlight streamed through the horizontal slats over the window.
Colleen pulled a long tee-shirt and shorts over her bare skin. “I’ll get it. Don’t get up. It’s probably Anjali again. She probably needs to borrow something else or talk about Jian or something.”
She trotted over to the door, flipped the locks, and opened it.
A man was standing outside.
24
Not Even You
Colleen
Colleen should’ve looked out the peephole first.
Summer air blew through the apartment’s open door, heating her face.
The man standing outside Colleen’s door was stocky and older. Iron gray shot through his short beard and buzz-cut hair. He squinted at her, examining everything from her muscle tone to the jammies she was wearing, and the tiny muscles around his nose tensed. He demanded, “What happened to you?”
“Dad?” Colleen hadn’t seen him in over a year, ever since that last fight when he’d pointed to the door of their house, his teeth bared in rage while her mother stared at the floor, and Colleen had chosen the door over begging for forgiveness again. “What are you doing here?”
Her father said, “I came to get you. You haven’t logged on to any of your internet places for three days. Your mother thinks you’re dead or kidnapped by the human traffickers.”
“Well, I’m not dead.” No contact for several years, and then he shows up at her door, angry? “I can’t believe you’re here, and what do you mean I haven’t logged on to my internet forums? Are you spying on me?”
Her father pushed past her and walked into the room of her apartment. “After you broke the family, your mother insisted we keep tabs on you. Mace figured out where you were logging in on the internet and set up accounts so we could keep an eye on what you were doing.” He pointed at Tristan, who was sitting up in the bed and had run his fingers through his dark hair. She was glad to see he was wearing a tee-shirt, which was blue and had Shine Industries written across his broad chest. “Who is this man? Why do you have a man in your apartment?”
Tristan stared at her father but didn’t say anything.
Colleen closed the door. The neighbors didn’t need to hear them arguing, and the air conditioning was getting out.
“Never mind him.” This was crazy. Her brother Mace didn’t even have social media accounts. There was no way he had the computer savvy to put a key-logger program on her computer or follow her around the internet. “What do you mean, you set up accounts to keep an eye on me? Mace couldn’t have hacked my accounts.”
Her father shrugged. “You used your mother’s laptop to go to your places when you were home that last time. Mace just looked up where you’d been.”
Colleen must not have cleared the browser history when she’d used her mother’s laptop because it was sitting in the kitchen and she’d been standing right there, the rookiest of rookie mistakes. “You shouldn’t have done that. That’s intrusive. That’s spying on me.”
“Well, we couldn’t let you just go off. We knew you’d screw up and have to come crawling back eventually. I can’t believe you chose the username QueenMod. You always thought you were better than us and never knew your place.”
Colleen couldn’t look at him anymore and stared at her fingers that were climbing over each other in panic. “I couldn’t think of a name when I joined the board, and they asked what my favorite classic rock band was.”
Her voice sounded small.
Her father jabbed a finger in the air toward Tristan again. “Have you turned into a slut? This isn’t how your mother and I raised you, having a man in your apartment overnight.”