That had not been at all what I’d been expecting.
I repeated his words in my head before clarifying. “You want me to tell you a story?”
He shook his head impatiently. “Definitely not a story, at least not in the fictional sense. It will be from your life, and it will be true. You will describe the event and all the relevant circumstances surrounding it in exact detail. I may ask questions as you proceed. I’ll expect answers. All of it, every single word that comes from your mouth, must be authentic.”
Now I knew why he’d offered the drink.
I crossed my legs, mirroring his position. Already my head was whirring with the tales I could spin, petty, plausible fables from a rich girl’s pretty life.
This was the stuff I was good at. This was going to be cake.
“I’ll know it’s not true, Celia,” he warned, reading my mind like he lived inside it.
“How?” I challenged.
“I just will.”
“But how?”
“Celia…” He gave me a stern stare that reminded me of the one my grandpa Werner used to terrify me with as a child whenever I was found doing something I wasn’t supposed to do. “I’ll know.”
“What happens if you don’t believe me?”
“If you’re telling the truth, I will believe you.”
I debated pushing the issue further because, really. How would he know? Even if I was honest and drudged up some hurt from the past and shared it with him in excruciating detail, he could accuse me of lying.
But just before I opened my mouth to say that, I looked at him again, really looked at him, and the sharp intensity of his gaze reminded me—he’d always seen me.
He’d see me now too.
There was something I was missing, though. None of the books about BDSM had covered anything like this. And I was pretty sure he was a sadist. Where did the pain come in?
“And then what happens?” I asked, no longer caring that I looked desperate in my need to know.
He looked at me plainly, as though the answer was obvious. “Then, depending on how you do, I’ll respond.”
There it was. What I’d been looking for. Where the pain would come in. “You’ll take me to the bedroom, tie me up, and flog me until I’m screaming, you mean.”
He tilted his head, his eyes narrowing as he studied me.
I’d gotten something wrong. I tried to guess what. Perhaps the flogger wasn’t his instrument of choice. A cane then. Or maybe he was more inventive with his play. Or more hands-on. Choking, perhaps. Or he’d use his fists.
My stomach lurched at the thought of fists.
After what felt like an eternity, he spoke. “You seem to be under the impression that I beat women up.”
“Don't you?” He was probably one of those guys who preferred to use words that didn’t make his violent side sound so violent.
“Not typically.”
I rolled my eyes, tired of this chasing around the bush. “Look, I know you do. Sasha said you did.”
He lifted his chin inquisitively. “She did?”
“Yes. She said…” I tried to remember exactly what the woman at The Open Door party had said about Edward. He’s really good...if you can take a beating. Which obviously meant that...
Oh, God.
It was a figure of speech.
This was the type of beating he meant to give me, not with physical pain, not with implements that weighed down my nipples or made my ass vibrate, but with words. My own words. My own pain used against me.
I swallowed, carefully. “So you just want me to pick some terrible thing that happened in my lifetime and tell you all about it like we’re best girlfriends who’ve had too much wine?”
That smirk again. “I expect you to be vulnerable, yes.”
If I hadn’t understood the point of the game before, I did now. And, in every way I couldn’t have imagined, this was worse than I’d prepared for.
I really wished I’d taken that drink.
Eight
“Take all the time you need,” Edward said, stretching his arm across the sofa, settling in. His self-satisfied look told me what my own expression must have given away, and I remembered again why I hated him.
“I have one already,” I said flippantly. “I met with this businessman on the pretense that he wanted to hire me. Oh, by the way, sorry I wasn’t around to finish your office. Something came up.” He’d never really intended for me to redesign his space, but I’d undertaken the task with sincerity. It pissed me off as much as anything else he’d done that I hadn’t been able to see it to completion.
“The pieces you ordered came in. It got finished without you.” His tone was flat and uninterested.
“And?”
He took a swallow of his cognac before answering. “Everything looks nice.”
It looked fan-fucking-tastic, I was sure of it. He knew it too, but there was no way he’d give me anything, even that.
“Anyway.” I let my focus drift, as though I was telling something romantic or whimsical. “I gave up my business, moved across an ocean, and married him. Then he told me he wanted to kill me. Now he’s keeping me captive on his pleasure island.” I brought my gaze back to him, narrowed and piercing.
If he wanted me to talk about something that affected me, then this definitely should count. There were very few moments in my life that had changed the course of my life the way that meeting him had.
His breaths were usually measured, but this one was deep. I saw it in the slight rise of his torso, the one tell he had that I wasn’t as easy for him to manage as he liked me to believe.
He took another swallow of his drink then set it down on the side table. With laser focus, he regarded me. “Is this really what you want to talk about?”
Yes. Yes, it really was.
Except…
He’d said he might ask questions. He’d said he wanted me vulnerable. There were so many ways he could poke and prod at me in this arena, and it was an arena that truly did belong to him. I might be a bull, determined and horned, but he was a skilled matador, and no matter how tempting he was with that cape, he’d be sure to sidestep when I charged.
There were other things to tell. Things that were harder to say but impossible for him to subvert.
Needing an escape from his unrelenting stare, I closed my eyes. Without meaning to go there, I found myself at the beginning, in a time when I was still only innocent, in a country garden, on a rope swing with a wooden seat.
Bile burned at the back of my throat. These weren’t memories I ever allowed, and I felt their foreignness like an illness. My body fought to remove them. My head ached with their presence.
But the actual beginning came before, in the reason I’d been in that garden in the first place. “I was close to my grandpa Werner,” I said, feeling the tremble in my voice. “I spent a month with him every summer, four glorious weeks without my mother and father. It was just me and him, and I was spoiled and loved. When he died—”
“You were six,” Edward said cutting me off. “This isn’t what I’m looking for, and you know it.”
My muscles tensed as though preparing to fight. He thought I was giving him something basic. Too basic. He assumed I was going to tell him how my granddaddy died when I was a kid and how it broke my heart and how I’d never been the same after, and while all of those things were true, it had only been the prologue to the real story.