Page 38 of After Hours
And then he was gone.
“Romily,” he said, and now it seemed as if he was lying beside her, maybe. She couldn’t see him, though she suspected that even if she could, she wouldn’t be able to tell where she was anymore. His voice was everything. Dark and rich. “I think it’s time you told me about your marriage.”
Chapter Ten
Romily felt herself quiver, everywhere.
As if he was still using her body as his own, personal sex toy. As if he was still inside her, using only his voice—as impossible to ignore as the plug in her ass or the clamps on her nipples.
Maybe the point was that he didn’t have to touch her, now, to make her feel the way he wanted her to feel. That all he had to do was exist.
She felt that same old electric charge seem to light her up all over again. At the same time, there was something in her that wanted to fight it. But even as she tensed, she remembered where she was. She was bound. Blindfolded. There was that inescapable butt plug. He had already fucked her mouth and licked her pussy, and yet she had no doubt that there was more in store.
Zachary never didonething. He preferred a build. A cascade. One experience leading into the next and making it hotter and more intense. Romily knew this ride had a ways to go—and today, apparently, he thought that the intimacy should be more than physical.
There wasn’t a single part of her that wanted to tell him about her marriage.
Not one part.
Yet she wasn’t helpless in this. She wasn’ttrapped. She reminded herself—as the panic began to stir in her—that all she had to do was tell him to stop.
She knew that exit strategy was available to her. It always was. She knew that he would release her immediately. And she didn’t think that if she pulled the eject button that would be the end of them, either. Romily knew Zachary well enough by now to know that he wasn’t punitive like that.
Which wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be some kind of reckoning.
She opened her mouth to do it, to say she wanted to stop—but no sound came out.
And she was so aware of him there beside her. Waiting.
No doubt studying every expression that crossed her face and every tremor that moved over her body.
Romily had no doubt that he would wait forever if he had to. She moved in her chains. She shifted her weight. Her breath was doing what it liked, and she knew he would be taking note of that too, but the panic was there and rising and —
But what it came down to was that she trusted him.
She trusted him and she proved that. Over and over again with her body. Right now her concern wasn’t the various erotic torments he was putting her through but what he wanted her tosay.
Why couldn’t she put her mouth to the test as well?
If what she craved was to fully surrender to this man, to fully accept the control he exerted, because she already knew that was where she bloomed — and God, how she bloomed here—then how could she disobey him emotionally?
The whole point was that she didn’t get to decide where or how she surrendered to him. She got to say if it was too much, if she couldn’t continue, if she truly didn’t want this.
But being apprehensive and possibly even afraid of something didn’t actually mean she didn’t want to do it.
The real truth was that she was afraid of what would happen if she did.
Yet the promise he’d made to her was that all she had to do was what he told her, and it would be okay. Whatever it was, whatever they did, it would be okay.
And everything that had happened in the months they’d been together had proven that to be true.
He had never betrayed her. How could she betray him?
This time when she exhaled, she let her whole body go limp with it.
She heard his rumble of approval from beside her, because of course he knew. She wouldn’t be surprised if her struggles were obvious to him as if they danced across her skin, put into words. Or maybe tattoos like his, bold pieces of art like time stamps to mark who he had been in each moment.
“What do you want to know about my marriage?” she asked, her voice as rough as if she’d been on a sobbing jag. She felt as if she had.
