Bartered Passion: The Billionaire's Wife, Part 6 (A BDSM Erotic Romance) (3 page)

When at last I was clean, I dragged myself out of the shower stall and wrapped myself in one of the huge towels hanging on the wall. Why did Anton have two towels? One for his body and one for his ego? The world would never know. I let the soft cloth drag over my hypersensitive skin, then wrapped it around my hair. Moving out of the bathroom I saw Anton still asleep in his bed. I crossed the cold floor and looked down at him.

He slept like a baby. His face, so controlled in waking life, became slack, relaxed in repose. Where his beautiful face seemed magnetic when animated, I found it alluring when asleep. I longed to reach out and brush away the dark lock of hair that had fallen against his forehead. I wanted to lean down and kiss him awake, but I didn't. He was still untouchable. And besides, there was no telling what kind of punishment he'd mete out for touching him without his conscious knowledge. The rules were different for me.

With a resigned sigh, I hobbled over to the closet and opened it. Inside hung an array of fine, extremely expensive clothes. I grabbed a shirt from its hanger and put it on. At least it covered my naked body. Bending down, I grabbed my little black dress from where it had pooled on the floor and tiptoed out of the room, down the hall, and to the stairs.

The steps creaked under my weight as I made my way down them, but no one in the house was up yet except me. Padding across cold floors, I made my way to the room I had chosen and shut the door behind me.

Once inside, I stood, unsure what to do. Lost. Anton had somehow unmoored me. Normally I'd know exactly what to do. It wouldn't always be the correct thing to do—many times my decisions involved smoking weed or texting old boyfriends—but at least I knew what I wanted to do. Now, standing naked but for a dress shirt and a towel on my head, I stared at the boxes holding my life and wondered what to do about such a pitiful bounty.

This was it. My whole life, except for my art, was here. My sculpting tools were all still at my old apartment, and I wished, suddenly, that I had asked for them to be brought here. Nothing would have made me feel better than to plunge my hands into some water and grab a block of clay and just fucking go for it. Make a horse, or a wolf, or a goat. Something lithe and beautiful. My hands would know what to do, if only I could lay them on some clay.

But all that shit was across town, and I was stuck here, cut off almost completely from the life I had lived a scant week before.

...Well, no sense standing around catching a cold about it.

I combed through the boxes, each labeled well, especially since my apartment had been a total disaster area when the movers had showed up, and found several boxes of clothes. Ripping them open, I dug through them until I found something warm enough to wear and got dressed. Just a sweater, slim jeans, and knock-off Ugg boots, but warm enough and I started to feel better. Plus having clothes strewn all over the guest bed I had claimed made the place feel a bit more like home already. I should just open all the boxes and dump everything out, I thought. It seemed like a really good idea. I mean, I'd only had about thirty minutes of sleep between getting my brains fucked out, but it would make me feel better. I put a hand on a box.

My door opened and I jumped about a foot in the air, stifling a shriek. Whirling around, I expected to see Anton there, but instead my father stood in the doorway.

Ugh. Great.
Just who I didn't want to see.

"What do you want?" I snapped. "I'm busy."

"Felicia," he said, then stopped, clearly uncomfortable and not sure what to say. I cocked a hip and jammed a fist into it, waiting for him to continue. Finally he sighed. "I was just coming to check up on you."

"Yeah?" I said. "Well, it's a little late for that. I'm not your responsibility any more. You sold me off."

"Oh god, don't say it like that..."

I threw my hands in the air, a gesture I suddenly remembered my mother employing to distraction last night, and turned it into running my hands through my damp hair. "Well, what do you want me to say?"

He shook his head, glancing around at the boxes filling my room. "I don't know," he said. "

I almost told him I didn't hate him, but I did. So I stayed silent.

Finally he blew a stream of air through his teeth. "Your mother wants to go shopping today to start getting your wedding in order."

Uuuuugh. I already had a wedding. I seriously did not need another one, and I really didn't feel like going shopping with my mother. Whenever I wondered why she stayed with my father despite the fact that he cheated on her with a new girl every week, I just had to go shopping with her to remember. She was addicted to plastic.

"You think she's going to feel well enough to do that?" I asked.

He looked at me blankly for a second, then seemed to remember that she was sick. "Oh, I'm sure she will," he said. "She always feels well enough to spend money."

That was pretty rich coming from a guy who blew all his credit, capital, and concrete assets on bad business ventures and had to sell his own daughter into modern-day sexual-slavery to save his own ass, but I stayed silent. He was never going to change, and I didn't need to fight with him. Besides, as much as I hated to admit it, things could have gone a lot worse than they had. I liked Anton. And I didn't really mind being married to him so much. There were worse things to be.

"I guess I'd better get some coffee started," I said.

He moved aside for me and I brushed past him and descended the stairs.

*

I found ten texts and two voicemails from Sadie warning me of my parents' impending arrival. Clearly I needed to glue my phone to my forehead so I didn't miss anything important.

I wanted to kick myself. I should have been able to warn Anton. We could have turned off all the lights and hid behind the couch and pretended we weren't at home. As it was, my mother whirled into the breakfast nook at nine, in high dudgeon. Anton had left the house half an hour earlier, pausing only to give me a cursory, distant kiss on the forehead. He didn't even look me in the eye before he drifted out the front door. My mother thought it rude of him to leave without greeting his houseguests.

"You are kind of unexpected," I told her. "He has things to do that don't involve you. Or me. Like running a financial empire."

"Felicia," my mother said, plopping herself down in the chair across from mine at the breakfast table, "why on earth did you marry a rich man? You are never going to be the first the first thing in his life. He is always going to be a businessman first and a husband second. Sometimes third or fourth! What
were
you thinking?"

I wanted to strangle her. Or hug her. I couldn't tell which.

"I was thinking, wow, he's really hot and rich and wants to marry me, let's do this," I said, which was kind of half the truth. He was really hot. I loved fucking him. On the other hand, now that I had some coffee in me and the damage from last night was becoming apparent, I hoped I had satsified him for at least a week. My pussy was raw and aching, and I kept shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

My mother, thankfully, didn't seem to notice. "Well, we are going to his office and retrieving him after I've had breakfast."

I blinked at her. "What?"

"We're going to go pick out wedding cakes and inivitations today. And we'll need to secure a venue." She sighed, as though this were a great burden and not something she had decided to do without even asking me. "It's going to be a lot of work. You'll both need to pick a wedding date, too."

I stared. She sipped her coffee and sighed. "Why do we have to do it this morning?" I asked her. "Can't it wait? Anton and I haven't even been married for forty-eight hours yet. Can't we... you know, ease into it?"

"That is not my problem," my mother told me. "My problem is your wedding, and I will not sit idly by while your husband blows you off like mine did."

Not for the first time, I thought that there was probably a reason my father blew her off, but I kept my mouth shut. Nothing was a sorer subject with my mother. She could talk about how terrible a husband my father was for hours on end if she really wanted to—my therapist had told me that it was highly inappropriate that she had done just that to me on several occasions—but the second someone on the outside of their relationship said anything she would burst into tears. It was maddening.

"He's not blowing me off," I said. "Believe me, he pays me plenty of attention."

She gave me a cool eye. "Not enough attention to give you a proper wedding," she said. "If he truly cared about you, he would have wanted to meet your family, given you two a proper start in life."

He doesn't care about me,
I thought.
He doesn't
want
to care about me. He just wants a companion. A roommate fuckbuddy.
It didn't really matter how much he liked to fuck me if he didn't actually like me, did it? And I
had
missed out on the wedding of my dreams. Which wasn't much, but I still wanted that princess dress.

And if he was angry with us barging in? Then maybe he'd talk some sense into my mother. If he could get my mother out of this absolutely insane, irritating obsession with seeing me married in a ceremony, it would be worth it to bug him this morning. Ten minutes of hassle and a possible spanking versus two months of stress and parental hovering? I couldn't imagine Anton putting up with that sort of shit. I was a slave to my family, and he was the opposite. Maybe I could get something out of this marriage besides a sore cooch.

"Fine, we can go see him," I said.

"I wasn't asking your permission, dear," my mother said. "And we should leave as soon as I've had some toast. I have an appointment this afternoon that I must keep."

I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

*

To say that Anton was surprised by his newly-minted wife and mother-in-law showing up at his office was an understatement. Even as we walked in the door, I felt him shut down from across the room. I wished I'd been able to get ahold of Sadie, but she wasn't answering her phone and I knew she'd been at Anton's office earlier this morning to discuss her employment. Maybe Anton had eaten her.

His sparse office, perfectly appointed for a rich man without attachments, seemed far too spare to me when I walked into it. Where before I had been impressed by its restraint, looking at it now I saw the repression that boiled over whenever Anton touched me. He was pushing a lot of things down, keeping them deep inside, and every refined, understated piece of furniture in the office gave me the willies, like I was looking at the pit of a long-dormant volcano and seeing the swell of the ground as something molten hot underneath struggled to come to the surface.

"Good morning, Anton," my mother said, striding toward his desk. "We have several appointments that require your attention this morning."

"Oh?" he said. "Do you?" His eyes shifted to mine and I tried to look contrite, mouthing
sorry
to him over my mother's shoulder. He raised a brow at me, but left it at that.

"Yes, wedding cake, venue, date, and invitations need to be sorted out this morning."

"That's a tall order. I do have a lot of work to do..."

"Yes, well, be that as it may," my mother cut in, "you are a married man now and have responsibilities."

He grew very still.

Oh, shit.

"Ma'am, I assure you I know my responsibilities and obligations," he said, his voice quiet.

"Then you will be able to spare a morning for wedding planning," my mother said. "I'll not have my little girl play mistress to a man married to a job."

For a long moment Anton sat in his chair, very still. Then he stood abruptly and closed his thin laptop. "Very well," he said, sending a shock through me, "I will accompany you. But we must be done by lunch. There are many important things I must attend to here."

"My daughter
is
important," my mother said, and I wanted to melt into the floor and disappear. Why had I thought this was a good idea? And why wasn't Anton
stopping
her?

Anton rounded his desk, not even glancing at me, the faint smile I had come to think of as Buddha-like plastered over his face and in a flash I realized he only wore that face when he was feeling something very strongly but desperately wanted to keep it hidden. The thought rocked me and I stared as he held his arm out to my mother. "Please, let us go, Mrs. Dare. There is much work to be done."

My mother seemed slightly taken aback by his acquiescence, then drew herself up to her full height—not very high, admittedly—and gave him a regal nod. "Thank you, Anton." And she looped her hand around his arm and let him escort her to the door.

I trailed behind them, suddenly feeling like a third wheel. At least it gave me a chance to watch Anton when the full force of his attention wasn't riveted on me.

His dark head tilted and leaned toward my mother, that Zen-master smile softening his gaze, and yet behind it I saw emptiness, as though he were wearing a mask made of his own face. I had seen that mask drop not once, but several times, and behind it I knew lurked a man full of something painful and dark. Seeing him adopt his persona so smoothly—I knew he must have had great practice at it. Years. Decades. Somewhere along the line he had decided that it was better to hide than to be forthright. Perhaps that was true in the world of business, but now I was bound to him, and I wished I could lift the mask away and see the man underneath. The glimpses I'd seen weren't enough for me.

As I observed him with my mother, all courtesy and dead inside, my heart twisted in my chest, a little ache born of pure human empathy, and a little jealousy, too. If I could hide like that... I probably wouldn't have had to get married in the first place, for a start. And yet we'd both arrived at the same place despite our opposite natures.

I chewed my lip and shadowed them to the car, my mother chattering away and Anton nodding politely. As he handed her inside, his eyes caught mine.