Kept (8 page)

Even though they didn’t have a spanking relationship, she wouldn’t be the least surprised to find herself upended over his lap as a natural result of his very dominant personality. Sometimes she got the distinct feeling that he was only seconds away from doing just that when he got aggravated with her. "I think you’re misunderstanding something about the agreement, namely that if we are together for five years, I will transfer whatever house or property you decide on into your name – and it will be paid in full at that time."

Trish began to struggle in earnest at his words, muttering

"Oh, no you’re not! I’ll get a mortgage for the remaining balance, but you’re not going to buy the whole freaking thing for me. Uh-uh."

Swat!

It really didn’t hurt or even sting, but it sure did bring her up short, effectively silencing her as she glared up at him.

"Hmmmm. That works really nicely! I’m gonna have to start remembering that and doing it a lot more often!" He held her jaw in his hand. "You signed the agreement, and that’s the way it is. And I’m not going to let you out of the agreement, nor am I going to

- 63 -

BacksideOfLove.com

Carolyn Faulkner

allow any changes. Do you read me?" He could hear her teeth grinding angrily together, but she nodded. "Besides," he bent to whisper in her ear, "if we’re together for the whole five years, I can guarantee that you’re going to have earned every penny of it!"

Reed released her with another solid crack to her rounded bottom that was sharp enough to have her rubbing the offended area as she descended the stairs. Jeez! Even if the man wasn’t a recreational spanker, he was a natural enough one to give her real cause for concern!

When they were on their way back to his place, she asked excitedly, "So, when can I move in?"

He caught her hand and put it on his thigh, covering it with his own. She was so happy she was practically vibrating. "Well, I want to have the place looked over by a friend of mine to make sure that it’s structurally sound – "

"Of course it’s sound, Reed – it’s beautiful – the roofline is straight as an arrow and I didn’t see any evidence of water damage from roof leaks or anything – all it needs is a makeover." Trish knew she sounded whiney, but didn’t like the idea that he was going to have the property inspected. She could just see the guy finding something major and then she wouldn’t get the house.

"Trish, I will buy the house as soon as Rob tells me in no uncertain terms that it’s not going to crumble around our ears in two years, and not before then."

Trish was just glad she wasn’t standing within hand’s reach of him during this speech, or she had the feeling he might have accented it with a few more well-placed smacks. He was very used to ordering people around, and as time went on, she realized that just naturally extended to her.

- 64 -

BacksideOfLove.com

KEPT

The inspector liked the house a lot; it was older, and therefore better built than most newer houses. He mentioned that the roof would probably need to be replaced within the next three to four years, and the insulation could stand to be beefed up a bit, but the plumbing was all new, the furnace was only about three years old, and the wiring was fine. Rob recommended more smoke detectors, that the central air conditioning unit be serviced and, when it finally died, that it be replaced with a better made unit, but in general he said that the people who owned it before might not have been the best interior decorators, but they had taken care of the rest of the house very well.

Trish was ecstatic, practically beside herself when Reed gave her her own set of keys and kept one for himself. She insisted that they spend the first night in the house, so Reed had just his bed brought over, muttering the whole time about it but smiling whenever he saw her face as she wandered through the rooms. He puttered along behind her, making note of what she was musing out loud about regarding the redecorating she wanted to do, but when Trish got to the Purple Room, he raced ahead of her and threw himself against the door dramatically.

"No! You have to leave this room alone."

Tricia poked her finger into his ribs, making him squeal like a girl, - she’d found out his one vulnerability – he was ticklish - but barely making a dent into his layers of muscle. "Not on your old lady’s tin-type, buddy boy. This room is the first to go."

"No no no! I want to leave it the way it is. It’ll be fun –

we’ll stick any company we have in here and they’ll go away faster

. . . "

She was giggling, and he loved it. He liked to think, egotistically, that she was happier since they’d been together. Reed knew she was sleeping and eating well, knew that she went to sleep every night exhausted by their lovemaking, and even so sometimes

- 65 -

BacksideOfLove.com

Carolyn Faulkner

he couldn’t help himself and he woke her in the middle of the night with his mouth on her eminently suckable nipples, or with his hands or his cock already between her legs. Exploring that warm, welcoming wetness was rapidly becoming an obsession, and he found himself delegating more things at work than he ever had in the past so that he could spend as much time as possible with Trish.

But the wild, explosive sex was not the only reason why he liked to be with her. She made him laugh, and sometimes even laughed at him or things he said, which made a bubble form in his chest that was almost painful. They could discuss anything, and did

- loudly, but neither bent to the other’s position. Sometimes, though, when things were very quiet and they had finally settled into what he had come to think of as their home, he would sometimes catch her staring out the window with the most melancholy expression on her face, as if she had never smiled in her life and never expected to in the future. It ripped his gut open from the inside out, and he wanted to fix it, to banish that look from her face forever, and his most immediate solution was to throw money at her in hopes of making her happy. Reed found though, that he was involved with a very stubborn and independent woman, and his attempts to smooth her way through life with his money only seemed to truly annoy her.

The worst arguments they had were over money. He wanted to bankroll her life, but at the very least, her redecorating. She refused to even consider it. The money he was paying her every two weeks was just sitting in her checking account, because he was paying for absolutely everything. Trish was not about to allow him to pay for that, too. Reed countered that, since he was living there, too, shouldn’t he have some input into what the inside of the house looked like?

Tricia was only too happy to inform him that he was more than welcome to come along with her as she looked at endless samples of wallpaper and paint, but that the final decision was hers

- 66 -

BacksideOfLove.com

KEPT

alone. Reed managed to conjure a fake injured look, but she wasn’t buying it. In the end, she did a beautiful job, and did it herself with only a little help from her cousins and their friends. He had arrived home one afternoon and interrupted a painting party, where she’d supplied the beer and pizza (after the painting was done, of course) and everyone chipped in to paint. All of the painting that needed to be done was accomplished in one longish day, and by the time he got there they were just breaking into the keg and placing an order at Pizza Slut.

That night, after everyone had gone home, he joined her in a long, hot shower, gently helping her get speckles of melon madness paint out of her hair and her ears and off her elbows and knees. Then he dried her and lifted her into their bed, where Reed stretched out on his back and arranged her on her back on top of him. He was already hard, as usual around her, and joined her body with his immediately, then spent a long time leisurely stroking his palms up and down her tummy and over her oh-so-sensitive breasts while he buried his mouth at that very vulnerable spot where neck became shoulder and slowly, very slowly, he drove them both absolutely crazy.

- 67 -

BacksideOfLove.com

Carolyn Faulkner

everal months later, they were very happily settled into their lives and their routine. At least he was, he S thought, leaning back in his desk chair. They had no real need for a formal living room – Reed had retained his place, and if he needed to do any business entertaining it would be done there. She had not backed down one iota about not wanting to act as his hostess, but he was learning that when she said something, she stuck to it. But he was working on her. So they had turned what had probably been intended originally as the "back parlor" or family room into an office, which they shared. Trish was busily typing away on her desktop just a few feet away, and Reed found himself sighing contentedly as he watched her.

Despite his own deep sense of contentment, though, he was truly concerned about her. She was listless and quiet and sad, and that was definitely not her. For a while there, Trish had seemed to recover a little from the bad spell she’d come down to her cousins’

place to break. Buying the house and decorating it had helped a lot, giving her something to divert her attention. He worried that it was more than that, that she wasn’t happy with him, with their arrangement, and nothing he did seemed to help – as a matter of fact, she totally resented it any time he tried to make things easier

- 68 -

BacksideOfLove.com

KEPT

for her by paying for something, and Reed had had to reign in his propensity to want to spend money on her so as not to upset her too much. He knew that she cried sometimes when she thought he wasn’t watching her, and that she wasn’t sleeping well. Sometimes he’d reach for her in the middle of the night and she wouldn’t be there, and he would get up and find her sitting in the dark on the screened back porch.

Reed always made her come back to bed with him, ignoring her protests to the point sometimes that he just lifted her into his arms and brought her upstairs, but he could feel the wetness on her cheek when she lay it on his bare shoulder. His body overrode his intellect every time, making him instantly lay claim to her when he put her on their bed, but she never seemed to object. Her body was always slick and welcoming, and her arms clasped him tightly to her as pleasure drowned him within her silken depths.

In fact, Trish had turned out to be the perfect mistress –

almost frighteningly perfect. She never turned him down for sex, and God knows he was a right and proper sex maniac around her; he was at her all the time. She never asked him for anything; indeed was the least demanding woman he’d ever known. She even avoided asking him for things she should have asked for that called for a man’s strength or sensibilities. It annoyed the piss out of him that she turned to Kell to help her move some heavy furniture around in the living room, and then again the next week to help her bring the big, heavy, awkward boxes of the new computer she’d bought into the house from the store. Kell was left scratching his head, too, and when Reed came home he nearly blew his top at the innocent bystander.

Kell was holding up his hands, proclaiming his innocence.

"Look, I’m just doin’ a friend a favor here, buddy."

- 69 -

BacksideOfLove.com

Carolyn Faulkner

Reed ran his hand through his hair. "But what the hell am I?

Chopped liver? I could’ve done all of this for her, without her having to bother you."

Trish had gone to the kitchen to get a pair of scissors, and she reappeared at just that moment, putting her hand on Kell’s arm.

"Thank you so much for the help. I really appreciate it, Kell."

Kell was watching Reed’s eyes narrow at the sight of Trish’s hand on him, and he could practically see the steam blowing horizontally out of the other man’s ears. "Not a problem.

I’m glad to help. Well, I’d better get home."

She was already digging into the boxes, but Trish called back over her shoulder, "Thanks again, Kell – we’ll have to have you and Maggie back over for dinner."

"I’ll have her call you," he promised, grinning to himself at Reed’s predicament as he let himself out the front door. He would have a liked to have been a fly on the wall for the discussion he knew was going to be forthcoming in this household!

"What the hell was Kell doing over here?"

Startled at the vehemence of his tone, Trish sat back on her heels and looked at him. He was positively seething about something. She wondered what it was; probably something at the office. Knowing it couldn’t have been anything she’d done, she went back to pulling out pieces of her new toy, spewing Styrofoam and plastic bags all over the floor of the office. "I asked him to help me lift the boxes of my new computer – he has that big Jeep Cherokee whatever thingie, with room in the back for all of it, and then he had the strength to lift them up the stairs and into the house." A long, exasperated sign sounded behind her, but she kept on talking. "I coulda done the getting it into the house part myself –

" If she had seen the truly thunderous frown on his face at that

- 70 -

BacksideOfLove.com

KEPT

statement, she might have taken the hint and shut up, but she couldn’t " – but my little car really doesn’t have the room – "

All of a sudden, she felt a band of strong fingers closing around her upper arm as she was unceremoniously hauled up against him.

"Why the hell would you call Kell to do that? Or to move the furniture last week, for that matter?" Trish grimaced. She knew he hadn’t let go of that one. Somehow she’d inadvertently managed to insult his masculinity by getting Kell to help her instead of him.

Was that what this was about again? That hand left her arm to descend in a very hard swat on her bottom while he kept her captive against him. "Don’t you think I’m strong enough to do it for you without you bothering Kell all the time?"

"Ow! Cut that out! I just asked a friend to do a favor for me.

What the hell is wrong with that?"