On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries #4)(76)

“My behavior was outlined, too.” She frowned at him, but it wasn’t an angry expression. She seemed more thoughtful than anything else.

“Why did you make me sign that contract? We could have gone on with the one we had before.” He should have done this a long time ago. Some people needed to sit in an office setting and talk out their problems with a third party, but he needed this. He needed her naked, his hands working to bring her comfort and pleasure.

“Because we were divorced. We needed to rethink how we acted.”

He tied off the design. She looked so f*cking gorgeous wrapped up in his ropes. The tortoiseshell design formed a sexy pattern around her breasts, showing them off. Her whole torso was in a gorgeous pattern. If they were at Sanctum, he would spend the next thirty minutes showing her off. She was a work of art. But tonight, he simply made his plea. “Eve, be brave. Please. Don’t be logical. Don’t be kind. Tell me what I did to you. You were hurting and you needed me, and what did I do?”

He heard her sniffle and looked up. Her brown eyes were sheened with tears. “You ignored me.”

He placed his head to her breast because they had finally come to his true crime. A deep sense of peace came over him as he finally admitted what he’d done. He’d been a bastard, but he sensed forgiveness was a heartbeat away. “I ignored you. God, Eve, please forgive me.”





Alex held her, his head soft against her skin. His words were whispered against her flesh.

She’d always known why he’d done it, but she’d only just realized that she’d punished him. If it had been anyone else, she would have seen it easily. She’d told herself that she wanted that contract to protect them both, but now she could see why it had been important to her. She’d been punishing him, forcing him to see her, to deal with her in the only way he seemed willing to. She’d been like a child who would take any attention she could get. “I never just told you how I felt.”

“I want to hear it now, angel,” he said. “I need to hear it. I need you to get it all out.”

She was tied up, unable to walk out of the room, and that was what she really wanted to do because the truth was so close to the surface and she was afraid to let it out. She’d held it in for so long, terrified of what really confronting that time would mean. “You don’t want to hear it all.”

He was on his knees in front of her, his head nuzzled between her breasts. “I do. I need to. We need to. I don’t want to hear the logic. I want to know how you felt so I can ask your forgiveness. I can’t ask for it unless I know. Angel, you had to have been so scared when he kicked the door in.”

She closed her eyes. God, she didn’t want to do this. She’d told the police and her therapist the bare bones, simply reciting the story over and over again, but the real memories were still inside her. Those moments of terror were deep in her veins, and Alex was trying to pull them out. The problem was she’d held on to them so long, she wasn’t sure who she would be when she’d given them all up.

She couldn’t be who she was back then. She’d been weak and completely submissive. She’d been dependent and then she’d been so alone. And now she was strong, but she was still so very alone. Could she find a way to be herself and have Alex, too?

“Please. Be brave, Eve. Talk to me.” His hands tightened as though he wouldn’t let her go.

But he had let her go. He’d agreed to the divorce without a second glance. He’d signed the contract without a word. Could she trust him now? Did she dare to try again? “I thought we agreed to stop doing this. We agreed to move forward and let go of the people we used to be.”

His head turned up, his eyes pleading with her. He was so gorgeous, her big bad Dom in a supplicant position, on his knees for his sub. “I can let go of the twenty-three-year-old idiot who didn’t realize just how much he could love you. I can. He’s gone. I can let go of the man who was so tied up in his own guilt that he didn’t really see you for years. But I will never let go of the eighty-year-old man who will hold your hand until the day he dies. I will fight for that old man. I will never let go of him.”

Tears blurred her vision, and she knew she was at that fork in the road she’d been terrified of for so many years—that place where she had to finally decide where she was going to go and whether the road would include the love of her life.

And in that moment, she saw him, really saw him for the first time in years. She saw him without the filter of her own pain. She saw him as that young man who had reached for her, who she’d learned with and grown with. She saw the Alex who had been sitting at her bedside when she woke up, his eyes haggard and guilt in every line of his body. She saw the Alex who had given in to her for five years, placating her, giving her only what she told him she needed while his eyes begged her for more. And she saw him as the old man he would be, lined and weathered and still so beautiful to her eyes. He would be there if she let him. He would reach for her hand, their lives so entwined that there was no way to disentangle them.

They had made a mess of things, but he was still here, still reaching out for her. And if she was brave, this time he might never let her go.

If she was really brave, she would make damn sure of it.

“I let him in.” She closed her eyes as she said the words, the horror of that day washing over her again.