Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1) Read online

  A perfect submissive, she glued her eyes to the ground and kept her hands at her sides.

  Stefan waved once and turned down the side path, pulling his pet behind him.

  “Follow me.” I spun and went up the steps. I usually put my hand on Diana’s back and let her walk before me, but things had changed. Now it was her job to be at my heels.

  Did it make sense that both felt right? That in Montauk, I could let her walk behind me in a subservient position, but in the city, I walked behind her?

  It didn’t make any sense, and it did.

  Once she was inside, I closed the door, shutting out the cold and the wind. Only the sound of the grandfather clock interrupted the silence.

  I faced her. She looked all over, taking in everything. The walls of glass, the open rooms, the wood floor, the oversized nature photographs. Willa had left flowers on the hall table.

  “We are the only ones in this house except for the following. Thierry and Willa live in the cottage just east.” I pointed generally east. “Thierry won’t come in without asking, and Willa comes to do some cooking and cleaning. Nothing they see will surprise them, but we are going to work around their times. The studio house on the west is currently occupied by Stefan and Serena, whom you just met. They have no reason to be in the main house unless invited, and the studio is absolutely, positively off-limits to you. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  I took off her coat, untied her scarf, put it in her pocket, and hung it in the front closet. The stairs to the second floor were by the front foyer, and the office door was on the other side. She faced the back of the house, which overlooked the ocean through high, wood-framed windows. She crossed her arms, looking past the horizon, where her worst fears were.

  “Questions?” I asked.

  “Will you invite them? Serena and Stefan?”

  “Maybe.”

  “For dinner?”

  “For whatever I want.” I stood in front of her, blocking the view. “Your room is upstairs. It has a red door and it’s connected to mine. Everything you need is there.”

  “Wait. We’re not sleeping in the same bed?”

  “No. Not even in the same room. It’s your space. There are clothes for you. Unless I have something laid out for you, you can wear what you want. The white nightgown is what you wear to bed unless I say otherwise. You must leave your room for meals and when I need you, but if you’re not servicing me, you can go wherever you like except the studio. If you see me, you present yourself.”

  “Servicing you?”

  “We can call it whatever you want.”

  I used to do this all the time. I’d brought a dozen subs up for thirty-day stretches, and they were typically excited and thrilled. They were usually sucking my cock before I even told them where their room was.

  “Can I ask a question?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t redline you sharing me.”

  “That’s not a question. That’s a statement.”

  “I didn’t cross it off because I didn’t think you’d let anyone else have sex with me.”

  “How strategic.”

  “Was I wrong?”

  “You might have been wrong.”

  Her face fell. She’d miscalculated. I didn’t want to hurt her, and I certainly didn’t want to share her, but she had to accept the rules. She had to do this one hundred percent if it was going to work.

  I asked myself if I enjoyed hurting her, and I answered yes and no at the same time. Then I asked myself if I was trying to scare her, and I got the same answer. My responses were tangled up in each other.

  “Go to your room and get changed. There’s a clock. The alarm is set for five p.m. Be at the base of the stairs before it stops chiming.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  No answer. I picked a stack of mail off the side table, sorted through it, and headed out of the room. Still, she didn’t move.

  “Do you want to go home? I’m not going to ask you constantly. It’s up to you. Or I can get frustrated with you and call it off.”

  She went up the stairs with her head down and her face firm. I watched her ass as she went. She wasn’t going to last a week.

  And yet, she only seemed scared when I was too brusque.

  The more I embraced who I had been—who I was at the core—the more I saw the signs of submission. The downcast eyes, the still hands, the attention to my Dominant voice.

  I flipped through the mail and paced the corners and edges of the house like a cat checking his territory. I hadn’t been there in years, but I had paid for upkeep with the other two. Not much had changed. It looked like a normal house. The library with its dark woods and stacks of hardcovers. The piano in the corner. The Oriental rug. The hidden hooks in the floor and ceiling. The couch and long table facing the ocean in the open room. The TV room with its rustic furniture. And the kitchen, built for cooks with an island and a six-burner stove with a grill. When we’d had over a hundred people here, it had been really handy, and not just for cooking.

  The entire back of the house was skirted by a deck that ended at a rocky beach, thirty feet from the high tide line. I stepped out into the cold and faced the water. I’d had a sub tell me the presence of the ocean and her Dominant in the same place made her feel infinitely small and powerless. She described it as the purest joy. Being under him, infinitesimal in the universe, yet cared for as if she was the most precious being in the world.

  Her eyes had fluttered a little when she described the feeling, as if she was re-experiencing the high.

  A grunt went up, carried by the wind, made anonymous and sexless in the gusts. It came from the studio. I walked to the other end of the back deck.

  The studio building was painted white. The barn doors faced the main house and had windows at the top. On the side, another door and a small porch faced the ocean.

  A plane of snow-covered grass tilted between the main house and the studio.

  There, thirty feet away in the cold sun, were the residents of the studio. Serena, bare-assed and bent over a huge planter, one naked leg leaning on the edge, one boot on, pants pooled at the ankle. Stefan behind her, thrusting inside her as if he wanted to kill her.

  I looked up. A railing above. The narrow balcony to Diana’s room was just above me, facing the studio. She stood there, a flat, blurry figure against the darkness of the room behind her.

  She was watching from her room. The edge of the porch wasn’t in front of her by much, and it was possible she didn’t notice me there. I couldn’t read her from that angle, but she saw it, and Stefan knew it. She was the reason for the show.

  Stefan put his hand on Serena’s throat, leveraging himself against it. Pulling her up. Her face went red. I could see it even from far away. She’d redlined choking with me. Had someone pushed that limit? Or was this a first?

  I looked up at Diana’s window again. She was still there. Stefan’s grunts carried over the wind, faster and more intense. When I looked back to Stefan and Serena, his hand was off her throat and her mouth was open wide as if she needed to inhale the atmosphere.

  I checked Diana. Still there. Barely a shadow against the window frame. If she saw me, she pretended she didn’t.

  Serena cried out, barking, “Please!”

  Stefan snarled something I couldn’t decipher, and Serena’s back arched in orgasm. He grabbed her ass with both hands and thrust hard and fast. He went tight, then loose.

  When I looked up again, my wife wasn’t at the window.

  I’d be surprised if she showed up at dinner with anything but a request to go home.

  Chapter 45

  PRESENT TENSE – DAY ONE

  The studio was visible from the office room. The sun lit a clear blue sky, warming the air enough to gently melt the last snow on the yard between the main house and the little studio where Stefan and Serena lived. By eleven, strands of dry grass and swatches of dirt came through the white tuft
s.

  I didn’t admit to myself that I was watching the studio, even as I looked over my laptop screen whenever there was movement. Diana’s room was right above me. I kept it nondescript with white bedding and pale wood furniture. I’d had the door between our rooms left open so she could see my bed, which was higher with posts and beams that could be used for ropes and shackles.

  She wouldn’t notice the potential of the bedframe as much as she’d notice the blue-and-green quilt, the art on the walls, the Persian carpet. She’d notice how the décor showed our relative places in the relationship. To most subs, the subtle message was a turn-on. To Diana, it would be insulting.

  Even the bed sheets made me think I was moving too fast.

  I made a hundred plans for her body and mind at dinner, ranging from honest talks to unfulfilling fantasies, then dismissed them all. Having gotten her here, I felt the emptiness of my success. Still so much to do, and I couldn’t decide how to do it.

  Mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted.

  I thought I did, but I couldn’t commit to it. I still straddled two worlds emotionally. My definitions were contradictory, and the shift had been too sudden. Was I half of a power couple? A Dominant with a submissive wife who didn’t love him? Or a single Dominant with insatiable appetites? Neither? Some third, nameless monster?

  I could only imagine what it was like for my wife. Except at the end of this, she could go back to being who she was. I couldn’t.

  At eleven fifteen, one of the barn doors opened. Stefan came out bundled in a wool hat and thick boots. Serena waited in the door, fully dressed in a burnt orange polo and brown pants. A narrow wood crate leaned on her hip. I’d seen Stefan transport his work, and that was a canvas crate. I stood and went around the desk, not even pretending to work anymore.

  I watched as he backed a pickup truck up to the door. Got out. Kissed Serena on the cheek when he took the crate. She went into the studio and got another, handing it to him as he came back. He rushed to relieve her of the weight and wagged his finger at her. She didn’t get far with the third before he took it.

  When he closed the back of the cab, Serena got on her knees, right in the flat, wet snow. She kissed the top of his hand, then the palm. He patted her head and picked her up, led her into the studio, and closed the door.

  As he drove away a few minutes later, I couldn’t forget that he’d put his hand on her neck until she stopped breathing. That had been a hard limit. Yet the scene I’d witnessed was as warm and normal as any between a Dom and his sub.

  I was making a problem where there wasn’t one. Serena’s lines had moved. Stefan was doing what Stefan did. Serena was a grown-up. She knew how it went. He was giving her what she needed.

  Neither Stefan nor Serena needed fixing. If anyone needed fixing, it was Adam Steinbeck, walking across the slope to the little house on the west side of the property with his dress shoes crunching on the old snow and the salt mist freezing in his hair.

  The guy with the love of his life biding her time to leave him. The guy who could only get her to spend thirty days with him by holding hostage everything she held dear.

  That was who needed fixing.

  As true as all that was, I didn’t hesitate to knock on the side door. It had been painted since I’d been at the house last. A shiny flat red against the crisp white of the wood siding. A shadow passed over the glass, and Serena opened the door a second later.

  “Hi,” she said, only opening the door an eighth of the way.

  “Hi,” I replied. “Sorry to disturb you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You’re not supposed to open the door for me or anyone is my guess.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here. You and your wife, I mean.”

  As if Diana and I were on anything more intimate than speaking terms. As if our marriage was more real than a thirty-day stay of execution.

  “Are you going to invite me in?”

  I was asking for trouble. Her ex-Dom asking to be in the house without talking to her current Dom first? Bad form. We were Dominant and in control. We shared submissives and put our emotions in a locked box. But we had so many ways of stepping on each other’s toes. We could release a caged animal with a simple slip, much less an intentional breach of space.

  Serena stepped away from the door and opened it wider. She knew what she was doing. It was possible I’d walked across the snow in dress shoes for a good reason.

  Before I crossed the threshold, I looked back at the main house, up to the second floor, where Diana had been standing before.

  She wasn’t there.

  Chapter 46

  PAST PERFECT

  Two days after I told Stefan to jerk off on his own dime, he split. Serena hadn’t seen him at the house. He had a well-earned reputation and I didn’t want her to be nervous. I wanted her to feel as safe as she ever had.

  I waited another day. I let her heal, but not completely. I brought a dress back from the city and told her to wear it to dinner. I had flowers brought in. Willa cooked and set the dining room table for two. Everything shone. The tablecloth was stark white and the glasses were nearly invisible.

  When she came down, she got on her knees, or she tried to.

  “Stand,” I said before she fell completely.

  I held out my hand. She looked confused, but took it.

  “This is your night,” I whispered. “It’s like your birthday.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Master.”

  “Tonight, I’m Adam.”

  She smiled nervously, looked me in the eye for no more than a flicker before putting her eyes back on the floor. “All right. Adam.”

  “You look uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t understand. That’s all.”

  “You came to me to lose your virginity, Serena. I’ll take it how I see fit.”

  She nodded slightly. Started to say something. Stopped herself.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “You worry me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what to expect.”

  A submissive always knows what to expect within certain boundaries. I should have listened to the heart of what she was saying. When I pulled the chair out for her, I was pushing her limits. When I shut off my Dominant voice, I was exploring boundaries. I didn’t realize it that night, but I was about to inadvertently stumble on my own redlines.

  Chapter 47

  PRESENT TENSE – DAY ONE

  Presented with a choice in the moment of its making, I didn’t think I was discerning one option from another. When I’d walked Serena up to her apartment in the Lower East Side, kissed her on the cheek, and thanked her, walking out hadn’t seemed like a choice. It had seemed like crossing the last t and dotting the last i. I’d had a project with a start and an end and the end came exactly on schedule.

  In the studio five years later, with the space scraped of the vestiges of its past and Serena in her polo shirt, I wondered at the choice. If I’d chosen to stay with her, if I’d given her a chip of my heart, would I have been able to give the entire thing to Diana the following week?

  If I’d embraced Serena and given her the time she wanted, how would I have felt about Diana when she walked into the conference room with her father?

  I shuddered to think of how easily I could have missed loving Diana. How the richness of my life with her would have been the reality of a parallel existence. One of a million lives not lived. A life created when my mind was blank as the subway rocked in the morning or during the last five tedious minutes on the treadmill. How the fire of my current existence had been sparked on the kindling of a choice to shut Serena out.

  “I saw you this morning,” I said as Serena shut the door behind me. I didn’t elaborate. She knew I didn’t mean in the front, by the car.

  The studio was painted bright white, from concrete floor to fifteen-foot ceiling. It was heated to over eighty degrees even though it was the dead of w
inter. Absolutely necessary when the occupants could be exposed and naked at any time.

  “Yes. You did.” Serena ran her hands along the white counter. The kitchen was part of the larger room, white and chrome. “Can I get you something?”

  “Water would be great. Thank you.”

  She got a glass and went to the sink. She was never saucy or oversexed. She didn’t flirt. Ever. Some of us found that very attractive.

  Diana flirted. I made the comparison immediately and knew just as quickly that her clumsiness at it had been the attraction.

  I took a few steps into the main room. Stefan’s work was neat, precise, and bold. Tarps were down. Paints covered. The slop sink could have been used for surgery. I sat on a red chair that looked like a puncture wound in the white space.

  “You’d never know how prolific he was from this studio,” I said.

  “I think cleanliness is part of the art.”

  “How many pieces did he take to the city today?”

  “Seven. He has a show at Broome.” Serena brought me the glass and stood in front of me.

  “Sit,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to put on a show for you, but I didn’t want to safe out over it.”

  I tilted my head toward the couch then slid a coaster out of the case and put my water on the glass table. She sat with her legs pressed together and her hands folded between her knees.

  “I’m fine with it,” I said.

  “But your wife. Diana.”

  Serena. Mentioning Diana. Calling her my wife. In the architecture of my life, there hadn’t been a hallway between these women. Now there was a thoroughfare.

  “She’s a big girl.”

  “She was the audience.”

  The room was so warm my glass already had beads of condensation on it. One at the top inched downward. Stopped in a no-man’s-land of clouded frost. Stefan had wanted my wife to see him hammer and choke Serena. Blood rushed to the surface of my skin. The droplet curved a little to the left. Stopped again. I shut down my feelings on the matter.