When she awoke again, she was alone in the bed.
She couldn’t bear it for even a minute. She got up and dragged her discarded nightgown over her head, then ventured into the hall. Everything was silent. Had her lover retreated to his sanctuary now that he’d had her?
Her answer came with the glug of the coffee maker. She wasn’t far behind him, and as she pulled two cups from the cupboard she heard the creak of his weight coming down the stairs from his bedroom.
Apparently oblivious to her, he paused at the bottom of the stairs with his index finger pressed across an eyelid. He had put on a T-shirt and plaid pajama pants.
A queer feeling struck her as the thought that he might have been crying passed through her mind like a cold wind, but he lifted his head and squinted. Only one eye was teary and blinking.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, moving to the refrigerator in search of milk.
He shook his head and shambled forward. ‘Dry.’
‘You sleep with it open.’
He didn’t look at her as he moved into the kitchen with her. She’d embarrassed him, she could see, and though she found it endearing she wished she hadn’t said anything.
‘It’s been like this since the accident,’ he explained after a moment. ‘I have nerve damage. I wear a patch over it at night, but last night … it was low on my priorities.’
‘Accident.’ Is that how he referred to it?
She let it drop, and poured milk into her cup. ‘How do you take your coffee?’
‘Cream and two sugars.’
He climbed onto the stool next to her and folded his hands in front of him. He was quiet while she prepared his coffee, and when she passed him his cup he fidgeted with the handle.
He was nervous.
Grace should have been crippled with anxiety, yet she went through the motions of taking things from the fridge and cupboards and putting them in order on the counter.
She put butter in the pan. ‘Eggs?’
He didn’t answer, and she glanced up to see him looking slightly taken aback by the question. He pulled his cup closer. ‘Two. Fried, yolk broken.’
‘Toast?’
Now he looked truly flustered. The beginnings of a scowl appeared and his cheeks went pink. ‘I don’t usually eat breakfast.’
‘Neither do I, but I also never had a kitchen like this, and I don’t care to eat in front of someone else.’ She broke four eggs onto the pan and stabbed the yolks, then dug into the bread bag. ‘Toast?’
‘Two.’
She pursed her lips but lost the battle to keep from smiling. ‘It’s bothering you now, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Having someone in your space. You look like you think I’m going to shank you any second now.’ His face turned blank, and she laughed it off. ‘You like what I do when I have a partner, but have you never watched me get one? I read people. I can tell with just a look whether a man is for me. I can tell if he wants to pull my hair while he fucks me, or if he’s simply wondering what I taste like. I can tell when he just wants to get his dick wet. I can tell when he’s lonely and wants more than I’m willing to give him.’
She returned to the pan and loosened the eggs from the hot surface. ‘Up until now, I had nothing on you. Now it’s clear that you want me here, but you don’t want me disrupting your order.’
‘I like things the way I like them,’ he returned with a defensive snipe, ‘and this is my home. You’re here to work for me.’
Her eyes narrowed and she looked straight at him. ‘Did you only watch me when I was with a man, or before you put me out of my job did you bother to see what sort of assistant you were getting?’
He didn’t answer, and she turned her attention back to breakfast.
‘I got the job with Caroway because he paid attention to what I was doing when I worked for Chuck Ramsay. He saw that I took information and treated it like a piece of machinery. I took apart what was broken, I examined every piece, and I put it back together again for him. Yes, I type. Yes, I answer phones. Yes, I even get coffee, but anyone can do that. I have a degree in business and I’ve been working in the corporate world since graduation. Mont Carmel isn’t Bay Street, but that office upstairs is where I’m going to be Jacques Alain Taureau. I require my autonomy and I require confidence. You can be heavy-handed with me in bed, but if you try and push me around while I’m working, I’ll cut your balls off.’ The toast popped, and she put eggs on a plate and turned. ‘Cheese?’
He grunted. He wore the expression of a naughty five-year-old whose nanny had just come in to set him straight about who was boss. She doubted anyone ever spoke to him like this. Before Jacques Taureau had been turned into a recluse, he had been a party boy with a fat wallet.
He arranged her own breakfast, joined him at the island and took her first glorious sip of coffee. She closed her eyes and savoured it, at the same time tasting the footing she’d found with him that morning. She felt more in control, not of him but of herself.
She opened her eyes in time to see him shovel a forkful of egg, cheese and bread into his mouth. He speared another before he had swallowed the first, and Grace raised her brows.
‘When was the last time someone cooked for you?’
His mouth was too full to answer, so she dug into her own breakfast. Taureau, unsurprisingly, finished well ahead of her. He sat with the empty plate in front of him and sipped his coffee, his expression turning wary whenever she stared at him too long.
Her bravado faltered as a spark of nervousness ran through her, but nonetheless she called him out. ‘You don’t like being stared at.’
Without thinking, she reached for the scar on the side of his face.
He jerked back out of his seat. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘I didn’t mean –’
His expression changed from surprise to confusion, and then to red-hot anger. He grabbed the hand she still held up in front of her and pressed it to his groin. He was soft, but his grip on her was like iron. ‘If you want to touch me, touch me here. That’s what I brought you here for.’
Before common sense could make it from her brain to her hand, she struck out. The crack of her palm connecting with his cheek seemed to shake the stone house around them, and the sting in her palm threaded along her arm like she’d stuck her fingers into a socket.
Taureau reared back, but his grip on her didn’t break. With his free hand cupped over the mark on his face, he yanked her round, between the island and his solid body.
Grace felt some of the same terror she’d felt the night before when she’d first noticed him in the dark. She wanted to push him, but worried he would push back.
‘Don’t touch me without asking. Don’t put your hands on me unless I tell you to,’ he said in a growl. ‘Don’t make me regret bringing you here.’
‘I wasn’t being –’
She stopped talking when he released her and turned his back.
There was no point in explaining that she had meant no disrespect when she’d reached out. He didn’t look at her as he walked out of the house, and he didn’t look back as he crossed the lawn to his cottage.
* * *
A second cup of coffee had done little to warm Grace after the ice had formed in her blood, and it made her nerves worse. She dressed quickly in shorts and shirt, then went to his library. She plucked a book off of the shelf without even looking at the title and left the house.
She wouldn’t stay inside for him to peer at her comings and goings on a screen. She suspected he had cameras aimed at the grassy corridor between the cottage and the house, but she preferred the outdoors to being a hamster in an aquarium.
Grace found a seat on a stone bench and leaned back. She opened the book but instead of reading she replayed the explosive scene at breakfast.
He shouldn’t have grabbed her like he did, but she shouldn’t have just presumed she could do what she did. After the previous night and after that morning, she’d forgotten that he was broken.
No, she thought, you just wanted to pretend he wasn’t broken.
It was true, she realised with a rush of guilt. Sleeping with Taureau hadn’t been mere cock-in-pussy or cock-in-mouth. It had been like the fulfilment of a prophecy that began when she first answered his call in the boardroom. Now that she’d had his hot skin beneath her hands and pressing against her, it was real. She recognised the security he clung to in hiding away. With slick skin against skin, the rush of blood and the ecstasy of not being able to draw a breath at the moment the world evaporated in the pleasure, there was no hiding.
Not from her.
Not from him.
She closed the book and tucked it under her thigh, and wished for a cigarette as she looked out on the lawn.
It had been a long time since she’d had an actual relationship. She didn’t miss it. She didn’t miss the irritation that went along with reading signals in the early stages. She didn’t miss the inevitable bullshit she had never been able to put up with. She didn’t want a relationship.
Then what did she want with Taureau? To be his toy, like she was some ingénue in a dirty book? To be his girlfriend? His wife? No, she didn’t want any of those things.
His woman.
She liked the sound of that. His woman. It suited the dynamic she already had with him. It had the possessive quality she revelled in, and yet it suggested something fierce and meaningful and singular.
His woman. Not one of his women, but his woman: the one he craved when he woke up in the morning, the one he could hold down to do what he wanted, and the one upon whose lap he wanted to rest his head when his world crushed down on him.
But what she wanted and what she would get weren’t necessarily in sync. This was a man who enjoyed watching her fucking other men. She could live with that, but only as a compliment to the fiery thing that had manifested between them the night before and this morning. This was a man who didn’t trust people. This was a man who pushed people away.
She left the book on the bench and rose to her feet, then stared long and hard at the guesthouse when he had hidden himself.
Whatever she wanted, whatever she would get, she wouldn’t get it alone. She wouldn’t coax him again.
No, she would go to him.
She strode to the wooden door. With the bushy shrubs on either side stretching in all directions, she had the sense that this was a little like the gateway to another world. Her breathless feeling of trepidation was akin to what she had felt when she was very small and sat on the floor of the family rec room, book in hand, prepared to follow her hero or heroine into the wardrobe or the secret garden beyond.
She touched the latch and the feeling changed as fear trumped her excitement. Now, oh, now she was about to discover the wives hanging by their hair in the cellar. For the first time, she worried there might be something she wasn’t meant to know. Perhaps he wasn’t merely broken but twisted beyond imagination. Perhaps the dark recesses of his mind weren’t a place one wanted to be. Perhaps his hungers were far more deviant than he had shown her.
The ice in her blood returned, but now biting rather than numbing. It was fear that forced her thumb down to open the old door. It was fear that wrapped around her as she stepped inside.
‘Oh,’ she said once the interior was revealed to her. ‘Oh … my.’
So much for Bluebeard’s dungeon. The guesthouse really was just a guesthouse, a long open space that was practically a miniature of The Convent House in its decor. A wisp of movement drew her attention to the kitchenette and she moved towards it. An electric kettle was still steaming on the butcher block next to an open box of green tea. There was a small room off to the side, and through the open door she saw the gym equipment that accounted for his current breadth.
A creak from above drew her. She didn’t linger to explore but went directly to the loft staircase and climbed up. Taureau hadn’t locked the door, and she doubted that it had been an accident; his movement was no doubt an attempt to let her know where he was.
He confirmed this, as she entered the space above, by turning away from his workstation to face her.
She crossed her arms over her chest as she reached the top step. ‘So, I shouldn’t have just reached out like that. I don’t know why I did it, except I was so busy telling you how I expected to be treated that it didn’t occur to me that you might have some boundaries.’
Taureau made a sound a little like a grunt and steepled his hands in front of his face. ‘Boundaries. That sounds so benign compared to an irrational fear of being touched.’
‘I wouldn’t call it irrational,’ she said, and decided to let the subject go. If he wanted to open up to her, he would. She wasn’t going to put pressure on him about his past. Instead she gazed around the room.
‘You’re kind of a geek, Jacques.’
The entire space was dedicated to Taureau’s electronics. Each side had a floating desk jutting out from the wall, and on top of each was a neat collection of equipment: multiple computers and monitors, winking boxes and panels. At the end farthest from the stairs was a loveseat placed in front of a large television hooked up to multiple game consoles, their controllers arranged on the dividing table like spiders dangling from webs.
‘Definitely a geek.’ She looked over his shoulder to the triptych of screens lit up by an artificial aurora borealis. ‘Were you watching me just now?’
He moved enough to nudge the keyboard with his elbow. The clock disappeared and was replaced by three scenes from the property: her bedroom, the kitchen and the door just outside the guesthouse.
‘I suppose there’s no way to surprise you as long as I’m here, Mr Taureau,’ she said, and moved down the line of computers. She tapped each mouse as she came to it and revealed different locations under surveillance. She only recognised the Taureau-Werner building, but there were many others, like warehouses and offices and …
She leaned down to peer at the screen before her now, a screen divided into four featuring the exterior of a house, front and back.
‘What is this?’
He appeared next to her in a flash of movement and touched the side of the monitor. The screen went blank, and, though his mouth had a playfully sardonic twist to it, there was a hint of warning in his eyes.
‘I have a few side projects you’d best not be aware of.’ He remained close to her, moving closer by the second until he had pinned her against the edge of the desk. ‘Are you going to expect us to be together every second of the day?’
‘Do I really strike you as the needy kind?’ she answered, though she grew hot at his nearness. ‘I’m a little off balance because of your antics, but rest assured there’ll be no tantrums. I just don’t like leaving question marks in the air. I was in the wrong and you were in the wrong, but I think we can forgive each other and move along.’
‘Agreed,’ he murmured, his gaze on her mouth and his mind clearly deviating from her apology. Then he glanced away. ‘This is where I watched you, except for the other night with Reeve. That was in the house.’
‘I know. I recognised the curtains in the living room.’ She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth as the pressure of his body through the layers of clothing created a delicious throb. She pushed back against him and grinned. ‘You’re not hard.’
He grasped the desk on either side of her and boxed her in. ‘Make me hard.’
Tempting, she thought, as he moved against her, but in the end she shook her head. ‘Not now. I want you to tell me about this place. Those, specifically.’
He didn’t follow her gaze to the shelf above the opposite desk. He tilted his head and that near-grin widened a little. ‘What do you think they are?’
‘DVDs with names on them. Men and women. Your playthings?’ She pressed her hands against his hard chest and pushed him away. ‘Where are mine?’
‘The ones behind me are old. Yours are new and still on my hard drive.’
‘Show me.’
‘I already did. Remember?’
‘Oh, I remember.’ She moved down the desk and took the seat he had vacated. ‘I didn’t get to enjoy them at the time.’
Taureau leaned back, pure sex on legs, with one leg crossed over the other and his big arms folded over his chest. ‘Hit ESC to get out of the surveillance camera. There’s a folder with your name on the F: drive.’
Grace smirked and went for her fly. She loved having his entire attention on the dancing movement of her fingers as she freed the button and tugged down the zipper. She lifted her hips and shoved shorts and panties down. She parted her legs for him, and as he turned his attention to her wet slit she blossomed for him.
‘Amazing,’ he murmured, and brought his hand to his lips.
‘What is?’ The motion of his fingers tracing his bottom lip was so evocative, she almost forgot what had put her in this chair to begin it.
‘I had you so good just a few hours ago, and yet you’re so wet and swollen.’ His fingers stilled. ‘Are you going to touch yourself for me while you watch?’
Grace shook her head. ‘No, I’m done putting on a show for the next little while. You, Jacques Taureau, you’re going to touch me while I watch.’
The rumble of his laughter resonated around her as she ran her fingers along her slick crack. She used her toe to swivel herself towards the computer screen. With the other hand she hit ESC and grasped the mouse.
‘Do you have a favourite?’ she asked once she had opened the directory.
Taureau came up behind her and bent low. Chin propped on her shoulder, he placed his hand over hers and guided her to the first file on the list.
‘This one,’ he murmured against her ear. After a couple of clicks he maximised the video screen and the action began.
She bit her lip as he draped his arms down her torso. Two fingers rubbed through the wet folds on either side of her clit and sent a hot pulse through her as two people came on-screen.
It was the video he had spoken of, the culmination of a week’s worth of flirting with the young man from IT who had come to do some upgrades on her computer.
‘Do you want sound?’ Taureau whispered, sliding his fingers down to stretch her open.
Grace tilted her head into the crook of his neck. ‘No, I want to hear what you have to say. Tell me, when you first saw this, how long before you got hard?’
‘Instantly,’ he said, and slipped his other hand beneath her shirt.
She wondered what he did that made his hands so rough, this man whose sanctuary was wires and cables and plasma. He wasn’t gentle with her. He grunted as he thrust his fingers into her, at the same time tugging her nipple so hard she felt the bite through her whole body.
On-screen, Other Grace slipped off her shoes and hiked her skirt up to her waist, then laughed as the IT man hurried to unbuckle himself.
She couldn’t remember what she’d said to him, but Taureau knew, and murmured against her.
‘Steady now,’ he said as Other Grace moved her lips and hopped onto the edge of Caroway’s conference table. ‘I like eager, but you’ve got to warm me up first.’
Grace chuckled. ‘I have to do the same thing for everyone under the age of thirty. They all want to get right to the fucking.’
‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Taureau joked, dragging his fingers back to her clit. ‘I wouldn’t dream of giving you mine until I had you squirming for it, like you are now.’
She pressed down on the balls of her feet, rocking in tune with the motion over her clit. ‘Why this one? Aside from it being the first?’
‘Just watch.’
It got harder by the second to focus on the screen, but as he pushed and pulled his fingers through the juicy flesh his wicked narration filled her head with the tale of his arousal.
‘He can barely believe his luck,’ he said. ‘Here is this beautiful woman opening her legs for him, inviting him to taste how badly she wants to be fucked. He’s got no finesse – see how she just gives him a word and he drops down on one knee like he’s just so grateful he’d lick the mud from her boots if she told him. She knows it, too. You can see it on her face. She’s got that smirk on her mouth as she pushes on the back of his head. You know what she’s saying to him?’
‘Nothing.’ Grace’s breath hitched on the end of the word. With every pulse his touch drew from her, he wiped her clean of thought and left behind only feverish sensation.
‘No, she’s saying so much without opening her mouth. She’s telling him that if he doesn’t give her what she wants, he won’t get what he wants. If he’s patient, if he treats her right, she’ll treat him right.’
He withdrew from her and spun the chair around to face him. Grace reached out to yank down those tented pajama bottoms but he caught her wrists and bound them in one hand as he reached out and tapped the keyboard. The grainy voice of Other Grace exploded all around, urging the IT man.
Taureau dropped to his knees and released her hands. She grasped the arms of the chair to anchor herself as he pushed her legs apart and leaned forward.
‘Oh, yes,’ she hissed through her teeth as he licked along her wet slit. ‘Whatever you want. You get whatever you want if you give me that tongue.’
She squeezed her eyes shut and gave herself over to him. Through pleasure that at times was too much, she just held on and let him devour her.
Unlike Other Grace, whose gasped words were laced with command, Grace’s words were her desperation given life as Taureau tongued her. This act was no incentive for him. She wouldn’t let him do anything, wouldn’t dole out permission to fuck her on the condition that he make her come again.
Not with Taureau. Even though he was on his knees, even though his tongue lashed her, the onus seemed to be on her to come, to give herself over to his whim and be as wet and ready for a fuck as he demanded.
‘Here,’ she whispered, and grasped the rubberised arms of the chair as the circling motion of his tongue around her clit flooded her. She held on, calling out to him through the thick euphoria that surrounded her.
‘Good boy, now give me that hard cock and make me come again.’ That doppelgänger on the screen issued her edict and moaned as her lover filled her with the length of his dick.
Here, on the other side of the looking glass, Grace became captive. Taureau rose to his feet and wound his hand in her hair as he moved into position. His tongue invaded her mouth, giving her a taste of what he had done to her, while he drove his cock into her.
He became a solid wall of flesh, contorted over her as he grunted through every rough thrust. It seemed to go on for ever. There was nothing else to do but take it and love it, just as she had the night before. His fist twisted on top of her head, holding her in place while he grasped the chair with the other hand for leverage. Every thrust jolted her, stamped on her being that when she was with him he would consume her.
The friction of his pubic hair bumping her clit trapped her in what seemed like an unending series of orgasms. She wasn’t sure how much more she could take as the inner walls of her sex shuddered around him. She held onto the chair and cried out, sure he would fuck her to death.
At last he groaned, a long nasal sound that drowned out the pornographic sounds of Other Grace, and went to the hilt. His cock jumped and he nearly suffocated her with his girth as he spurted into her.
Her exhilaration became a heavy burden in the aftermath. She wrapped her arms around his neck and rested her face against his shoulder. It struck her as almost funny that as they melted together, Grace crushed beneath him and Taureau perched awkwardly on the edge of the seat, Other Grace was still cheerleading her lover on.
She almost laughed. She would have laughed, if she hadn’t opened her eyes and seen what she had missed moments before.
A name on one of the disc cases on the wall. There it was, so innocent and tucked away, sandwiched between a Lisa and a Diana.
Bette.
‘I can’t breathe,’ she said, pushing against Taureau. He withdrew, still gasping for air.
With years’ experience of staying cool under pressure, Grace managed to push the sick feeling aside as she pulled her panties and shorts back up, then turned her attention to Taureau as he did the same with his pajamas. She smiled and stopped the video.
‘I didn’t do it until I saw you,’ he said, surprising her with his candour.
‘Sit in here and jerk off? I never would have suggested such a thing.’
‘I mean watch as long as I did. Once I saw you, I just couldn’t stop.’
She glanced at him and found the same uncertainty on his face that had been there this morning. It stripped away years, leaving her with a sense that she was glimpsing the man-child buried under the stunted man she knew and the cocky drug addict who had preceded him.
She held her breath as he raised his hand and stroked along the scar beneath his eye.
‘I don’t like to be touched,’ he said, so low his words were barely audible.
‘I understand.’
‘But I won’t grab you again like I did this morning. I don’t want to frighten you. I’m not that person.’
There she was, thoroughly fucked, with both their juices still leaking into her panties, standing in a room with a man she couldn’t figure out, with the ghost of the woman who had done this to him peering over his shoulder, and Grace felt tears prickle behind her eyes.
‘Jacques,’ she said quietly as she got to her feet. She took his hand and just held it by her side. ‘Is there something you want to do with me today, aside from the obvious?’
He pressed his lips together and turned to the little square window behind his gaming nook, his expression thoughtful. She was worried for a moment that he was going to ask her to play a bloody game with him, and she probably would have done, for no other reason than because he had asked, but then he squeezed her fingers.
‘Are you scared of motorcycles?’