crying—she was being stupid. Seriously. Who cried because they got their period, right on time, other than women who were trying to get pregnant? No one, that’s who.
She didn’t even want to have a baby right now. Having a baby was definitely Not. In. Her. Plans. At. All.
So why was she sitting in the penthouse bathroom, sobbing because she got her period?
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“Just a minute!” She splashed more water on her face and opened the door. Abby stood waiting for her with the same worried look on her face she’d had every time Lynne saw her for the last two weeks.
Lynne had gotten out of the cab at the penthouse after leaving Simon and Nathaniel, planning to pull her stuff together and check into a hotel, only to find Abby waiting for her. Abby said she was not quitting and that was that and there was to be no arguing. She then pulled out a pint of double chocolate chip fudge ice cream from the freezer and two spoons. Lynne told her she wasn’t being fair, but secretly she knew she had the world’s greatest boss.
Abby had confessed about telling Nathaniel and tried to apologize. She’d said she didn’t want to, but he’d asked her specifically if she knew whom Lynne was playing with. Lynne wouldn’t allow her to apologize, telling Abby she would never expect her to lie to her husband for her.
Lynne stepped out of the bathroom, and Abby put her arms around her. “You got your period.”
“How’d you know?”
Abby shrugged. “Just a hunch. Come sit down.”
Though she had decided to stay on as their nanny, she’d told them it was only through the end of the year. By then she’d be able to teach, and come January, she wanted to have a teaching job and an apartment of her own lined up.
They sat on the couch. It was Saturday. Nathaniel had gone into the office and the kids had spent the night with their cousins. Lynne was thankful Abby didn’t have plans; she needed the company.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to you last night when we got in,” Abby said. “But have you talked to Simon yet?”
She shook her head. “No. He’s sent a few texts, left some voice mails, but I haven’t replied. Even those stopped after a few days.”
“Did you expect anything else? You left him, remember?”
“So?”
“So. In his mind, he’s giving you time. He figures since he never told you to leave or that he didn’t want you, and since you haven’t replied to any of his attempts to contact you, that he’d leave you alone for a bit.”
Lynne eyed her warily. “Did he tell you this?”
“No, and Nathaniel hasn’t either. I just know how men think.”
“The exact opposite of us?”
Abby laughed, and Lynne had to smile. It felt good. She hadn’t done a lot of smiling for the last two weeks.
“Do you still love Simon?” Abby asked.
Lynne squeezed her hands into fists, digging her nails into the palms of her hands so tight, she knew there’d be marks. Did she love Simon? Yes, of course she did. That’s why it hurt so much to be separated from him. Why she cried when she found out she wasn’t pregnant, even though she didn’t want to be pregnant.
She wasn’t just in love with Simon; she was stupidly in love with him.
“Yes,” she admitted to Abby, and some part of her felt free at the admission.
“Then we need to come up with a plan to get him back.”
• • •
Lynne wasn’t going to call. It hurt, but Simon had come to grips with it. Mostly.
He sighed. Okay, not at all. He hadn’t come to grips with it at all.
But it didn’t matter that he couldn’t accept it. That was the way it was, and no amount of wishing on his part would bring her back. Sometimes he questioned if he’d done the right thing in giving her time. Maybe he should have flooded her in-box with e-mails and her phone with texts. Somehow, though, he didn’t think that was the answer either.
No, the only person who could change anything was Lynne, and that wasn’t going to happen. He wouldn’t even allow himself to ask Nathaniel about her or to check with Luke to see if she’d submitted her application for membership at the club. A clean break was a good break. Or that was what he told himself anyway. During the day it was easier to believe. At night it was downright impossible.
He had followed up with Luke and Nathaniel about Anna Beth, ironically enough. The local authorities found enough evidence to have her arrested, thanks to Jeff and his team. As it turned out, she’d hacked into Lynne’s computer, apparently through a bug attached to a photo. Simon, along with Nathaniel and Luke, saw to it that she was denied bail while she awaited trial.
It was a hollow victory.
Of course, lately everything felt hollow. He hadn’t realized how much of his free time he’d spent talking to Lynne or planning something to do with her. Now that there was no need to plan anything and since she wasn’t talking to him, he often found himself with nothing to do. On the upside, he’d put in a lot of overtime the last two weeks.
By Sunday afternoon, two weeks after she’d left him, he was slowly going crazy. He’d been told by his supervisor not to even think about coming to the office today. He tried working on a puzzle, but doing so brought back memories of Lynne. One of his friends mentioned going to Luke’s club, but Simon had shut the man down before he finished asking the question.
He briefly considered getting drunk, but decided it wasn’t worth the headache or the hangover. Then he decided just thinking that made him part old fart, part stick-in-the-mud. He fully expected to wake up one morning with nothing better to do than to yell at people to get off his lawn.
The sound of the doorbell brought him out of his misery long enough to sadly laugh that maybe he could tell whoever that was at the door to get off his lawn. Practice, he decided.
He didn’t even bother to check who it was. He threw open the door, ready to yell at whoever was unfortunate enough to be standing on the other side, only to freeze at the sight of Lynne.
“Hi,” she said.
Hi.
Fucking hi.
Like she hadn’t stormed out of his life as fast as she’d breezed in. Like she hadn’t ignored him for the last two weeks. Like she hadn’t torn him to so many damn pieces he felt like a puzzle that would never get fully assembled.
He wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her and breathe in the scent of her hair. Hold her until she swore she’d never leave and confessed how much she’d missed him. He wanted to grab her and pull her down the hall to his bedroom and do evil and wicked, wicked things to her body.
Instead, he leaned against the doorframe and said, “What are you doing here?”
Uncertainty clouded her expression, and her lower lip trembled. He could have kicked himself. This was what he’d been wanting for the last two weeks. What he’d been hoping for. What was he thinking with that being the first thing out of his mouth?
“I came to say I’m sorry. I thought about making you a card,” she said. “But decided that probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“A card?”
“Yes, I’d put on it ‘I’m sorry I acted like an ass. Will you spank mine?’”
He couldn’t help it; her answer was so unexpected, he laughed and laughed until his chest hurt. “Come in.” He held the door open for her.
She stepped tentatively inside and waited for him to lead the way into the living room. He pointed to a nearby chair. “Have a seat. Can I get you something to eat or drink?”
“No,” she said, sitting down. “I’m good. Plus, I’m so nervous right now that if I ate or drank anything, I’d just throw it up, and that would be worse than the spank-me card.”
Her hands twisted in her lap. She was looking everywhere except at him. She was obviously nervous as hell and didn’t know what to do about it.
“Calm down, Lynne,” he said. “I’m not so upset that I’m going to hurt you.”
She looked for a minute like she
was going to say something sassy, but obviously thought better of it. She was as skittish as a horse, and while he had never been good with animals, he did know nervous submissives. He was convinced he could handle soothing her.
“Take a deep breath.” He watched as she followed his instructions. At least that was a good sign. “Another.”
By the time she had taken four deep breaths, she had relaxed a bit. Or at least she didn’t look as if she was going to run scared and screaming from the room if he said the wrong thing.
“Now, then,” he said. “You said you came to apologize, for what exactly?”
Her body tensed, but just a little, nowhere near as bad as it had been. “To begin with, for the way I left.” She shook her head. “I know it was wrong to just run off like that, without saying anything or talking about it.”
“That was a major disappointment,” he said, seeing no reason to lie to her at this point.
“I know.” She took a deep breath. “I was able to apologize to Nathaniel, and that was so much easier than coming here. I wondered why for a long time, but recently figured out why that was. Nathaniel was just a job, an employer. You are so much more to me.”
“Am I?” he asked. “Up until you left, I was hoping that was the case. But then you left with barely a word to me, and it’s been two weeks with no contact between us. So forgive me if I’m being an ass, but why today? What makes today special and not two weeks ago, or last week?”
Whatever it was, she wasn’t jumping up and down to tell him. Then it hit him, two weeks. Two weeks since he had last seen her, since they had last had sex. Sex that had been unprotected. He struggled not to show any emotion. Holy fuck. She was pregnant.
She was pregnant and she’d come back to him because she had nowhere else to go and she knew he’d take her in. He would, of course. But even though he wanted her back, he didn’t want her in his life this way. With him because she didn’t have a choice.
He braced himself for the words. The phrase that would tell him his life would never be the same. Would she grow to hate him? Despite the fact that she was stuck with him because he made the stupid mistake of not using a condom one time?
One time he’d messed up and now he’d screwed up her life forever. She must hate him.
Except, she wasn’t looking at him as if she hated him. He wasn’t totally sure what the look on her face was, but he was fairly certain it wasn’t hate.
“I started my period this morning,” she said.
The first thought through his head was How does she have her period? Pregnant women don’t get periods. Then it hit him.
“You’re not here because you’re pregnant?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m here because I’m not pregnant.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I suppose I’d be here if things had gone the other way.” She looked down at her lap. She was twisting her hands again. “But when I realized I wasn’t pregnant, I started to cry and I thought, how stupid is this? I don’t want a baby right now. And then it hit me—no, I didn’t want a baby. I wanted you. And if I couldn’t have you, I at least wanted a part of you.”
“Then why did you run off and leave me?”
“When I got back to the room that Saturday and saw the package, I thought you’d had something delivered to me. I didn’t understand why you sent me a video to watch, but since there was a DVD player, I thought you wanted me to, so I did, and when I saw . . .”
She didn’t have to tell him what she saw; he knew all too well. Hell, he’d lived it. He’d flogged Anna Beth and used a cane. By then he’d known she wasn’t into what he needed, so he’d cut the scene short and got her off. The video had ended with a blow job.
“But why get upset when you knew how I felt about her?”
“I don’t know. I just remember that at the time it made perfect sense.” She locked eyes with him, appearing to beg him to understand. He swallowed. It was too hard to ignore those pleading eyes. She bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know if it was Nathaniel showing up or the emotions of the weekend, or what. Suddenly it was all too much to work through. I just had to get out of there.”
She’d obviously finished what she’d come by to say. Her mouth snapped shut, and she shifted her gaze back to her lap. He didn’t say anything either. He was too busy trying to process everything she’d said, as well as what she’d left unsaid.
“I guess we’ve both screwed up things between us,” he finally said. “Me, when I gave you that bogus reason for breaking things off with you the first time. And you, just recently when you ran out on us without even trying to talk things through.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe we should take it all to mean we aren’t meant to be. That the universe is trying to give us an unmistakable sign that we aren’t supposed to be with each other.”
He didn’t go any further with that train of thought, wanting to see instead how she’d react to it.
Her reply was low but unmistakable. “In that case, I hate the universe.”
• • •
The Delaware submissives had gathered in Abby and Nathaniel’s living room. Lynne had feared her presence would be awkward, though why exactly she thought that, she wasn’t sure. It actually seemed very silly with the warm reception she was given. It didn’t matter that other than Abby, she only knew Sasha and Julie.
She never liked being the center of attention, and though the new person in a group was often everyone’s focus, that wasn’t the case this time, thanks to Julie.
Since Sasha and Julie co-owned the floral shop they worked at, they’d driven to Abby’s together. Though Julie always seemed to be in a good mood, she was unusually buoyant.
“Damn, Julie,” one of the submissives Lynne didn’t know said. “Would you mind dialing the happy down a notch? Not all of us bathed in confetti and fairy sprinkles this afternoon.”
“You can talk until you’re blue in the face and it won’t do any good,” Sasha said, but from her smile, she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she looked like she was in on a secret only the two of them shared. “She’s been impossible all day.”
“I wouldn’t say impossible,” Julie said with a mock glare at Sasha. “I’d say high on life.” She turned to the other submissive. “And I didn’t bathe in confetti and fairy sprinkles this afternoon.”
“Yeah.” Sasha looked like she was having too much fun at Julie’s expense. “I’m not sure what she was doing this afternoon, but it wasn’t bathing. She came back to the shop after lunch and she had a hickey on the side of her neck. You just can’t see it now because her hair’s covering it up.”
Julie didn’t even blush. “Daniel was a bit . . . exuberant.”
Abby came into the room, carrying a tray of drinks. With a knowing look in her eye, she walked to where Julie sat and stood in front of her. “Have a drink?”
“Thanks.” Julie reached for one.
“Use your left hand.”
With those words, everyone’s eyes shot to Julie as she slowly raised her hand, revealing the large diamond ring she now wore.
“How’d you know?” Julie asked Abby as the room exploded with congratulations and Let me sees.
“I didn’t know with any certainty; let’s call it a hunch.” Abby put the tray down. “I should get some champagne out.”
Lynne had never thought she’d be having a champagne toast at a submissive group meeting. She loved the dynamics of the group, though. Everyone was friendly and down-to-earth, and there were a few introverts, just like her.
Once Abby brought out the champagne and everyone toasted Julie, they begged her to tell how Daniel proposed. Julie got a dreamy, faraway look in her eye as she recounted the events of the previous weekend.
Watching Julie talk about her Master and soon-to-be husband, Lynne knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted it all. And she wanted it with Simon. She didn’t care what the universe thought.
She told Simon that exact thing when she saw him later that night. H
e had asked her over earlier in the week. “I mean, you can’t let the universe get you down. Even if the universe is against us, I’m willing to bet we can overcome it.”
“You think?” They were sitting in his apartment, working on a puzzle. “You and me taking on the world?”
She took a deep breath. It was now or never. “Love conquers all. Or so they say. And I do—I love you, Simon. I think I always have. Even when you broke up with me, I never wanted anyone other than you.” She’d been looking at the scattered puzzle pieces on the table, but he was too quiet following her confession. She glanced up, hoping to get some feel on what he was thinking.
He was watching her with wonder and maybe a hint of surprise. It was the wonder that gave her the courage to continue.
“Is it possible, do you think, that you might feel the same about me one day?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice void of emotion. “Not one day.”
She turned her head, not wanting him to see the hot tears that filled her eyes at his matter-of-fact statement. She tried not to