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How could I marry someone that I hadn't given all of me: the annoying businessman, the relentless chef, the doting son and brother, and the lover who was filled with passion and dark needs in the bedroom? Dark needs that she and I hadn't even brushed up against in the year plus that we'd been dating?
I put my hands on her shoulders, knowing what I needed to do. Tonight, I'd show her...and I'd let her decide if she still wanted to marry me.
“Why don't you spend the night at my place? We'll have some wine, order in-”
“And we'll avoid this conversation some more?” She shrugged off my hold, darting to the corner like she was afraid that if I got too close, I'd make her forget that she was angry. Not just angry. Furious. The flush ran from her face to her neck and was intensified when I saw her clenching and unclenching her fists.
I let my own anger and frustration out to play, tugging my tie loose with a scoff. “You seem to have something on your mind. You ask me questions and I give you answers but since I didn't wrap it up in some bow, you're pissed at me? What do I have to do to convince you that I want to marry you? Pour over wedding magazines and go to cake tasting after cake tasting? Cancel all my meetings and make the wedding planner #1 on my speed dial?”
Her jaw fell open like I'd just called her out of her name. “You really don't get it, do you? That's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking you to talk to me-”
“Which is why I suggested dinner-”
“A dinner that will be cut short when we start drinking and kissing and fucking!” She said shrilly. “I don't need a husband for that. I don't need you for that.”
I tightened my jaw. “Well, then. Glad to know where I stand.”
She took two steps toward me and stopped. “I didn't mean it like that.”
She looked down at the floor and I saw her shoulders trembling and if I wasn't so stubborn, so angry myself, that's when I would have taken her in my arms and held her tight. I didn't need roses and wine and Chinese takeout to be honest. I just had to trust that when I let her see me, all of me, she wouldn't throw the engagement ring at my head.
But I just stood there, watching her cry silently, breaking my heart because I could see hers pulsing and battered right in front of me.
“I know you love me,” she said hoarsely. “And I love you...but I feel like there's this wall you've built and I've got my rope and I want to scale it.” She shook her head furiously. “No, I want to tear it down, but you won't let me in. How can I marry someone that won't let me in?”
She looked up at me with tears streaming down her face and I opened my mouth. I saw the hope dangling and...I couldn't.
I cut the string.
“I don't know what you're talking about, baby.”
I didn't believe me. And from the way her tears stopped and her face was cleared of all emotion but rage, I knew she didn't either.
She shoved past me, looking at my hand like I was diseased when I grabbed her, trying to dig myself out of the hole I'd put us in.
“Go to hell, Desmond O'Connell.”
I let her go then, but I followed her from my mother's study, past my sister's room where she pretended like she was reading a book and hadn't heard the entire exchange. My mother was on the couch, wine glass in hand, engrossed in some game show.
“Ms. O'Connell,” Caity asked my mother, wiping her face and forcing a smile that just twisted the knife in my chest. “Do you mind running me home? I don't feel well.”
My mother turned her drowsy green eyes from the screen, to Caity, then me, then back to Caity. She finished her glass of wine in a single gulp and continued the O'Connell trend of pretending like everything was just peachy.
“Sure, sweetheart.” She nodded back at me and shuffled over to the door where her keys were waiting. She told me goodbye.
Caity said nothing.
I told myself that tonight, I'd go to Caity's apartment and I'd wait as long as it took.
I'd make this right.
****
It was the first time a submissive had summoned me to a dungeon...and the first time that I was the one doing the obeying.
I’d become a walking contradiction. I hadn’t given Kara any grief on set in days. I forgot I was supposed to be an asshole when the cameras were rolling, smiling at the contestants and giving out compliments when they wowed me with their dishes instead of my usual responses. Things like, ‘It doesn’t suck’, or, ‘It’s edible, but just barely’, and one better, ‘You may not be going home tonight’. I’d even agreed to meet some gossip columnist for lunch tomorrow, and those kinds of inquiries usually went directly to the trash.
Sophia made me smile; she made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, I’d found someone that could embrace all the pieces of me. If she wasn’t frightened by the most taboo side of me, the Dominant, then the Desmond outside the bedroom would be a breeze.
