Page 9 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“Hardly.” I bind her wrists to the headboard with a knot I trust, firm, quick to release, and I check the slack with two fingers, because her circulation is now my responsibility. “It means you are fortunate to find someone who knows how to do this right. If you had agreed to play with an amateur⁠—”

“So, you do this professionally?” she teases.

“Among other things, yes. I’ve bound people professionally.”

“Oh.”

“I did warn you about me, pet.”

Again, she gulps. “Yeah. You did.”

She watches me pull out the pocket square, folded once. I hold it up, a question. “I wish for you to hold this in your teeth. Will you do that for me?”

She opens her mouth, an answer, and I set the silk between her teeth, and she settles back against the pillows and looks up at me, waiting patiently.

“You will keep that in your teeth for as long as you are able. If you drop it, I read that as a signal to stop whatever I’m doing. A safeword of sorts. I assume you’re familiar with the concept?”

Her eyes narrow over the gag, half rolling, as if to say, “Duh.”

I find I can read her fluently already. That bodes well. I sit back on my heels and look at her, bound and bare in a stranger’s bed on the twelfth floor, and I take my time about the looking, because the looking is mine now and no one is going to interrupt it.

“Some honesty, since you cannot interrupt. It’s been a long time since I did this. Not for lack of offers. For lack of hours, and lack of interest, and a schedule that’s eaten larger men than me. There’s been work, and more work, and rooms full of people I couldn’t turn my back on.”

The last woman who spent a night beside me lived in Marseille, and that was long enough ago that the harbor there has since been rebuilt. Since then, the calendar has offered nothing but flights, negotiations, and the kind of company a wise man does not undress in front of. I didn’t miss any of this, is what I told myself, the way a man tells himself he doesn’t miss salt while his doctor is in the room.

Her eyes track me. I take her ankle in one hand, and her breath jumps at the contact.

“And then some gorgeous, exhausted woman drenches me in front of a few hundred people,” I say, pressing my thumb into the arch of her foot, dragging it slow, watching the shiver run the whole length of her, “and lectures me about club soda while her hands shake, and offers me a night with no names attached. So, pet, I intend to enjoy myself. Thoroughly. At my own pace. That’s the agenda, and you are famous for respecting an agenda. I saw it at the party.”

The sound she makes behind the silk is indignant and pleased at once. I kiss the inside of her ankle, and the sound stops.

I begin there because the beginning is the beginning, and I work upward by inches. I’m not fast. Fast is for men with somewhere better to be, and for the first time in years, there’s nowhere better. I use my mouth and my hands and the time until she’s so wet, her pussy gleams.

“Your supple calves deserve poetry,” I murmur as I kiss up them. “They’ll receive profanity because fuck, they’re perfect.” I reach the backs of her knees, soft divots that imply plump thighs. Tenderly, my fingertips skate across the satin there. “These are a scandal. Too precious.”

The soft width of her hips beckons, and I grip them with both hands and tell her the truth when I lift my eyes from her beauty. “You’re fucking magnificent, every inch of you. I intend to enjoy them all.”

She writhes, her eyes unsteady.

It’s my job to steady her. I pin her hips flat with my forearm and continue, unhurried. “None of that. You will lie still and take the compliment along with anything else I decide to give you.”

The noise she produces could strip varnish. Somewhere in it, there’s an indignant laugh, strangled by silk, furious about existing.

I map her ribs with my tongue and teeth. Her tits are glorious, fleshy mounds that’ve just the right amount of hang to them, and while I tweak her pretty nipples, she’s pulling at the headboard hard enough to make the wood whine.

Her eyes have gone glassy and murderous with wanting. Her body answers everything. Every pass of my hands gets a report, a shiver, an arch, a muffled syllable.

I didn’t know how starved I was for this.

I find the strawberry mark at her nape again when I turn her jaw aside to taste beneath her ear. “This mark is under new management.” I lick her there, relishing the way she twitches and groans beneath me. She snarls at me. Bound, gagged, flushed to the collarbones, this woman snarls at me, and my heart, that decommissioned machine, turns over like an engine left too long in the cold.

I fucking love this.

By the time I arrive where she’s been trying to steer me for the better part of an hour, she’s trembling everywhere at once, and the first touch bows her clean off the mattress with a cry the silk barely holds.

There are other toys in my box, ones that could send her to another stratosphere. But I don’t believe she’s ready for that just yet. This is her first playtime, and I won’t scare her from seeking these amusements again. She’s too young to be jaded that way.

Perhaps just the one toy… I hold up a dildo from the box, and her pretty eyes go wide. “Unless you spit out the gag, pet, I’ll be fucking you with this now.”