“I could live in the water if I’m here with you,” I whispered, “I wanted this so badly last time we were here.”
“So did I,” he admitted, “I fought those feelings but it didn’t take long before my resolve melted. I was powerless against you.”
“Thank God for that bottle of vodka and zero self-control,” I whispered against his earlobe, smiled and gripped him tighter with my arms and with my inner walls.
“Thank God,” he agreed and his grip on my hips tightened.
He’d credited the vodka and no control the day after we’d had sex that first time.
That was also his toast when we got married, in front of everyone. He thanked God for the gift of me and said he had to give a bit of credit to a big bottle of vodka and zero self-control.
He finished inside me and I immediately wondered if he’d gotten me pregnant. I might actually be ovulating today. The idea of conceiving a baby here at Kruna had screwed with my head and so I hadn’t said anything to him about it because I didn’t want to think about the possibility we could make a baby here at Kruna.
If I did get pregnant, it wouldn’t matter where but it might be kind of nice if it was here in the water instead of in that building. If I got pregnant this cycle, I’d think of this very moment as the moment of conception. Here, at our beach.
We hung out for a while and then walked back along the beach to our room and got some smirks from Mr. Lucas from the patio. He’d definitely seen what we’d been up to.
***
We were dressed for dinner and we were meeting in the small partner dining room; the same room we’d sat in the last time we were here for that formal dinner. At the table were Mr. Lucas and Mr. Delgado and there were slaves at their feet.
Neither of the two men owned the slave that was at their feet, but Delgado practically lived here and Mr. Lucas had Kruna assets at home.
It was beyond strange to sit at the table, at eye-level with them. I’d knelt through dozens of meals in this room on my sapphire blue pillow.
“Serve Mrs. Ferrano as well, Mr. Ferrano?” the server asked.
“Yes,” Dare had said, “Always. Please pass that along so I won’t have to keep repeating myself. She’s to be treated by everyone here with the same respect as I am treated.”
“Absolutely.”
No one batted an eye at that, or the impatient way he delivered it.
When the server left, Mr. Delgado muttered, “Only one to treat your wife differently is you, am I right?”
“You know it,” Dare said, putting my napkin across my lap without revealing anything, but his eyes did meet mine for a beat and they flashed with what anyone would’ve thought was lust and promise. I gave him a small coy smile and batted my eyelashes.
Mr. Lucas cleared his throat and snickered, “Getting’ hot in here or is it just me?” He petted the head of his assigned slave and she obediently stayed in position.
“It’s quite hot in here,” Mr. Chen said, arriving at that moment, taking in the room and the people in it with a sly grin on his face.
***
We’d gotten through soup, salad, and half way through our main course of surf and turf (which wasn’t being adequately shared with the slaves, of course). Mr. Chen was talking to Dare like he was an old friend. Dare would seem, to most observers, that he was behaving the same way, but even though we had only been together a few months, I could see that he was pretending. It was all on the surface.
His eyes were stone cold even when he was smiling or laughing at a joke. I’d seen him really smile, really laugh. This smiling was very different from that. These people would never get to see that side, the real side, of Dario Ferrano. My Dario.
My Dare made jokes, he teased the people he loved, he loved a heated debate on a hot topic, he was competitive in a fun and teasing way, and although he could be super angry and broody, he definitely was what Tia had confided in me she’d thought of as “angry-hot” from when she’d first met Dare.
Mr. Chen didn’t have a slave at his feet for the meal. At Mr. Delgado’s feet was a slave I’d never seen before. She was blonde, pixie pretty, tiny and perfectly obedient, getting hand-fed from his plate. Maybe she was my replacement.
I didn’t allow myself to dwell on that. I couldn’t or else I’d show emotion that I couldn’t afford to show. I had to continue to show the Kruna powers-that-be that they’d made the right decision in choosing me for Dare. If I didn’t, it’d put him in danger. And he needed to be seen by the leadership team to be completely suitable for that role.
The girl at Mr. Lucas’s feet was someone I was familiar with. Her name was Lulu. We weren’t really friends; most people avoided me to stay off Cleo’s bad side. Lulu and Truly were tight. She had been around longer than I had, but we knew one another.
The meal moved at a snail’s pace but I just did what I was supposed to do. I was dressed in a flowy ivory sundress with straps over my shoulders and crisscrossed on my back. It had some cleavage but not too much. I had on my three-strand necklace, my wedding rings, and my hair had been flat ironed straight, with an iron we bought for this trip. I hadn’t been flat ironing. Dare liked it curly. Dare and I had thrown my iron down the garbage chute at home and I’d hated buying a new one.
I kept eating and avoided direct eye contact.