Thoroughly Whipped

“Something amusing, Miss Parisi?”

“Afraid you’ll get your tush dirty on the elevator floor?”

“This is a three-thousand-dollar suit.”

“Of course it is.”

Harry tipped his head to the side like I was a puzzle he was trying to work out. “You are here late.”

“Had to finish off my column. As you know we go to press tonight, and I was a little behind.”

“I shall look forward to this week’s Ask Miss Bliss’s offerings,” he said and ran his hand across his forehead as though he were fighting a migraine. “Anything particularly enlightening this week?”

I shrugged. “Squirting, herpes, and cock rings were the solid standouts.”

“Quite,” he said, and I thought I caught a slight flicker of a smile. It was gone so quickly that I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it. I once hit my head in the bathtub and swore I saw a mermaid swimming toward me during the subsequent concussion. I believed this could be akin to that. I felt the back of my head. I hadn’t hit it during the breakdown, I didn’t think.

“Are you hurt?” Harry’s voice changed in tone and he sat forward, narrowing his eyes to see me better in the low lighting.

“No, thought I might of hit my head. But I’m good.”

A minute fluttering sensation moved under my sternum. I shook my head, not having a clue what it was. I rubbed my hand across my chest. “You have anxiety attacks?” Harry asked, nudging his head toward my hand.

I nodded. “Don’t like the dark much. Or should I say, I don’t like the dark when I’m trapped inside a steel box that is dangling from a single cable in thin air.” But I knew what a panic attack felt like. The sensation I was feeling now had nothing to do with anxiety. Strange.

“We will be out soon.”

I checked my watch. I was running so damn late!

“Are you in a rush?” Harry asked.

“Kind of.” I gave Harry a tight smile. “I just have somewhere I need to be.” I decided to omit the fact that I had a sexual Dom waiting to teach me all the secrets of pleasure in the most interesting of ways, an experience I hoped to write about in a big feature that Harry Sinclair knew nothing of. “You?” I asked, trying to polite.

He shook his head. “Afraid not.”

“No hot date?”

Harry huffed a laugh, and I thought I might faint at the sight of him smiling, even if it was only a small hint of a grin. “No hot date.”

I studied my boss. He was only a few years older than me. Was ridiculously handsome and a billionaire to boot. He came across like an absolute prick, but he wouldn’t be that way to everyone. Surely some people warmed to him. He must have some potential suitors in his life. He was frequently photographed with that Lady Louisa Samson for one.

“So,” I asked, filling the dead air. “How are you settling into New York?”

“Well. I have been coming back and forth to Manhattan for years. I know it well. It is fine.”

“Not as good as old England, hey?”

“England is home.” His expression made me breathless. It was a look of pure love. He said “home” with such warmth I felt it deeply within my heart. And I knew that feeling too.

“You’re Italian?” he asked. He pointed to the grid of buttons. “Cazzo. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a swear word in Italian, is it not?”

I burst out laughing in shock at the word slipping from Harry’s prim and proper mouth. “Yes,” I said. “It’s Italian. And it’s a bad word.” He waited for me to continue. “My papa is Italian, from Parma in Emilia-Romagna. The north.”

“I know Parma well.”

“You do?” I asked. “I’ve never been. Though it’s my dream.”

“You’ve never seen your father’s home?”

My smiled died and my gut clenched. “No. They could never afford it when I was younger.” I didn’t want to add that they had saved up for years to go back last year, but it had all been stolen by a man Papa had trusted like a brother.

I’d never cared for money; it had never been a notable factor in my life growing up. Apart from the obvious—needing a house to live in and food on the table. But of late, it had been a huge factor to my parents. Good people who had been deceived by a bad man.

“But you are from New York?” Harry asked, pulling me back from the sadness I feared I’d drown in one day.

“Hell’s Kitchen.” I smiled, thinking of my youth running through the streets in the summer with my friends, the theaters, and neighbors gathering on stoops to chat and drink and laugh. “I live in Brooklyn now.”

“A true New Yorker,” he said with no discrimination in his voice. It reflected an easy affection toward those born and raised in the Big Apple.