Page 164 of High Reward

“This is a date,” I say somewhere over dessert, watching him carefully.

“It’s been a date since I picked you up.” He reaches across the table for my hand. “You’ve had one with Grace. I wasn’t about to let you go without one of your own.”

“I didn’t realize I was owed one.”

“You’re owed a hell of a lot more than one date, Liliana. This is just where I’m starting.”

He drives me back to the house as the sun starts dipping, and for once I don’t argue when he pulls into the driveway instead of dropping me back at the Sapphire.

“Just for tonight,” he says, reading my hesitation. “Grace already knows.”

Grace meets us at the door, already changed for the party, and the moment she takes in both our faces, her expression softens, and she doesn’t have to ask how the day went.

“Good day?” she asks, looping an arm through mine.

“The best one I’ve had in months.”

“Good.” She smiles, then glances at Victor, and the look that passes between them makes me instantly suspicious. “Because he told me what he’s planning tonight, and I have some thoughts on how to help.”

Victor’s jaw tightens. He looks caught somewhere between anticipation and nerves, which is not a look I have ever gotten from him, and I forget to ask what they’re talking about until Grace is already pulling me toward the bedroom.

Once inside, Grace shuts the door and turns to face both of us. She’s nervous, which never happens to her in this room.

“Victor asked me to help him with something,” she says. “For you.”

“Should I be worried?”

“No.” Victor’s voice comes from the closet doorway, and when he steps out, he’s already shirtless, and his face is doing the thing it only does right before he tells me something that costs him. “I want to give you something tonight. Both of us do.”

“You’re both worrying me now.”

Grace takes my hand and draws me toward the bed. Victor doesn’t follow. He stays where he is with his arms crossed, watching me the way he does when he’s already decided something and is waiting for me to catch up.

My chest goes tight. “Victor.”

“I’ve been thinking about this since Rhode Island.” He doesn’t move. “You spent six years with a man who took and took and never once asked what you needed. So we’re doing it differently tonight. You’re going to tell me exactly what you want. Out loud, in front of Grace, no hedging and no making me guess. Then I’m going to give you every bit of it.”

Grace squeezes my hand. “I’m here to make sure he doesn’t let you off easy.”

Heat floods through me so fast it’s dizzying. Six years of learning to want things quietly, and he wants me to say it out loud in a lit room. “That’s the whole game? I just have to ask?”

“You have to ask.” His mouth curves. “That’s the part that costs you something, Spitfire. Not me.”

I look between them, my two constants for months now, and my chest cracks wide open.

“Fine.” I lift my chin so he doesn’t get to see me lose my nerve. “Get the cane. The one in the bottom drawer, not the club one.”

His eyebrow goes up. Then he crosses to the dresser without a word and comes back with it, and my whole body goes warm at how little argument that took.

“Anything else?”

“Grace stays on the bed where I can see her.” My voice holds, barely. “And you don’t stop when I go quiet. You stop when I say red.”

“Done.” He says it flatly, like I’ve asked him to pass the salt, and somehow that’s hotter than if he’d made a production of it.

It’s the first time in my adult life I’ve named exactly what I wanted and had someone simply hand it to me.

He strips me himself and puts me over the end of the bed with one hand flat between my shoulder blades. Grace settles cross-legged near the headboard, close enough that I can see her face the whole time.