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“Horrible,” I confirmed with a petulant pout.
And yet all my hurt, and all my disappointment, and all the anger that might have been there was vanishing away. Something we’d created a long time before, a sixth sense between us, seemed to intercede. All logic was out the window and my anger with it. I knew this was going to end well.
“I love you, Alex,” he said. The words appeared to me as gentle as an angel’s song, though his voice was sweetly deep.
“But why did you leave me?”
He looked at me and chuckled. “To make you mad,” he joked.
“To make me mad?” I was about to be angry again.
“Yeah, to make you mad, so you’d come home and stumble on these stairs, and I could rescue you again.” He didn’t stop smiling.
I bit my lip, trying to fight back tears, but it didn’t work at all.
“The battle’s never going to be over, my love, but we’re winning the war. And that’s the point. Tonight happened exactly the way it needed to. I didn’t plan it that way, I swear. But it did get me moving.”
“Moving?” I asked.
“Yeah, I left so quickly tonight because I was anxious to get moved back in.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding. But I also left because I thought you needed one last rude awakening.”
“You certainly gave me that. But moving in?”
“There’s a pile of boxes in the living room.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, shaking my head.
“That’s okay, because I do, and we have all night to talk.”
“How about in the morning?” I suggested. I was so weary.
“Well…” he hedged. “I guess. But that’s the last thing I’ll let you control, believe me.” He smiled, very pleased with himself, then reached down and pulled me up.
In the apartment, I ignored boxes of Will’s things that had suddenly made their way back, and I let him lead me to the bedroom and our warm cozy bed. My bottom was smarting, my poor rear hole ached. But my heart was mending; and I was as happy as I’d ever been, to think there was a playground, safe and loving, where all the wild crude things inside me might at last find some peace. As lost and confused as I had been for weeks, I was sure of this now.
We toppled into bed together, which felt like home again.
My Darling Jocelyn
Chapter One
On The Night Of The Full Moon . . .
The Executive Retreat was at the Hawks Nest Lodge for the third year in a row. On Lake Tahoe’s north shore in January, drifts of bright white snow piled high around the rustic facade of the stately mountain dwelling.
“I don’t normally like people taking my freedom from me like this,” Reggie said wearily to his next in command, Dwight Carroll.
“But it’s a good management choice, Reg,” Dwight replied. “You need to let your guard down every once and a while.”
Reggie chuckled, knowing Dwight was always thinking company first. It was why he relied on him so much. “It’s a curious mix this year,” Reggie said.
“We’ve made a lot of changes in your executive staff,” Dwight acknowledged.
“I don’t know half the people here,” Reggie remarked looking down from the second story balcony to the enormous living room, with the grand stone fireplace that covered an entire wall with mountain rock, built sometime in the 1930’s.
