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I pressed my thighs together. “Mmm, yes, I did.”
“Well, I have a surprise, then.” He reached for me and pulled me close to lean on him. “Go to sleep. We’ve got a drive ahead of us.”
I frowned up at him. “I thought the jet was standing by?”
“I told you, I have a surprise. Now, listen to your husband and do as you’re told.”
I sat up and gave him a warning glare, but he had already dissolved into laugher. “I’m sorry,” he chuckled. “I can’t say that and keep a straight face.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Sophie? We’re here.”
I blinked awake with some difficulty. My mascara had turned into cement while I’d slept. The facade of a building showed through the windows, and it took me a moment to recognize it as the model Pavillon Français on our property. The upward grazed lighting illuminated the nook where the center chamber met two of the outer four rooms. The building was a cross with an octagonal middle, and we were parked between it and the huge fountain in the drive. While the grounds weren’t to scale, the previous owners had gone to the trouble of recreating some of the water features.
We’d celebrated my birthday here, and it had been unbearably romantic, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you just kept around. “I thought you were going to renovate this.”
Neil took my hand and helped me from the car, and I staggered a little on my tired legs. “I did have it renovated. I think you’ll like some of the changes.”
We entered the main salon, the towering center of the building. My heels clicked on the inlaid marble floor. Unlike its counterpart in France, this version of the Pavillon had electric candlelight. Neil took the remote off the wall and turned up the lights, bathing the room in soft, subtly flickering illumination.
One of the “renovations” was quite obvious. A black steel frame stood vertically in the center of the room, shackles dangling from all four corners. A table stood nearby, its gleaming white marble top bearing all sorts of tantalizing goodies. Three paddles, one of unadorned black leather, another that was a bit wider with dulled, square metal studs in a grid, and a larger wooden one with rows of small holes drilled through. A set of nipple clamps. A long black cord threaded through wooden, spring-style clothespins. The wireless wand.
Neil took off his tuxedo jacket and threw it over the back of the Louis XVI chair positioned in front of the frame. Standing there in his white
shirt and black trousers, his silver hair slightly mussed, he looked so, so good.
“Oh my gosh, I bet my makeup is all messed up,” I lamented, and he motioned me closer, meeting me halfway. He hooked an arm around my waist and pulled me up roughly. The delicate silk of my dress rode up my thighs.
He caught my chin and smeared the pad of his thumb over my lower lip. If there was any trace of my dark berry lipstick left behind, it was smudged across my mouth now. Tilting my chin up farther, he said, “It certainly is.”
I gestured to the room around us. “Is this my surprise, Sir?”
“It’s a gift,” he corrected me. “To both of us. You can look in the other rooms, if you’d like.”
Warily, I crossed the salon for the first of the four sets of double doors in the room. I stepped through, and Neil followed behind, turning up the lights as I went. All around the room, pieces of furniture were draped in white drop cloths. I cast him an uncertain glance as I lifted the edge of one, a long, low rectangle on the ground. It was a wide, short table, and on top rested a very familiar shape.
“A Sybian?” I almost clapped my hands with joy.
“You said you wanted to try one. I don’t know why we haven’t yet.” He motioned to another of the shapes doing their ghost impressions. “Have a look there.”
The second one was a complicated-looking piece of machinery with a rod affixed to a wheel, attached to another, smaller flywheel. An electrical cord lay wrapped around the base. If not for the black silicone dildo attached to the machine’s long arm, I would have had no idea what it was for.
“It has a surprisingly powerful electric motor. It’s adjustable up to three hundred strokes per minute, and the horsepower—” At my beleaguered eye roll, he changed subjects. “There’s one more, here.”
He pulled the cover back on the next item, a black steel H-shape with two rods and a dual controller on a long cord. “For double penetration.”
“Are you kidding me?” I twirled around. “I feel just like Belle when the Beast gives her that library.”
“That was my inspiration really.” He circled me slowly, his hands in his pockets. “Go on, have a look in the other rooms.
Another salon had been transformed into a gorgeous eighteenth-century bedroom, with a canopied bed. Where there might have been elaborate scenes painted in a real palace, the oval frames and curved ceiling above were mirrored, reflecting and multiplying us above our heads. I imagined seeing myself spread out, shackled to the bed with the golden cuffs that dangled from their anchors on the scrollwork headboard.
There was a recamier, a narrow, backless sofa with padded, curled arms on either side, like the one he’d tormented me on in the hotel suite in France. Only, that one had been powdered blue silk. I trailed my hands across the white leather.
Neil stepped close behind me and caught my hips, pulling me back. He put his lips to my ear and said, his voice low and husky, “It will be far easier to clean, after you’ve been tied to it, pleading and gushing and screaming in frustration.”
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered, trembling.
