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And inside, she quivered as if he’d set her on fire.
Especially when his hand settled around her neck like her favorite clamp, then propelled her outside when she’d settled her bill.
“We’re going to have a long talk, you and I,” he told her as they walked, a delicious threat in his voice and Paris around them like a song. “We’re going to talk about insolence. The astonishing use of the word ‘dumbass.’ And when you’re finished experiencing the consequences for both of those things, to my satisfaction, we will have a little talk about maintenance. My favorite.”
But when he slanted his beautiful dark blue gaze her way, out there in all that sunshine, she knew that his favorite was her.
Then, and always.
And he would prove it to her one spanking at a time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CONRADHADALWAYSassumed that he would get married with great pomp and circumstance, as suited a man of his fortune and position. His attempt at a great vanilla wedding had been just that sort of thing—stately and stuffy, so every business associate he’d ever had could come and gawk.
Even then, when he’d balked at the madness surrounding what had been, to him, little more than a business arrangement, Chriszette had always indicated that her children’s weddings were for her, not them. Conrad had really never seen any reason to argue with that. He didn’t care enough about weddings to care whether or not he enjoyed his.
But he hadn’t been sorry when it had all fallen through.
And now there was Rory, bright and hot and not in any way a lie.
Unsurprisingly, she had all kinds of opinions on weddings. And she lectured him a little too intensely about the evils ofthe historical marriage mart, whatever that was, the wedding industrial complex, and her feelings about proclaiming her role as chattel with a blood diamondfrom his homelandon her hand.
She paid for those lectures, of course, but that only made her rant at him more.
Accordingly, they celebrated their engagement—which involved Conrad ordering her to pack up her things and move into his church with him roughly two or three days after he’d found her in that ridiculous cat café—in private. In his little chapel, with the light streaming down her body as he carefully tied her to his Saint Andrew’s Cross.
That night he not only introduced her to his whip, he claimed her as his by switching out her clit piercing for one of his choosing. With a nice big stone with no blood on it. A bigger, more aggressive piercing that made her come screaming at the slightest touch and necessitated she take a solid week to get used to walking with it.
Conrad thought that was an excellent opportunity for her to think about what she was signing up for.
Because he was a man who did everything slow. Who prided himself on doing it right.
Except when it came to her.
Nothing about Rory and him made sense, because it all made too much sense to explain. They fit together and that was the end of it.
“I’m going to say this as clear as I can,” her father boomed at him when they visited Rory’s family in Nashville. Her mother had claimed to adore Conrad on sight, but big Marty Morton had taken a moment. “That’s my baby girl. I don’t understand a single thing that comes out of her mouth, but if you break her heart, I’ll take your head off with a pocketknife.”
Conrad grinned and lifted his drink in Marty’s direction. “I will hand you that pocketknife if that happens, and take my beheading like a man.”
And when the other man had muttered something gruff to Rory that sounded likeabout gotdamn time,he’d taken that as the best blessing he would receive.
That was how Conrad Vanderburg, head of his family and corporation and lauded throughout the business world, married Rory Morton, internet “influencer,” within two months of meeting her.
Their wedding was so private—on a solitary beach in the Philippines, with just the two of them, their officiant, and the breathtaking blue sea—that Rory only uploaded a single photo of it to her social media account.
It was a picture of Conrad looking stern and indulgent at once, while she was a vision in white, the wind making her skirts flow everywhere, and a look of such joy on her face that it made his heart ache.
Rory didn’t wear his ring, but she did wear his tattoo. The one he dreamed of that first night, that marked her as his, indelibly. It wasn’t visible in that picture, but he knew it was there. He saw it every time he stripped her naked—a great pleasure he indulged in often.
He had that photo framed and placed on the wall in their living room.
So he would never be tempted to forget himself again. To drift off into all that dire gray responsibility that had weighed him down forever. Nothing could be dire when she looked at him like that.
Because with Rory, he found he could let go, a little. That wasn’t to say that he shirked his duties, or suddenly discovered the urge to kneel. Hardly.
But she made him laugh. He had always been all intensity, all the time, but they shifted in and out of the different levels of their dynamic as it suited them.
