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“Tomorrow night.”
“No. I have plans.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I have plans to not be here.”
She raised her chin, as if daring him to challenge the statement.
Their scene had been good. So damned good. He wanted to play with her again tonight—it was early enough, and then again tomorrow.
She was pulling back.
Probably because she shared her past with you, was open and vulnerable, and instead of reciprocating you stonewalled her with silence.
She’d shared things with him. Told him both her dark secret and how previous relationships had shaped her kink.
He hadn’t been brave enough to do either. Damn.
He could explain that he didn’t talk about his past, not at Las Palmas. He could encourage her to stay, pull her back onto his lap, and touch her, gently at first, but with increasing intimacy, until she was ready to go again.
There was something in the tightness of the skin around her eyes that stopped him.
“Next weekend.” Daniel stepped back, out of her space.
She relaxed. “Thank you. For listening. For making me feel…a little less broken.”
“You were never broken,” he assured her.
“Hearing you say it makes me believe it just a little bit more.” She gathered her long blanket train, holding it in the hand not pressed to her breasts to keep the rest of it in place. “Until next weekend, Sir.” She added a sassy little wink.
Daniel watched her walk away, and hated himself for not being brave enough to stop her.
Chapter 15
“This is stupid. I’m sorry.” Autumn looked at her best friend. “You should go home.”
Summer gestured with her glass. “Don’t be stupid. I’m your ride-or-die bitch.”
“Cheers to that.” Autumn picked up her own glass and touched it to Summer’s. It wasn’t the first time this evening they’d toasted.
They’d been friends since freshman year of college when they’d been roommates. Someone in the housing department thought they were clever, assigning girls named Autumn and Summer to the same room. They’d bonded over a similar feelings about their names—both of them having a combination of irritation and pride in their seasonal names.
They’d held each other’s hands through those first awkward months of college. Their lives had taken different, if parallel, tracks in the past few years. They were both finally established in their careers. Summer was going to save humanity from itself. She was a program manager for a major environmental non-profit.
Autumn had always been good with numbers, but earned her BA in economics, which was an odd major, since economists were people with advanced degrees, and besides that, her best job prospect was to teach.
She’d gone a different route, making her own way in the world of what she liked to think of as fake-money.
Now she was a hedge fund manager, a position she’d taken just because it was a new challenge. They’d begged her to come on board because Autumn had made a name for herself, and an ungodly amount of money, as a day trader. High risk, high reward, and the earning potential had been nearly unlimited.
She’d paid off her parents’ house, was paying cash for her siblings’ college tuition, and her abuela was still lighting candles for her every week, because she was sure Autumn had to be doing something illegal to have made that much money that fast.
Her day-trading mentor—one of her professors—had always said she had a super high EQ—emotional quotient, to go with a good IQ, which was why she could handle high risk day trading. Before yesterday, she would have agreed with him.
But it had taken Daniel to point out that she didn’t actually despise other submissives, but was, in fact, afraid for them. Afraid they’d experience the pain she’d gone through. So much for a high emotional quotient.
“Remind me again who we’re looking for?” Summer leaned in, head swiveling so she could scan the crowd in the dim bar with narrowed eyes.
