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“I have to return to New York tomorrow,” he said after a moment. “I canceled meetings left and right to come here.”
“Hmm,” I said. Meetings. Boring.
“We'll need to make living arrangements,” he continued, and I heard an edge come into his voice, a bit of a strain. “I meant to discuss them with you before we wed, but...”
He trailed off. I was beginning to suspect that he was feeling a little embarrassed about his hasty decision to marry me without any kind of notice to anyone, let alone me. His need to control everything around him was a weakness, and I knew I could use it to find the answers I sought.
Anton cleared his throat. “Anyway, my schedule is packed tomorrow afternoon. I've arranged for an assistant to help you organize your things and plan out the next few weeks while we settle in.”
I saw an opening. “I actually have an assistant,” I said.
“You do?” He sounded amused.
“Yes. And by assistant, I mean a friend who needs a job.”
He was quiet. “Very well. I will give the job to your friend. Conditionally based on performance.”
Oooh, that would go over well with Sadie. “Done,” I said. Hey, she needed rent.
He continued. “And we'll talk about the honeymoon this weekend...”
My ears perked up at that. “Honeymoon?” I said. “Where?”
He ran his fingers through my hair. An affectionate gesture. I yawned. “Anywhere you like,” he said. He was starting to sound far away. “And I think we should still go shopping for your wedding boudoir.”
“Boudoir?” I mumbled.
“Yes. You'll need toys and things that are all your own.”
A fetish and sex toy shopping spree all for me. How romantic.
“Well,” I said, “I already liked that buttplug you used. We can keep that. There. That's one thing off the list.”
“You like it?” Anton said, and he sounded far away to my foggy brain. “We will keep it. Consider it one of my wedding presents to you.”
Who the fuck gives a buttplug to the wife they barely even know as a wedding present? I wanted to ask him, but I was too tired. Besides, I already knew the answer: Anton Waters did.
Anton Waters did a lot of strange things. And I wanted to know why.
But for now, I needed to sleep, so I drifted off, nestled against Anton's chest, listening to the beat of his heart.
I slept like a baby.
Chapter Five:
Bartered Submission
So it turns out that when you get secretly married to one of the richest guys on the planet, it doesn't stay a secret for long.
I slept on the plane back to New York while Anton worked. His desire to bone until we both ended up in the Emergency Room with third degree burns on our genitals seemed to be doused in the cold light of a hundred and fifty urgent emails dinging on his phone the next morning. We'd grabbed only coffee and pastries for breakfast in Anton's haste to get back to work. By the time the plane touched down, the news was spreading, and I knew it was only a matter of time before it reached people I knew, if it hadn't already. Sadie had a really big mouth.
"Keep your head down," Anton advised as we ducked into his town car.
"What?" I said, looking around. "Why?"
Anton gave an exasperated sigh. "Because," he said patiently, as though explaining something to a very small child or a particularly dim hamster, "there's paparazzi everywhere, and you just gave them a great shot of your face. Congratulations."
"What?" Shit!" I was not at my chipper best. Slingshotting to Nevada and back had made me crazy jetlagged and I wasn't even sure what time it was. All I knew is that I wanted a Filet o' Fish and a Dr. Pepper the size of my arm, and my chances of getting one were vanishing with every merry ding of Anton's phone. I let my hair fall over my cheeks as the driver—sadly, not Zachary—shut my door, and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized the windows were tinted to hell and back.
