collar bone. “You…the way you felt about me, how I felt about you, it changed all of it. What happened with Hayworth showed me that I really could lose everything, but not in the way that I feared. I had to figure out how to hold onto what mattered. Give you everything.”
She adjusted closer, and he banded both arms around her. Her voice was muffled against his chest. “Ever since the first time I looked at you and knew you noticed me…the way I noticed you, I knew what mattered the most to me.”
She shuddered. The more words she pushed out, the more he could tell she was fighting that involuntary reaction, the nausea and fear. He understood the steps a person had to take, when coddling them wasn’t helpful. He also understood when a person was asking too much of themselves all at once. Fortunately, that intuitive part of him that was getting stronger all the time knew a Master’s job description included putting on the brakes when a sub was doing that.
He tipped her face up again, brushed his lips over her nose, her eyes, her cheeks. “I want you to embrace everything you want for yourself,” he said, giving her a steady look. “But you can take all the time you need saying aloud something you tell me a hundred other ways. Be at ease on that. I love you.’”
Pain and relief were in her smile, but also joy and hope. They were okay. When she wrapped her arms around him, he held her, and that contained all the things they needed to say to one another for now.
They were both okay.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I could get used to this,” Rory said.
“You don’t make enough money to get used to this. Neither do I. I’m just lucky to have a rich female friend.”
Brick smoked a cigar, lazily reclining on a giant unicorn float in the heated pool. Rory, drifting with a pair of blue swim noodles under his arms, sent him an amused look.
“What did you do to earn the privilege of using her house while she’s in Spain? Are you her boy toy?”
Brick snorted. “Gutter brain. She’s seventy. Admittedly a very hot seventy, but she’s told me to keep my hands to myself.” He smiled fondly. “We’re cut from the same cloth, anyway. Even without the age difference, we’re too compatible to be together. But I helped get an arson case involving her son solved, after it had sat on a cold case pile for a couple decades. We became friends.”
He gave Rory a critical look. “You’re looking a lot better. Sound better, too, than when we talked on the phone.” He tilted his head toward the other side of the pool. “You’ve got a good nurse.”
“She’s not my nurse. She’s a ninety-eight-pound tyrant with more eyes than a spider.”
“She looks great in that swimsuit, though.”
“You can keep your hands to yourself there, too.” Rory pointed a loaded finger at him and Brick held up both hands, grinning.
Not that he’d needed any encouragement to look in that direction, since he did it about every minute or so, but Brick’s comment inspired Rory to follow his glance. While he and Brick had drifted to the deeper part of the pool, Daralyn had stuck to the four and half foot end. Today had been her first swim lesson, and while there were plenty of swim noodles to use as flotation devices, she’d been practicing stroking where her feet could still touch.
She did look good in a bikini. It wasn’t overly skimpy, but nicely revealing, and a cherry red that looked good with her brunette coloring. Amanda had helped her pick it out when Brick had invited them to meet him here for the day. The house in Waxhaw was a millionaire’s version of a log cabin, with lots of screened porch, natural wood, and a thick cluster of surrounding forest to buffer the eight-acre property. The enclosed and heated pool was well vented and surrounded by windows so clear it didn’t have that usual stuffy indoor pool feeling Rory disliked.
Brick dropped off the float and moved over to the side, all the while puffing on the cigar. He removed it from his mouth, gestured. “I’m headed back in to handle some work stuff. Probably take me about an hour or so.”
When Rory lifted a brow, Brick met his gaze with a twinkling one of his own. “In case you don’t understand the language of Obvious-land, you’re not going to be