My husband brought his new boss home for dinner, not knowing that he was also my ex.
I have a darkness in my past that I’ve been running from. Secrets I’ve been keeping and bargains that I’d made. I don’t recognize who I used to be and I like it that way.
But my husband doesn’t know any of this and he doesn’t know that his new boss is my old ex. He doesn’t understand what this man did to me, or that even his presence here means that his games are only beginning.
When he sets out a challenge and a dare it comes with an offer we’d be crazy to refuse. A bet that he can have one hour with me and I won’t beg and if I hold out then we will get enough money to make our wildest dreams come true.
I wonder if I knew from the start that I was going to fail. I wonder if I only ever agreed, knowing that the satisfaction would pay off for me.
Because my ex is back and he’s got me now and he’s not going to let me go. He’s going to make me beg and he’s going to make me his and he’s going to take me away from my happy little life and back into the darkness I escaped once.
And I’m going to love it. And I’m going to love every last minute of it. And it’s not going to hurt me.
But it will destroy my husband.
Excerpt
We can’t say no to this. She knows that we can’t say no to this.
To have this offer sitting in front of us is almost unbelievable and if it wasn’t backed up by Sara clearly believing that he’d make good on it, I don’t know if I would have believed it. But I trust her and when she nods she says everything. She says that if we follow through and win this bet Aidan will pay his debt to us.
I’m still not exactly aware of what their history was. I know that Aidan was her boss at one point, but their relationship was anything but traditional. I got the impression that they were close enough to be dating, to be together, but that things never crossed over into physical. She was instead his companion and more than that. She was a trophy and a motivation until she walked away.
And now she was with me and he was offering to make all my dreams come true and all she had to do was win this bet, this bet that seemed so simple and so easy on the surface of it.
I would set a timer. One hour. In that hour all Aidan had to do was make her beg, and what she was begging for was clear.
Begging for him. Begging for him to touch her. Begging for him to please her. Begging for him.
That seemed simple to me. I knew Sara and I knew that while she could go and go once she got started it took a long time to get her there. And I knew her well enough to know that begging was never on the table for her.
Sara was always in control. I had no worries and no uncertainty. She could do this.
And if that wasn’t ridiculously easy enough he also wasn’t allowed to touch her, nowhere that mattered at least. Oh he could touch her shoulder and he could touch her forearm, but he couldn’t touch her breasts. He could brush against her waist but he couldn’t grab her ass. He could trace the outside of her thigh, but he couldn’t dip between. He could caress her cheek, but he couldn’t kiss her.
The arrogance of this man astounded me. To think that he could make her cross the line into begging, in an hour, with only the hint of physical contact that he was allowed. It took quite the cocky asshole to think he had the ability to do that.
And I knew that and if he was willing to throw his money away on something so futile then he was more than welcome to it, but I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I was on easy street, sitting back and ready to watch him fail, to watch his cocky arrogance stop it all.
Hell, the man even gave me my own personal out.
Yoga. All I had to do was say the word Yoga and it would stop everything. We’d even call it even. It would be like the bet never happened at all. I would keep my job and he would keep his dignity or whatever it was that he had at stake here. We would both walk away from this with what we had going into it.
Provided I said it before she begged. If she begged, it would be too late to stop.
“Okay,” I say finally, nodding at my wife after she confirmed that she was in, “Then it’s decided. One hour. I’ll start the timer and we can begin. Unless you want some kind of prep time or something?”
“No,” Aidan said cooly, looking at her and not at me, “I’m ready.”
“I’m ready too,” I said, “Sara?”
I looked over at her and she was staring, transfixed, into the middle distance. Her eyes were unfocused and she was so far away that it made me wonder what it was that she was thinking about.
I wasn’t used to that. In the whirlwind time that we’d known each other I’d become so accustomed to understanding her, to getting a good insight into her. Since I met her I’d never not known what she was thinking, even right at the beginning.
But now I couldn’t place it. I couldn’t parse the far-off dreamy look in her eyes. The way her body was twitching as if it was holding fast in anticipation of something. The way it looked like she was waiting, inhaling, just before she threw herself off the edge of something.
It discomforted me. It made me feel… alone.
“I’m ready,” she said eventually, nodding and focusing. But it wasn’t me that she focused on.
It was him. She only had eyes for him.