“Are you going to do that all night?” Nora asked.

Nico nodded.

“I thought so,” she said. “I do have wine.”

Nico shrugged.

“Later. Got it,” she said.

Nico had nodded and shrugged because his lips and tongue were otherwise engaged with her nipples. After defiling the bedspread, they’d curled up together in bed, and Nico had pulled the straps of her gown down—without asking first, wicked boy—and had spent now...Nora checked the mantel clock over the fireplace...seven minutes sucking her breasts.

“I should have brought a book to read,” she said at eight minutes. “Wonder if I could reach my phone...”

She stretched her arm past Nico’s shoulder.

No, she couldn’t reach her phone. Too bad. She could have answered a few more e-mails. She ran her fingers through his soft hair, rubbed his neck and shoulders…

Nine minutes.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, moosh,” Nora said. “It does feel good. It’s just...” She glanced at the clock again. “Nine minutes?”

“You’ve sucked me for longer than nine minutes,” he said, coming up for air.

“Entirely different situation and you know it.”

He shook his head and returned to his task. Nora and Nico lay on their sides, arms and legs intertwined, Nora’s chin at Nico’s forehead, his head buried against her chest.

Ten minutes.

“This has got to be pathological. Were you bottle-fed as a baby?” she asked. “Never mind. That was mean. I’m childless. I have no room to judge.”

Twelve minutes. She was starting to get a little sore. Aroused, but sore.

“Guess it could be worse,” she said with a sigh. “If you’re going to have an orally-fixated boyfriend, better tits than cigarettes, right?”

Finally, Nico laughed hard enough that Nora was able to pull away from him and yank her nightgown back into place. The boy was insatiable sometimes.

Nico reached for her and she batted his hand away.

“No, bad moosh. It’s wine o’clock.”

“I have wine every day of my life,” he said. “I only get your breasts four months a year.”

“But it’s California Chardonnay,” she said. “And I have more candy.”

“Hmm,” he said. “If there’s candy...”

He pulled on his jeans and went downstairs to hunt up wine glasses while Nora opened the bottle.

He returned, triumphant with two white wine glasses just in time to catch Nora nosing through his weekender bag.

“Looking for something?” he asked as he set the wine glasses on the side table by the sofa. He picked up the wine bottle, looked at the label and grinned.

“My present,” Nora said, still nosing. She had no shame about getting caught digging through his things. She owned him all the time. While they were together she owned him even more. That meant his body was her body, his heart her heart, and his luggage her luggage. So she figured anyway.

“It’s in there,” he said. “Bottom.”

“Is this it?” she asked, pulling out a flat white box with a black ribbon around it.

“No, that’s for his birthday.”

“Kingsley’s?” Nora asked. Kingsley’s birthday was November second, the day after she’d get back from their trip.

“Yeah,” Nico said. “Although...ah, I don’t know if I should give it to him or not.”

“You should give him a present. It’ll mean the world to him.” Nora wanted Nico and Kingsley to have a good relationship almost as she wanted Nico and her to have a good relationship.

“It’s not that,” Nico said. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing to give him. He might...” Nico shrugged. His grandmother called him “moosh” for a reason. Unlike nearly everyone else she knew, herself included, when Nico didn’t know what to say, he said nothing.

“Can I look?” she asked.

Nico pointed at the box with his wine glass as if to say, “If you wish.”

She wished.

She slid the black ribbon off the box. It was a pretty box with a pretty bow, which likely meant Nico’s cousin, the winery’s office manager Marbella, had done the wrapping. She lifted the lid and found a small book, black leather.

“Photo album?” Nora guessed. Nico said nothing, so she knew she’d guessed right. He wasn’t looking at her while she opened the cover to the first photograph, but focused instead on the golden liquid in his wine glass.

“Oh my God,” Nora said, clapping a hand over her heart. “Look how cute you are.” The photograph was of Nico—she’d know those eyes anywhere—at about age five. He was sitting on a tree stump on the edge of the winery with the house in the background. He’d caught a cricket or grasshopper or something and held it out to the camera in his palm. He was smiling and Nora saw he was missing his two front teeth.

“There’s more,” Nico said. “All me from five to twelve.”

Nora flipped through the photo album slowly, and found her eyes were welling up. It didn’t mean that much to her to see Nico as a little boy. It didn’t mean that much to her to see pictures of herself as a child either. But the thoughtfulness of giving Kingsley a whole album of photos of his son, of the years Kingsley had missed...

There was Nico in shorts and a t-shirt, running from one of his other cousins, a soccer ball at his toes. There was Nico on the beach, the French Riviera, wearing his mother’s too-large sunglasses with white sunblock on his nose. There was Nico, curled in a ball sleeping on a pile of clean laundry like a house cat.

“Kingsley will never recover from this,” Nora said, grinning. “If the house catches on fire, he’ll save Juliette, Céleste, and this photo album.”

“Not Søren?” Nico asked.

“Søren will save Kingsley,” Nora said.

“And what about you?”

“Who do you think set the fire?”

Nico laughed as Nora flipped through the album again.

“No baby pictures?” she asked.

He winced. “I couldn’t find any.”

“You have to have baby pictures somewhere.”

“I mean, I couldn’t find any that were me alone. Maman is the photographer, so in all the baby pictures...you know...” He fell silent again. Nora understood then. All the pictures of Nico as a baby, his father was holding him.

“You sure it’s okay to give it to him?” Nico asked. “He won’t be...”

“Triste?” Nora supplied the French word for “sad.”

“Hurt,” Nico said.

“He missed twenty-five years of your life. Of course he’ll be hurt. But if there’s one thing you’re ever going to learn from being with me, it’s that there’s good pain and bad pain.” She closed the photo album and held it briefly to her heart. “This is good pain.”

“You can take it to him then,” he said. “And tell him bon anniversaire.”

“He’ll be touched you were worried about hurting him. He wants you to love him as much as he loves you.”

“In time,” he said. “Maybe.” Nora understood his reticence to really let go and love Kingsley. The man who’d raised him from birth until his death two years ago still held the high ground in Nico’s heart. Slowly, but surely, Kingsley was making inroads. Impossible not to. Kingsley could be damn lovable when he wanted to be.

“Kingsley is the reason we’re together,” Nora reminded Nico.

He lifted his wine glass in a salute. “No,” Nico said. He pointed at her. “You are the reason he and I are together.”

“You play so hard to get,” Nora said. “But this is proof you do love him. These aren’t copies. These pictures are originals.”

Nico shrugged, but didn’t deny it.

“Okay, enough about him...where’s my present?” Nora asked. She put the box away in her bag to give to Kingsley.

“Small red box.”

“Small red box,” she said, digging in the bag again. She found it stuffed under a pair of socks, neatly folded. “Can I open it? I don’t care if you say no, I’m opening it anyway.”

“Open it,” he said.

Nora ripped the ribbon off the box and lifted the lid and found inside...

“Nothing?” She held up the empty box. “Or is there a very tiny diamond in here I’m just not seeing?”

Nico was a born male submissive and any male submissive worth his salt brought gifts to his mistress. She knew dominatrices who posted wishlists on their websites just so their clients would know what sort of tribute they expected. Nora had never gone that far, but she never turned down a thoughtful gift given in the right spirit. And Nico... There hadn’t been one visit, one trip, one night together when he hadn’t brought her something. Their first time together had been the best gift—he’d given her his company during the hardest night of her life.

Nico grinned. “It’s whatever you want to be,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I tell you?”

“You want to do something to me that I’m not...” He waved his hand at her, indicating he wanted her to finish his sentence for him.

“I see…you’re giving me permission to do something to you.”

“That’s it.”

“So I can use this for...pegging?”

Nico blinked, but recovered quickly. “As I said, it’s whatever you want.”

“Blood-play?”

He held up his hands in surrender.

“Making you get a cock piercing?”

He winced so hard both eyes closed. Slowly one eye inched open. “If you want,” he said.

“Oh...” Nora said, her voice a purr. “Good present. But you know I could make you do any of that if I wanted to.”

“You can,” he admitted. “But...I was thinking of when you were teaching me about us, about what couples like us are supposed to be like. You said real submission isn’t something taken but something freely given and freely accepted.”

“I said that?”

“Last year, during my, ah...training.”

“God damn, I’m smart,” she said.

He laughed. “Very. That’s my gift. I’m giving you my submission, and I want you to accept it from me.”

“Thank you,” she said, walking over to kiss him. “I do accept this beautiful gift of your submission, and you are going to regret ever giving it to me.”

“No regrets yet.”

“The night is still young.”

They kissed a good long kiss, a wine-flavored kiss, better than candy.

“You aren’t really going to make me get a piercing, are you?” he asked.

“Oh, maybe just a little one.”

He took a ragged breath. “More wine, please?”