I met Dominic. He was six five, and when I shook his hand, I felt as if I were grabbing a concrete-filled oven mitt. I put on a movie and invited him to watch with me. He declined and went out into the hall. I checked on him a few times. He stood outside the door, listening and waiting. I invited him in, but he said he was fine. He refused food, took water, confirmed he didn’t need the bathroom. I watched another movie in my bedroom and fell asleep in the blue light of the TV.

I woke when the light went off. “Adam?”

He sat on my side of the bed and moved my hair off my face. “Go back to sleep.”

I pushed myself to a sitting position. I couldn’t see the clock. My vision was cloudy with sleep, but my mind was completely awake. “What happened?”

“I can tell you tomorrow.”

The light from the moon and the building across the street surrounded his silhouette.

“I can’t sleep if you don’t tell me.”

He turned on the lamp. I squinted and turned away from it, and he put his hand on mine while I adjusted to the light and wakefulness.

He looked fine. Better than fine. Hale and healthy and ready for a day out. I must have been a sight with my crusty eyes, nest of hair, and candy-cane pajamas.

“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“Two and change.”

“What took so long?”

“It wasn’t as easy as we hoped.”

“Did Dominic stay in the hall the whole time?”

“He’s a pro. The best.”

I cleared my throat, tilted my head right then left to stretch my neck, then sat up straight. “I’m ready.”

He smiled and patted my hands. The gesture wasn’t forced or shallow. He wasn’t phoning it in. “We went to the last known address. Me and Charlie. Dominant members of the Cellar have to pass a probation period and interview, and Charlie was part of the vetting process. So we figured it was just a misunderstanding.”

“Right.”

“We got to the place on the Upper East Side. Poor guy, living alone. It smelled like he hadn’t left in months.”

“Months?”

“Maybe decades. He had Watergate memorabilia all over the house. He had a ‘Nixon Now’ poster. Framed and everything. He said his mother put it there when Ford took the White House and he hasn’t moved it since.”

I blinked a couple of times. “Wow.”

“We talked. I think you’re safe now.”

“Thank you.”

I was more than safe. If Insolent was actually a smelly, homebound Dominant pretender living in his mother’s old apartment, I’d eat my candy cane pajamas. I’d just heard Adam Steinbeck’s fantasy of Insolent, and I wasn’t about to burst his bubble. I would let him get away with his lie and give him the gift of my unquestioning obeisance.

“What should I do?”

“Go back to sleep.” He stood. “Tomorrow, you’re moving in with me.”

I jumped out of bed. Maybe not that unquestioning. “Wait, wait…”

“I don’t like that he knows where you live.”

“Murray Hill might as well be the moon. It’ll take me an hour to get to work.”

“Forty minutes. And it’s temporary.”

I crossed my arms in my Christmas pajamas with little elves. I didn’t know how I expected him to take me seriously in that getup. “How temporary?”

“Until I’m confident he’s gone. Or the end of our agreement. Whichever is first.”

“So you’ll let me move to somewhere on planet Earth after the thirty days?”

His smile was shaped like an orange slice. “Jesus, huntress. It’s just the east side.”

“Ugh.”

“I have two bedrooms. It’ll be just like old times. And it’ll be easier for me to train you if you’re there.”

I brushed by him and opened my top drawer. “I’m awake anyway.”

My back was to him, so he couldn’t see my excited grin. He was making me a part of his life, giving me plenty of opportunities to prove to him that he loved me. On a day-to-day, married people level, we belonged to each other.

My smile turned into a frown.

He was bringing me further into his life and embrace. He was protecting me and treating me as his own. Of course I should be thrilled. That was exactly what I wanted. The more access I had to him, the more likely he’d realize he loved me.

Unless he didn’t.

Unless this all backfired completely and training me was the last thing I should let him do. What if I fell more deeply in love? What if this only got harder instead of fixing the rift between us?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Sure.” I pulled out some more clothes. “I was just thinking about what I have to do at work tomorrow.”

I’d lied through my teeth, just like him. We weren’t supposed to lie. That had been the problem in the first place. Lies to ourselves and each other had broken us and they had no power to heal.

“You’re not going to work tomorrow,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re staying with me until I know it’s safe.”

“It’s down the block.” I thrust out my arm with its fistful of underwear. “Why don’t you just stay here?”

“Because this person knows where you live. He doesn’t know where I live. Just work from my place tomorrow.”

“No. Here’s the deal. I stay with you if I go to work. You stay here if you want me to take the day off.”

It made no sense. I was basically inconveniencing myself no matter which option he chose. But I couldn’t just give up on one of my redlines.

“You’re impossible,” he said, a stiff second finger pointing at an irritation somewhere in the southern sky. “You’re making it very hard to take care of you.”

I opened my mouth to say, “I didn’t ask you to take care of me,” but that was another lie. I wanted him to take care of me. When we were married, and after we got back from Montauk, I wanted nothing more than to feel the weight of his watchfulness.

But that didn’t mean I was going to let him eat me alive.

“It’s not my job to make it easy for you,” I said, dropping my underwear back into the drawer. “The business is about to be mine. If I’m in the city because you sent me home early from Montauk, then I get to prepare the business for the transfer and you just have to deal with that.”

He crossed his arms and set his feet a little farther apart. For anyone else, that signified intransigence. For Adam, it meant the negotiations were about to begin.

“The deal was you submit to me. We never negotiated our feelings.”

“Sexual submission. That was the deal.”

“Place and time were my call.”

“The place was Montauk. Wanna go back? Or is it not as much fun without your ex-girlfriend in the house next door?” I slammed the drawer closed. “You knew they were there, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Why did you put me in that situation? On top of everything else, having them there made everything worse.”

“Because you agreed to go. They were there and you agreed and I had to choose between taking you to Montauk or not. I decided to take you because I was dying every day. You have no idea how goddamn desperate I was.”

If I hadn’t had an idea ten minutes before, I did once I heard those last two sentences. His desperation was still there in the soft rattle of his vocal cords and the forward set of his jaw as he tried to hide it.

“I do. I know it. You looked at me and saw someone you loved not loving you back, and all you wanted to do was save yourself. Right?”

He took a long time to answer. I thought I was in for a rant on what I’d done to him versus what he’d done to me. I expected excuses, defenses, and rationalizations.

I got one word, said with a thick undertone of regret.

“Yes.”

“I need to make sure my company survives. This is how I’m saving myself.” I could have lost him at any minute. My situation with him was that precarious, but winning him wasn’t worth losing myself.

“This was supposed to be easy,” he said with a smirk.

“It’s not. It sucks.”

“Right. Yeah. And there’s tomorrow.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand while the other was still crossed over his chest.

“I have to work.”

“The papers your dad opened? It was a Withdrawal of Claim. My uncle Bernard—”

“The hoarder? In Idaho?”

“Yes. He accepted a buyout for the house.”

His grandparents’ house was a beautiful three-story Cape Cod two blocks from the Belt Parkway. His uncle had wanted the house, but Adam wouldn’t sell it so he could “fill it with old newspapers and empty Coke cans.” The fight had been bitter and long, but Adam was a tenacious fighter and a patient man. It had obviously paid off.

“I’m going there in the afternoon to see how much of a mess I’m dealing with.” He took his hand from his face and flattened it, pointing it toward me. “Come with me. Work in the morning, and come with me after lunch.”

Sheepshead Bay was the exact last place I wanted to go, ever. It was far away, residential, isolated, a land of freestanding two-story houses with siding and stoops—and it had nothing to do with me at all.

“Why not just go yourself and let Dominic protect me from evil for a few extra hours?”

His shrug was barely perceptible, and it had the weight of honesty behind it.

“I wouldn’t mind having you around.” He looked at the floor, put his hands in his pockets, and looked back at me. “It’s been empty a long time. I haven’t seen it since my grandmother died. I don’t…” He stopped himself and shook his head a little as if dismissing a thought.

I believed him, and I felt for him. His grandparents had raised him as their own, educated him, and made him into a man after his parents died. Getting the house meant he had to deal with the place he’d grown up in.

“All right. But I’m sleeping here tonight.”

“And Murray Hill tomorrow night.”

He’d slipped right back into the negotiation. I couldn’t help but admire him sometimes.

“Fine.”

“Discussion over,” he said, his voice steady and sure, half an octave deeper with an unbreakable rhythm. “You mouthed off.” He yanked the end of his belt to undo it, and I was wet in an instant. “Put your elbows on the bed. Feet spread on the floor and your ass up where it belongs. We’ll start with your pants on. You’re going to count until I tell you to stop.”

He snapped the belt free and looped it in one hand. I couldn’t stop looking at the way his fingers bent around it. When had he slipped from a human man into the skin of a god? Was it when he rubbed his eyes or when I agreed to his last demand? It seemed fast, but the transition was so smooth, he must have been changing right before my eyes the entire time. My knees were so weak with anticipation that I could barely make it to the foot of the bed, but I did exactly as I was told.

He put his hand on my back, across my ass, between my legs, pressing the fabric against me. He didn’t correct my posture, just appreciated it.

“Count with me,” he said from behind, and I did.