Hostile Takeover

She kept looking down into the water, the mild wind keeping it rippling with movement. After seeing her in outfits that taunted and teased him beyond bearing, it was unexpected to realize she was even more beautiful to him like this. Her face pale but quiet, her hair drawn back from her face, the dark modest dress against soft skin. She looked both older than expected, and yet more vulnerable.



“If you could meet God and ask him one question, what would it be?” She had a wistful, sad look, and he knew he’d do anything to make her feel better.



“I’d ask him if there was anything in the world that hadn’t been done, that hadn’t happened. Not the significant obvious stuff, like world peace. The urban legend kind of thing, what people claim has happened before, but no one is certain about it. Like someone sitting down on the toilet and finding a snake in there.”



She turned her head to look at him, her brows raised. “You ass,” she said, and then she started laughing.



Extraordinary. That was the word Jon had used about her maturity, but it fit so much more about her. He couldn’t help touching her face, but when he did, she stopped laughing. As she lifted a hand, hesitant, he waited on her. He knew it wasn’t that she wasn’t sure of his permission. She wasn’t sure of herself, of what she wanted. What he’d done to her, the hurt, was still too close. He had to let her choose. Which meant he also had to swallow down the disappointment when she closed her hand into a fist, lowered it to her lap again. “What would you really ask?”



“Hell, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “If you’re in the presence of God, all questions are supposed to be answered, right? At least that’s what I’d hope.”



She pursed her lips. “I wasn’t sure you believed in God. Not specifically. I figured you were more of an agnostic, if not a complete atheist, because of how things went when you were little.”



“When my mother left me in an alley, I was wearing a plastic rosary with a pressed shamrock pendant, suggesting she was Irish Catholic. Guess that’s the only reason she didn’t abort me. Or maybe she didn’t want to waste the cash she could use on her drug habit.” He shrugged before she could say anything to that. “When Jonas nabbed me for picking his pocket, he didn’t turn me in to the cops. He found me a decent foster home. He checked in on me, made sure I went to school. A lot of things happened in my life, good and bad, but now I’m pretty well off. I worked my ass off for that, but certain things had to happen at the right moments to get me on the right track. It makes sense there’s something out there that will help you, if you’re willing to be helped.”



“So if love is staring you right in the face, it’d be kind of stupid to turn your back on it, right?”



Touché, love. But before he could think of a proper answer to that, she spoke again. “I got your flowers. The bouquet. Forget-me-nots. But I don’t want to talk about that right now, okay?”



“Okay.”



She sat silently for a few minutes, gazing at the minnows clustering around her toes. “I don’t know why I was thinking about this today. It was so long ago, and it seems somehow disrespectful, with how much further Jeremy came by the end, but I was remembering that night.” Her shoulder jerked, a tic, and his brow furrowed when he saw it.



“Allen, that was his name. I was thirteen, didn’t know anything. He was nineteen, and he came into my room, started flirting, but then he got mean and pushy. I was screaming for help, and he was tearing at my clothes, and all I could think was, ‘why isn’t Jeremy helping me?’ I never thought…when I realized that he’d been sitting in the other room, too stoned to even pay attention…”



Ben put a hand over hers on the dock. He wanted to hold her, but recent and past history was pressing in too close, so he settled for that overlap of fingers. Hers were cold. She stared down at them. “Cassie got home just in time, pulled him off me. God, she was… I think about it now, and she was incredible. It was like watching a bear go after something attacking her cubs. A nineteen-year-old guy taller and heavier than she was and she pretty much kicked the crap out of him. All the shit I gave her growing up…and she was always there. But even after that, she loved Jeremy, just as much as she loved all of us.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t know if she’s ever going to get over not being able to save him.”



“She will. Because she’s got you. And Lucas. All of us. We’re here for all of you.”



She looked at him then, and her eyes were sheened with tears. “Ben, please hold me. I promise I won’t try to jump you. At least right now.”



“Christ,” he muttered, but he needed no further invitation to pull her into his arms. Or put his mouth over hers, despite the absolute stupidity of doing so. It was a soft, long kiss, with gentle heat and connection, and he could almost feel that line between them tightening, winding around them both, holding them together. But there was a tension to her, a caution. He’d caused that, and he needed to fix it. It would take time, and a hell of a lot more than a kiss.



She hadn’t rebuffed him though. She’d asked him to hold her, even made a weak joke that made him hope she still wanted him. He needed her to want him with that same fierceness she’d had before, so he could honor it the way he should have from the beginning.



But today wasn’t about that. When he finally lifted his head, her eyes were closed. He used his fingertips to carry away the few tears, and then those brown eyes opened, looking at him. “I should get back to the house. Cass will need me.”



Looking at how pale she was close up, feeling the tremor in her hands, he shook his head. “She’s surrounded by friends and family right now. Let’s take a little bit of time for you.”



“Ben—”



“No arguing,” he said quietly. Her gaze flickered up to his face, uncertain. “If I thought she genuinely needed you right now, we’d go back. But she’s all right. Give yourself a breath. You’ve gotten what, probably two hours’ sleep this week?”



She shook her head. “I’ve been okay.”



“You’ve been better than okay. You’ve been brilliant. But dim the wattage for a few moments, firefly. Let’s walk somewhere. How about down to the gazebo?”



“Okay.”



He helped her up, picked up her shoes. As Marcie watched him with those sad, tired eyes, he knelt, dried her feet with his handkerchief, guided each foot into the practical heels. She held onto his shoulder, and he felt the curve of her fingers in his coat. After he donned his own shoes and socks, straightened his trouser legs, he took that hand, pressed a kiss to her knuckles. Tucking it into the crook of his elbow, he guided her onto the path that followed the edge of the lake. For a little while she was quiet, just leaning against him, walking together, but then she pointed to the sky.



“Look at that. See how the sky is blue above the tree canopy, and directly beneath it, it’s white, a perfect segue? I wonder what causes that?”



“We’ll ask Jon. He knows all the science stuff.”



“You’re a lawyer. You know how to make up stuff that sounds right.”



“Light refraction,” he said solemnly. “Caused by the whosiwhatsit interacting with the thingamajig in a synaptic reaction.”



“That’s total nonsense. Good enough.” They’d dropped to holding hands, and it felt pretty damn natural. Even more for him to pull her under his arm, guide her hand under his coat so she could settle her palm on his waist and he could put his around her shoulders. She laid her head on his chest.



They followed the boardwalk to the screened gazebo overlooking the marsh. It was a hushed place, a couple white herons fishing gracefully among the waters, the silence punctuated by the occasional sawing cricket or chirping note of a frog.



“Let’s just sit here,” she whispered. “We can listen and watch.”



He shed his coat, put it over her shoulders, then took a seat in the Adirondack chair. Guiding her onto his knee, he let her lean back against his body, put her head next to his. The marsh grasses rippled back and forth, like conversations. Seed motes floated through the air. The heron stepped with stately slowness through the water, watching for fish.



“Do you have a quiet place like this, Ben? A place where everything makes sense?”



He’d been stroking her hair, carefully removing barrette and pins until it tumbled to her shoulders and he could comb through it, follow the line of her narrow shoulder blades. He could answer her question with more lawyer bullshit, things that sounded right, were somewhat true, but this was the first step. He wasn’t going to be a chickenhearted bastard anymore.



“The St. Louis cemetery,” he said, with effort. “I used to go there as a kid, at night. I still go there to think. If you sit on top of one of the bigger vaults, you can see most of the place. There’s a sense of peace there, of problems set aside.”



“Well, yeah. Everyone there is dead.”



He tugged her hair, though he couldn’t help a smile. He turned his head enough so they were eye to eye. Hers had a soft gleam of tired humor. “Brat,” he said.



“Do you find it…when you do a scene?”



“You tell me. I think you already know the answer.”



She pressed her lips together. “When I was watching you that night at Surreal—the first time—I saw it. You could have been in the middle of an empty desert, because it was just you and those three women. You were focused on finding the true root of their submission, and when you got them into subspace, you were right there with them, in a similar…Domspace, where everything made sense, their very lives, every movement, every breath, in your hand.”



She nodded out to the marsh. “When I come here, for comfort, wisdom, or to be nothing for a little while, I imagine being held in God’s hand. But the other night, when you took me over, Mastered me so completely, it was one and the same. I was held inside of you, because you had that same strength I sense here. I was nothing, in every good sense of the word, because it also felt like everything.”