“You didn’t have a backup plan?”
“Plan Bs are for losers who don’t think they can make it.”
The competitive edge in her voice makes me smile, even if the circumstances she describes appal me as much as my childhood appals her.
“After it ended, I never found anything I wanted half as much. It seemed like a waste of effort to work hard at something I didn’t care about.” Her mouth twists as though she’s about to add something, then she releases her pent-up breath in a sigh. “Were you really trying to get me pregnant?”
The question catches me off guard and I’m glad she’s not looking directly at me. Not that I didn’t think about wearing a condom—there’s a sleeve of them still in my trouser pocket—but when it came time to put it on… I don’t know.
I didn’t want to wait, but that’s not it, not entirely. I have enough self-control even when caught up in the moment.
While thinking, my hand has moved down to her abdomen, rubbing it lightly. When Isabelle first realised, she didn’t jump from the bed into the shower to wash me away, hadn’t protested when I scooped up the runoff and tried to stuff it back inside her.
“Would that be something you’d want?”
She hitches up her right eyebrow and rolls her eyes. “Being a rich gangster’s baby-Mumma? Sure. Sign me up.”
I guess she’s joking—Ithinkshe’s joking—but she also isn’t pressuring me to call the doctor, to get hold of the morning-after pill, or demanding that I free her from the bonds of captivity at once.
I have a thousand things to do this morning and my internal clock is already signalling I’ve slept in, but when Isabelle closes her eyes and starts snuffling as she dozes, I shut mine again to join her in sleep.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
ISABELLE
Baxter leaves me to grab breakfast and get started on his day. I can’t be bothered doing the same—I’ve eaten more in the past three days than I usually do in a week—so lie in bed dozing. When I do get up, I stay in the shower for so long I expect my fingers to prune.
The long bathroom mirror shows me a couple of lines of welts on my backside, nothing bad enough to have broken the skin. I trace the path of them with my fingertips, reliving the sensations from our lovemaking during the night.
Ha. Lovemaking.
It was dark and dirty fucking. No trace of love in there at all.
Care, maybe. Him going down on me, especially first, was a surprise. With my last few encounters springing from a local bar, there has been little attention paid to my needs lately. Or ever.
My cheeks are flushed red when I finally pull a robe over the marks and move back into the bedroom to see what I’m wearing today. Although a faint feminist voice is still calling out from inside me that having a man pick out your clothes is ridiculously controlling and can only lead to danger, I kind of like it.
Of course, me ‘kind of liking’ bad things is a reason my love life is in such a tragic state.
I pull on the soft cashmere wraparound dress and tie it at the waist. There’s no bra and my tits feel strange rolling around without support. I pull the wrap a little farther across just to simulate the garment and it works. A bit, anyway.
The shoes are flats. I guess I’m forbidden those sexy heels until my ankle has recovered. These are probably just as expensive if the label pressed into the soft leather insole is anything to go by, but they do nothing for my legs. It’s almost as though they’re reduced to protecting my feet from the elements or something just as lame.
Dressed, I lay on the bed again, sniffing at Baxter’s pillow to catch a whiff of his musky scent. I smile as I think of how body shy he was. Not something I expected. Especially when his scars are hardly disfiguring. If anything, they just make his toned body look more buff.
I doze again and when I sit up, determined to dosomethingwith my day, my ex has wormed his way into the forefront of my brain, once again.
This is the same thingmy internal nag scolds me.He’ll start off hurting you because you beg him for it, and you’ll end up begging him to stop.
I want to push the idea away as ridiculous. Highlight to myself the many differences between the man I had sex with last night and the man I knew in my teens.
My ex didn’t have the self-control that Baxter exhibited. If he’d had to do a run through of punishment, it might have ended the same for me, but he’d certainly have got his.
Of course, I think that, and my mind immediately rushes to point out that my ex also had control. It felt like he would lose it, his mood turning on a dime, but that was from a surfeit of control, not a lack of it.
If he’d truly been out of control, his anger would have exploded out in front of a parent or a fellow skater. Instead, the only time he lost his rag was when we were alone. When he could conveniently take it out on me.
I’d asked my ex to go down on me once. By then, our so-called love life had been three-quarters him jamming his cock into my mouth until I gagged or bending me over—a bed, a chair, a table, whatever was to hand—and ramming inside me for a minute until he came.
