I Married a Master(32)
Author: Melanie Marchande

This wasn’t really a conversation I wanted to have with anyone, let alone a near-stranger who wanted me to be his pretend-wife. But it seemed I was stuck with it.

"Look, I get it," I said. "I’m not a prude. I get bondage and blindfolds, I get that a little pain can be fun sometimes. But I just can’t wrap my head around making a lifestyle out of it. Actual punishments. Twenty-four-seven crawling around naked in an apron. It’s just…it sounds tedious to me."

"Nobody said it had to be twenty-four-seven." Ben twirled his glass around between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, grinning. "I think you might be projecting."

"But that’s a thing, isn’t it? Twenty-four-seven? Total power exchange?" I was challenging him with stolen phrases I barely understood, but the sickly-sweet vodka had loosened my tongue and I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted some kind of rationale. It was easy enough to see why he might enjoy it, why any man would – but why on earth would any woman willingly become a domestic slave?

He nodded, slowly. "Yes, those are all things. But they’re all different. What I do is a playful sort of thing. It’s an arrangement. It can be stopped at any time."

An arrangement. That didn’t sound terribly sexy.

Blowing out a puff of air that caught my too-long bangs and scattered then across my forehead, I glanced at him. He was right. He didn’t have to sit here and explain anything to me, but he did. Even if it sounded like he’d just come up with the most over-the-top politically correct excuse he could, whether or not it was based in reality…he was trying.

I frowned at the remains of my drink. Maybe, just maybe, he was being honest. Maybe that was really how he felt. It was hard for me to believe, put together with the whole package of Benjamin Chase. He was a contradiction. I wanted my life to be simple.

And yet, I was still considering entering into a marriage of convenience with a billionaire who wanted to spank me. That was…anything but simple.

Hold up.

I did a u-turn on my own train of thought, examining what had just run through my head. Wanted to spank me.

Me.

He’d never expressed that. In fact, everything that I’d mistaken for genuine interest was apparently just him preying on someone desperate enough to agree to his crazy plan. If he liked me – I mean, really liked me, wouldn’t he have side-stepped the whole "I have to marry you" thing and made an effort to actually woo me, first?

I mean, probably. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the best course of action for a situation like his.

He began to speak after a long silence. "Once again, to be clear, I wasn’t trying to hide it from you, I just didn’t think it was important for you to know. The last thing I want is to make this thing more complicated than it already is. Obviously, we’re only going to act as a couple in public. I don’t expect anything more from you." He glanced at me. "Which I’m sure is a relief, so I won’t bother saying that of course it goes both ways."

Laughing slightly, I set my empty glass down. "So that’s it? You don’t want me to like…go with you to any of those clubs, or whatever?"

He shook his head. "That wasn’t part of the deal."

What he wasn’t saying, however, still reflected in his eyes. He did want me to go to those clubs with him. I could hear the hesitation in his tone, like maybe he’d been hoping to ask me about it later, to ease me into it down the line. Once I was comfortable with him, and let my defenses down. Or maybe I was just imagining things.

"I know you said it was a conditional yes," he went on. "But I hope this doesn’t count as a condition."

Even after a long sleep, which should have left my mind refreshed, I still felt tangled up in confusion. Exhausted, a little raw, wondering if I thought about him spanking me because I actually wanted it, or because the idea had been planted in my head. Because his tattoos made me stupid, and I wanted him to touch me, even if it wasn’t the kind of touch I expected.

The things he’d said made sense. His introduction to the world, his reluctance, creating tension in his relationship because he couldn’t wrap his head around it. Not so long ago, he’d been like me, standing on the outside looking in.

My eyes were fixed on the polished hard wood floor in front of me, but I dragged them up to his face with an effort.

"I need to trust you," I said, simply. "And I’m not sure I can."

Silently, thoughtfully, he folded his hands on the desk. His fingers intertwined.

"Plenty of women have chosen to trust me," he said. "None of them ever regretted it."

"Not even your ex-wife?"

It was a low blow. I didn’t mean it that way – it just escaped, without permission, dangling in the air while he held his face in a carefully composed mask.

A moment later, he shook his head. "She never trusted me," he said. "But I’ve learned a lot since then."

I didn’t know what that meant.

Two million dollars. Was I really thinking about walking away?

I thought about Maddy. How happy she looked, having reconnected with her husband just days after a blowout fight, touching some deep level of feeling that I couldn’t even begin to imagine. The quiet authority in his voice when he told her when she was going to meet me, gave her a schedule like he was actually still her boss. And the way she warmed to it, obviously loving his control.

Because she trusted him.

Trust was key. No matter what, I couldn’t get around that.

"This is a different kind of trust," I said, at last. "It’s one thing to trust a guy not to physically harm you, but this…"

Ben raised an eyebrow. "You think what I do is easy?" He paused, as if he actually expected an answer, before continuing. "It’s not about accidentally hitting too hard. If you can’t avoid that, you’ve got no business being around other human beings in the first place. My responsibilities go so much deeper. And so does their trust. They have to trust me to know their limits, to read their reactions, to understand every little moan and whisper of their body language like I’m reading a book. They have to trust me to know their fantasies before they know them. That’s the most you’ll ever trust anyone, in this life. It’s not one snap decision, one moment, it’s a constant balancing act that I can never let go." He fixed me with a look, and it spoke of cool detachment, but there was always something swirling in his eyes. "If they can trust me, you can trust me."

I didn’t know about that.

All the same, there was something hypnotic about the way he spoke. It would be so easy, so terribly easy, I thought, to fall under his spell.

Of course it would. I was vulnerable, I was alone, I was looking for reassurance. A place to belong. However enticing certain aspects of these man might be, he wasn’t it.