Iona watched Gage stride toward her. She was sitting cross-legged on her primly made bed. He joined her by sitting at the foot of the bed and matching her position.
“What do you want to do?” Gage asked.
“I want to start by asking you a few questions. Nothing too taxing, but a few personal questions so I can get to know you better.”
Gage nodded.
Iona nodded back at him and she began. “Do you like boys? Is that why you keep blowing me off?”
He shook his head. “No. I keep blowing you off because one of the rules of my new life is what I said before. I’m not your toy. I’m not anybody’s plaything. I live by my own rules and I don’t need the money enough to sell myself in that way.”
“But you used to?” she asked, suddenly feeling like he was somehow looking down on her for having sold herself in the past.
He shook his head again. “No. I never did.” He clenched his jaw.
Iona did not expect that. “If you’ve been toyed with before then that must mean?”
“Yes, that I was sold into involuntary slavery… more than once.”
“What was that like?” she asked tentatively. He might not answer her.
He sighed. “It was nothing like the contracts you’ve signed that I’ve supervised. I’m not here to ruin your holiday by explaining all the ways I was toyed with.” He scratched the back of his neck. “All you need to know is that I have a general distaste for sexual experiences that are not a thousand percent voluntary. I think all forms of BDSM are an abomination and anything that is intended to humiliate and degrade another human is sickening.”
“You must know that a lot of the girls you ferry around do things like that as part of their contracts,” Iona said, having been subjected to both whipping and whipping others during the early years of her career.
“Yeah, but I can’t control what other people do,” he said with a slight wave of his hand. “I can only control what happens to me, and I can only do that some of the time. I wanted to tell you that a few of the boxes you checked on your original contract were telling. Do you find that sort of thing interesting?”
The truth was that Iona didn’t normally go for BDSM. She hadn’t checked any boxes that allowed for whipping. She had mostly checked boxes for dirty talk and yelling, but it was true that she had checked a few boxes that leaned towards the BDSM that he hated so much. One was the reason she’d already stated. She didn’t want to look like a prude, but most contracts were confidential, so the truth was that she didn’t want to look like a prude in front of Gage. What had been offensive if it were done to her by a master had appeared provocative if Gage had been the one to do it to her.
“Honestly,” she said, pulling his hand to her and stroking the inside of his palm the way she had with Dante. “I thought you were harder than this. I thought that if I checked those boxes, you would be more interested in signing that contract. I was very surprised by your objections.”
“Why?”
“Because you look like a sex machine and a warrior. Your eyes gleam with this friendly light, but I don’t know that that friendliness isn’t just because of our roles on this ship. You’re supposed to take care of me and you do that with complete professionalism. When you’re alone, when you need pleasure, certain lines of your face suggest that you couldn’t be satisfied by something homegrown. In secret, you want something more.”
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He scoffed. “I’m at odds with my face… and my body.” He rolled his eyes but kept his palm between her fingers allowing her to touch him.
Iona only let a corner of her mouth tick upward. She almost had him. She continued softly, “That said. Do you find me attractive? If you don’t, it would soothe my ego quite a lot to know it,” she asked with a nervous chuckle attempting with all her might to appear vulnerable.
“You are very attractive,” he said, placing two fingers on the point of her knee and running his fingers down her calf to her foot. He pulled one of her feet free from under her and pulled it into his lap. Gently, he began rubbing it and it felt so good to Iona that she almost fell over.
“Are you doing that so I’ll forget to ask you questions?” she asked.
“Ask me another,” he allowed.
“What do you think of the men I’m chasing?”
“They’re all dirtbags, but if you want a rich man, you aren’t going to get a good man. There aren’t that many men who could afford you and a good man would never bid on you.” He left one hand on her while he reached for a throw blanket that drooped off the edge of the bed. He slid it over her bare legs and continued the message.
Iona wanted to complain. She wanted her legs bare so he could see them, but she couldn’t deny that she was more comfortable in the cool spaceship with her legs covered.
“What do you think is pretty about me?” she ventured.
He looked up as if he were thinking. “Rose petals could learn a thing or two from the softness of your cheek.”
“I’ll kill you, Gage,” she replied crossly.
“Oh? You didn’t want the poetry special, taught to particularly beautiful boys so they don’t say the wrong thing to anyone’s daughter?”
She stuck out her tongue. “Ugh, I’m just thinking of the very special appeal of you only saying what you truly mean instead of all that crap you dish out to improve the mood of the heiresses.”
He smirked. “Can you really say that with a straight face after what you just did to my palm? Tracing lines all over my palm like I’m your little snowflake? You probably do that to every man you want to sway when you can’t bear to look at his face.”
Iona colored slightly. He wasn’t wrong. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just hard to remake all my moves on the fly for you.”
“I understand,” he said before hissing his breath through his teeth. “That’s why you’re getting a foot rub.”
“It’s a good foot rub.”
“Iona,” he said, clearing his throat. “The thing that is the nicest about you is that you don’t weary me with your complaints. I have never heard you make an unpleasant sound. Even just now, when you threatened to kill me, you still sounded beautiful. The truth is, you never needed to get me under contract to get me to touch you like this. If you’d asked me for this, I would have done it. You are a darling to me.”
He let go of her feet and slid off the bed. He took the two steps necessary to her end of the bed and touched the side of her face gently.
“Forgive me,” he said. “This is going to feel exactly the same as it felt when I kissed the last person I was forced to under contract. That’s what you get when you pay for a date, the same moves they used the last time.”
Gage bent over her and his gaze was adoring in a way Iona never dreamed a man would ever look at her. When he put his lips on her, it was with the most delicate pressure she’d ever felt in a kiss. There was no rush and a remarkably small amount of heat as he had made his breathing very shallow. Instead, his lips explored hers in a way that made her feel like he could actually sense every line, groove, and sensation in her lips. It was a kiss that asked for nothing except the continuation of worship. She was the one being worshiped.
Then the heat came. He couldn’t hold his breath forever and he let all the heat that was held up inside him come out in a rush. He parted her lips with a flick of his tongue and the feeling was everything she dreamed of since their kiss on the stage.
Perhaps it could have gone on. Perhaps.
Gage turned his head away from her and Iona saw the light from the silent alarm. Gage was needed in the cockpit. He said nothing as he moved away from her, but took her hand in his and kissed the perfume point on her wrist before leaving the room with swift easy strides.
Iona didn’t realize what the words he said before the kiss meant before he left. She knew he’d been owned before, but what he showed her was both wonderful and horrible. It was wonderful that he’d been willing to share that part of himself with her, but it was also horrible because it meant that he had been a love slave which was not the same thing as a model from Sleeping Beauty Inc.