Paradise: The Masters of The Order Novel Two (30 page)

Isabella heard the lie in that word and stiffened as he continued, “Let’s just say your brother did not appreciate my gift.”

“Teo knows about us? I mean, us, us!”

She waved a hand between them as her eyes grew wider. When he nodded, they got so huge, he could see the full circle of brown in them. He wasn’t sure what would follow her shock. Tears? Anger? Shame? He didn’t want to see any of those emotions on her face.

To his surprise, and delight, Isabella flipped a petulant hand through the air. “
C’est la vie
,” then shook her head with a smirk. “And how exactly are you still alive?”

He couldn’t help but laugh at her expression when she said that. “Teo’s pretty scary, but we managed. You’re okay with him knowing?”

“Not exactly,” she jacked up her chin, “but my brother doesn’t have anything to say about my sex life. I make the choices about my life and I choose you.”

His Isabella was almost as hardheaded about controlling her own life as he was.

“Don’t think he agrees with you there, angel. He doesn’t approve.”

“Well that’s the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?

“You know about Teo?” Part of him was a little shocked, but the bigger part of him should have known that Teo couldn’t hide something like that from Isabella.

“Uh-huh, but we never actually talked about it. I think he feels as guilty as I do, I mean, did before I met you. He hasn’t been as lucky, I guess.”

The comment triggered a mental barrage of questions about big Dom brother, but the slip in her words was more important. “Do or did, Isabella, which is it?”

“Did, Jacques, did,” she said firmly, but something in her tone announced that her conscience wasn’t feeling as firm.

His own words echoed through his mind.
Perfect just the way you are
.

Did he truly believe that? Even though they’d ventured farther into the life together, he knew Isabella still harbored a lot of guilt. Before today, he’d thought his role was to help her shed the limitations of her upbringing. She was the one who should change. Now he realized that maybe the right answer wasn’t her shedding her past, rather him shedding his. Change was coming, only maybe it was him who would be changing.

The salesman reentering the salon halted their pivotal conversation. “
Madame
, if I may.” He reached for Isabella’s hand.

“No. Let me do that.” Jacques took the ring into his hand. It was spectacular. Its facets filled with sparkling light and fire, just like his Isabella. He slipped it onto the ring finger of her left hand. “Perfect together,” he said.

Her eyes filled with tears.

As her arms came around him, he made a silent vow. Nothing he did would ever snuff the joy he saw in those big brown eyes when she looked at her wedding ring. Whatever she needed, he would give. Whatever made her happy, he would be. Even if it was a traditional plain vanilla husband.

*****

“Well, Isabella Honora Rey Meszaros, what's it gonna be: angel or devil?”

Isabella sat on the window bench while Jacques slept. The dawn’s light had yet to snuff the twinkle of Paris. In one hand, she held her wedding rings; in the other, the diamond choker. Jacques asked her to take some time and really think about what she wanted for their relationship going forward. The decision was too important for a semi-private discussion in a jewelry salon. He wanted her to be sure. And he wanted her, whatever she decided. He’d certainly proved that last night. Her body ached in all the right places and after a night like that, the afterglow she sported could light the entire city.

They’d made love before, hundreds of times before, but nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what they did to each other last night. Jacques’s original plan was to start with a romantic dinner at home, but the second they stepped foot into the dining room, well, old habits die hard. They started with dessert. Dinner followed and they’d already worked off all those calories but good.

Jacques in the kitchen was fabulous; Jacques in the dining room, ab-so-lute-ly fa-bu-lous!

As Isabella looked out over Paris, flashes of her life crowded her mind and dredged up all the old conflicts. The ones that birthed the angel and the devil who coexisted inside of her. Holding the hand of her
abuelo
as they walked to church on Sunday morning to listen to the priest’s guidance on how to live a moral life. Putting on her white dress-up gown and “marrying” Teo in front of her teddy bear while dreaming of her future as a good wife. Joaquim scooping her into his arms and dancing her around the living room while her feet dangled and he made her promise to always be a good girl. The warmth of traditional family dinners in their cramped kitchen and the chill of wondering if she would ever find that on her own. Crying as the entire
familia
took her to the airport to fly away from Spain and begin a new life in France. Her boyfriend from University smiling over her naked torso and licking his lips while her mind twisted with guilt and her body writhed with pleasure. Living with Craig and witnessing the pain caused when sexuality is dictated by words written thousands of years ago. Meeting Jacques and finally finding someone who made her feel safe enough to live her fantasies, then marrying him in front a real priest as if those fantasies belonged to another couple.

“Alright, ladies. Let’s hear it,” Isabella said to no one and waited for the great debate to start playing in her head.

Nothing happened. No words. No fighting. Only a deafening silence in her mind and the gentle hum of the avenue below in her ears. For her entire adult life, the Angel Isabella and the Devil Isabella had carried on a running commentary on her sex life and now that she faced the greatest conflict imaginable, they had nothing to say?

“What the hell?” she said in the darkness, a little too loudly.

Jacques groaned and rolled over.

She thought about everything she’d been through since she met him and a lone voice echoed in her mind,
You are perfect just the way you are
.

Was that Angel Isabella or Devil? She couldn’t tell.

“Which me?” she asked herself and was answered with deafening silence. Her girls were really enjoying torturing her through this one. “Which one is perfect?” she demanded more urgently.

As the words left her lips, the epiphany sang through her mind,
There is only one woman. Isabella Honora Rey Meszaros is finally perfect
.

Being with Jacques wasn’t the culmination of her fantasies. Marrying him was. The conflict evaporated. The Angel Isabella and the Devil Isabella were no more. There was only Isabella and her sex god, dominant, miraculous husband, and together, they were perfect.

She shot across the room and started jumping on the bed. “Wake up, Jacques. Wake up. Wake up.”

“That better not be the woman who kept me up all night bouncing herself into more trouble than she can handle,” he growled.

She kept jumping, laughing out loud and watching his black hair fly as his body bounced. A hand shot to her ankle. Before she could blink, she was pinned to the mattress by a hard, heavy and seriously sleep deprived blanket of male.

“I know the answer, Jacques. I know it to the moon and back,” she giggled, remembering the first time he had her pinned like this.

“Great. Wake me out a sound sleep and then ruin my perfectly justified bad mood by reminding me of the first time I made love to you. You’re going to be the end of me, Isabella.”

He half-smiled, then kissed her breathless. But she didn’t want to kiss - well she did, but not at this precise moment - she wanted to talk first.

“Jacques, wait,” she said past his tongue. “I have to tell you something.”

He eased back, glancing down with a look that said,
you actually woke me up to talk?

“I know the answer,” she said breathlessly, still winded from all that jumping and kissing. “I’m perfect. We’re perfect together. They both show that.” She lifted the rings and the choker. “I want to keep them both.”

Jacques ran a hand through his hair and said, “You sure, Isabella? I don’t …what are you staring at?”

“Sorry, I was distracted.” She shook off the vision of him on their first morning together.
Dios mío
, her sex god had great hair.

He gave her a puzzled look and went on. “Your family is important to you. I know you care about what they think.”

“I’m yours, Jacques. If my family can’t love and accept me as I am, so be it. I’ve lived my entire life trying to figure myself out. I mean, I know, but I always felt guilty. I wasn’t supposed to want the things I do. I didn’t think the things I dreamed about could be reconciled with the other part of me so I spent my days as a celibate nurse taking care of everyone except myself.

“There were always two people in my head: the woman I thought I should be and the woman I was. One person can’t be two things, right? Well I was wrong. I can be a lover and a wife. Your lover. Your wife. One woman who is perfect just the way she it. There’s no sin in that. Life is too short to deny what makes you happy. You make me happy. The whole me. I’m through with the limitations of how I used to live. I just want to live as I am.”

He smiled the proud, humble smile of a man very much in love and lifted the choker to place it on her neck, then slipped the rings onto her finger. “Perfect together,” he said with a kiss, then moved away.

Isabella squeezed her thighs together as she watched her sex god husband saunter to the armoire. The one that held all of his fun toys. When he turned back, he changed slightly. He was no less loving, but now the look in his eye was tinged with lust. He rubbed one hand over the stubble shading his jaw, hid the other behind his back and grinned. “But we have to do something about all that bouncing, my naughty wife.”

She threw her arms above her head, giggling like mad.

*****

Jacques yanked Isabella to him, crushing her softness against his harder frame. Somewhere between the endless lip lock and their frantic sighs, his plans for her evaporated. He didn’t bind her or keep her from touching him. He craved her touch with a fierceness he couldn’t explain even to himself.

When her hands stroked over his bare chest and moved lower to take him into her silken grasp, he lost himself to her. He didn’t know where his need for control went and he didn’t care. He only knew he wanted her to keep touching him.

“I belong to you, Jacques, in every possible way. Please, tell me what you want,” she whispered against his lips.

Without opening his eyes, he answered, “Whatever you want, Isabella.” He moaned as her hands left his shaft and pushed against his chest.

“Really?”

His eyes popped open.
No, not really
.

For some inexplicable reason, he’d just taken a quantum leap into the unknown. He’d never allowed a woman free reign during sex. Marriage was one thing; that was something else entirely. But as he looked down into those excited eyes, all he could say was, “You belong to me as much as I belong to you.”

Dangerous words, but he couldn’t call them back. He didn’t want to, any more than the look on her face said she wanted him to. Those words were the God’s honest truth. He’d known it before and now, she knew it too. He would never deny his fiery angel anything.

For a moment, Isabella only stared up at him as if searching for something. He stared back, revealing nothing of his thoughts, and waited, stunned by the arousal that came with surrendering to the will of another person. He wouldn’t necessarily say it was his preferred
modus operandi
, but he wouldn’t deny that he was turned on either.

A dark look passed across her eyes as she put both hands on his shoulders to urge him onto his back. When he complied, sweet reward, her naked body rose over his in a straddle, her sumptuous bottom planted squarely on top of his raging and very awake erection.

“If I’d known marriage would have this effect on you, Mr. Meszaros, I would have asked sooner,” she said with a very sexy grin as she rolled her hips over him.

“
Au contraire
, Mrs. Meszaros, I asked you,” he grinned back.

She pressed her palms over his pecs, her fingernails digging tiny half-moons into the skin. “Do you think it wise to contradict your Mistress?”

Holy fuck

Isabella wasn’t planning to simply make love to him. She was actually going to top him. His mind froze with a momentary panic as his traitorous body strained upward seeking its Mistress’s mysterious depths.

Her hand came down hard on his chest. “No taking what I'm not ready to give.” She placed a finger on her chin and looked away as if remembering. “I seem to recall hearing that somewhere,” then shifted her full weight back over his dick.

He swallowed hard against the mind-bending arousal as he forced his backside to stay pinned to the mattress. Isabella had said she was through with the limitations of her old life. Well maybe he should take a page from her marriage playbook and be through with his. When she picked up the discarded cobalt restraints, “maybe” became a resounding “definitely.”

She tied his wrists to the bedposts, all the while watching his reaction to make sure he was alright with what she was doing. It felt strange to be so vulnerable, but he trusted her. He relaxed his body, content to go with it. When she slid down his torso and sucked him deep into her mouth, he nearly came with it too. He would let her tie him up anytime she liked if this was what she did to him afterward. His eyes trailed over the place where they were linked, watching her lips coast up and down his shaft as it disappeared and reemerged against a backdrop of creamy breasts and red hair.