Page 25 of Taming the Beast (Fairy Tales of New York)

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Lying sprawled face down on her bed five weeks later with her eyes closed and feeling so lethargic she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to move again, Mercy thought that this just sex arrangement was working out really rather beautifully.

It was everything she’d wanted. Everything she could have hoped for. Over the last however many Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings she’d enough sex to make up for a lifetime of celibacy, not just five years of it, and it was proving to be the perfect antidote to all the studying she was doing.

Keen to get her work out of the way by her Saturday lunchtime appointment with Seb, she was more productive than she’d ever been. And come Sunday afternoon when they said goodbye and she turned her attention to the week ahead, she felt refreshed, invigorated and raring to go.

The sex itself was awesome. Way better than she remembered. Way better than she could have imagined. Seb had become kind of dominant in the bedroom, the shower, the kitchen and wherever else he had a mind to have her – more so than she remembered, come to think of it – but that was OK with her. More than OK actually. She’d been responsible for so many decisions over the years, both major and minor, that secretly it was lovely to be able to just lie back and be told what to do.

It was a winning situation all round and she was glad she’d had the courage to go for it. The girls, who’d squealed with glee when she’d told them about the weekend only arrangement the morning after that scorching encounter in Seb’s office, thought so too, and Mercy couldn’t have been more delighted.

OK, so conversation between her and Seb had been pretty much non-existent beyond pleasantries, the very barest of small talk and details of what they intended to do to each other, but that was fine with her. It was more or less what they agreed and she still considered it wise. Conversation, she knew, would lead to interest, which would lead to involvement, which would lead to entanglement and possibly hurt feelings, and no one wanted that.

So if she occasionally found herself having to bite her tongue to stop herself from asking him a question that was even the slightest bit personal, well, that was probably only to be expected seeing as how she was the conversational type and generally interested in people. It wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t need to know anything about him and vice versa. And she could live with it. After all, Seb seemed perfectly happy.

The main thing about this whole arrangement was to remain emotionally detached and she was achieving that. She’d compiled a whole range of scenarios designed to test her feelings towards him and every time they said goodbye she checked. So far, she’d passed with flying colors, and she fully intended to carry on doing so because she was enjoying herself far too much to jeopardize things.

Especially right this minute, what with the way Seb was lazily trailing his fingers up and down her spine, making her shiver and tingle and wonder whether she had the strength to turn over and provide him with an opportunity to make her submit once again to his delicious demands.

“So tell me something,” said Seb idly, his voice cutting through her thoughts before she could decide one way or another.

“What?” she murmured.

“Why the MBA?”

Mercy cracked open an eye and looked up at him. He was lying on his side next to her, propped up on his elbow and watching the play of his fingers over her skin. “Huh?”

“Why the MBA?”

“Yes, I got that,” she said a bit warily because where was he going with this departure from the norm? And what was he anyway – some kind of mind reader? “But why do you want to know?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You haven’t before.”

“So I do now.”

Hmm. “It’s a bit personal, don’t you think?”

He arched an eyebrow. “Is it?”

“I think so.”

“Seems a pretty innocuous question to me.”

Yes. Well. To her it seemed as innocuous as those clever fingers that were drifting so deliciously over her skin. “Do you realize that if I answer it’ll most likely lead to a conversation?”

“That was the general idea. Is that a problem?”

Mercy frowned. “I don’t know. Is it?”

“Well, we can’t exactly lie here in eternal silence, can we?”

Couldn’t they? It was working for her.

“And I don’t know about you, Mercy,” Seb continued, now feathering his fingers over her shoulder, “but I think we’ve pretty much exhausted the weather, our health and what takeout we’d like to order as topics of conversation. If this arrangement is go

ing to continue much longer – and I, for one, hope it does – at some point we’re going to have to converse about something, so why not now? And a simple question about what you’re doing is hardly a deep, meaningful discussion about hopes and dreams, is it?”

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