Page 16 of Love by Design (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #1)

MARSHALL

I spent the whole of Monday looking forward to seeing Silas after work, and not even an annoying onslaught of text messages from Finn could sour my mood.

He’d taken my confession about my interest in Silas and run with it, refusing to let me know a moment's peace about the whole thing. He’d told Hunter as well, because my usually stoic and reserved middle brother even sent a message about it as I was getting ready for bed Sunday night.

The only saving grace was that Smith seemed to still be in the dark.

I was nowhere near ready to tell my youngest brother that I was involved with someone his age. Someone he knew from school.

It was just before seven when Silas showed up at my house, still dressed for work and looking like he’d been through the wringer. When I opened the door to him, his shoulders sagged, and he shuffled inside, toeing off his shoes again without being told.

I liked that about him.

“You look like you’ve been through it,” I said as a greeting.

He gave me an exasperated look.

“Bad day at work?” I asked .

“The day you came for that meeting, my dad told me I could redraft the bid for him.”

Something a lot like dread pooled in my belly, and I hated it was my first reaction. Bidding against Stanley meant I would get it for sure, bidding against Silas? That wasn’t such a sure thing. He was too bright and too forward-thinking for that sort of assumption.

“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.

He glanced up at me, tired. “It didn’t really come up, Marshall. I didn’t think we had that kind of relationship.”

“No.” I shook my head, gesturing for him to follow me toward the kitchen. “You’re right. I just?—”

He snorted. “Are you worried now?”

“Yes,” I said simply.

I wanted Silas to see how good he was at his job, how smart he was. Even if I wasn’t sleeping with him, going against him for a competitive bid would have been a lot more work than going head-to-head with his father.

He bumped his shoulder against mine before climbing onto one of my barstools and letting the counter support his weight. “You’re safe. I haven’t been taking it seriously.”

“Why not?”

“He said if I redrafted it, he would look at it, not that we would use it. And he thinks my ideas are too revolutionary. I don’t see there being any world where he actually takes my work seriously.”

“You should come work for me,” I blurted, which earned me a wide-eyed look of shock from an otherwise weary-looking man. “Or not.”

“That feels like a gross misuse of power at this point.”

“How so?”

“You’d be my boss?” He said it like a question. “But you’d also be my Dom and my…boyfriend?” The last word caught in hi s throat. “All three seem overwhelming when you put them together.”

“But you can take the last two on their own?”

Silas’s cheeks burned a very pretty shade of pink, and he looked far less tired than he had when he’d arrived, but he didn’t give me a verbal reply.

“You’re wound tight as a bowstring, Silas. Do you want me to help you relax before we eat? Before we talk?” I tapped my thumb against my forefinger, hovering near him and hating how much the anticipation had me feeling like a snake ready to strike.

“I don’t even know,” he grumbled, scrubbing both hands down his face.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What do you need ?”

Silas clenched his jaw down hard, and he banged his elbow onto the counter, catching his chin in his hands like he needed the help to stay upright. He threw a look up at me from beneath the fan of his dark lashes.

“You tell me,” he muttered. “You choose.”

The decision was right there on the tip of my tongue. It was so very close, and I knew it would solve his problem. It would bring the relief he needed, but if I’d learned anything…if he had learned anything, it was that negotiations had to happen with a clear head.

“I wish I could, but we’re not there yet, sweetheart. I can’t make those decisions for you until we’ve already set the ground rules.”

He made the unhappiest noise, and I kicked the stool around so we faced each other, then I wrapped my arms around him and let him rest his head against my chest. I could give him this, for now. Gingerly, I stroked my hands down Silas’s back, breathing heavily as he exhaled against me.

“I know,” he reluctantly agreed, nodding his forehead against my sternum .

I bent down to kiss the top of his head, inhaling the scent of tangerines.

“Let’s eat, and then we’ll talk, and then we’ll see where the night takes us.”

At the promise of the last part, Silas groaned, and I had to put space between us because the rumble of his need rattled me down to my bones.

“What’s for dinner?”

Instead of telling him, I went to the fridge and decided to show him.

Earlier I’d made a chicken salad and a caprese plate, which felt like a nice enough meal without trying too hard.

I didn’t know where we’d end the evening and didn’t want either of us to eat anything too heavy.

Silas leaned forward and peered down into the salad bowl.

“Did you make this?”

“Why? Is something wrong with it?” I looked down at the salad, the shredded cheese on top, the croutons, the crisp lettuce.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

“Yes.” I pulled the plastic wrap off the salad and the caprese, then got us plates and forks. “I made it.”

“It’s interesting to picture you standing here at the counter slicing chicken up and picking leaves of basil off the stem.”

I had a bottle of white wine chilling in the fridge, and I poured us each a reasonably small glass.

“I don’t normally cook,” I admitted, “but I was trying to impress you.”

Silas laughed at me a little, then took the wine and raised his glass for a toast. “To me being impressed,” he offered.

I clinked the rim of my glass against his and took a drink of the wine.

“May I serve you?” I asked, setting the glass down on the counter .

He hummed thoughtfully. “I would have expected the other way around.”

“All things have a time and a place, Silas.”

He stared at me, licking his lips in a way that spoke of deep thought, not seduction, and then he swallowed hard and gave me a quick nod.

I scooped some of the salad onto a plate for him, then a neat stack of mozzarella, tomato, and basil.

I repeated it for my own plate and took the empty stool beside him.

“That’s as good a segue as any, I suppose,” I said, waiting for him to take a bite before continuing. “About what I would expect from you…in a relationship.”

Silas chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, then used the side of his fork to cut off a piece of mozzarella. “I’m surprised you expect anything since you said you didn’t date.”

“My father was—and probably still is—a womanizer. My brothers and I all have different mothers, none of whom are still in our lives. I didn’t grow up with a healthy role model when it came to relationships, but just because I don’t date doesn’t mean I don’t know what I would want if I did.”

He took another bite, washing it down with a sip of wine.

“And what do you want, Marshall?”

Fuck, I loved the way he said my name. I liked hearing it more than I could ever imagine enjoying the sound of the word Sir rolling off his tongue. He managed to infuse far too much promise and threat into the two simple syllables.

“I want you to tell me what you need,” I said. “I want to know what kind of ache brings you out to Rapture looking for a man to take you over his knee and spank you until you can’t breathe.”

“It’s not just that,” he whispered.

“Tell me.”

“God.” Silas dropped his fork and covered his eyes with his fingertips. “This is embarrassing. ”

“It shouldn’t be,” I reminded him.

“It’s nice to not disappoint someone for once,” he said, edgy, chasing the confession with the rest of his wine.

My finger twitched, and I rubbed it against the seam of my slacks to stop myself from reaching for him. The urge to touch Silas was so very tangible, but if I touched him, I would never want to stop, and I needed him to continue being honest, telling me what he wanted from me.

“You like being dominated because the expectations are clear,” I said, and he nodded. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? You like the pain.”

He tapped his temple. “It quiets everything down a bit.”

“But more than that?”

“It makes me hard,” Silas said.

“You know that would be enough, right?” I ate some salad, had some wine, and dropped my voice low. “Even if the other things didn’t come into play, wanting it because it made you hard would be enough.”

“I know,” he whispered.

“Does it also make you hard to give up the decision-making? To submit that fully?”

“I’ve never thought too hard about that part,” he said.

“Maybe you should.”

Silas picked up his fork and finished off the caprese I’d served him. I climbed off my stool and went to get him water, since the small serving of wine was more than enough for us both, all things considered at that moment.

“It makes me feel good in other parts of my body,” he finally answered.

“But does it make you hard?”

Silas licked his lips slowly, staring hard at the salad left on his plate. “Yes.”

“It makes me hard too,” I told him. “I like being in charge. ”

“Why?” he asked.

“I need the control, I think. It probably has to do with how my brothers and I were raised.”

I thought about how we’d all been given up by our mothers, abandoned to a man who cared more about making more sons than caring for the ones he already had.

It created a tension in the house from the four of us toward him, but an irreversible sense of comradery between us.

There was no one who would support me more than my brothers would, and no one I would support more in return.

At least…there hadn’t been before.

“Does it get exhausting?” Silas asked.

I huffed a laugh out of my nose. “I’ve never done it long term.”

“Not even in college?”

“Not in the ways I wanted,” I said.

Silas chewed the inside of his cheek hard enough for me to see the outline of his teeth. I reached up and tapped his cheek and he immediately released the skin. I smoothed my touch over his cheek and down to his jawline before letting my hand fall back into my lap.

“So back to it then,” Silas said quietly, his body swaying toward me like he was chasing after the feel of my fingers again. “What do you want, Marshall?”

I’d done nothing but think about the answer to that question since the very first time I saw Silas with his bare ass in the air at Rapture, and the answer remained unchanged.

“I want to know how much you’ll give me,” I admitted, “and then I want to know how much you’ll let me take.”

Silas swallowed audibly. “Have I eaten enough dinner?”

I looked at his nearly untouched plate. “No.”

The unspoken question hung in the air between us, and I knew he was waiting for me to be brave enough to reach out and grab it.

There was no question we both wanted it to very certainly the same degree, but I didn’t want to be the one making the final call and neither did he.

Neither of us wanted to be the one who pushed the other too far.

But it had to be, in the end, didn’t it? That was partially my role, my job here.

“Eat some more salad, Silas,” I commanded, and he picked up his fork with trembling fingers, spearing some lettuce onto the tines and lifting it to his mouth.

He wasn’t trying to eat in a sexy way, but the fact it was an order he’d been given and an order he’d followed was hot in and of itself.

I studied him in silence while he finished all of the chicken salad I’d served onto his plate, and after the last bite, he set the fork down to his right and folded his hands into his lap—the perfect picture of submission.