Page 105 of Love By Design

I wanted to tell him I loved him back because it was the truth. He knew it, I could tell by his eyes, but there was something to the words of it and I wanted him to have that. But the words were still a tightly wound, wrongly shaped knot in the back of my throat.

He smiled at me then, and it didn’t look sad.

“Dinner, Silas,” he said, giving me a pull toward the door. “We need to go because I have plenty more planned for you, and I’d like to get to bed before tomorrow.” The corner of his mouth tipped into a smirk. “Some of us have to get up for work. We don’t all have the luxury of lazing around naked in bed.”

CHAPTER 32

MARSHALL

My jaw ached from trying to get Silas’s cock in my mouth, but the look of unfiltered pleasure as he came on my tongue was worth it ten times over. I chased the pain with a drink of wine and an eyeful of the man I’d just admitted I was in love with, and he hadn’t said it back, but the way he looked at me from the other side of the dinner table was answer enough.

“What’s good here?” he asked, looking at the menu without really reading it. His stare zoned in on the center of the page and never moved.

“I’ll order for you,” I assured him, reaching out and plucking the menu from his fingers. His cheeks darkened, and he folded his hands neatly into his lap.

“Thank you, Sir,” he said quietly. “May I ask a question?”

“I always want you to speak freely.”

He reached onto the table, pressing two fingers against the base of his wine glass and sliding it halfway toward him without picking it up.

“You said you had plans for me later, so why are we drinking?”

I chuckled, not sure if I was more amused with thequestion itself or the barely restrained disappointment that laced around Silas’s words as he asked it.

“We’ve spent more time together than before, and I have a better understanding of how alcohol affects you,” I explained. “No drinking, to a few sips, to a full glass. Some people disagree, but I find you still have your wits about you after six ounces of Merlot.”

My answer acted as some kind of permission for him, and he raised the glass to take a drink, chasing a stray drop from his lips with the tip of his tongue. My eyes went straight to the movement, and he must have seen it because he smiled at me.

“I was worried it was some kind of test,” he said. “Like if I drank it, you’d deny me later.”

I raised a brow. “I might deny you still, but not on account of enjoying a celebratory glass of wine that I ordered for you.”

Silas nodded and returned his glass to the table.

There was still somethingalmostoff about him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I worried it had to do with me sucking his cock, with me getting on my knees to put on his shoes and kiss his feet. Just like there were people who thought the only way to play was to play sober, there were also dominants who would have considered it out of character or unreasonable for me to do either of those things. Obviously, I wasn’t one of those men, but I now wondered if Silas would see it that way. If by indulging my own wants, I’d changed his perception of me.

“Now I have a question for you,” I said.

He smiled shyly at me, scratching the side of his cheek before leaning back in his chair like he was finally getting comfortable. “Well, you most certainly don’t need permission to ask me.”

“Neither do you,” I said, waiting for him to acknowledge the truth of it before I went on. “How did you feel about everything we did at home?”

Silas’s eyes flashed wide, and he was no longer relaxed, leaning over the table with a hushed voice.

“Everything?” he repeated. “Should we talk about this here?”

I glanced around the restaurant, finding it busy but not overly so. There were tables in proximity, but no one was on top of us. If they wanted to eavesdrop, they would have to make an entire thing of it, which I sincerely doubted anyone would bother with.

“Yes.”

“Well.” His cheeks were darker than before, almost crimson. “I liked it a lot.”

“Was it uncomfortable for you? To have me on my knees like that? For me to be between your legs that way?”

Silas’s eyes darted around the restaurant. “It wasn’t uncomfortable.”

“You don’t think me less capable of being dominant for it?”