He breathed a silent sigh of relief. If she asked a question like that she had already decided to accept his offer, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it quite yet. “We’d be married in name only. You don’t have to have regular contact with us if you don’t want to, except when I’m undergoing treatment and I need you to sign forms or whatever so he can be there with me. You can live your life exactly as you do now. Even have Bob if you want him. Date, whatever. Hell, move in with someone, I don’t care.” He felt no compunction about telling her the lie. If she would just agree to the arrangement, he could then work his way into her life.
But he had to start somewhere.
“What’s going to happen? With your treatment.”
He shrugged. “I’m scheduled for a biopsy this coming Wednesday. Then they’ll go from there, whether surgery or radiation or chemo, I don’t know yet.”
“Have you told Cris?”
“No. I wanted an answer from you first.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re going to tell me no, I’m going to release slave without telling him about my cancer. I’d rather go through this alone than have him tied to me because he feels he has to be here out of pity or duty.”
She stared at him for a moment, apparently stunned. “You are seriously nuts.”
“No, I’m sick of knowing that for all these years someone owned his heart besides me. I thought he loved me as much as I love him. I do love him. I never stopped loving him when we were apart, I told you that.”
Tilly studied Landry as her emotions swirled. This was crazy. Totally nuts. As much as she hated Cris for what he did to her, the part of her that could still feel compassion and empathy, no matter how small it had shrunk, felt sorry for Landry.
Then there was the miniscule, yet annoyingly tenacious particle of her soul which still loved Cris.
And the mercenary part of her soul told her she’d be a moron not to accept his offer. Get out of the pro Domme business and back into nursing.
“If I say yes, and I’m not saying I will, how would this work exactly? We’d sign a pre-nup?”
He nodded. “Exactly. I will also change my will. I would specify that everything you own now is fully yours and I’m not entitled to any of it, and any money you earn while married to me is also yours, not joint assets. But everything I have and earn will be yours.”
“Is this some half-assed attempt to get me and him back together?”
“No. In fact, feel free to beat him as much as you want while we’re together.” He smiled. “He deserves it.”
“You are a fucking sadist, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “Not all of us do it for money, Mistress Cardinal. Some love inflicting pain for the sheer enjoyment of it. Although I never used humiliation on him before all of this.”
“Tilly,” she absently corrected him as her brain still struggled to comprehend the situation.
“What are your chances of surviving this? Seriously.”
He shrugged again. “One doctor said seventy percent, another said eighty, a third said ninety.
Unfortunately, if you add in my previous bout, it can skew the odds against me. I just found about it two weeks ago at my regular check-up. Blood work picked it up, scans confirmed it. I could beat it this time and it could come back a year or a decade from now, or maybe not at all. They all agree that it’s likely I’ll beat it and go into remission. Just how hard I’ll have to work for that remains to be seen.”
“How long did it take you to recover from it the first time?”
“Over a year before they knew I’d turned the corner, but that time, I was already at a much more advanced stage. Much of that time I was too weak to even get out of bed, between healing from my injuries and the cancer treatments.”
“Tell me about your wreck.”
He looked away. “I’d rather not.”
That’s when her bullshit alarm went off. “You’d better.”
He took a long, ragged breath. “I never told anyone this, and I would appreciate you not saying anything about it either, but I was trying to kill myself. Actually surprised the hell out of me when I woke up.” He laughed, but it sounded harsh. “What does it say about me that I could fuck up my own suicide? I forgot to take off my seatbelt before the crash. They said it’s the only thing that saved me.”
They talked for over two hours, mostly Landry talking while Tilly asked him questions. She hated that she actually liked the guy. It’d be a lot easier to tell him to go fuck himself if he was an asshole. Still, her anger at Cris burned, seethed. Her pain. Her memories of what she’d gone through.
As for Landry, he was a nice guy, smart, funny, witty. Handsome. If he wasn’t gay she might have dated him. They had a lot of common interests.
Then there was his Master and sadist side, which she knew lay dark and deep. Definitely a lifestyle Dominant, not just a weekend slap-and-tickle player.
He also felt very scared, even though he didn’t admit how deeply in so many words. She knew from listening to him, how he talked, how his body language changed. It humanized him and gave her insight beneath his thin veneer of bravado.
He worried he’d have to release Cris, and then he would be alone. His personal honor code wouldn’t allow him to keep Cris if she wouldn’t agree to this insanity.
“What if the cancer hadn’t come back?” she asked. “Would you still be here?”
“Yes. I hadn’t expected it to be like this, though. I considered taking him to a club where everyone had once known him and let anyone who wanted a turn to take a swing at him. I also seriously considered releasing him in front of everyone. The ultimate humiliation for what he did. I would have ordered him to take whatever punishment I deemed to mete out, and he would have.”
She shuddered. She remembered how Cris had stood there as Bob threatened him. The old
Cristo would have defended himself. With a black belt in karate, he could have easily kicked Bob’s ass.
But Cristo the slave would have let Bob beat the crap out of him. The only time he defended himself was when she went for his eyes, and even then after she’d calmed a little he let her take more whacks at him.
As upset as she felt at Cris, she felt a little sorry for him. “You don’t have to release him if I don’t agree to this. I told you, I don’t hold you responsible. Don’t feel guilty on my account.”
“Yes, I do have to release him. Because I would rather be alone. It’s the principle of the matter.”
“This is your life you’re talking about. Time to shelve the principles, don’t you think?”
“I disagree. It’s even more important now. I would hate to die knowing I didn’t do what I felt necessary to make amends.”
“You just said the odds are in your favor. And you don’t need to make amends. Jesus, you’re fucking dense. I don’t hold you responsible.”
“I hold myself responsible.”
She looked out over the bay again. A few sailboats anchored nearby bobbed on inky black chop.
While lights shone in a few, most lay dark, tied to mooring buoys. “Three years?”
“Yes. After that, if you want to stay married, we can re-negotiate the annual salary if you’d like.
But everything I own will be yours if you stay with me, if that’s what you want.”
So much pain. So much anger. Could she ever look at Cris and not want to pound him in the nuts?
Then the irresistible pull. She did like Landry. Frankly, she liked him as much as she liked Bob, in many ways. Different ways.
Dominant ways.
The fact that they had their anger at Cris in common only made her feel closer to him. Not that she wanted to admit it, but it did touch her that he felt so upset on her account despite not knowing her.