Unraveled Together by Wendy Leigh

well.

    The worst scenario for me would be if she already knew that Georgiana was still alive when she and I were in Hawaii together, having a romantic interlude, a sensual fantasy so perfect that I almost changed my mind and arranged for us to be married then and there on Waikiki Beach.
    If I had married her in Hawaii, I would have also presented her with her wedding presents, the deeds to which I had taken to Hawaii with me, just in case.
    Ten wedding gifts.
    A chalet in St Anton, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, and gym.
    A penthouse on South Beach.
    A castle overlooking Monte Carlo.
    A Regency house on London’s Park Lane.
    A mansion on the Île-de-France.
    A riverside triplex in Manhattan.
    A Malibu beach house.
    A Bel Air villa.
    An estate in St Barths.
    A loft in SoHo, New York.
    The truth is that even if I establish conclusively that Miranda did betray me, as I fear she did, in recognition of the brief yet blissful happiness she did give me before she destroyed my dreams and our future together through her duplicity and dishonesty, I shall still give her the deeds to all those properties. They were purchased for her, as love nests for the two of us, but if she is a betrayer, and not the true and gentle submissive I thought she was, then I will never set foot in any of them. She can have them and I won’t give them, or her, another thought.

    In Hawaii, of course, we became engaged, and I met her mother, Clare, who was beautiful and charming (just like Miranda), and her stepfather, Alex, who was intellectual and erudite.
    I could sense, though, that Clare was shocked by Miranda’s pale and frail appearance, but as she didn’t voice her concerns, I didn’t have to explain. Or try to.
    We leafed through the photo albums of Miranda as a child, a teenager, a young woman. Although my detectives had managed to secure copies of most of them for me, I pretended to see them for the first time, and inside felt guilty as hell. Naturally, I didn’t exhibit any signs of my guilt. Proficient as always at hiding my emotions, I just can’t stomach the thought that Miranda was equally able to do the same.
    For some strange reason, her mask did momentarily slip when we sat in the hotel bar, listening to “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She blushed scarlet, but even now that I am starting to suspect the degree of her deception, I still have no idea what it was about the song that caused that reaction in her.
    Clearly, I was missing something. Perhaps because I was so excited that she had been so blatant about her longing to walk on the wild side of BDSM with me once more, my excitement temporarily eclipsed my powers of analysis.
    Not that I lost it altogether. I knew exactly how to rein in my own emotions and to bide my time until the submissive was ready to relinquish all control and put herself in my hands completely.
    But although Miranda was never a pushy submissive (if she had been, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with me), she still managed to slyly make it clear that she was longing to submit to me once more. And while I was flattered, aroused, and excited, I thought long and hard about what exactly I should do with her and how.
    In the end, I restricted her return to BDSM to a short scene with a shoehorn, then a hard fucking on the plane back to New York, but that was enough to satisfy both of us and make us happy. As happy as Miranda was able to be, those days.
    Back in Hartwell Castle, her mood turned black once more, and as much as I employed all the skills I’d learned in journalism to coax a subject to open up, to me, she remained resolutely silent about everything that had happened to her in the mausoleum, and about her kidnapper—or kidnappers.
    A sub hiding something major from a dom? A reversal of roles, if ever I’ve heard of one, as an experienced dominant was generally adept at hiding his passion for a submissive from her, and certainly didn’t