Page 67 of The Anchor Holds

Elliot’s smile changed, morphing somehow. It was still warm and hopeful. Reverent, with a glimpse of the love he felt for his niece. “She’s good. We don’t want to get our hopes up too soon, but I’m a hopeful motherfucker, so I’m going to say she’s better than good.”

My muscles sagged with relief, and I felt myself smiling. “I’m so glad.” My mind moved to more unpleasant topics best leftavoided, given my knowledge, but I couldn’t help myself. “And Naomi, after the transplant?”

“Gone,” Elliot replied with an edge. “And I’m a hopeful motherfucker, so I thought even with plenty of evidence to the contrary, that she would be the mother that Clara deserves.” He sucked in a breath that was painful to even listen to. “I mean, how could you not want to be her mother?” He asked quietly. “Just spending a second with her, you know she’s something special, extraordinary, and you can’t help but feel honored to even know her.” Elliot’s eyes shimmered, and he didn’t even try to hide the single tear that escaped his eye.

He unabashedly wiped it away, a gesture that was so intensely masculine even though it went against all conventional notions about stoic men.

I wrestled with the complicated emotions I felt over knowing Naomi was gone for good and would never darken their door again. A major one being the guilt I felt that I was there in his living room, knowing someone had murdered her. That I’d been party to it.

“Some people are just bad,” was my response to Elliot. “We’re not meant to say that. It’s trendy to believe there’s good inside the worst of us, but I don’t believe that to be true. And you can count your blessings that she doesn’t sully the glorious person that Clara is with an ounce of her evil.”

Elliot searched my face, spending a long time on my mouth.

I did my best not to shift from foot to foot, uncomfortable under his scrutiny, standing in the middle of the room without anything in my hand, nothing to distract me from my discomfort.

He looked like he was going to say something. And by the intensity on his face, the furrowing of his brows and the weight of his stare, I assumed I wouldn’t like it. Because it was going to be real. That’s what Elliot Shaw was. Real. That’s what this thingwith him was. Real. It was becoming increasingly hard to escape that.

“Sit.” He motioned to the armchair. “I’ll make you dinner.”

I licked my lips, my stomach growling with hunger since I had indeed missed dinner and hadn’t indulged in appetizers at Nora’s.

Though a different kind of hunger sparked within me, mindful of how long it had been since I’d had Elliot’s hands on me. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but a second longer seemed unbearable.

“I don’t want food right now,” I purred, feeling more content lapsing into a sexual tête-à-tête. My comfort zone. Where there were less emotional landmines and intense looks.

Based on the hedonism I’d seen in Elliot’s eyes since I saw him, since that fucking kiss on the beach, I didn’t think he’d be opposed to the idea of some tawdry sex. Behind the easy smile he was a kinky fucker, and a hungry one at that, with stamina that impressed and delighted me.

Though his eyes flared at my words, he shook his head. “No, I’m going to feed you first.” He pointed. “Sit.”

“You’re really going to tell me when I eat?” I raised my brow at him. “I’m a big girl. I can decide that for myself.”

He didn’t answer straight away, just looked at me blandly, stretching the silence long enough for me to want to fidget.

“You want to bemygood girl?” he finally asked, liquid sex in his tone.

My throat closed from the intensity of the lust that coursed through my body in response to the simple question.

Though my first instinct with any other man was to fight, my muscle memory with Elliot was to submit, so I was nodding slowly before I realized what I was doing.

A wicked smile stretched across Elliot’s face, so different from the warm smiles from before. It had my mouth watering with need.

“Then you’ll do as I tell you.” It felt like the oxygen in the room pulsed at his murmured words. “For the rest of the night, until I tell you otherwise, you do as I say. You sit where I say, you eat until I say stop. Then I’ll reward you with my mouth on your cunt, my cock inside you until I decide you’re done.”

The list should’ve been offensive to me on many levels, even if I wasn’t a woman who operated off the need to control everything and everyone around me. Generations before me had marched, protested and screamed until their lungs hurt in order to free themselves from the shackles of a man’s orders.

But Elliot wasn’t telling me what I couldn’t wear, what I could and couldn’t do with my life. No, he was specifically dictating the borders of this … arrangement? His house. This night.

Though I considered rules, laws and any other markers of authority to be utterly suffocating, I somehow felt comforted by the concept of surrendering to him. Knowing that for the night, Elliot was in charge of me. Even what I ate—something I usually monitored with a militant precision. Unhealthy, bordering on eating disorder, but it didn't so much relate to my body image and self-worth than my ability to ensure that I was not a victim of my own willpower or desires.

All complicated things I had never really explored and likely needed a very credentialed therapist to wade through over years and thousands of dollars.

Not things to go deep into at that time, but it was all brought to the surface by Elliot’s uncomplicated proposal.

Let go of the reins.

Trust.

Trust a man to take care of me. To know what I want. What I need.

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