Page 40 of Learn My Lesson
My dress is still up around my hips, and I know I look a mess. I hold Hades’s gaze as he closes the distance between us. He gives me a small smile. “Have fun, love?”
Fun? This little tango I’m doing with the two of them is many things, but I wouldn’t call it fun. A week ago, I would have smiled and made a biting response. I don’t have it in me tonight. I lift my chin. “He gave me what I need.”
Hades goes still at that. His dark eyes take in every bit of me, seeming to dig beneath my skin, though muscle and bone, to my very soul. “Did he?” he says slowly.
Alarms peal through my head, but I’ve gone too far to back down. “You’ve been focused on other things.”?2 Things he’s not including me in. Plans that he no longer details out for me with relish. He’s shut me out and we both know it. I want so desperately for that not to be the case. I can’t quite manage to voice those words, but I tell him with my eyes. Hades reads me better than anyone. He has to see all the things I can’t make myself speak aloud. He has to.
“Ah, Meg.” He smooths my hair back with both hands and lets them linger on my shoulders, caressing my collarbones. Something soft and warm flares in his gaze, there and gone so fast I’m half sure I imagine it. “Who do you think set Hercules on the path that ended up with him here, throwing caution to the wind for you and you alone?”
I expect him to say a lot of things. This doesn’t number among them. “What?”
Hades’s smile is more than a little bittersweet, but it’s real. “I meant it when I said he was a gift, love. Your gift.” He brushes his thumb across my bottom lip. “A peace offering, if you will.”
The implications of his words have me shaking down to my very center. Emotions flick through me, too fast to settle on just one. “What are you saying?”
He reaches down to the hem of my dress and pulls it carefully over my head. “Tonight is yours, Meg. Just yours.”
1 They are so messy and raw, and that’s why this book will always hold a special place in my heart.
2 They’re being more honest with each other here than they have been in a long time.
HADES
If I were a different man, I would have told Meg my purpose for Hercules from the very beginning. I’ve made more than a few mistakes with her in recent years. Such is the nature of life. Even the best of us, the ones with the farthest reach, are still bumbling through it as best we can. I’ve hurt her. She’s carrying a wound that I dealt, unwittingly or not. A wound I’m incapable of healing on my own.
But I’m not on my own anymore.
I cup the back of her neck and bring her forward until her forehead rests against mine and our exhales mingle. “You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t give you.”
“I used to know that. I’m not so sure anymore.”
The raw honesty in her voice cuts me to the quick. Deeper yet because she’s not wrong. She hasn’t been this honest with me in years. If I hold a good portion of the blame for that, she’s not completely innocent either. I close my eyes and inhale. The room smells of her desire and Hercules’s need and their commingled scent that is pure sex. I’ll deal with him in a moment. Right now, she’s my entire focus. “You should have asked.” I trail my fingers over her thighs. “You left me to figure it out for myself what you need.”
She looks away, flushing. “I never had to tell you what I needed before.”
“Communication goes both ways, love.” Now isn’t the time for recrimination and blame. It took me longer than it should have to realize she was unhappy, longer still to decide on a path forward. Already, Hercules’s presence is helping, just like I’d hoped it would.
“Communication.” She pressed her lips together. “Would you have told me the truth about him and your plans if I’d asked?”
I am not an easy man to share a life with. I’m self-aware enough to know that. Our games have always held a darker edge, and I’m incapable of changing that, even if it’s what she wants. For the first time, I wonder if I’ve left things too long. If we are too broken to truly fix.?1
Meg gives a broken little laugh. “I suppose that answers that, doesn’t it?”
“For fuck’s sake, Hades, just talk to her.” Hercules glares up at us. At me. “Can’t you see that you’re hurting her?”
“Hurting is what we do.”
If anything, his glare intensifies. “It’s not the same thing and you know it.”
I do know it. His righteous fury makes me feel strange, and I dislike it intensely. I snap my fingers at him. “Eyes on the floor, little Hercules.” He holds my gaze for a long moment and then deliberately drops his. Letting me know that he’s choosing to submit. That I’m not forcing it. He’s stronger than he realizes, and it’s a mistake to enjoy that strength when he’s only here for two very specific purposes, neither of which truly includes the long term. I’ve always been too self-indulgent when it comes to strong submissives.
Meg is just another example of that.
“We’ll talk after,” I find myself saying, asking for the trust she used to give so freely. She either trusts me now or she doesn’t. Black and white. Up and down. I don’t know how to be anything but what I am. It used to be enough for her, though things shifted somewhere along the way. If she can’t give me this, then—no. Meg is mine, for better or worse. There is no finished with us. Not while there’s still something left to fight for.
She finally nods. “Okay. After.”
It will have to be good enough. I stroke my hand down the center of her body. “Top or bottom?”
