Page 57 of Savagely Yours
“They won’t let us get married, Dez.”
“They go through a lot to keep the Class Ones from blowing their lids,” he said. “They might make an exception for us once they realize I’ll kill to keep you.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Haven’t considered it.”
“So, whore’s a strong word,” I prefaced. “I get that. What if you say that you want me as a mistress, then? It could be fun. We can use our meetups to strategize. That’s what I was doing with LaSalle.”
His entire demeanor shifted. “What kind of fun were you having with LaSalle? Youwerelying about why you two were meeting up, right? About the favors?”
“Oh, one hundred percent. He was helping me pass along messages and organize small groups. That’s it.”
“So you and him never…”
“No.”
He studied me as if searching for the truth.
We both knew LaSalle was the furthest thing from “my type.” In all fairness, Dez hadn’t exactly been my type either, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still painfully attractive. Then, if I stripped away his exterior, his personality fit mine to a T. Had we never met the way we did, I would have likely passed him by because I wasn’t looking in his direction in the first place.
“Are you still going to be meeting up with LaSalle?”
I snorted. “Let’s be real, Dez. The moment you caught us, that was dead in the water.”
“Yep.”
“But, backtracking a bit...” I raised my chin, ready to thwart any objections he might have to my following statement. “I suggest that you argue to keep me as a mistress, not to have me as your wife. Say that you used to work for me, and now that you have the chance, you want me in a position where you have the power.”
He groaned, stretched the muscles in his neck, and rotated his shoulder.
“Offer to put me up in one of the other buildings.” I glanced at the map. “Juniper, maybe. That’s where the doc lives, yousaid. That way, you can visit me anytime, night or day. If I’m on duty and your…needshave to be met, you have the authority to pull me away from whatever I’m doing. Theoretically, that means we can meet whenever we want.”
One of his fingers had whittled out a slit in the covers to expose a peek of my upper arm. That finger was currently absentmindedly stroking a path along my skin.
“You’re not considering something,” he said.
“And what’s that?”
“Myneeds.”He added a second finger to the slit. “How often is too often for our arrangement to be believable? If I need you four or five times a day, is that suspicious?”
“Hypothetically speaking, how many times a day do you think you would need me?”
He didn’t answer.
Not with words.
I gnawed on my bottom lip. “Well, um, we could start with a few times a day. If someone says something, we’ll adjust.”
“What if it stops being hypothetical? I mean, we just discussed that feelings exist between us. One accidental kiss, and the whole thing could explode. Are you prepared for that possibility?”
The expression on his face held nothing back; messing around with him would mean that eating and sleeping would be luxuries. It would mean that seeing the light of day on a regular basis would be more questionable than guaranteed. If this turned into an actual physical relationship, I would have to make all my runs throughout the camp with a limp while sporting a veil of sexual exhaustion—and that was if we managed to leave each other’s bodies long enough to coordinate a rebellion.
“We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it,” I said.
He ran his tongue along his teeth.
“But continuing on this track,” I went on, “you can also negotiate some terms. You worry about my health, so you can request that I have access to healthcare to keep myself,” I crooked my fingers, “clean. I’ll keep my job in Sanitation, but I won’t live there.”
