Gagged (34 page)

Caspian takes the stage. As he does, I don’t see false modesty. I don’t even
see
modesty. I see embarrassment. He’s still uninterested in the praise. He’s still so much more comfortable being hated, so he acts like a tyrant and cuts ruthlessly deep in all his business dealings. For the deals that matter most, Lucy plays Good Cop, and things work out fine. He’s still a cold, hard bastard to the world, and that’s perfectly fine with me. I love that side. He’s sure to show it to me, when I want. We sort of take turns. Some nights are mine, and others are his.
 

He tells me I’m much more willing to be who I want to be these days. He tells me the old bindings and gags have mostly been shed, leaving me to move and speak and be. He tells me that my shame is mostly gone when I’m with him. He runs his hands down my naked back, tracing old wounds my father left with his belt the day my mother caught me masturbating. And Caspian tells me,
Your scars are what make you beautiful to me.
 

I watch him onstage. I can’t see his scars, only his discomfort.
 

He has his own bindings.
 

He has his own gag.
 

But each time he allows someone to thank him, to compliment him, or to tell him he’s capable of sowing good into the world — each time he trusts someone’s intentions over his own knee-jerk skepticism — those old bonds loosen.
 

When he comes offstage, I take his hand in my lap. A few cameras come forward and get some shots of us together. Caspian tries to smile and finds it hard with all this praise, so I tell him to think of the last business rival he destroyed. His smile is superior and cocky. I like it just fine.
 

The ceremony continues. Dinner hasn’t even been served. It’s one of those long-winded affairs where the bloat is intentional, so that five minutes of award presentation can somehow be made to fill several hours. I’m bored. Caspian seems restless. His eyes are hard. He’s scanning the crowd and checking his watch.
 

I lean over to whisper in his ear.
 

“What’s wrong, cowboy? Do you have something better you’d rather be doing?”
 

He whispers back. “Yes.”

“What?”
 

“You.”
And his hand goes to my bare knee. It tries to slither up my leg, but I push it back.

“Later,” I tell him.
 

“We could go back to my place. Sneak out now and haul ass to the car. I’ll text Jean. Have him parked by the garage staircase with the door held open.”
 

I give him a look. And I say, “That’s ridiculous. We’re in the middle of a fancy ballroom banquet in your honor.”

Caspian’s face falls. “Oh. Sure. You’re right.”

“We should be fucking in the private boxes.”
 

His head turns toward me as if on a spindle. But before he can open his mouth, I grab his hand and drag him out of his seat. We’re at the front of the room, so everyone sees it happen. When Caspian finally finds his feet, he stumbles and almost falls. I bark laughter. The speaker onstage looks briefly down at us but can’t decide what to do, so he plods on with his boring speech.
 

We make it behind the large red draperies along the walls, my heart hammering, my color up, a smile that feels like there’s a coat hanger stuck in my mouth. Slowly, watching me, Caspian smiles, too. It’s somewhere between true mirth and his usual asshole’s grin. Like he can’t quite figure me out. Like he’s not sure who this girl is, making a scene.

I drag him to a small, narrow staircase. There’s a chain across it and a sign that says,
Box Ticket Holders Only
. I use one hand to remove the chain and the other to grip Caspian’s crotch, finding his cock already rock hard and ready for me.

“Take me upstairs, Caspian.”

“Who
are
you?” he asks, delighted wonder on his face.
 

“It’s your fault. I used to be such a nice girl.”
 

His cock throbs in my palm. His hand runs down the back of my dress, cupping my ass. He pushes me forward. Toward the stairs. I’m in the lead when I hear him unbuckling his belt. Unbuttoning his shirt. Just the sounds make me wet.
 

“I’m going to fuck you while they talk onstage about how great I am.”

I laugh. “You’re such an asshole.”
 

“And I’m going to time it so that when you come, everyone claps.”

I laugh harder as we reach the top of the stairs, into the private area. Beyond the curtain, I can still hear the ceremonial blowhards onstage, gabbing on about nothing.

Caspian grabs me. Turns me around. Pulls me into an embrace. Our mouths meet, and we kiss, long and hard.
 

Then he pulls away and says, “I love you, Aurora Henley.”
 

“I love you too,” I say, kissing him again. “Now take off my dress, and make the audience applaud.”

W
ANT
TO
KNOW
WHAT
HAPPENS
NEXT
?

I
HAVEN
’
T
WRITTEN
IT
YET
, but my next book centers on Lucy White — Caspian’s sister.
 

If you’d like me to let you know when Lucy’s story comes out (and to get it at the lowest price), be sure to join my email list here:

http://aubreyparker.net/deals/

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is the first book in my “Trevor’s Harem” series — a hot and suspenseful billionaire’s game of tested limits and forbidden temptations that’s like nothing you’ve ever read before.
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THANK YOU FOR READING!

Aubrey Parker

S
HIT
Y
OU
S
HOULD
K
NOW

I
WROTE
G
AGGED
IN
2015. Or maybe it was even 2014. I don’t remember.
 

Then I wrote it again, from the start, in 2016.

When I wrote the first version, the concept was simple. I wanted to tell the story of a powerful man who
unlocks
the repression of a girl he’s been fixated on. I thought it was a good story, but either way it was fairly straightforward. The action all took place in the same location: Caspian’s office, which had a secret door to his palace of pleasures.
 

It wasn’t romance. I thought it was at the time, because in the end Aurora breaks Caspian instead of him breaking her, and they have sex and she loses her virginity, and then they live happily ever after. So I figured: “Happily ever after! Romance!” But it so wasn’t. It was erotica. It was a long erotic novella or short novel, clocking in at around 45,000 words. Lots of mind games and psychological suspense, but not a ton of deep emotion. I had nervousness and I had fear and I had ecstasy, but that was about it. It was hard to get behind Caspian. He wasn’t a cad you love to hate and then come to love; he was a giant asshole who happened to be really hot and knew how to use his cock.

By that point in my writing career (which goes back further than books under
Aubrey Parker
; stick with me, and one day I’ll tell you more), I hadn’t written romance. I’d read it and liked it, but I didn’t really
understand
it. I finally dipped my toe with
The Boss’s Daughter,
did okay, and (I think) finally found my readers with the four
Trevor’s Harem
books, starting with
The Burning Offer
.
 

Trevor’s Harem
, if you haven’t read it (and you should; I actually like it a little better than
Gagged
) is the story of a contest at a rich man’s mansion — a contest that actually turns out to look a lot more like an experimental mindfuck. The series’ heroine is a strong, feisty girl named Bridget, but even Bridget met her match when I decided to write my old anti-hero Caspian White into the
Harem
books. I was doing it because I like keeping my books mostly in the same
world
, rewarding regular readers with Easter egg connections between them. Besides, I figured I could rework that old
Gagged
project from mothball and release it next. I could take what I’d learned from my readers and make it better. It wouldn’t take much, I figured, because the story was already a good one — albeit limited in scope and emotional depth.
 

So I put up a preorder for
Gagged
, complete with its rather eye-catching cover, and pointed to it in the back of the final
Harem
book.
 

THEN I set about reconditioning
Gagged
.
 

And I said, “Fuck.”

Because
Gagged
just wasn’t good enough. At all. Not as a romance. It was hot, so was Caspian, and I’m sure it worked as a one-handed read. But if readers couldn’t cheer for Caspian and love him in the end, he’d never be “book boyfriend” enough to make the book a solid experience for anyone. And early feedback told me that, too, so high-five if you were one of the original
Gagged’s
early readers. I screwed up all sorts of things. Some of it I could fix, but that still didn’t change the story. He was an asshole at the beginning an asshole Aurora learns to cope with at the end. Rah-fucking-rah, right?
 

I thought about adding flashbacks. Let’s give this guy a backstory to explain him better. But that didn’t work because the relationship just wasn’t long enough. The first version of
Gagged
takes place in
a single day
. How could H and h cope with a new relationship’s ups and downs in just one day? That’s not a slowly blooming love. That’s a lot of screwing.
 

Problem was, I didn’t have time to write a new book. I’d cut it too close on the preorder because I’d assumed (without verifying) that a simple reconditioning draft would be enough. If I wanted to do it, I’d have to drop everything I was doing and write
Gagged
over from scratch RIGHT. FUCKING. NOW.
 

I didn’t want to do that. In many ways, I really
couldn’t
do that. So I went back and forth for a while, trying to convince myself that the old version was good enough, or that adding a few scenes would fix the problem.
 

With a great sigh, I realized that would be cheating my readers. That would be taking the easy way out, and you deserve better. Hell,
Caspian and Aurora
deserved better.
 

So I made my choice, and started the rewrite from scratch. (Okay, that’s a lie; I recycled the first chapter and a lot of the second, mostly because I loved the bit with Jasmine doing the cereal-box maze.)
 

I knew I’d made the right choice as soon as I started. At first I followed the original outline because I couldn’t separate them in my head: Caspian invites Jasmine for an interview, hijinks ensue. But then I knew there had to be more to the story.
 

The scene where Aurora goes on her little educational research tour and ends up photographing Caspian’s building? That was my first true change. She needed a reason to hate him that she could take personally. (And of course, I wanted a way he could change to redeem himself in her eyes at the end.)

When she hears Caspian honk behind her and realizes the asshole is getting coffee instead of honoring his appointment with Jasmine? That came out of the blue. It’s when I first realized he was setting Aurora up. He knew way more about her than he should (as in the original draft) but was using it to get her attention in the outside world (unlike in the original).
 

I usually write from an outline. I didn’t have one for this new version of
Gagged
. There just wasn’t time. So I wrote from the heart, at each turn asking what my characters might do next. I figured Caspian’s dark worldview would clash with Aurora’s and they’d need to introduce each other to the other side, but I came up with the whole “wager and taking turns” thing totally out of thin air. I wasn’t sure what they’d do each turn, only that each time Caspian was in control, he’d try to shock Aurora out of her old guilty resistance because he knew she was sexual deep inside. And that each time Aurora was at the wheel, she’d try to show Caspian a nicer way to be. It wasn’t until the book’s halfway point that I realized she was trying to “break” him, too … that Caspian was as “bound” by his parents’ expectations as she was.
 

Oh. About that whole “binding” thing, by the way:

You probably noticed this wasn’t really a BDSM book. That’s intentional. I’m not into that whole scene and couldn’t write it convincingly, nor did I feel compelled to. But also,
Gagged
was always about psychological bondage to me, not physical bondage. It was about the restraints society and our peers and parents put on us. On women in particular, which is why it took me so long to realize Caspian was “gagged” as well. In our world, men are allowed to be sexual. Encouraged, even. It’s in the male character to think sexual thoughts … and then, often, to overtly act on them. That cycle is hardwired into men; it gets his genes spread far and wide.