Matter of Time (22 page)

The problem was she’d been on his best friend’s arm, laughing at his witty charm and looking at him with adoring eyes, completely oblivious that Mathew was even in the room. Ian had brought her with him when he stopped by the apartment he shared with Mathew to shower and change clothes before dinner. He’d asked Mathew to keep her company in his absence, and he had been only too happy to act as Ian’s stand-in.

Hell, he’d been more than half tempted to shove Ian out of their third-story bathroom window, tell Muriel the bastard bolted, and take her to dinner himself. But it was obvious by the way her eyes lit up at the mention of Ian’s name that she was as into his friend as Ian was her, so Mathew stood in the back corner of the kitchen and watched his best friend walk out the door with the girl of his dreams. Then he hit the corner bar for some serious malt therapy.

Thirteen years later, she still had the same effect on him. The only difference was, rather than being Ian’s date, she was his wife… his widow.

And Mathew was still a son of a bitch for coveting her.

Lucas, however, was an even bigger SOB for making Mathew an accessory in tonight’s scheme.

“We need to get Muriel back in the game,” Lucas said late one night the previous week when they were at the club, working on their secret project.

Mathew froze, an awkward addition to the life-sized replica of the Three Graces Statue he and Lucas had just settled in place. Intuition told him what Lucas was insinuating, but there wasn’t any way in hell he could be an active participant in any kind of plan that involved Muriel.

Needing to respond in some way, so he wouldn’t look like an even bigger idiot than he already did, he forced his limbs to move and stiffly walked to the crate the statue had been packed in. Shoving the broken packing material and wooden support brackets back into the shipping container, he said, “How do you propose to do that?”

“When we reveal the Roman tubs, we’ll use the evening as an opportunity to draw her out of the shell she’s crawled into. Who better to reintroduce her to the lifestyle than us? She’s more comfortable with us than anyone. We’ve played with her before, and she trusts us. We need to do this for her.”

No… no-no-no-no-no,
Mathew silently screamed while panic clawed at his chest.

Throwing the pieces into the container with far more force than he intended, he ground out a correction. “She’s played with you, never with me.”

Lucas huffed. “Because you never showed up at their play parties.”

Damn right
, Mathew thought as he ground his teeth and watched Muriel mingle with friends from his reasonably safe distance across the room.

“Playing with Muriel” was an oxymoron as far as he was concerned, and it had been a line he’d resolved, years before, to never cross.

Where she was concerned, sex, especially when combined with Dominance and submission, wasn’t a game. She took it seriously, and if she were his submissive, so would he. He’d always known if he was ever put in the position of “playing” with Muriel, he’d be playing for keeps. And her marriage to his best friend wouldn’t have mattered.

Yeah… he was that big of a bastard.

For that reason, he’d spent the past thirteen years dodging invitations to Ian and Muriel’s play parties and usually found a reason to be out of town so he didn’t look like a complete ass for always declining. He’d gone out of his way to ensure he never found himself in this exact kind of hellish situation.

The first time Lucas broached the subject of easing Muriel back into the lifestyle, Mathew skirted around it. During subsequent conversations, he’d politely declined, claiming Muriel would be more comfortable with Lucas alone, especially since she’d never been with Mathew or, as far as he knew, two men at once.

But Lucas did what he always does—twisted things around so even though Mathew knew he was being manipulated, he still capitulated and agreed to the whole massively fucked-up plan.

Basically, Lucas asked Mathew to tie himself to the train track, then engineer the train that would leave him emotionally mutilated and scarred for life. Hell, it would be easier and less painful to turn himself over to an evil Domme for six hours of cock and ball torture.

His gaze slid to Mistress Sadie and her boy toy of the week. He winced as she grabbed his nuts and squeezed until the poor boy stood on tiptoes, gasping for breath, apologizing profusely for whatever offense had her so angry.

Okay, fuck that. Mathew wasn’t into pain—giving or receiving—and in the end, he’d only be switching out one pain for another. He might as well keep rolling with the emotional ass-kicking he’d grown accustomed to over the years.
That,
at least, he knew how to handle.

At least he thought he did.

He’d convinced himself he could man up and get through the evening, for the most part, unscathed. As soon as his feet hit the floor this morning, he’d begun reciting his new mantra—
Keep your distance
—and had continued repeating it throughout the day until it became an unconscious mental loop.

By the time he arrived at the club, he felt pretty good about his ability to pull off the impossible task of working with Lucas to remind Muriel of her place at the club and convince her it was safe to come back to the home away from home she’d loved so much. It wasn’t the same without Ian around, but it was still a great place to go to be with friends.

But as he stood off to the side and watched the members of the club welcome her back, he began to think he might’ve been overconfident in his abilities to see this through.

The persistent hollowness in his chest, along with his innate ability to be cold and nasty in the courtroom, had convinced him years ago he no longer had a heart. But as he watched the lights of the bar glimmer off her golden hair, he was forced to face the truth.

The painful, erratic thumping in his chest was his cold, long-forgotten heart, and he was a damned liar. There was no way he could pull this off tonight without being totally eviscerated.

And then he truly would become nothing more than an empty shell.

Coveted (Pandora’s Playground #1)
 – coming fall 2015

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