A corner of his mouth lifted in a smile, and he reached over, tugged free a tendril of her hair trapped under the collar. “I was on the wrestling team. You’re the football quarterback type. You’d have turned up your nose at the likes of me.”

“Wrestling?”

“Absolutely. You know how punishing football is on the adolescent bone structure? At least, that’s what my mother told me, over and over again, ad nauseum , when I whined to sign up. We compromised with wrestling.”

“Matt Kensington, whining?” She leaned back against the opposite wall, which made her knee brush his.

The contact felt right, so she didn’t take it away and he didn’t seem to notice.

“Like the proverbial girl. But something tells me you never whined.”

She gave a half laugh and some of the coldness returned. She crossed her arms over her breasts, gripped the edges of the jacket closer to her, letting go of the ball of tissue in her hand so it fell into her lap. The coat smelled of him. She pictured a closet of such suits, all smelling like this, and her falling into them, holding on in the quiet, tranquil darkness of his closet.

“Geoffrey didn’t believe in it. He taught me that if you want something, you strategize how to get it. You never beg. And if you fail, you accept the failure, analyze it, go back and win what you lost back.”

He nudged her knee with his own.

“What’s that in your lap?”

“Just a tissue…” She looked down at his puzzled expression and instead of the tissue, she saw a tiny rag doll, little bigger than the length of her hand. She’d left it on her bed earlier, hadn’t realized until this moment that was what she had clutched in her hand as she screamed into her pillow, and apparently had held onto when she left the room. “Oh.” She lifted a shoulder, tried for a casual look, even as her hand settled protectively over it under his shrewd gaze. “At my father’s corporate Christmas party, one of his business associates brought a little gift for me as the ‘lady of the house’. When I was six,” she added, at the twinkle in Matt’s eyes. Her eyes could not linger on his face, so she looked back down, fingered the

doll. “He knew nothing about me of course, was just trying to win favor with my father.”

He had no clue that fawning on Geoffrey’s child meant nothing to Geoffrey.

“But I liked it.” Extraordinarily liked it. Kept it with her that night, slept with it hidden under her covers where her father couldn’t see. But Geoffrey had known. “One night, I was tired over something, and I whined, I guess as children can do, and he punished me by taking it away. I found it in his closet when I was looking for a suit for him…for this.”

“He never gave it back?” Matt raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged. “Of course not. As I said, he’d told me whining didn’t get you anywhere. It meant the things that mattered got taken away from you, and when you lose things from your own actions, you must learn from them.” Savannah shook her head.

“Don’t look at me like that, Matt. I know it sounds dysfunctional, and maybe it is, but you know, kids from good income brackets get about everything they want these days, and for the most part, they are whiny, self-indulgent, spoiled brats whose parents don’t know how to say no to them. Geoffrey may not have been a loving, affectionate father, but he taught me everything I know about how to be successful. How to be hungry only by choice.”

Reaching out, Matt put a hand to her face, startling her. She was immobilized by how good it felt, that human contact freely offered, pressed against her skin. “You were the best thing that ever happened to him,” he said quietly. “He had all the money in the world, and he got his most valuable acquisition the day you were born. And not just because you could run his company better than he could run it himself.”

Savannah didn’t know what to say to that. She looked toward the bottom of the stairs. “It’s odd no one’s walked by here to disturb us.”

“I told them there was free food in the main courtyard. It drew them off.

Here.” He offered her his plate.

“As I said, the food’s quite good.”

“Of course.” She shook her head at it.

“Geoffrey already had his menu planned out. It wouldn’t be less than perfect. Hungry by choice, remember?”

“The best kind of hunger there is,” he said. Suddenly, she knew exactly where his knee pressed against hers, and what hunger he was talking about, because it had her lower extremities in a perilous grip.

“I want to give you something for later.” He broke the charged silence between them. Withdrawing the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, he folded it into her hand, his own remaining over it.

“What, is my makeup running?”

“No. It’s for when everything about this day hits you, and you finally cry, even if it’s for no other reason than you don’t feel like crying and that breaks you down.” He rose. “Keep the coat until you’re warm.

I’ll get it back later.” Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead, just a gentle brush of lips, his hands holding the lapels so she was in a light embrace within the jacket. “I’m here if you need me, Savannah.

I’m always here. Come down when you’re ready. Lucas and Jon are in the foyer hallway, keeping people from coming this way. You don’t have to come down at all if you don’t want to.”

“Of course I do.” The dangerous temptation of such an image broke the spell. She rose to her feet, slid the jacket off her shoulders and handed it back to him. “I don’t need this.” But she kept the kerchief. It was a gift, after all.

She was on the step above him, so their positions put them at eye level.

His expression had hardened with an emotion she couldn’t read as he studied her face. In a surprising move, he suddenly slid an arm around her back and legs, swung her up in his arms and turned, carrying her down the steps.

“Matt,” she hissed. “What are you doing?”

At the bottom, he let her feet touch the floor, but he held her elbow another moment. “That was to remind you that someday, you might need someone else to carry the load for a while. And you can trust me to get you where you need to go, no matter how steep the hill is. Up or down.”

He left her there, amazed, speechless.

Oddly happy and hurting at once. And that was when she used the handkerchief for the very first time.

* * * * * She’d kept it folded under her pillow ever since.

The fuzziness receded and she became aware of her surroundings again. They’d adjusted the chains so she was level and turned her over so she was once again on her stomach.

She was lying on the table, still bound, but the straps had been loosened back to their prior snugness, rather than the snugness that had been necessary when she didn’t have the back support. They’d also let her head down so her cheek was on the table.

Matt was sitting in the chair, leaned forward, his face no more than a foot from her.

“I guess we got a little carried away.

You carried us all away. You were something else.”

She coughed, her voice raw from her screaming. “But I’m still tied up. So you’re not done with me yet.”

“I’ll never be done with you.” He drew even closer, so the depths of his brown eyes were all she could see. “You’ve scared yourself, and you’re retreating again. I can see it.

I’m not going to let you. I’m going to feed you.”

A weak chuckle, somewhere close to a sob, broke from her abused throat.

A throat that remembered vividly what it was like to have him slamming against the back of it. “You can’t bribe me with food, Kensington, at least not unless you plan to keep me like this for several days without food and water.”

“An intriguing possibility.” He cocked his head. As sensation returned to all her limbs, she realized he was stroking her forehead, playing with her loose hair. “Actually, while manufacturing this invention and renovating the room for it, I’ve thought about it a great deal.

Imagining what it would be like to have my woman suspended in it every day, accessible to me whenever I wanted to play with her nipples, slip my fingers or cock into her wet cunt. Put her on display for business associates who come in here for meetings, a mesmerizing centerpiece for my conference table.

I think my competitors would give me anything for the privilege. But just to look at you. No man other than those in this room tonight will ever touch you again. You’re mine.”

That harshness came to his eyes again, and just as naturally as command came to him, resistance to capitulation flooded her. But this time she had no sarcasm to offer, just simple denial. “No,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he responded, just as quietly.

He supported her skull in his hands as he readjusted the straps so her head was lifted, her facial expressions exposed to them all again. The chains tightened and she was raised from the table, only this time she was only lifted about two feet, and it was her upper body that was raised higher than her lower, so her breasts thrust out at Matt at eye level, in a blatant display that roused an embarrassing heat along her throat and face. His eyes followed the track of it, and when his gaze got to her face, his own fire was a match for it.

“Here.” Lucas slid a small plate to Matt’s elbow and Peter placed a gold-edged wineglass next to it.

Savannah smelled the rich scent of red Merlot.

“You need to eat and drink,” Matt said. “We don’t have a good strategy for getting rid of your body if you die from too much pleasure.”

His eyes glinted with humor, and she bared her teeth at him. He brought the tumbler to her lips, cradling her cheek with his hand, touching the corner of her mouth, compelling her lips to part. The angle was awkward with her position, and before she could take more than a sip, he took it away.

“A better idea.” There was a pause while he took a swallow. She wondered and imagined and then hoped, and then his mouth was there, sealing over hers, opening, letting the wine on his tongue spill onto hers, his hand still along her face, the grip of his hand moving along her throat as if to help her swallow the liquid.