Chapter 21

The fact that the food was distracting her from trying to listen in on Victor and his Jamaican guests was annoying the hell out of Sinead.

Marc had ordered a bottle of wine for each of them, and then they’d started with a gazpacho - definitely not something that Sinead would have ordered. Who the fuck liked cold soup?

Well, apparently she did.

The dish had been overrun with flavour and she couldn’t get over how delicious it had been. Then had come some sort of tuna sashimi, but fused with French techniques and served with a jasmine-infused soy sauce and rhubarb. She’d almost fallen out of her chair on the first bite.

Now they were onto their their main course, and Marc had ordered them both the veal tenderloin which was served on a bed of fresh corn (where they got fresh corn in the middle of winter in Canada, Sinead couldn’t guess) that had been seasoned perfectly, along with a plum sauce that was nothing like what she would get in the grocery store. It was creamy and rich and she wanted to lick her fucking plate when she was done, so she was eating in little bites just to savour it.

The problem was that, even though the food was great, and when she focused she could listen in on the conversation happening over at Berisha’s table, she was also having fun.

“So, go back to the last story,” Marc said, smiling that fucking smile of his in-between bites. “You had a look when you talked about graduation from college.”

Sinead smiled and rolled her eyes a little. “It was nothing,” she said. “Just a silly dare between a few of us.”

“Well, clearly it wasn’t nothing,” Marc chuckled. “I can’t tell by the way you’re smiling.”

“Stop,” Sinead laughed, reaching over and patting his arm. “Fine. There was a group of us that only wore our underwear under our graduation gowns. One of the boys even went naked.”

“Lingerie, or something more normal?” Marc asked.

“Lingerie, obviously,” Sinead grinned. “If I was going to risk getting caught, I had to wear something worth getting caught in.”

They both laughed, and Sinead felt a twinge of realization. She was laughing. With Marc. The man who was making her wear a buttplug at that very moment just so she could get close to Victor Berisha. And she was flirting with him. Her mind flashed back to just an hour earlier, flushed as she looked into her own eyes in the mirror of his bathroom as he fingered her ass, preparing it for the buttplug. To him walking up the stairs behind her, staring at her naked ass. To kneeling in front of him, being forced to suck his cock.

She was flirting with the man who was leveraging her for sex. Except he wasn’t fucking her.

Sinead grit her teeth and leaned back in her chair, trying to focus on the conversation over at Victor’s table. That movement shifted her centre of gravity just slightly, and it was enough to make her keenly aware of the buttplug all over again. She sniffed softly, not at any pain, but at the tingle of ... naughtiness she felt. Sitting there, in a fancy restaurant, with a fucking buttplug in her. It was so wrong.

“Sinead,” Marc said, a little more quietly. “You know work can mix with play, yes? You can enjoy yourself.”

“I do enjoy my work,” Sinead said, a little tersely. Taking a bite of the amazing food made her feel a little guilty.