"No clothes, huh? How convenient," Sarah said to Honor, grinning.
The store had a decent bistro within sight of the till. They were sitting at a table, nursing coffees while Marq was standing in a queue, a basket of new clothes in hand.
Honor grinned back. "That's what I said." She giggled as she looked in his direction, lips parting. "I have no idea why he needs them anyway ..."
She had made full selfish use of all two days of getting 'reacquainted', refusing to let him out of the apartment, much to his amusement. She had a spare toothbrush, and she had ordered his preferred toiletries as she remembered them from Bangkok, delivered from the nearest store that first night. A focused online search found 'Fresh Morning' packs in a Thai-owned store across the city and she had ordered that too.
Rick, looking abashed, had broken protocol and delivered the packages, and her bright red suitcase, right up to her apartment, knocking and quickly leaving before she could open the door, decently enwrapped in her long bathrobe.
She took her deliveries, went back in, and slipped off the bathrobe so she could continue fucking Marq Haydn.
She went downstairs to collect her ordered food though, in a summery wrap dress, no bra or panties, smiling brightly at a blushing Tony as she took her delivery.
Then she had gone back upstairs and unwrapped the dress even before entering her apartment, entering nude so she could continue fucking Marq Haydn.
He had swiftly figured out that the room they were using was not her bedroom, and she had been forced to describe witnessing David and Jillian on her bed just before he had shown up from Zurich, of their trysts happening for months in both her apartment and the apartment Jillian had shared with her husband.
Naturally, Marq had not faulted her decision to get rid of every set of bed clothes and flip the mattress over before getting it steam cleaned.
Then he had fucked her in the room anyway.
Ignoring her perfunctory protests, bending her in front of her dressing mirror, he'd entered her from behind and ridden her slowly while instructing her to watch herself, to see how beautiful she was as her breasts dangled and shook in front of her with every stroke into her body.
"Let's make a new, better memory, for this room," he said, licking and biting into her shoulder, making her squeal as he squeezed a swollen pointing nipple.
She had begun to cream out again, thick wads of lubrication oozing out of her opening, when he paused and told her to touch her clit so she could come and he could watch with his hardness inside her.
Honor had exploded, liquid gushing out of her as he held her on his cock, sternly ordering her to keep her eyes open. She struggled to obey, but she mostly failed.
Then he had exited from her as she was still shuddering, still bent, hands braced on the mirror, and he'd knelt in front of her open and exposed cunt, grasping her thighs as he shared a deep exploring kiss with her nether lips.
He ordered her to watch herself as he pleasured her, his head moving between her legs, his fingers joining his tongue in her wetness until she screamed helplessly again, falling, unable to hold herself up.
He caught her, as she had instinctively known he would, bringing her gently down to the carpet. Instinct also told her to spread herself open for him, and she had whimpered her welcome and then licked her liquid off his face as he rode her till he came, carrying her over the edge with him.
"Oh ... @#&%!" she gasped afterward, hyperventilating and spread eagled on her bedroom carpet, cum lying in streaks from her thatch to her belly button, staring up at him, her room suddenly a welcome untainted space again.
She would still get rid of the bed linens though. Not knowing which other ones had hosted David and Jillian meant all of them had to go.
She 'sat-still' on him both nights, talking to him, making plans, almost babbling as she sheathed and held him for as long as she could, both times after extended ministrations to his cock with her mouth: being his odalisque, his 'Ramya.'
Which had led to the revelation that apart from his passport, wallet and phone, he had traveled with one more thing, which he had placed in his pocket in a spare glasses case.
He'd put the chain back on her body that first night, when he had woken up, and she had cried and asked for his forgiveness for leaving him again. He had held her in his lap for a long time after that, just kissing her and playing with her chain, letting her know no such thing was necessary.
She had gone to sleep wearing it, cocooned in his arms, feeling safe, loved, pampered, and had not taken it off since.
She only allowed them to leave the apartment after two days because he had brought no clothes except what he had worn from Switzerland. She had liked that, but even she agreed that was untenable.
Getting rid of the bedclothes at the nearest charity shop, mailing David's left behind clothes, shoes and other items back to him, and making a necessary visit to her workplace were other good reasons.
The mutually bought knick-knacks and souvenirs also went to the charity shop. The pictures, she had thrown in the trash.
Sarah stared at her friend, astounded at the difference after just two days. "Oh my @#&%, Hon. You're just ... glowing. Do you know that?"
Honor blushed, but she was unabashed. "I didn't know I could feel like this, Sarah."
"I'm so happy for you," Sarah said, reaching out and holding her hand. "Have you told your parents? Family? What about the wedding? Your patisserie? Zurich? Your job?"
Honor smiled. "You sound like me."
"Someone has to be sensible," Sarah snorted. "And you're on a dick high."
Honor laughed, not bothering to deny the obvious. "Is that what they call it?"
"Who the hell is 'they?'" Sarah sniffed. "'Dick high' is my invention, patent pending." She squeezed Honor's hand. "Seriously though, Hon, what next?"
Honor smiled. "Wedding's off..."
Sarah rolled her eyes. "Obviously ... I'm talking about the bookings, deposits and stuff."
"I'll deal with all that ..."
"Promise you'll let me help." Sarah raised her eyebrows and gestured at Marq speaking to a shop attendant. "Because with that man around, I don't think you'd even remember to eat. Unless it's him."
Honor giggled, then frowned at the young woman smiling a little too coquettishly at Marq as she pointed at something. She relaxed as he nodded politely and walked in the indicated direction, and frowned again as the woman kept watching him, a smile on her face, playing with her hair.
Sarah noticed it all. "Goodness! You're so territorial!"
Honor looked at her, remembering sitting on his lap and feeding him on a restaurant balcony, naked. All because another woman had looked at him. "You have no idea how 'territorial' I am about that man," she said, bluntly.
Sarah raised her hands in surrender. "Wow. Okay."
Honor shrugged, grinning. Unashamed.
"So?" Sarah continued. "Parents? Patisserie? Bank? Zurich? Job?"
Honor sighed. "In no particular order, I'm quitting today. And I'm following him to Zurich in a few weeks." She saw her friend's face fall slightly at that and she smiled. "But I'll be opening my patisserie here. And in Zurich."
"What?" Sarah started.
"And we're going to see my parents at the weekend," Honor finished.
"Okay," Sarah said, raising a hand and making a U-turning motion. "Let's go back to opening your patisserie both here and in Zurich."
"His idea," Honor said, watching her love return to the till with another item of clothing. He looked in her direction and she smiled.
He smiled back, and Honor let out a quiet hum, lips parting, visibly reacting.
"Goodness!" Sarah exclaimed. "If I didn't know any better, I would think you're this close to fucking him in the dressing room!"
Honor turned to her and raised an eyebrow. "Now that sounds very very ... interesting, Miss Fernandez."
Sarah's mouth dropped open. "Oh ... shit!"
Honor grinned and licked her lips lasciviously. "Thank you for that idea, Sarah. I am getting a little ... antsy."
"Are you serious?"
Honor met her eyes, her grin turning wicked. "Very. I think it's called nymphomania."
Sarah backtracked quickly, to a safer topic. "Okay. patisserie here and in Zurich? How? How can you do both?"
Honor kept her eyes on Marq, watching him line up again, happily watching him not notice the shop attendant who had assisted him eyeing him from the nearest aisle. "He said I should start here first, at Carlisle, get things working and standardized, then maybe expand to Bowen, then to Zurich."
Sarah frowned. "Why not just Zurich? With him?"
Honor turned to her and smiled. "Because I told him, back in Thailand, that I wanted to do it on my own. And he said, purely businesswise, since I've done my research and I know the market here, I should start here."
She had showed him both of the closer street locations to her apartment on their walk to the mall; Carlisle and Jameson. Her least preferred location, Bowen, was a much farther walk, but he had immediately identified it as serving a complementary pedestrian population.
"But what about the two of you being together?" Sarah asked. "What about his work?"
Honor shook her head, looking wonderingly toward Marq again. He was paying at the till. "He's taking a break from Ascent Kapital in Zurich. He'll be working from here, he said. To stay with me while I get started."
"That's ... that's awesome!" Sarah looked at Marq as he picked up his newly bought clothes and started walking over, with the same wondering look as Honor. "He's ... fucking awesome!"
Honor looked at Marq, happily nodding in agreement as he approached, and looked back at her friend, her eyes tearing up as she smiled and simply said. "I love him."
Sarah leaned forward, grasped Honor's hand and said, seriously. "Forget what I said. Go fuck him in the dressing room."
________________________
Jeremy Kane, her boss, had always spoken to her in short clipped sentences. And he always called her 'Ms. Banet' even after four years, even when praising her work. In return, she called him 'Chef Kane.'
He had worked in multiple Michelin starred restaurants as a younger man and had won a number of other awards himself.
He had intimidated her at first when she joined his kitchen, but she had learned soon that he, like most chefs at his level, was simply a man who had high standards that he expected to be upheld at all times.
Sensible, disciplined Honor Banet appreciated that, and she had enjoyed working for him despite his imperious and curtly impersonal style.
Appearing in his office, after two days of an unexplained absence, to tell him she was quitting, was therefore not something she was looking forward to.
"I thought you were in an accident, Ms. Banet," he had said at first when he saw her, frowning over his glasses. "I don't know whether to be angry or relieved that you are alive and well."
She had felt herself flush as her mind replayed exactly what she had been too occupied with to even call as a matter of courtesy to say she was not coming in to work.
She felt embarrassed as a professional, but thinking of Marq, who was waiting for her in the hotel's lobby, recovering from a quickly and enthusiastically administered blowjob, she knew she would probably do no different if she could relive it all over again.
But then the meeting took a markedly different and unexpected turn when she told Kane that she was leaving his employ.
Instead of being angry at her, at the lack of notice, he took a deep breath and looked away from her, then he looked back with a strained, sad smile. "I have to say, as the Executive Chef here, I am not happy you are leaving my kitchen."
"But," he added, "as a chef, as someone who loves food, I am glad you're leaving. You're starting your own establishment, I hope?"
Honor nodded, non-plussed at his reaction. "Yes, a bistro-patisserie."
He nodded. "Good. It's about time. Working under someone else is not where you will really shine, Honor."
Honor looked up sharply; he had not called her by her first name since her first week.
He noticed her surprise and smiled again. "Yes, I called you by your name. There is another reason I am glad you are leaving. As a man."
He laughed softly at her look of confusion. "I have been a happily married man for over twenty years now. You're the first woman in years to make me wish I had a reason to not be faithful to my wife."
Honor's mouth dropped open.
He looked into her eyes. "That's why I stopped calling you by your first name after the first week you started. That's why I refused to allow us work alone together on anything. By design, there were always two other people with us. And I only listened to your ideas with the other chefs present ... so I wouldn't be biased."
"But," Honor stammered, "you were never ..."
"So 'friendly' to you?" Kane suggested.
Honor decided that was the best way to put it. "Yes."
"Believe it or not," Kane said. "I used to be much more ... personable. Then you came along."
"You are smart, kind, driven, talented, creative and an amazingly beautiful woman, Ms. Banet." Kane shook his head. "I'm more than twenty years older than you, but it would have been so easy for me to fall in love with you, and up-end my entire life as I knew it. As it was, I still obsessed over you for weeks. And I wasn't the only one. I suspect I lost a good sous chef and a chef de partie because of you."
"I ... I didn't know," Honor said, flustered. "I would never have ..."
"I know," he said. "And I don't know if that would have made a difference. I just knew that I needed to run away from temptation. And that was you. So I very carefully changed the way I did things. Turned into this cold guy to everyone instead of just letting you go."
She stared at him. "You wanted to ... fire me?"
"Yes. For my own entirely selfish and personal reasons. I was going to find you another good place to work and palm you off to them. To avoid temptation. To remove a threat to my marriage." Kane confessed. "But that would have been unfair. To you, to my kitchen, and to the folks here who would have learned from you. And that would include me." He raised an eyebrow. "But mostly, unfair to you, because it wasn't your problem, it was mine."
Honor did not know what to say to that.
"Besides," Kane continued, "I dare say there was stuff for you to learn from here too."
Honor nodded and said, sincerely. "Yes, I did learn a lot here. From you."
Kane looked pleased.
"So," Kane carried on, leaning back again in his chair, "on balance, I'm glad you're leaving. And even more so, I'm glad that it's on to better things." He smiled broadly. "And if I'm not mistaken, there's a new man in the picture? Not that other guy, David something?"
She blushed. "How can you tell?"
Kane snorted. "I know what a woman in love looks like."
"But I was in love before ..."
"Not like this. I can tell this is something else." Kane said, smiling fondly at her. "I know what heartbreak looks like too. Ever since you came back, you were so sad, and we actually lost you in here for a minute, which really surprised me. Then you're gone for three days and now you are an entirely different and very happy woman."
Honor felt herself flushing deeper.
"So, new man, right?"
Honor nodded shyly.
"I'm glad," he said. He looked uncomfortable at her curious look. "I saw your former fiancee," he nodded at her bare left hand, "more than once, with other women, different women, in other places ... and I'm afraid I was too cowardly, too worried I'd want to comfort you and end up crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed."
Honor was quiet, looking down. Then she looked up. "I guess I can appreciate that."
Kane looked ashamed. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."
"It's okay," she said, thinking of Marq.
He nodded, and smiled. "Well, then ... your resignation is accepted, and in lieu of notice, you'll give me and my staff five days of lessons on your techniques that we haven't yet picked up."
She grinned. "Okay. But not for a few weeks."
"Oh?"
"The new man," she said, raising her eyebrows.
He laughed and stood up, offering his hand. "Deal." He clasped her hand with both of his. "Good luck. And I'm sure I'll be a customer at your patisserie. I'll even see if I can throw you some business."
"Thank you so much, Chef Kane."
"Call me Jerry, Honor." He smiled as he released her hand. "And no pun intended, but it's been an honor working with you."
________________________
Jaya Banet's reaction when she first saw them on her doorstep was worth the two-day trip by itself.
"H... Ho... Honor? Wh... what's ... going on?" she stammered, mouth dropping open, blinking confusedly at her daughter clutching a strange man's arm. "Who is this? Where's David?"
Marq's gray eyes blinked behind his glasses, and he turned an exasperated look at Honor, comprehension dawning as he saw her smirk. It wasn't far off his usual calm neutral expression, but to Honor, who knew and loved every part of it, his face spoke volumes.
"I'm not with David anymore, Mom," Honor said. "This is Marq." She giggled. "And you should see both your faces!"
The rest of her family reacted in much the same vein. Alain Banet's head whipped around while his son started out of his chair. "What the ...? Who are you?"
Honor's older sister, Grace, four months pregnant, let out a sharp squeal of shock, which brought her younger sister, Faith, out of the kitchen with both a rolling pin and a knife, who had then frozen at seeing Honor holding the stranger's hand.
Honor enjoyed it all immensely.
Alain recovered first by noting the obvious to Marq. "You are not David Brenner."
Marq took a deep breath, and Honor squeezed his hand, breasts pressed against his arm, heart wrenching as she realized that he, calm, competent, accomplished, confident, was nervous. "No, I am not David Brenner, sir. I ... I apologize for us meeting this way for the first time. My name is Marquin Haydn."
He was taking the responsibility for her trick, instinctively trying to protect her, and Honor loved him so much she wanted to cry. "No. It's my fault, Dad. I wanted to surprise you."
"Congratulations," Valor said. "You did."
Her father looked from one to the other, at his wife looking confused and hovering behind them. "I think I need an explanation."
"I think I know you," Valor said, tilting his head, looking closely. "You're that Phoenyx Capital car guy, right?"
"Ascent Kapital," Honor corrected.
"I think I want that explanation right now," Alain Banet said.
Jaya Banet echoed the sentiment, sounding stern. "So do I."
"I'd say we all do," Faith said, to concurring nods from Grace and Valor, putting her two weapons on the table.
Marq looked at her, and Honor swallowed, wanting to kiss him. Then she just did, a quick press of her lips on his before turning to her family. "I'll tell it."
Before she did, she looked at Faith, frowning. "Faith, take the knife back, please."
Everyone sighed with relief, the tension lessening considerably as Faith rolled her eyes and hurried to return the knife and come back.
"Still my daughter." Alain chuckled, but he looked seriously at her. "Go ahead. What's happening here? Who is this man, Honor Marina?"
Honor sat with Marq, holding his hand. "I met him in Bangkok."
"When you went to surprise ... David?" her mother gasped.
Honor smiled bitterly. "Actually, David surprised me. He was there with another woman. As his wife."
Everyone's mouth dropped open.
"That's ... that's crazy," Grace whispered.
"I thought so too," Honor said. "Then I saw them. At the hotel. Together. Dancing. Kissing. She was my married neighbor in my apartment building. He flew her over there. She was staying in his room. As Mrs. Brenner."
Her mother's hand was over her mouth as she stared at her, horrified.
Valor took a deep shaking breath and rubbed his face. Then he restated what he had just heard, sounding almost like Sarah as her friend had driven her back from the airport. "So your fiancee flew your married neighbor to Thailand and checked her into his hotel room as his wife. And then you found out when you flew over there, on your own dime, to surprise him. And you saw them together."
She nodded at her brother. "Yes. You pretty much nailed it."
"Oh my @#&%!" Grace gasped.
"That ... fuck," Valor swore.
It took a lot for Valor to use profanity in front of their mother, and even more so for Jaya to ignore it. In this case, she actually nodded in agreement.
"What ... what did he have to say for himself?" Jaya asked, voice shaking. "How could he do something like that?"
"He never saw me," Honor admitted. "I just ran."
Alain Banet's face had turned grave, and he looked ill and gray as he looked at his daughter. "I'm so sorry, my darling. You must have been in so much pain. And you were alone."
Her mother got on the couch and hugged her tightly, tears cascading down her cheeks as she just held her daughter. Honor began to cry as she hugged her back.
Grace and Faith joined in, crying as well, as the men sat quietly, both of the Banet men visibly seething, Marq wearing his inscrutable mask, his eyes never leaving her.
The women parted after a while. That was when Alain stood up and walked up to Honor. He opened his arms. She stood and fell into them as he hugged her, kissing her hair, silent as she cried again.
After a while, he released her and sat back down. "Where is he now? Is he back?"
"Yes," Honor said, sitting back beside Marq, holding his hand.
"Does he know you saw him and the other woman?"
"Yes. He does now."
"I'm going to fucking kill him," Valor growled.