Page 120 of At Her Pleasure
“He wanted me to tell you, and give you a number to call. If ever you need to know his status, you can use it to reach out to me. I’m a safe contact.”
“He wanted to make sure I don’t go looking for him in the wrong places, and if I get worried about his whereabouts, he knows nothing would keep me from doing that.”
Tyler lifted a shoulder. “Submissives know their Dominants, as we know them. It’s a closed circle. My sub is a switch, a formidable Mistress in her own right. My angel.”
The weight he put into those two words, the endearment, told her why he was interested in purchasing the flower. “To get anything past her takes a great deal of subterfuge,” he added. “I’ve laid my heart at her feet. The effort of hiding something from someone I love so much is too difficult. Eventually, it’s just unimaginable.”
“His whole life is subterfuge.”
“He excels at it,” Tyler agreed. “I don’t give out that kind of praise lightly. He’s learned how to twist lies and truth together so well no one can tell the difference. Except him. He never confuses the two, the most remarkable thing of all. His conscience would be a lighter burden if he did.”
Tyler stretched an arm out on the bench behind her, not as a come-on, just something a big man did to get more comfortable. He also had a quality that made the gesture a protective reassurance. An offering, if she was willing to trust it.
Buddy, you’re barking up the wrong tree for trust.
But he was giving her information. She didn’t know what Mick had told Tyler it was okay to say, but she was going to find out, with the question most important to her.
“Everyone has a breaking point. So, Dom to Domme. How close is he to breaking?”
Tyler’s mouth tightened to a firm line. The acknowledgement stabbed her like one of her own knives. In the heart, the gut. Scraping her throat raw, making it hard to speak for a few moments. Tyler filled in the silence.
“First, you’re asking me a question I suspect you already know the answer to. You’re looking for reinforcement from the informed perspective I possess. Second, I’ll expand on it, if you give me an honest answer to a question of my own.”
“My lack of tact, otherwise known as my honesty, is legendary.”
His lips twitched, but his eyes kept that piercing look. “Are you his Mistress? You understand what I’m asking.”
She did. She could conduct a thousand sessions at Progeny, have a million orgasms, but he was the first man who’d coaxed her heart into the equation and kept it, making it his and no one else’s.
She hadn’t told him that. But he knew. The bastard knew her, just as she’d told Vera. However that had happened, it was simple truth. Same as the answer to Tyler’s question.
“Yes.”
“Good. He’s needed that, for a very long time.”
Tyler took out his phone and made an adjustment on it. “Blocks listening equipment,” he told her. “The risk here is minimal, but I prefer to stay vigilant.”
“I’ll watch your back.” Cyn gestured over his left shoulder, past the front of the parked truck. She could see anyone approaching from that direction, something Tyler couldn’t do unless he could owlishly turn his head a hundred and eighty degrees.
She received an approving look, but Tyler got right to it. “Shutting down trafficking operations involves a number of agencies, informants, and a hell of a lot of work and frustration. For an undercover operative, it requires steel nerves and an armored conscience buried deeper than three stacked graves. Mick is one of the best I’ve worked with.”
“I thought you didn’t work for an official agency.”
Tyler shook his head. “Not anymore. I did for many years, before I went to the private sector. I maintained the contacts and resources that allow Mick’s work to bear fruit, without being actively engaged myself, connected in ways that can come back to my life and family. It’s why you and I can have this conversation, though your discretion is important. Your life and mine have intersecting points, in the BDSM world and business. Ros and I have met in both.”
Cyn blinked, surprised. “She doesn’t know…”
“No. There are always guesses about my background, but even those who know more about that believe I’m fully retired. And for all intents and purposes, I am. But what I can put to use for active people, I do. This is one part I can still play, that I desire to play.”
Tyler rested his ankle on his opposite knee, his hand draped loosely on his calf. “Over the past eight years, Mick’s work has been vital to identifying important vulnerabilities. That intel has shut down trafficking routes, resulted in the arrests of key operatives and the seizing of their funding sources. On top of that, he’s done it without blowing his cover, and saved countless future victims.”
Tyler paused. “Those results require tremendous patience, and a sizeable investment of time and energy. They require people who can play the long game. He’s had to watch people suffer and die, because his job wasn’t saving them. It was making sure it couldn’t be done to others.”
“He told me.”
“Yes.” Tyler looked toward the orchids. “But I’m sure you know there’s no way to fully understand it. We can do what ifs. What if you learned a plane is going to go down because of a terrorist. Three hundred people will die. Men, women, children. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. People with plans, lives, who laugh, cry, and who are loved by countless people on the ground. Every one of whom would beg you to save the plane and curse you to hell, want you dead, for doing nothing when you had the means to stop it.”
The words surrounded her as the ghosts of those people would. “But in this hypothetical situation, if you do stop it, you lose access to the terrorist’s funding source, a network supporting a dozen more plots, some even worse. Do you let the plane go down?”