Page 127 of At Her Pleasure

He shuddered as she kissed his shoulder blade, following the X cut she’d made on him. He had a death grip on the edge of the table, and she heard it creak alarmingly. “What do you want, Mistress?” His voice was grim. A threat, rather than a question. She ignored that, too.

“To break you into a thousand pieces, boil them down, drink them in, make you a part of me, so I know every single dark space inside you. This is a very dark one. The darkest. Pain and violence armors you, but tenderness and praise from your Mistress…that’s a reminder you don’t get to have any armor with her.”

Imposing it on him, watching how it was breaking him apart, infused her sadistic side with a deep joy. While the woman in her, the one who had so many feelings for him, stayed watchful, telling him with her touch, You’re all right. You can be an ugly, hot mess, a dangerous disaster. I know how to handle all of it.

“When you let me go, you better be able to fucking run.”

She laughed against his skin, nuzzled him. “If you catch me, overpower me, you know what will happen. You’ll back off and kneel to me. Which is what you should do. Always.”

Instead of gripping his hair as he might have expected, she stroked it and blew a playful breath into his ear. “Because I own you, Mick. Don’t try to control me. You try to fit me into a mold that you can handle, I’ll always see that coming. You wanted a Mistress who can see you. I see you, Mick.”

“Fucking bitch. Let me go.”

She slid her hand under his hips to run the heel of her hand over his cock. Caressed and teased. “Hate me, Mick. Chase me. Try to catch me. But I'm not the one running. You are.”

He bucked against the table then, almost dislodging her. “Don’t do this chickenshit soft stuff. Why are you doing that? That’s not what you want or like.”

“Telling a Mistress what she wants and likes.” She made a clucking noise. “That always goes over well.”

It was a newbie mistake, which told her he’d never let himself go down this road. If a Mistress had tried it, misreading him, he’d been able to detach, politely thank her for the session and seek one out who’d give him the physical pain he wanted.

He couldn’t detach from her. He hadn’t from the first time he’d met her. She finally saw it, knew it, owned it.

Gloried in it, even as it tore her to pieces and remade her.

She kept kissing him. Featherlike touches of her mouth, easy caresses over every scar, old and new, ones she’d inflicted and ones he’d earned other places.

The quivering increased, and he cursed her in earnest, trying to keep his mind from being dragged where she was taking it. He couldn’t. He was no more immune to her knowledge of him than she was to his.

It started to kick in, that reaction a man couldn’t stop. Something inside would crack and then break loose. They’d howl, fight, sometimes panic, but it would very quickly be replaced by rage. That was the kind of man she chose. They didn’t know the flight part. Only the fight.

She’d always stayed outside the wind tunnel, her goal to prove she could unlock the dark rooms of a man’s soul before she quietly shut the door again, leaving him intact.

Not this time.

Because of that decision, her heart was breaking. It was taking all her focus to keep her hands from trembling and the ache out of her voice as she murmured to him. It stabbed her soul, seeing his desperation go beyond what he could contain merely because he couldn’t bear gentleness. Or care.

Nobody understood a hardcore masochist’s relationship with pain the way a sadist did. Like an artist did the art, or the cop did the criminal. And vice versa. They understood one another in a way no one else ever would.

He was still cursing her, but his voice cracked. His body bowed upward as if his spine was hardening, drawing him in to himself. The table groaned as his hands gripped the sides and his legs pushed upward against the ropes, the chains. She’d distributed them correctly, though. He couldn’t get enough of a leverage point to break anything.

Except himself.

“It’s all right.” She laid herself over his back, standing between his spread legs, hips against his iron taut backside. She stroked his hair, her mouth by his ear. “It’s all right, Mick. Everything you are is in my hands. It’s safe. Trust me. Be mean, be angry, be violent. It doesn’t matter. You come back to my hands. My care.”

My love.

“I can’t…I can’t take any more. It’s killing me, Mistress. I won’t safeword, but I can’t bear it. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Let me go. Let me go.”

The last part went from a plea to a snarl, a demand, and his teeth snapped close to her cheek. She raised her head in time to avoid it, straightened and stepped back. She watched him struggle, fight the table. Snarl and shout at it. Curse it, curse her.

She waited him out, pulse beating high in her throat. When he stopped, his muscles were still rigid, his thighs trembling from the strain on his bent knees. His chest expanded and contracted, and he dipped his chin to find her, one hostile blue eye riveting upon her through mussed hair.

He was coming apart. When she put him back together, it would send the message that she was responsible for both states. She’d never been a nurturer, but it didn’t matter. She would do anything to help put him back together. It would be her strength that would provide the glue, make him accept the loving with the pain. His phenomenal inner strength would help him bear the pain.

Her faith in that strength would help her bear hers.

“You done yet?” she asked, her tone neutral.