Page 44 of At Her Pleasure

She wasn’t often wrong.

She moved in front of him to cuff his right wrist. Instead, that hand shot between the V of the upper pieces and closed around her throat.

He yanked her to him, her left breast against the wood, pinching her nipple. His wolf’s eyes were fierce.

“Kiss me, Mistress. Remind me I’m not a beast.”

“Go fuck yourself, Mick.”

His grip constricted, and blood pounded in her temple. Grabbing onto the cross to steady herself, she clamped her other hand over his tense wrist. Then she jammed the metal claw into the soft spot between two of his fingers.

The area was sensitive to mild amounts of pain, and she didn’t make it mild. When a muscle flexed in his jaw, and a shudder went through him, taking the pain, pushing into it rather than pulling back, sensation rippled between her legs. As if a crop had touched her there.

She’d done that to herself before. If she had the urge and it wasn’t the time or place to inflict it on someone else, she could get a mild charge from doing it to herself, visualizing when she’d next do it to a willing sub.

“You want to make someone afraid of you, go find one of your little doting subs.”

The line between playing a game and getting lost in one’s own fucked up head was a tangled helix. When her sister had breathed her last in Cyn’s arms, Cyn had seen what she saw in Mick now. Contorted despair caused by a failure to live up to expectations, so profound that hell’s punishments could never match how she could torment herself with it.

Cyn didn’t have to know how he’d come to experience it to handle it. She wouldn’t tolerate it in this space.

“Let me go, baby.” Still assertive, despite the constricted airway, but she discarded her aggression. It wasn’t needed.

What went through his eyes reminded her of cloud shadows passing over a desert landscape. Like a switch flipping, his fingers loosened and the look vanished. He didn’t retreat. Didn’t go behind a wall. He merely put the hand back where it needed to be so she could buckle the cuff.

As she did it, he went perfectly still again. The moment had passed, no need to analyze or discuss it. They understood each other without understanding a damn thing. And when she secured the second cuff, the most important battle was won.

He was hers.

When she moved to the corner table where she’d laid out her options before he arrived, those three words beat time in her head. Like that song he’d hummed when he took her to his uncle’s car.

Gone, gone, gone.

The lyrics had stuck with her, despite the certainty she’d never see him again. She’d put it on her playlist, and had heard it tell her, over and over, that he would love her, long after she was gone. She was a practical person; she’d known it would be easy to idealize a ghost. But right now she latched onto the Gone, gone, gone part. That was where they were going, some place far beyond the world outside this space.

She pulled back the cloth that had concealed her options. Coiled single tail whip, cane, dragon tail, and tawse. An older Scottish sub had given her the last one, telling her the discipline tool had been used on him when he was a schoolboy. It hurt like hell, and enduring it had been a badge of honor among the boys.

Cyn had told Vera if that reincarnation crap she believed in was real, and a person could return as someone in the past, Cyn was petitioning to be a Scottish teacher back then.

She picked up the cane and paced toward Mick. She liked to leave patterns. She wondered if she could manage an M. For “Mine.”

The desire unsettled her. She only wanted a man to be hers inside a session. During that time, she’d have a version of them no future girlfriend or wife would ever know. But the connection between her and Mick had existed long before now. It sort of freaked her out, but he hadn’t raised any walls against her, so she wouldn’t do that to him. They’d see where it took them.

She risked as much of herself in this space as her subs did. She wanted to hear them strangle on the grunts of pain, see their hands flex, bodies jerk, their eyelids squeeze against tears of rage and frustration as they fought through it, fought to keep pace with her. Keep it pure.

Give me something as good as what I’m giving you.

Make your marks on my mind the way I put mine on your body, so I can carry them into my week, my world.

So I don’t give in to the clamoring urge to burn it all down. Or wrap my fingers around the throats of everything I love and try to swallow their air, feel what they feel. Take them inside so I’m never alone, so they can’t leave me.

That was the fear that never went away, no matter how good life got, because the reminders of the dark spaces were always there.

Mick had dipped his head, catching her in his peripheral vision. For a heartbeat, it was as if they were the same person. He gave her words back to her.

“Let it go, baby.”

It wasn’t a permission. It was a confirmation that the space belonged to them both. The rest of the world and its judgments could go fuck itself.