by Lila Dubois
“Did our time together mean so little to you?” he asked softly.
Her lips trembled. She was on the verge of sobbing. She swallowed hard, fighting back her feelings. When she spoke next, the words were strangled.
“It meant everything to me.” She opened her eyes, and there he was, so close she could reach out and touch him, yet he seemed so far away. “After yesterday…” She paused to take a few deep breaths. “I tried to tell myself that what I felt for you was just because of the BDSM, because of the kink.”
He frowned. “What happened yesterday?”
She was not going to tell him about Dino. “I actually spent all night Googling you. I had decided that whatever it took, I was going to find you, apologize for lying. Tell you who I really was.”
“And then I just happened to show up. You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth, which I realize might not mean that much coming from me. But I gave up on that idea.”
“In one night, you decided to find me and then abandoned that decision hours later?” The derision in his voice cut at her.
“I Googled you. I know who you are.”
“Oh? And who am I?”
“You’re a billionaire prince!” She threw her arms out, trying to encompass her apartment, her uniform, how very different she was from him.
“I’m not a prince.”
Was he serious? “Your mother is a princess!”
“Technically.”
Christiana held her hands up in an “exactly” gesture.
James’s lips twitched. “I can see how that might be intimidating.”
“Intimidating? When I realized how different we were, the idea of going after you like some woman in a romantic comedy was more than intimidating. It was… it was ludicrous.”
“I want to be clear what we’re talking about here. You think the idea of us having BDSM scenes together is ludicrous, because I’m wealthy?”
That stopped her cold. BDSM scenes. That’s how he had just described their relationship.
Christiana swallowed and, only in that moment, admitted to herself that she’d classified what they had as something more. That in her mind there had been an emotional bond between them that went beyond what she now understood standard BDSM relationships normally had.
She didn’t know how to respond, so she turned and went into the kitchen, shaking some aspirin into her palm and dry swallowing them. She could feel him watching her.
“I don’t know what I thought,” she whispered.
“I’d ask you for honesty, but…”
“Cheap shot,” she snapped, still hurting from hearing what had been for her a life-changing relationship minimized.
“Am I wrong?”
“I know you might not believe this, but the only thing I lied to you about was my previous experience.”
“And who you are.”
Another flare of anger made her whip around. “No, that’s the thing. I felt…”
I felt more like myself with you.
She crossed her arms. “What happens now? I promise I won’t tell. Do you want something you can use to blackmail me to keep me silent?” She left the kitchen, needing to move.
He tucked one hand into the pocket of his slacks. “Hardly. I’ll explain to Lillian that you found the location of the club due to a series of coincidences, and that you stayed because you were interested in the lifestyle. I suspect she’ll have you sign an NDA.”
“NDA?”
“Nondisclosure agreement. I’d suggest you have your attorney review it before signing, as it’s quite stringent.”
“My attorney?” Christiana shook her head. “I don’t have an attorney.”
She took a step back, turning as she did. The movement was awkward, and she stepped right into the corner of her little side table. The sharp edge pressed on a particularly sensitive spot on her upper thigh and she yelped.
“What’s wrong?” James was frowning at her.
That was a loaded question. The renewed throbbing in her ass made it hard for her to hold on to her hot anger, and she felt teary again.
“Christiana, what’s wrong?” The cold was gone from James’s voice. Then he was touching her, his hands rubbing her upper arms, helping her to straighten from her hunched position. He sounded like James from their nights together, instead of the indifferent almost-stranger he’d been a moment ago.
She didn’t look up, she didn’t want to see that blank, hard expression on his face. She leaned into his chest, arm folded up protectively, fists at her shoulders. He hugged her, rested his cheek on her hair.
This. This was why she’d wanted to go after him. More of this—this feeling, this peace, this security. This was more than just a BDSM relationship, wasn’t it? What she was feeling now?
“What’s wrong?” he whispered against her hair.
“I was stupid,” she whispered. “So stupid. I thought…”
His hands stroked her back, and she wished she were naked, so she could feel his palms on her skin. “What did you think?”
“I thought that I could find someone else to submit to.” She steeled her courage and leaned back enough to look him in the face, though she stayed within the circle of his arms. He deserved the truth, even if that made him walk away from her. “I thought that it would be the same with someone else, but it wasn’t.”
His eyes narrowed. “You submitted to someone else.”
“I tried. I don’t think I submitted to him.” She forced a laugh, but he squeezed her until she stopped.
“Christiana, tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
His gaze bore into her.
Honesty. He’d asked her for honesty and she hadn’t given it to him. She could change that, rectify it, now. She studied his face, so close to hers, and spoke quietly, just above a whisper, as if they were hiding under a blanket sharing secrets.
“I joined websites, tried going to a party.”
“BDSM party?” His quiet voice matched hers.
She nodded. “Munch. I was being smart about it, until yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“I was imagining you in Luxembourg with someone else,” she admitted. “It was—” breaking my heart “—making me crazy. I thought that if I submitted to someone else, then I would start to forget you.”
“You were trying to forget me?”
“What else could I do? I thought I’d never see you again.”
One brow went up. “I thought you said you’d decided to come find me.”
“This was before. The scene didn’t go so well.”
His face darkened. “Christiana, what happened?”
“Nothing bad,” she rushed. “But I couldn’t submit to him. I tried, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want him.” She tried to control her breathing, but she let out a little sob. “He wasn’t you.” Tears slipped from her eyes.
He must have thought she was a needy fool. She tried to pull back, regretting just how honest she had been.
James kissed her cheeks, just below her eyes, kissing away her tears. “Why are you wincing?” he asked. “What did he do to you?”
“It was this black thing. A slapper, he called it.” Her stomach was knotted with nerves, as if she were confessing to cheating on him. She felt better for having told him. She remembered a saying of her grandmother’s that roughly translated into English as “even the smallest lies become big and evil.”
Now there were no secrets, no lies.
“Damn it, Christiana.” He stepped back, but kept his hands on her arms. “Let me see.”
“See? My butt?”
His lips twitched. “I’ve seen it before.”
“I haven’t even looked,” she admitted. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Was there aftercare?”
“Not really. I sort of… ran away.”
His stare was intense, his brows beetled. “Did you not have a safe word?”
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“I did.”
James released her and then crossed his arms. “I’d like you to lower your pants and let me make sure you’re okay.”
From anyone else, that would be an outlandish, offensive request. With him, for him, it seemed right, if alarming.
What did it mean if she did as he’d asked? What would happen afterward? Would he walk out the door and she’d never see him again?
She wanted to ask, but she was scared of the answer. And more than that, she wanted to feel his hands on her. She needed him to touch her the way a flower needed sunlight. She was going to do it because maybe, just maybe, if she stripped off some clothes, he’d touch her.
Christiana pulled her long-sleeved polo from her pants, undid the button at the collar, then took it off. She wore a black tank top under it, and a thick sports bra, so she was hardly naked.
She undid her belt, then stopped and took a moment to take off her boots and socks, setting them to the side. Her breath was coming fast as she wiggled out of her pants, careful not to let her heavy belt scrape against her ass. She stepped out of the pants and belt and kicked them aside. Normally she wore briefs, but today she had on a black cotton thong, as even her loosest regular underwear had hurt.
On the surface, this was no different than what she’d done with Dino, yet it felt so different.
James examined her, her arms and legs bare, while her sex, breasts, and torso were still covered. She considered removing the tank top, but he hadn’t asked her to do that. He’d asked her—told her—only to show him her ass.
Her backside was smarting a little from having her pants rub against it, despite her attempt at being careful. She needed to turn around, but she couldn’t bring herself to. What if James didn’t want her anymore when he saw the physical proof that she’d gone to someone else? Tried to replace him?
Anxiety built inside her, and she pressed one hand to her stomach as if that could stop the nauseous feeling.
James cleared his throat, drawing her attention to his face.
“Turn around, Christiana.”
Chapter 4
James prided himself on his discipline—something he’d learned after the errors of his youth—but at the moment, his control was tenuous. This interaction continued to play against everything he’d imagined it would be. Christiana was not—as he’d told Lillian—some investigative reporter. The theory he’d found most plausible was that she was a member of one of San Francisco’s local clubs and had found out about the event and decided to crash it. Instead, it seemed a series of coincidences had brought her into his life, and he might be able to laugh it off if she hadn’t told him that he’d been her first BDSM partner.
He was frantically thinking back over everything he’d done to her. She’d been a BDSM virgin. Her powerful reaction to the spanking on the second night made more sense in light of that.
She finished stripping off her pants, and stood there, barefoot and bare-faced, wearing a tank top, workout bra, and a plain black thong.
Her body language was vacillating between nervous and defiant. One second she had her arms crossed protectively over her stomach, the next they were straight at her sides, her hands balled into fists.
He waited, but she didn’t turn around.
There was no place for anger in this moment, yet the idea of someone else touching her made him see red. He would get the full story from her, but for now he could make an educated guess as to what had happened. She’d gone to a few public parties—he knew they existed, though he’d never been to one—and found someone to scene with. No two Doms approached a scene the same way, and if he’d been her BDSM first, then she might have had trouble adjusting to someone else’s style.
That was what the reasonable, rational part of him was saying. The less reasonable, less rational part was insisting that she’d hated it because she was his, and therefore another Dom’s mastery would be an anathema to her.
He waited, giving her time, but when it became clear that she was too conflicted to move on her own, he said, “Christiana, turn around.”
Her body language calmed, and then she pivoted on the balls of her feet.
James’s blood ran cold.
Her ass and thighs were black and blue. She’d been beaten.
He’d never left marks like that on a woman.
“My God, Christiana.”
He was surprised she was able to move, let alone sit in a car. Now the pills he’d watched her take made sense. She must be in incredible pain.
James knelt, raised his hands, then hesitated. Her skin was mottled red and purple with patches of black and deep blue bruising. In a few places he could see semicircle shapes where the end of the slapper had hit her hard enough to break capillaries and leave blood-filled imprints.
His jaw muscles started to ache, he was clenching his teeth together so tightly. He forced himself to open his mouth. His hands still hovered in the air, raised but not touching her. He put them down and gathered himself. He thought he was calm, but when he spoke his voice was a growl. “Who?”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “Who?”
“Who did this to you?”
“How bad is it?” She craned her neck and canted her hips, then sucked in air. “No wonder it hurts.”
“He beat you,” James growled.
“I agreed to it,” she said quietly.
“You agreed to be beaten black and blue?”
“Well, no, but I agreed to a scene.”
“How did you agree? You negotiated it? You had a contract?”
“You and I didn’t do that.”
“Because I thought you were an experienced player. It’s different.”
Christiana turned to face him. Her fingers were curling and uncurling at her sides. “I shouldn’t have gone home with him.”
“You were at someone’s private residence?”
“Don’t yell at me,” she snapped.
James surged to his feet. He wanted to rage and scream, yet at the same time he felt cold and scarily calm. “Christiana, I want you to look at me and tell me exactly what happened.”
She shrugged and a tendril of hair escaped from her bun. “I went to a munch. This guy came up and introduced himself. I was feeling… I wasn’t in a good headspace, so I agreed to go to his place. We went in, and as soon as we did, he started acting all…” She waved one hand in a vague motion. “Dom-y. Dom-ish.”
“How, precisely?”
“He told me I couldn’t wear shoes.”
Barefoot or heels was a common enough rule, and a way to easily identify submissives, but that didn’t make James feel any less angry.
“We went up to his playroom.”
“My God, what were you thinking?” He blurted the words out.
“I was thinking about you!” Her lower lip trembled and she was breathing hard, those lovely breasts heaving. “I was imagining you at the thing in Luxembourg and it was killing me, so I decided to try and get over you. A rebound fling, but instead of a fling, a rebound scene.”
“BDSM is inherently dangerous. You can’t treat it like a one-night stand.”
“I was careful.”
“Clearly not.”
“I didn’t let him tie me up, I had a safe word, and he wasn’t… he wasn’t a bad guy. He was kind of a dick when he was being a Dom, but otherwise he was nice.”
“Nice? Would you like me to take a photo of what he did to you so you can see it more clearly?”
“No thanks. I’m good. I can feel it.”
He couldn’t stand not touching her. He cupped the sides of her face, then leaned in so their foreheads touched. “Why did you let him keep hitting you?” he whispered. “That isn’t the result of ten, or even twenty, strikes.”
Her arms slid around his waist, but she didn’t answer. There were fine tremors, too delicate to be a shiver, working their way up and down her body.
It wasn’t anger that consumed him, he realized, but fear. He was terrified by what could
have happened to her, and that fear was so sharp that it felt like anger.
“I deserved it.”
Her words were so quiet he almost didn’t hear them. “What was that?”
“I deserved it. For what I did to you.”
James’s heart stopped. “No,” he breathed. “No, no. Christiana, no.”
“I did, though. I mean, that’s why you’re here, right?” She pulled back, and her cheeks were wet. “Maybe you can take a picture and send it to Lillian and tell her you all don’t have to worry about me.”
He slashed a hand through the air. “I don’t care about that. About any of that. None of that matters now.”
“It doesn’t?”
It did. Nothing had changed about the situation, but now that he’d seen some other man’s brutal handiwork, what he was going to do about the situation had changed. Drastically.
“Do you have ice?” he asked.
“Some frozen peas.”
He raised a brow.
“I use frozen peas as ice packs. And a dishtowel.”
He’d buy her a proper ice pack, the kind that came with insulating sleeves and elastic bands to hold them in place.
He went into the kitchen, opening her freezer. There were some frozen meals, some dessert-like items, and a very large bag of frozen peas. He took it out, examining it. The thin plastic wouldn’t be good on her skin. He looked around, then snagged a small decorative towel off the handle of the rather dingy-looking oven. He wrapped the towel around the peas.
“You need some ice on your bruises.” He was about to order her to lie face down on the couch, but forced himself not to. “If you lie down, I’ll put the ice on for you.”
Christiana was watching him with an odd expression on her face. Rather than replying in words, she walked to the couch and lay down, with crossed ankles and propped on one arm. Narrow bands of light coming in the window made stripes of gold on her body.
The bruises looked even worse now, and the peas clacked and crunched as he squeezed the bag. James lay the cold parcel lengthwise, covering her right ass cheek and upper thigh.
“Cold,” she whispered.
“It should help,” he said. “Did you ice it at all last night?”
“I took a cold bath.”
