She froze. He'd found her safe place.
The buzzing sound stopped.
"Where are you, Savi?"
In hell. My own living hell.
Fear clawed at her again. Savi fought against the restraints, thrashing her head side to side. "Please, Damián. Let me go!"
He placed his hands on her cheeks to hold her head still. She begged him silently to release her from this hell, but he ignored her. "Look at me, Savi. Tell me where you are."
Savi shook her head. She couldn't voice her thoughts. She just needed him to stop.
Dirty, filthy slut…you deserved it.
"What was that thought?"
Savi opened her eyes and looked into Damián's eyes, just mere inches away. A flush of warmth spread up her neck and into her cheeks. She shook her head. Never would she tell him. Her secret shame.
"Savi." His stern tone of voice made her stomach muscles turn to jelly. "What were you thinking?"
"I'm dirty."
"Bullshit. You just had a shower, if you did as I instructed before coming downstairs to the club."
She nodded. She'd obeyed, part of her learning discipline. She wanted to be able to have control of herself again. That was the whole point of this exercise.
"Then tell me what else you were you thinking."
Anger boiled up quickly; she couldn't stop it. "Do I have to tell you every fucking thing I think now?"
He grinned. "You do if you want me to be your Top. You do if you want to continue this scene."
"What if I don't want that anymore?"
He squinted his eyes and the grin faded. She'd hurt him. "Then you use your safeword, and it's over."
Why couldn't she let go of her fear and trust him? Damián had never done anything but care for her, to try to help her put the past behind her and move on. She owed him more than to keep running in the opposite direction.
"Safeword or continue, Savi? But, if we continue, you will answer my questions."
She took a deep breath. "Continue." God help her, she wanted to continue.
"Thank you, bebé. Now tell me why you think you're dirty."
"I can't." She could never tell him about the brand.
Damián pulled away as if she'd slapped him in the face. "Maybe you need more time to think about what it is you do want, Savita. If not me, there are other Doms and Tops I could suggest who'd work with you here at the club. Or maybe you just don't want to have anything more to do with dealing with your past in this way."
Damián unfastened the chains that bound her left arm and went to the foot of the table to release her other arm. He pulled the extension out at the end of the table and released the chains holding her right thigh, lowering her leg to the table. He methodically unchained her other leg, massaging both to relieve the ache from her muscles. Next he released the thigh and wrist cuffs.
Was he also releasing her from their Top/bottom agreement? Tears stung her eyes.
He held out one hand, then wrapped another behind her shoulders to help her sit up.
"Sit a minute and let your head and legs get steady again."
He placed the cuffs in the duffel bag and began putting away the other equipment. He was ending the scene. Could he do that? Well, if she wasn't cooperating with him, what choice did he have?
"Wait!"
Don't leave me!
Savi wasn't sure where that thought had come from. All she knew was that she didn't want Damián to give up on her. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life paralyzed by fear.
She blinked rapidly to fight off the tears and whispered, "It's hard for me to say the words."
He sighed and turned to face her, still standing a few feet away. "You know you can say anything to me. I'm not going to judge you. Those things happened to you against your will."
Why wouldn't he listen to what she was trying to tell him? Why couldn't she find the words to make him understand? "I'm not what you think I am."
"You shouldn't presume to know what your Top thinks. So, tell me what are you, then?"
She needed to tell him. Maybe he's stop picking at this scab afterwards. But deep down, she didn't want him to know what she was. "I can't say it."
He closed the gap and spread her legs until his hips were wedged between them. She wanted to close her legs, but couldn't. Just inches from his crotch, she felt some of the old fear rise up.
"How can I know what to avoid, what your triggers are, or what to work on if you won't talk to me, querida?"
Savi nibbled at her lower lip until Damián zeroed in on the motion with a smoldering gaze.
Her stomach churned. "Don’t look at me like that, Sir."
"Like what?"
She paused long and hard, but his intense gaze told her he wouldn't let up. She forced the words past the lump in her throat. "Like I'm your whore."
Damián flinched and pulled away. "Why do you think that's what I think when I'm looking at you?"
She looked down, staring at the tail of the dragon tattoo that slithered down his arm. "How can you help it?"
He sighed. "Savi, we've been over this before. I don't see you that way."
Savi withdrew inside herself. "Please, stop." He didn't understand at all. How could she make him see? "Sometimes I responded, even enjoyed those things."
"Involuntarily. It's natural for your body to respond to that kind of direct stimulus. I could make you come now, whether you wanted to or not."
She turned her head away, unable to meet his gaze, and added in a whisper, "I can't feel anything like that anymore."
"You sure felt it a couple times tonight. You even came once."
"I mean, I can't…with a man. I'll never feel anything when a man touches me there."
Damián chuckled. "You sure know how to throw down a fucking gauntlet, bebé."
She pierced him with her glare. How could he joke about something so serious? Why couldn't he see? "I'm not what you think. I'm a filthy whore. His whore."
Damián took her chin and tilted her head back, but she refused to meet his gaze.
He frowned. "Whose?"
She closed her eyes.
"Look. At. Me. Do not withdraw your attention from me again, Savi." His stern voice told her he was angry with her. "Whose whore?"
Surely he could guess, but he must want her to speak the words. "Lots of men, including Lyle, but mostly my father's," she mumbled.
Damián had to strain to hear her. "Yes, well, I wouldn't take the word of two cabrones who are worse than dog shit on the bottom of my boot. Why are you giving them that much power over you?"
Because they've always had power over me. They'd continued to control her, even after she'd gotten away. The fear and shame had sunk into her bones and mind, their words replaying over and over in her head. She'd never really escaped them.
"When I look at you, Savi, I see a beautiful, sexy woman. The mother of my daughter, who…"
She tried to turn away, but he kept a firm hand on her chin. "How is it you see something so different that what I see, Sir?"
He brushed his thumb across her cheek. "Because I see the real you. They fucked with your mind to distort how you would see yourself. They wanted you to see what they saw, what they wanted to make you. But they didn't succeed, querida."
She frowned. "They didn't?"
"Savi, you submit to me, but your submission is a cherished gift. You aren't bartering your body for anything. You're just trying to find healing, peace. I meant it when I said your body is sexy, beautiful. When you decide the time and the person are right, you're going to make some man very happy by submitting to him. In the meantime, I'm honored you have entrusted your body and your healing to me for now. I'd die before I would let you down."
She wished she could believe him, but years of seeing herself one way couldn't be erased no matter how much she wanted them to be.
"I'll give you time to process that, and we'll keep working on those negative messages in your head, but you still haven't answered m
y original question. Who else used the violet wand on you?"
The man was tenacious. She might as well answer him. Maybe this would be the thing that repulsed him to the point he would finally see her as she was.
Before she could get the words past her lips, Savi began shaking. Damián lifted her into his arms and carried her to a cushioned bench in the corner. He placed her on her feet, then he sat down and pulled her onto his lap. He wrapped a soft blanket around her and handed her a bottle of water.
She drank slowly. Maybe she just wanted to postpone the inevitable, but she liked their time together after a scene more than the actual scene—well, most of the scene. Parts of them were nice, like when Damián had coached her to her first orgasm in a very long time.
When she finished the bottle, he took it from her. He leaned against back the wall and pulled her to his chest. He stroked her hair. "What did they do to my precious Savita with the violet wand?"
Precious? She wished he'd always think that of her, but he wouldn’t after she told him the truth. Okay, maybe this was the part where he would give up on her and leave. Savi had known it would happen eventually; she just hadn't wanted it to happen so soon. But it was inevitable. Nice, honorable men like Damián didn't fall in love with a slut like her.
"You know I would never judge you for anything they did to you. You weren't in control."
"It's not that." Nothing about the branding scene had led to a pleasurable response from her body.
"What did the head on the violet wand they used look like? Maybe if you describe it, I'll know more what they used."
"I don't know. I couldn't see it. I could only hear the sound."
"What did it feel like?"
"Please, Sir. Don't make me think about that anymore." She snuggled against his chest, hoping he would just hold her, comfort her.
He didn't say anything but curled himself to her body, his head in the crook of her neck. "It's okay. We'll talk more about it later."
She wished he'd leave it alone. Why did he want to keep bringing it up if she said she didn't want to talk about it?
Tell him. Get it out. You can trust him.
Wanting to get it over with, she blurted out the words.
"It's what they used to…" Even so, her voice still hitched before she could reveal the truth.
"To what, Savi?"
"…to brand me."
His body stiffened. His hand stilled. His breathing stopped. "They did what?" The barely leashed shock and outrage in his voice frightened her.
She struggled to get out of his embrace, but he applied pressure to her neck to hold her still. Tears welled up in her eyes; her chin shook. "Please, Sir. Don't make me say it again."
Chapter Seventeen
Madre de Dios.
Damián's guts twisted. Had he heard her correctly? He could easily guess where they'd branded her, given her hard limit. Puta madre. If he ever got ahold of those cabrones…
Not now. Later.
He held her closer, as much to calm himself down as to console her.
"Who did it?" He wanted to be sure he got the name right, before he tore the fucking man's balls off with his bare hands.
"My father gave the orders."
The man would pay as surely as Damián knew he'd take another breath tonight.
"Querida, I don't know where you found the strength to survive all they did to you, but you are a survivor. You're one of the strongest people I've ever met, stronger than some of the Marines I served with."
"I wasn't strong. I was terrified. After they did that, I just wanted to die."
"Being scared doesn't make you any less strong. You should have seen how terrified I was in Fallujah and after…"
Slipping her hand outside the blanket, she reached up and stroked his cheek. "Oh, Damián. I'm so glad you came home safely."
Safely, maybe, but far from whole. But this was Savi's aftercare, not a time to talk about his past. "Tell me about the branding."
Her hand lowered, and she gripped his vest as if it were her lifeline.
"Breathe, Savita."
She took a deep breath, continuing to hold onto his vest. "It happened just a month before I met you. It was the final degradation." A sob caught in her throat, and he held her tighter.
"I've got you. You're safe. That's far in the past." As if something like that could ever completely be relegated to the past.
"I can't erase it."
"All of it will stay with you, whether mentally or physically, but we're going to keep working on redirecting those things so they don't have the same power over you. We've already made good progress in a short time, but this process can take many months, even years, to complete."
After a moment, she took another deep breath. "I planned to end my life the night you first saw me in the restaurant at the hotel, before Lyle and the sadists took me upstairs. That was going to be my last time to be abused by Father's clients."
Jesús. They'd both come so close to ending their young lives when they'd thought there was no hope for a future.
She choked on her sobs. He'd help her find a way to shed the tears she'd kept inside so long.
"That's it, bebé. Let it out." If he could cry, he'd have done so now himself—for his sweet, tortured Savannah.
Realization dawned. He'd thought before that Marisol had come close to not knowing her daddy, but she'd almost not been born at all. The world would have been a much bleaker place without Savi and Marisol in it.
After a while, her body stopped convulsing from the sobs. "I changed my mind."
Dad and Marc had changed Damián's plans, when he'd come within a day of putting his sidearm into his mouth and pulling the trigger. "What's changed?"
She played with the edge of his vest, her cool fingers touching his chest. He willed his dick to behave but wasn't sure he could do with her in his lap like this. He wasn’t about to let her go anywhere, though.
"Well, I'll admit that I didn't figure out right away why I couldn't go through with it. That day with you was so beautiful that I had a glimpse of something better out there. But that first night…I…was too weak from the beating I got for running away that day."
Damián raged inside at the thought of her being punished because he'd run off with her—and brought her right back to the monsters who had done such horrific things to her. If he hadn't come into her life in that penthouse, would she have followed through and killed herself?
"Then I thought, maybe I could find you and you could take me away."
She'd looked for him?
"Did you get any of the messages I left at your gate? I gave you my phone number and address."
She pulled away from him, blinking away her beautiful tears. "You came back?"
Fuck. She hadn't turned her back on him; she just hadn't gotten his messages. "Dios, Savi. I came back almost every day for weeks. I even staked out the hotel in La Jolla, hoping to catch a glimpse of you, but security told me to beat it, or they'd have me arrested for trespassing."
She smiled. "You came back for me." The awe in her voice ate away a piece of his heart. "I didn't think anyone wanted…" A new wave of tears filled her eyes.
He brushed the tears away from her cheek as they spilled. "Savi, I'd never met anyone as special as you. After I took you home that night, you were all I could think about for months." Years, to tell the truth, but he couldn't admit that to her, because she'd wonder why he'd given up looking for her.
Now he wondered that himself. Pride. Dad had said pride comes before the fall—and man, had it ever. He'd never thought a girl like Savannah would want to have anything to do with a jobless, wounded Marine like him. But that was later. Being a jobless Chicano hadn't kept him away until one of the Gentry household's cleaning staff had found him at the gate when she came to work one morning. The woman had told him he needed to leave immediately; Savannah didn't want anything to do with him.
Soon after that, when he'd lost his Harley and was close to being evicted, he
'd joined the Marine Corps. In the back of his mind, he thought maybe if he were a war hero, she might give him a second glance. Then he'd gotten his fucking foot blown off. A wounded Marine wasn't worth anything to a rich girl like Savannah. Pride, pure and simple, had kept him from her. He wouldn't pursue her as half a man. He was too busy plotting his own demise and feeling sorry for himself to go after her.
As a result of his foolish pride, he'd missed out on being a part of Marisol's life from when she was a baby. He should have been there to take some of the burden of parenthood off Savi.
Realistically, even if he'd wanted to pursue her, he'd never have found her. She'd changed her name when she'd moved away from home.
She reached up and stroked his cheek. "Just think how different both our lives would have been if we'd run away that night after the beach." The sadness in her eyes probably mirrored his own, but they both knew it was too late to go back.
"Everything happens for a reason." Oh, yeah. Tell someone who'd been tortured a good portion of her life shit like that. Dad would know the right words, but he wasn't here. Still, one thing he knew for certain. "We are who we are because of all those circumstances—good and bad."
Savi's gaze lowered to his mouth and he wondered if she was waiting him to continue. Hell, that was about as philosophical as he ever got.
Then she surprised him by letting her fingertip trace one side of his mustache, sending electric jolts to his groin. Control yourself, Chico. With her on his lap, there would be no hiding a hard-on.
Savi smiled and surprised him by sliding her hand around to the nape of his neck and pulling his face toward her to meet her lips. What the fuck? He held himself still, waiting to see what she intended. She was in aftercare, vulnerable; he wouldn't take advantage of her but his body's involuntary responses might make her think the wrong thing.
Gently, she brushed his lips with hers, igniting a flame that was totally wrong in this moment. His balls tightened as if they hadn't figured that out yet—or maybe they'd gone OFP on him.
He should stop her. She wasn't thinking clearly. She was still coming down off the endorphin high. She didn't know enough about a man's libido to know what kind of signal she was sending out.
Nobody's Perfect Page 33
