by Joey W. Hill
His hand settled alongside hers. Not covering it, just pressed against it, their smallest fingers aligned with one another.
“I’m glad I did, too.”
“I don't know any of this stuff, Des," she said, tracing cracks in the parking lot with her gaze. "That first time with you, you made me feel so safe. I guess it didn't occur to me it could be different, that Pablo wouldn't know what he was doing. Like you said, I was being stupid."
"Hey." When he touched her face this time, she didn’t draw away. His expression was serious. "I never said you were stupid, and I never would. You weren't being stupid. I was.”
It was then she saw the component of his rage she’d missed—guilt. Her lips parted on a protest, but he held up a hand so she’d let him finish.
“Because it did work so naturally with you, I focused on that and not on your lack of experience. I didn’t think about how you'd be exposed to other performers here. Since you're so proactive, I should have realized you might offer to help them in a situation like that, thinking that what happened with us was the way it always goes."
“That’s a lot of things to anticipate. If you’d put all that together, you’d be God. No one can anticipate everything. Even a Dom.”
“There are eastern philosophies that postulate all of us are God. That the collective unconscious is the true source of Divinity.”
She made a face, but she was glad they’d both recovered enough to tease. “How about this? Let’s go Dutch on the guilt. I’ll take half and you take half, because ultimately we’re all responsible for ourselves. Though I didn’t care for the way you made your point—patronizing and assholish—you weren’t entirely wrong. I should have thought it through.”
“And I shouldn’t have been so caught up in how well things worked between us last time that I didn’t give you a safety lecture afterwards.”
“That would have been a buzzkill,” she pointed out practically. “Plus I’m not sure I had the brain cells to process anything afterwards.”
“Nice ego stroke, but I would have made it really easy. Tarzan breakdown. ‘Des great at this. Everyone else sucks. Only let Des do this to you.’”
She elbowed him, then decided to stay leaning against him. Putting his arm around her, he kissed her forehead.
“You scared me, love. Scared the shit out of me. Are you okay, really?”
“Yeah, I really am. Promise. Pablo might be a dumbass, but he wasn’t some mean person intending me harm. I think the deal is he’s always performed in a club environment, and this is the first time he’s really been on stage. He got a little distracted and self-conscious.
“I’m not excusing him,” she said as Des’s expression became ominous. “I’m just saying it wasn’t much different from the tech guys almost braining me with a boom. I’ve learned to be nimble and duck when needed. But it’s hard to duck when you’re tied up.”
“Yeah.” He stroked her hair, held her close with both arms, squeezing her hard. “Don’t do that again, all right?”
“I promise to never again let someone tie me to a frame that’s going to fall over and make me a theater ghost.”
“Smartass. Say the Tarzan thing. Make me happy.”
“Des great at this. Everyone else sucks. Only let Des do this to you.” She chuckled into his shirt front. “And Des needs shower.”
“Yeah.” He sniffed himself ruefully. “It was a particularly nasty job today. I was going to do a quick clean up in the back bathroom and change my shirt before I came to find you, but I wanted a quick glimpse of you first. Fortunate timing.”
“That’s an understatement.” She dropped her head back to give him a speculative look. “So, you become a rage monster when you're pissed."
"Pretty much. Might as well put that down on the con side of things about having a relationship with me."
"I don't know, I better hold off. I don't want that side to outweigh the pros too quick."
“Ouch.” He winced. “What else have I done?”
“You’ve left a gap in my program, for one thing.” She held up her phone. “Pablo texted me that he’s pulling out, just as Billie predicted. So can you recommend any riggers to me that could come up to speed yesterday? I don’t want just anyone. You owe me someone who will absolutely wow my audience. Someone who can compete with Billie for top billing.”
“Nobody can compete with Billie.”
“So you know him? Her.”
“Yeah. Billie’s a hell of an interesting Dom. Or Dominatrix. Depending on his or her mood.”
“You have the same problem I do.”
“Billie’s told me never to consider pronouns a problem. She likes being flexible.”
“That’s the feeling I’ve gotten from him, too. And no dodging. I want a fabulous rigger.”
He lifted a brow. “I think you’ve already got someone in mind.”
“I’m looking at him.” She poked him in the chest. “Billie had some footage of the sessions you’ve done at shibari conferences. He said you let him record it.”
“Under the mandate that it was only for his private use. He wanted to learn about rope bondage.”
“We privately viewed it together,” she assured him. “We’re not posting it on the Internet. Unless you turn me down. I’m not above blackmail.”
“Julie…” He grimaced and she held up a hand.
“I get why you don’t like to do it as a performance. But you’re creative with it, you like to explore all the possibilities and, if the energy you conveyed to me one-on-one translates to an audience, I think they’d learn a lot from watching you. And be totally mesmerized while doing so.”
“Or be put to sleep, because I get so into it with the sub I forget they exist.” He put his bill cap back on, and she tapped the brim, dipping her head to look at him beneath its shade. It gave him a more mysterious look and emphasized the curve of his mouth, the glitter of his gaze under the bill’s shadowing. All of which confirmed she was dead on right about this. The audience would be enthralled by her Dom-wizard.
“Madison wants people to see how beautiful the mutual give and take we all crave is, and put it in a BDSM context. Show the overlap, that people who are Doms and subs aren’t freaks. That does a hundred times more good than beating people with lectures about alternate sexuality and tolerating diversity.”
He pressed those fine lips together and leaned back on his palms, a look that stretched his T-shirt across his chest and made her want to trace the sun-warmed denim on his thigh. She was apparently having an I’m alive and I need to jump someone to confirm it moment.
“You know, all of us are freaks,” he pointed out. “Vanilla or kink.”
“Duh. Most people with any sense know that.” She tapped the bill of his hat again and he caught her wrist, tugging her toward him. She resisted, but only to gain capitulation. “Will you do it? If you really don’t feel comfortable with it, I’ll lay off with a minimal amount of pouting, but I think you’d be brilliant.”
He cocked his head. “Show me your best pout. Give me something to fantasize about with those soft lips of yours.”
She shifted so she was leaning over him, and transformed her face into a sad, longing look, complete with full pursed mouth that she moistened with a sultry pucker.
“Damn.” His brown eyes sparked. “You sure you don’t perform?”
“I was a drama major, but I was a mediocre actress at best. I discovered I loved the production end more.”
He’d released her wrist to slide his hand under her hair and caress the sensitive point at the base of her neck. She took advantage of her position to put her palm on his chest, fingertips sliding across the T-shirt. Des studied her.
“Okay. I’ll do it. But not because you’re exercising feminine wiles on me.”
She straightened abruptly, eyes widening. “I was doing no such thing.”
“Either I’m so irresistible you couldn’t keep yourself from touching me, or you were trying to use feminine wiles. Whi
ch is it?”
She tucked her tongue in her cheek and examined her nails. “If you put it that way, it was totally feminine wiles.”
“Liar. I told you I was irresistible.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Mr. Need to Get Over Yourself.” She relented, though, slanting a glance at him and smiling. “Thanks, truly. So who will you get to do it with you?”
“Well, if you’re not volunteering…”
“No way. First off, I’m Harris’s troubleshooter that night. Second, I couldn’t do stuff like that in front of people.”
“I told you I don’t perform on stage, and see where that landed me.” But he waved a hand, telling her he understood and wasn’t going to push it, though she appreciated being asked. “There’s a sub at Logan’s club, Missive, who enjoys rope play. She’s a knockout, too, a good-looking twenty-something blonde, but she’s the real deal, not a poser, so she’ll make a good impression on an audience.”
In her professional capacity, Julie was pleased to hear it. As the woman sitting next to him, not so much. But she’d just told him she couldn’t do it and, beyond that, it was a performance, like watching male and female leads do a love scene, even if their spouses were sitting in the audience.
Only Des didn’t have a spouse, or girlfriend. No firm commitments. She wasn’t looking for one herself. Hadn’t she planned to have a talk about that with him? Don’t be stupid. You and he have barely even started…whatever this is. And you haven’t even decided in your mind you want to start anything.
Could she be more wishy-washy? She was being a coward and she knew it. She also had never asked him if he was involved with someone, but she was pretty sure he would have been up front about that, or Logan or Madison would have told her.
She rubbed her hand over her throat again unconsciously. He saw it, that ominous flash going through his gaze as he touched her hand there. She drew back, though, and hopped down off the dock, in time to see Madison pulling in. Great. A couple hours of being poked and prodded. She’d do it, but she wouldn’t like it.
“There’s Madison. Thanks for being willing to fill in for Pablo, okay?”
“Yeah.” He was studying her. “You okay?”
“Totally. Touch base with Missive and let Harris know if you guys are a go. He’ll coordinate everything with you and pull me in as needed. Tell Madison I’m just going in to grab my purse.”
“Julie…”
But she pretended not to hear and went back into the building, letting the door close and trap her in shadows in the back hallway of the theater. You cannot afford this shit, she told herself. Time to do the hopefully unnecessary medical check, then get a hot shower to head off the worst of the aches and pains. The physical ones at least.
Maybe afterward she’d use a vibrator until she lost consciousness, so she wouldn’t be having nightmares about or dwelling on her near-death experience. No, instead she’d be fantasizing about Desmond Hayes. She’d like to lie to herself and say she could ban him from any masturbation montage, but he was right.
She found him irresistible.
Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out. “Speak of the devil,” she muttered.
Text me and tell me you’re okay after your appointment. Madison says you’re staying with her tonight and she’s making you take a half day tomorrow. Unless you’d rather sleep in, I’ll pick you up at nine to go to a farmers’ market. A friendly non-date.
No. Definitely no. They were handling her. She didn’t appreciate that.
There’s a woman who makes a better-than-sex broccoli casserole.
There will be peanut butter cookies.
And homemade wine.
A WWII vet makes airplanes out of beer cans.
In the time she sat there staring at the phone and wrestling with her own responses, he sent her a list of twenty perks associated with the farmers’ market. She was smiling and near tears both. I can’t afford you, Des. I just can’t.
She wanted to type that, but she was struggling between cowardice and desire. He made her feel good, he made her laugh. As a Dom, he made her tremble and ache in all the right ways. So what if he could do the same thing for a million other women? Didn’t make it less true for her, did it?
Don’t make me use the ‘I saved your life’ card.
She snorted. Do you have no shame?
Let me check all my pockets. Nope, none here.
That did make her laugh. She leaned against the wall, beat her head against it and groaned. Pressed the phone to her forehead until it buzzed with one more text.
Please, Julie.
“You just never learn, do you?” she demanded of herself in the darkened hallway. Yet even as she loathed her weakness, she was typing.
Okay. Nine o’clock. But pick me up here. She’d have Logan drop her off on the way to the hardware store, which opened early. She wanted to be back in her own space before she saw Des again. No matter how unsteady he made her feel, she wasn’t going to forget how to stand on her own two feet.
Chapter Five
“This is me, take it or leave it. My own girl, better believe it…”
She was pleasantly off tune, with feminine pride and gusto. Des grinned as he followed the sound of her voice through the theater to her makeshift dressing room apartment, where she appeared to be sorting laundry and shaking her very fine booty to the beat of the Mindy McCready song.
He watched her dance to the music through her earbuds, arms and hips gyrating, her glossy thick brown hair swinging with her movements, her breasts bouncing. He knew she thought herself too heavy by about fifteen to twenty pounds. Most women weren’t happy with their bodies, and women with generous curves like hers, almost always. It baffled him, though he expected it was because they saw themselves the way women did, not men. It was one of the many reasons he loved tying up a woman and topping her. He could show her how she looked through his eyes with no white noise, everything driven out of her mind but honest, pure reaction.
He loved Julie’s energy, her quirky nature, her responsiveness. She brought out protective instincts in him, more than his usual response to a woman who’d given him the privilege of adorning her in his rope. He noted she did have some residual bruising on her throat, but it wasn’t as severe as he’d feared it would be, and her loose hipped dancing said she’d taken some good pain meds. It still made him want to choke the life out of Pablo with a prickly coconut twine.
He shouldn’t be pursuing this. He’d spent his life knowing down to the minutiae what was good and bad for him. Sometimes the lines were fuzzy, yet when it came to getting close to other people, there was no mistaking the boundaries. He had no desire to hurt anyone.
But God, look at her. Her life. Her joy. She embraced everything around her. People, new experiences. From the things she tried so hard not to say but ended up stumbling over, he knew she’d been hurt too often. Those clueless bastards’ loss was his gain. At least for as long as he could keep this inside the box he always kept his relationships.
You’re already outside the box, asshole. Don’t be the next one to break her heart.
He wasn’t going to do that. They were both adults. They could have fun. He could help her learn more about BDSM. She was here only temporarily, anyway. She wasn’t looking to set up house.
Wow, feeding yourself a major line of bullshit there, buddy.
He wanted to slide up behind her, take off the earbuds and ravish her neck with lips, tongue and teeth. He wanted to hold her heart-shaped ass against his cock and grind. He wanted to hear her laugh, gasp and whisper, feel her tremble, all because of what he could do to her.
Proving he had restraint, he leaned in the doorframe, giving himself a private moment to enjoy. He’d met women who put effort into an eccentric persona. Goth, off center, social justice warrior, name your role or emotional costume. That didn’t bug him. They weren’t pretentious. They were merely donning the clothes that best helped them handle their world, same as everyone did. Yet his favorite
gift to his Dom side was stripping the physical and emotional clothes off each woman and finding out who she really was. In return, he learned more about himself. It was a two way street of pleasure and emotional satisfaction.
Julie was his first experience where the inner core of the woman was open, dazzling to see in all its honesty. Nothing proved it more than her reaction when she discovered she wasn’t alone.
She’d executed an enthusiastic spin, fist pumped the air, and saw him watching her. She gave a surprised yelp, but recovered fast, as he somehow knew she would. She did another shimmy and shake for him, belted out the last chorus with impressive lip synching skill, and finished on another spin. When she popped out the earbuds, she fixed an accusing look on him. “You’re an hour early.”
“I brought coffee.” He lifted the flat from behind the door, in the hallway where he’d stashed it. “And flowers.”
The bouquet of yellow daisies had looked playful and bright, like her. “I’m a traditional guy.”
She took the flowers just as he’d expected and hoped she would, with clear delight, but as she sniffed the flowers, she tossed him a mild glare.
“Didn’t you say this was a non-date?”
“I lied about that. Figured after you had time to think about it, you’d realize a date would be much nicer.”
She smiled, but he saw wariness in her eyes, a woman who didn’t trust herself, whose heart was fragile from past wounds. It took an unusual grip on him.
She’s different, you idiot. Back away from this.
We’re just going to a farmers’ market. Not running away to Vegas.
There was no harm in enjoying her company and using his skills to help her trust again. He’d done it with other women, the lines of care and affection clean.
You’re going to the farmers’ market to prove to her she’s different, because she thinks she’s just another rope bunny to you. How is that not crossing the line into relationship territory? Lying asshole.
