Steele Clips: A Compromising Position

by Lila Munro

  “I want you back. I love you. I miss you. I want you back,” Connor confessed.

  Well, wasn’t that what she wanted, too? Then why did she feel like he’d just stabbed her in the gut then twisted the knife? Maybe because she did want the same thing he did and the whole concept scared the shit out of her. Failure once…okay. Failure twice? Not her cup of tea and what were the chances they could make it work on the second time around?

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly and threw his legs over the side of the bed, rising and heading for the door. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Connor, stop,” she almost begged, sitting up. “Don’t go and don’t be sorry. I want…me, too. I want you back, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the whole idea scares the hell out of me.”

  “You think I’m not scared?” Connor laughed and shook his head. “I think I’d rather take a bullet than let you down again. I’m not sure where we even begin to put this thing back together.”

  “How about from the beginning?” Jodi offered. “Only this time, we need to tell each other up front what we want. What we expect. What we won’t bend on and what we’re willing to give up.”

  “Sounds like negotiations to me,” Connor said, turning to face her, his face shrouded in the shadows.

  “Like you said, we’re older. Maybe we have learned a thing or two.” By that time he was back at the edge of the bed and Jodi patted the mattress. “Come back to bed.” When he eased back in beside her, she curled her frame around his and laid her head on his shoulder. “Let’s see if I remember how this process works…do you swallow?”

  “Very funny,” Connor grumbled. “I think we have more serious issues.”

  “Fine. I’ll try to be more serious. Talk to me like that again and you’ll find yourself on the end of some nasty punishment, mister,” Jodi said in the most sultry Mistress voice she could muster considering she was getting tired and she knew exactly what Connor was talking about. They’d always had a hard time separating play time from life time. “I get exhausted sometimes.” She whispered her admission like it was a shameful thing she should never say out loud. “Sometimes I need you to take over and be a man in all ways for me. There are things you’ve not been able to do for me before.”

  “I know, babe,” he soothed, running his fingertips down her arm. “I’m willing to try to figure out how to fix all that though. I need you. Whatever it takes.”

  “Whatever it takes?”

  “Yeah, whatever it takes.”

  It was the first time Jodi had held hope that Connor would either step up and learn to top her the way she needed at times or agree to opening their relationship up and letting someone come in to service her when she needed it. Even if that someone was Simon LaVonne.

  What was it Connor was going to want in return?

  Chapter Nine

  Jodi wondered who the hell was at the door at the ass crack of dawn, but didn’t bother budging from the comfortable nest which was Connor’s King size bed and burrowed deeper beneath the flannel sheets, draping them clear to her chin. She knew he’d been up for some time as was indicative of the smell of fresh ground coffee brewing. He’d evidently been to the all night grocery already and picked a few things up. Fresh ground wasn’t something he just kept lying around. Connor only purchased it when she was in town and only one brand, Caribou. She inhaled again as she rolled over and smiled. He’d remembered to get hazelnut.

  As she was drifting in and out of a warm fuzzy doze, she heard the front door open and close then Connor talking with another male voice as they made their way through the living area and down the hall into the kitchen. Once they reached the dining room on the other side their timbre became a low, gravelly hum easing her back into sleep.

  A couple of hours later, showered and wrapped in a bath sheet with her wet hair hanging down her back, Jodi wandered down the hall following her nose to the still wafting scent of her favorite brew. She padded across the outdated bluish linoleum, noting it was one of the things she’d change about this place if given the opportunity, and before she had a chance to pour her first cup, spun at the glimmer of shadows she’d caught out of the corner of her eye. Realizing she’d let her guard down and forgotten the first rule of working in the intelligence community, attention to detail, her heart leaped until she came center and saw it was Connor seated at the table with someone she’d not seen in years because she’d taken great pains to avoid going into his clubs if he was present. Now she couldn’t even remember the reason why.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, staying her thundering pulse and turning back to the pot to fill a mug to the brim before blowing the steam off, taking three stinging swallows then opening the refrigerator to see if Connor had also remembered her creamer.

  “He’s my first line of negotiations,” Connor answered for the man.

  “Kyle Montgomery is your first line of negotiations?” Jodi laughed, retrieving the vanilla cream, topping her mug off with it, and sitting. “And what does this entail, sweetheart? Him servicing me when I need it? Getting one of his infamous Masters from Wilmington to? No thanks. I’ll stick to Simon. I know him and trust him.” It was then her reasons for avoiding Kyle’s presence all those years tickled her memory. Kyle had a young Dom in training named Dillon who’d made the serious mistake of leaving a sub in his charge to her own devices and she’d had a PTSD episode right in the middle of the club. It wasn’t pretty. Jodi had lost a measure of respect for the man and his judgment at that point. “When exactly did you have time to invite him here anyway? I thought I kept you busier than that last night.”

  “Apparently sometime between two-thirteen and two-nineteen this morning, you slacked and fell asleep,” Kyle growled, clearly annoyed Connor had contacted him somehow in the middle of the night and most likely disrupted either his sleep or a session.

  Jodi shot Connor a glare she knew told him he better come up with some answers and quick.

  “He’s my first negotiation, yes,” Connor said. “But not for that purpose.”

  “What other purpose is there?” Jodi sat and pulled a Krispy Kreme donut from a fresh box sitting on the table. “My first negotiation is…”

  “Pardon me for interrupting, Mistress,” Kyle started. “Or is it pet this morning?”

  “It’s just Jodi to you.”

  “You are confused aren’t you?” Kyle asked, tilting his head and looking at her like he could drill a hole right through her soul. She’d always hated that about him. The way he analyzed a person and they just never knew if he really could read them or if he was simply bluffing. “Now, here’s how this is going to go, princess. I’m the first negotiation. Then I’ll stay and mediate the remaining issues if you’d like. But for now, it’s Connor’s turn and you’re going to let him finish. Then you can present your first request, unless you find your needs have been met after you politely hear him out.”

  “I want you to quit the Corps and go to work for Kyle,” Connor proposed. “As soon as your current contract is up.”

  Jodi looked from one to the other several times, blinking and absorbing what it was exactly Connor was suggesting.

  “So the rumors are true?” she asked, pushing the napkin with her donut on top back, her stomach doing an uneasy flip. “In spite of my aversion to you, you still want me?” Jodi couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re as cocky as I ever remember you being, Kyle.”

  “I prefer self-assured,” Kyle said over a chuckle. “Perception I suppose, but yes, I still want you in spite of your apparent hatred for me. If people happen to cross my path who I see something in and feel are a good fit in my very lucrative side-business, I approach them with an offer regardless if we should like each other or not. Sometimes hatred isn’t such a bad thing. Keeps the lines from blurring at times.”

  “And what do you see in me, exactly?” Jodi asked, casting Connor a heated glare.

  “What I’ve seen for a long, long time,” Kyle answered, picking up his cup an
d taking a swallow, eyeing her the entire time over the rim. “A highly intelligent woman who has two sides she’s struggling with maintaining. If she’d but let go of the tight hold she has on the one side, the other side would fall into perfect balance. I also see someone I’ve been itching to recruit since the first time Gabe Sanchez told me who she was and what she did. I believe you know another one of my employees. Allison Baker, formerly Blaise?”

  Jodi’s eyes must have grown to the size of saucers because Connor smirked and snickered a bit at her expression. “How the hell…Gabe Sanchez…Alli works for you? She agreed to work for you after you let Dillon leave her alone and she fell to staves in front of God and everybody? Connor, what the hell have you done?”

  “Heeded your wishes, babe,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Whatever it takes, right? I can’t be the man you need me to be if you don’t let go of some things and let me be that man.”

  “You’re actually offering me a job?” She turned her gaze to Kyle. “And you’re asking me to take it?” she asked Connor, turning back toward him.

  “No, no, no,” he said, his smile turning into a firm white line. “You misunderstand. I’m telling you to take it.”

  “You’re telling me to quit the Corps and go to work for a mercenary? You can’t be serious,” she hissed. “How dare you even…”

  “Stop,” Kyle said, holding up one hand. “Play nice or everyone will find themselves restrained and gagged until they can. Connor, explain yourself and make it quick. I have another appointment at noon over some of the best oysters in the state.”

  “Right. Last night you told me you needed me to fulfill certain needs for you, be a man in all ways at times.” Connor crossed his arms over his chest and drilled Jodi with a look which said listen or walk. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around your need to switch at times, but if that’s what you need and it’ll make things right, I’ll do it. I’ll accept that I’m not fully embracing my submissive side by denying you certain aspects in the bedroom and give in, which means me dominating you when you need it because it’s what you want and would please you and what pleases you should be my goal…as your sub. I get that for a long time the sex hasn’t been anything but just that between us and one-sided at best because I was only worried about me and what you could do for me, not what I should have wanted to do for you. I’m willing to correct that. But. I don’t want my complete submission to completely emasculate me. I’m still a man, by God, and if you want to make this work you’re going to have to accept a few things yourself, missy.”

  Connor paused as Jodi tried to absorb she’d walked straight into an ambush fully exposed. “What things?” she asked, feeling vulnerable for the first time in a long time. And it wasn’t an entirely bad place to be.

  “For starters, you need to let me be the man outside the bedroom and take care of you like a woman should be taken care of. Like a wife should be. I want you to be safe, cared for, protected, fed, clothed, and cherished. I can’t do those things for you with you working a hundred miles away and with the threat of either of us deploying at any minute. One of us has to give and either it’s you or we end this thing this weekend and walk away.” He stopped and took a breath. “I saw two people I considered brothers die a few weeks ago. I’m not willing to stand by and wait for it to happen to you. This is the one thing I am not willing to compromise. Take it or leave it.”

  Like a wife should be.

  Connor kept going without so much as a pause, as if he thought if he stopped he’d lose her attention and the guts to say these things right alongside it.

  “I have to think of you as more than my Domme. I don’t know where the shit train derailed exactly, I don’t know when the exact moment was when I started abusing your gifts to me and using you, but I know this much. Life sucks without you and not just when you’re not around to beat the hell out of me because I can’t cope. I miss you. You. Understand? My wife, partner, lover, and friend. Not just the woman you morph into when it’s time to play.”

  Jodi sat stunned for a while, her mouth hanging open, the silence growing so loud it rang in her ears. “Is that all?” she finally asked.

  “No. I want kids.”

  Where the hell had that one come from? “You want what?”

  “I. Want. Kids.”

  The odd feeling Jodi had experienced when she’d touched Meg’s belly came rushing back over her and she acknowledged exactly what it was. Her biological clock was ticking and getting louder by the month. She wanted kids, too.

  “Kyle. We don’t need you anymore,” Jodi said, standing and holding the towel to her chest, leaving the room.

  She didn’t make it a half a dozen steps before a hand landed on her shoulder and stopped her forward progress.

  “He’s not kidding, you know,” Kyle said in a voice Jodi was sure had sent dozens of swooning subs to their knees for the man. Smooth and rich, it caressed her very soul. And pissed her off. “When you’re ready to come to work, you give me a call. This is my personal line.” He tucked a card between the towel and the top of her left breast, his thumb grazing closer to her nipple than she felt necessary. “Call Alli if you’d like and ask her how good it is working for me. I assure you, no matter what you think of me personally, or my business ventures, you’ll find being in my employ miles past satisfactory.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she mumbled, pulling away from his touch and storming away.

  The need for more air than was in the house overwhelmed her as she made her way through the den and out the patio door, a blast of icy air sucking what wind she did have right out of her lungs. Tiny pellets of a cross between sleet and snow pelted her face and stung her eyes as the wind howled around her and her hair began to freeze in a stringy matt around her cheeks.

  Just as her teeth started to chatter and her once overheated flesh went numb, Connor’s big arms came around her middle and he steered her back into the house. “You’ll get pneumonia this way,” he said, swinging her up into his arms once the door was closed and carrying her to the living room where he set her down in front of the fireplace.

  After he’d retrieved a quilt from the back of a chair and wrapped her in it, he sat behind her on his knees and ran his hands briskly all over her. It worked. Her skin started to tingle and ache as life shot back through her.

  “Which part are you balking at? The part where you give up the Corps or the part where we have a baby?” Connor asked, pulling her into his chest and placing a kiss on the crown of her now thawing head.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think negotiating would be this hard,” she said, sniffling.

  “It’s hard because we’ve never done it and up until now you had the say so in everything.” Connor stood and headed for the kitchen. “I meant what I said. Whatever it takes, but you have to live by that motto, too, babe. You have to be able to bend a little. I think I’m bending nearly into a pretzel by agreeing to top you when you need me to. And for the record, I’m even willing to go so far as to let Simon do it if I can’t.” He turned back just before he disappeared through the archway. “Think about that. If I can go that far, how far are you willing to go?”

  Chapter Ten

  “That’s an antique,” Jodi scolded the burly man holding one of her Japanese vases in one hand while licking the thumb of the other preparing to peel a piece of slick brown paper off the pile on the floor. “I’d prefer it not be broken when I get there.”

  “Look, lady, we break it, we buy it,” the man said flatly.

  “I don’t give a fuck what your personal motto is,” she growled. “I have your supervisor on speed dial. Don’t make me press one.” Spinning in the middle of what would soon be someone else’s living room, Jodi caught sight of another disaster in the making. “Hey, you. That’s actual real trash. Do. Not. Pack it.”

  “Whatever,” the man said, rolling his eyes and dropping the can.

  God, how Jodi hated moving. It never failed. The Marine Corps consistently did
one thing well and that was finding the worst movers known to mankind via the he who bids lowest wins the contract method. Yeah, well, when would they learn you get what you pay for? It was approaching three in the afternoon and her place looked like a typhoon had come through and quite honestly she was beginning to believe a do it yourself move would have been wiser.

  “Hey, lady,” a voice ragged from years of smoking rasped from the door to the bedroom. “Your cat’s loose and I need to know…” He cleared his throat and his already ruddy complexion ran a shade darker. “There’s a closet in here? Do you want me touching all that?”

  “Was the door closed?” Jodi snapped, putting on her mad face but internally suppressing a peel of laughter. He’d obviously found the toy chest.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What did your momma teach you about opening closed doors without permission?”

  “I’ll leave it then?”

  “Yes, leave it. Thank. You.”

  The man tipped a finger to his ball cap brim and disappeared again just as Clovis shot out from the bedroom, her fur wild and eyes wilder. She scurried straight past Jodi and disappeared into the kitchen, probably to hide under the sink. The door had always hung open just enough Clovis could open it at will and climb under. At the sound of what Jodi knew to be her antique vase shattering, she wanted to crawl under the sink with Clovis.

  At midnight that evening, Jodi walked out of the house for the last time, kitty carrier in hand, Clovis screeching her protest to the latest disruption in her life.

  “I know,” Jodi crooned as she secured the carrier in the passenger seat of her new Escalade. With the latest move, the Camaro was no longer viable or practical transportation. “Not to worry. I’m sure you’ll love the new place.”

  Clovis wailed her hearty disagreement and Jodi slammed the door, shaking her head and laughing. They had a long drive together and Clovis had never made for good road trip company.

  Jodi made one last stop, a drive-through for coffee at Starbucks before heading out of Jacksonville, wondering where her stuff was and if what they’d not managed to already break was still in one piece.