The Dangerous Hero

by Barlow, Linda

  "It's not something I brag about, if that's what you're asking. But I won't lie about it, either. I'm not ashamed of who I am. People who pass judgment on others' sexual preferences are not the sort of folks who could ever be friends of mine."

  "I agree that people shouldn't pass judgment. I just think some things ought to be private."

  "I don't openly discuss it with anyone except my partners. But authors do gossip about one another, just as members of any community do."

  "My father's not part of your BDSM community."

  "He's part of my writers' community, though. There are other kinky authors and some of them might have big mouths."

  "It's humiliating enough to learn that my father was spying on us nine years ago without his knowing what our sex life is like now."

  "If he were any kind of a gentleman, he'd have kept silent about it. Instead he deliberately tried to frighten you, as if I were some kind of sadistic psychopath from one of his books."

  "Sadistic psychopaths feature more in your books than his," she shot back.

  Okay, thought Stephen. Time to change the tenor of this discussion before things really start to deteriorate. But he wasn't sure how to fix things.

  "Why do you and he hate each other so much, anyway?"

  "I suppose it goes back to the unraveling of our mentor/student relationship that summer. Your father probably thought that without his help, I didn't stand a chance. But my recent novels have all done better than his."

  "Are you saying he's jealous of your success?"

  "Authors are often jealous of each other. I don't know what's inside his heart. But for years he has taken every opportunity to snipe at me in interviews, articles, and online discussion groups."

  "Seriously?"

  "Yeah. We belong to the same organization that advocates for mystery and crime writers. One year we were both on the board of directors. We butted heads constantly. Your father and I have mutual friends, but they've learned never to invite us to the same party, lecture, or book signing."

  "I didn't know any of this."

  "Percy and I have different styles of interacting with people. He's tries to force his ideas down everybody else's throats. Of course, he's smart and witty, and he has the Hemingway-type charisma going for him, so he's not unpopular. He's larger than life."

  She nodded. That described her father pretty well. "And what's your style?"

  He shrugged. "I'm more easygoing. I can be stubborn, and if I think there's a right way to do something, I'll argue in favor of it, but I get along well with most people. I don't have a lot of enemies. Except him."

  "Wow. I didn't know that there was so much personal animosity between you. It's not as if he's ever spoken about you to me."

  "No? I guess I thought I must have been the object of cursing and snark in the Quentin household."

  She shot him a quick glance, looking relieved that the mood seemed to have lightened a bit. "He rarely talks about his work with me. Maybe he's afraid I'll write a critical review of one of his books."

  Stephen felt his bubble of annoyance burst and turn into laughter. "Heaven help him if you do!"

  She laughed too. He reached out to squeeze her hand. "This is exactly what we shouldn't do, you know. We can't allow the fact that you're Percy's daughter to cause strife between us. What's more important—that we enjoy our time together now, or that we continue to rehash the past?"

  "You're right," she said. "No rehashing. We should consider ourselves lucky to get a second chance."

  "Absolutely." He slid toward her and pulled her into his arms. "So let's make the most of it."

  Chapter 16

  They spent the day doing some of the fun things they both enjoyed, including a sail on his catamaran. They took Rusty for a lengthy hike along the deserted beach, passing numerous boarded-up summer homes. Few people besides Stephen lived here all year long. "I need solitude when I write," he explained. "I probably won’t get much done in the summer when the neighbors show up."

  When they got back to his beachfront, they sat down in the sand to construct an elaborate castle. He wanted its architecture to be modern, but she insisted on medieval style. When she attempted to fashion flying buttresses out of wet sand, Stephen rolled onto his stomach and laughed at her until he choked. The buttresses did not fly for long. The tide, which retreated a very long distance on this, the shallow side of the Cape, began to creep back in. Viola studied the beach, realizing they had not quite managed to do their construction above the high water line. At high tide, the sea would breach the castle walls.

  "Poor planning on our part," she laughed. "I can't bear to stay and watch it destroyed."

  "Let's go in, then."

  Her hair was tangled from the wind, and there was sand and salt all over her, so she took a quick shower. When she came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a cozy bath towel, Stephen was up in his writing loft. "Just making a few notes on some ideas I had," he called down to her. "I'll be down in a few minutes."

  "No hurry. Take your time."

  She got dressed and wandered out on the deck. The sun was sinking, and the afternoon was taking on a distinct chill, but it felt so good to be breathing the sea air that she wanted to relish it for as long as she could. Staring at the waves as they rolled in, one after another, she allowed the sound and smell of the ocean to suck her into the past.

  She knew now why she had been so devastated by his disappearance from her life nine years before. It hadn't been just a teenage romance. She'd been crazy in love with him. All the things she had loved about him then she still loved about him now: his quick wit, his liveliness, his lightheartedness, the uninhibited way he expressed his emotions. He was an easy man to like.

  She had to remind herself not to get too caught up. They had both changed in nine years, despite their current satisfaction with one another. No doubt his other partners had also found him congenial, and where were they now?

  A little while later, he came out onto the deck, greeting her with a smile and handing her a glass of wine. She rose, smiling at him, and they clinked glasses and drank. He leaned to kiss her, his lips hard and firm against her own. As the kiss deepened, he pulled her up into his arms and ran his hands along her spine to the curve of her ass.

  "Umm, nice," he whispered, molding her thighs to fit his own. "Can you feel me wanting you?"

  She nodded, arching her pelvis against his. She loved the feel of his hard cock against her.

  "It's been several hours since I was inside you," he said, kissing her throat, then moving his lips to nibble at the portal of her ear. "I'd like to remedy that as quickly as possible. I guess we'd better eat first, though. I want to be sure we have plenty of energy for the night."

  She laughed. "True. Let's load up on calories and then burn them off."

  While they ate supper, she asked, "If you could do everything that you wanted with me, what would that include?"

  He grinned. "Well, that would be quite a list."

  "But what's on your list? Besides whipping and that predicament bondage thing?"

  "You really got off on that, didn't you?"

  She shivered a little. "I got off on the idea of it. I'm not sure about the reality."

  "We'd have to work up to stuff like that. We don't know what your limits are yet, and I don't want to move too fast."

  "I appreciate that. But I'm still curious. What would you do for your own pleasure? If pleasing me weren't even a factor? What would you do if you could just, I don't know, use me to get off?"

  He hesitated. "You're asking a writer about his fantasies? Dude, I could talk all night—my brain is always teeming with images and scenarios. Hell, if you've read my books you already know a lot about the way my imagination works."

  "I knew it...you're really Bart!"

  He laughed. "Look at it this way, babe—my bed is way more comfy than his rack."

  "You're still not answering the question. I've been here all weekend, and I'm a little in the dark about
you."

  His expression grew serious. "Okay. It's just that despite your interest in these things, you're a beginner. Whereas I—" he shrugged "—I've been into this for years. At times, I've played hard. I don't want to freak you out by doing anything that might scare the pants off you." He reached out and slipped a hand inside the waistband of her pants, stroking the silky fabric of her panties. "Actually, these are coming off, scared or not."

  She giggled. "It's not as if there's anything here to frighten me. You don't even have any predicament bondage hooks driven into the ceiling of your bedroom. I checked. And if you have as vast collection of whips as you've intimated, I don't know how they all fit into that bedside table. You don't have a dungeon in the basement, because unlike Bartholomew Giles, you don't have a basement." She smirked at him. "I'm beginning to think you're all talk."

  "I might not have a basement," he said slowly. "But I do have a dungeon. A well-equipped dungeon. I had it built to my specifications. I wasn't planning to show it to you this weekend, but if you'd like to see it, we can go out there tonight."

  Out there. The garage? The garage where he did not keep his car?

  Oh my god. She wasn't sure which emotion was strongest—curiosity, dread, or excitement. He had a freaking dungeon.

  "It's in your garage, isn't it?"

  "It never actually was a garage. I had the architect change the plans before the builders started work. I decided I didn't really need a garage."

  But he did need a dungeon? Whoa.

  "I warn you, if I show you the dungeon, we'll spend some time there. Use the equipment. There will be rules. If you say yes to the dungeon, you're saying yes to everything that happens while we are in there. Although you can always use a safeword if something gets too intense."

  Her heartbeat had zipped up into the danger zone. "What rules?"

  "I'll tell you the rules when the dungeon door closes behind us. My rules, my orders, my control. That's the price of admission. You enter there and you're mine to do what I wish with. Mine to dominate. Mine to hurt. Mine to fuck."

  She took a deep breath. "Oh wow."

  "I can get really into the role play, babe. That's part of the kick for me. There's a socially forbidden place where I like to go, and my dungeon is that place where I indulge that side of myself. Safe, sane and consensual still applies. It always applies. But that doesn't mean that I won't be harsh and cruel. I'm a sadist. You know that already. You might have even sensed it nine years ago, but you trusted me. If I kept you safe then, when I was a rank beginner, you can trust that I will keep you safe now that I know what I'm doing.

  "So I have two questions for you? Do you want this? And do you still trust me? If you can say yes to both those questions, we will go to my Not Really A Garage and play."

  She was scared, but she had to know. She had been a little disappointed when she'd thought that he didn't have a dungeon. Now that she knew he did, there was no way she was going to leave here without seeing it. And trying it out.

  "I want the dungeon experience," she said, trying for lightheartedness. "I'm much too curious to say no to that, now that I know it's a possibility."

  "Curiosity might not be enough of a reason—"

  She interrupted him. She took one of his hands and brought it to her breast, where her nipples were erect and swollen. Then she pulled his hand lower. He took over then, sliding his fingers under her waistband and down, in between her legs to the place where her pussy was drenched. "I don't think I brought enough panties with me," she gasped as he expertly caressed the slick folds. "Every time I put a new pair on, it keeps getting soaked though."

  "I suggest you leave them off altogether. All your clothes, in fact. It's plenty warm here, and I love to see you naked."

  "Is that an order?"

  "No orders here for now. In the dungeons, though, my word will be your law."

  She pressed herself against him. "Take me there. I want to, Stephen."

  "Okay. I will."

  Chapter 17

  There wasn't a plan for this. A yearning, yes. A need. He hadn't intended to bring her here because he hadn't let her know yet how great his need was.

  Of course he had a dungeon. He had spent almost as much time planning it as he'd put into the design of his beachside home.

  But taking a novice into his dungeon might not be the best way to proceed.

  Especially a beginner like Viola, who was here with him for other reasons. Other reasons? He wasn't even sure what he meant by that thought. She hadn't come to him as a submissive. She wasn't here because of the dungeon. It was an odd feeling. All the women he had hooked up with in recent years had been into some form of BDSM.

  He didn't do vanilla dating. Not anymore. Not at this point in his life.

  Not that she was vanilla. He knew with every instinct he possessed for these things—his splaydar, he called it because he would have her naked, splayed out in front of him, arms and legs bound—he knew that she wanted what he wanted. Or, close enough.

  She had been his first. Before Viola, he had never watched with awe and delight while a girl he had bound, helpless, came hard, screaming his name.

  Now she was his again. Beautiful, passionate Viola of the smiling face and the merry, teasing eyes.

  And yet...and yet. His instincts, which he had learned to trust, had been warning him right from their first night together that something was not quite the same. It was subtle. His rational side had argued that people changed a lot in their twenties. She had changed and so had he.

  But did sexuality change? His sexuality had been fixed for almost as long as he could remember. Even in grade school he had dreamed of capturing girls, binding them, even using a whip. There was no reason for it that he knew of. No abuse. No spankings in his family. No reason why his imagination should take such a dark, forbidden turn.

  He had spoken with enough other doms to know that this was not unusual. Some people had childhood experiences that had shaped their sexuality, but many, like him, had not had any weird or violent experiences. He was just kinky. That was the way it was. He had nothing to feel guilty about or apologize for.

  If he had never found out that there were people who shared his fantasies, he probably would have kept them secret, pleasures to be indulged when he was alone. A way to get himself off. In the privacy of your own mind and heart, you could indulge any scenario. Safe in the shadows, no one else involved, no one else harmed.

  But it had turned out that there were other people who shared his need. Who fed it. And he had learned the ways to take his pleasure and give it, while keeping his partners safe.

  The great taboo surrounding consensual BDSM had mostly been lifted in the contemporary world. People knew about it, joked about it, did it for fun. Dabbled.

  Stephen wasn't a dabbler. He didn't want a partner who was BDSM-curious. He wanted someone who was took the same delight in it that he did.

  So far, he hadn't been able to decide where Viola fit in the scheme of things. At some moments, he thought she was as into it as he was; at others he wasn't so sure. He would discover the truth of her, though. An intense BDSM scene had the tendency to strip away all pretense, all facade. He could take her to a place where there was no shelter, nowhere to hide. A place where she would have to be honest with him, because when your defenses were shredded, honesty was all that was left.

  * * *

  She didn't know what to expect. She had seen a few pictures online of the interior of BDSM clubs and people's personal dungeons. Usually it was just a room in someone's house where they'd hammered hooks into the walls to hang their whips, paddles and floggers. Maybe a spanking bench where the submissive could be bent over and restrained. Dim lighting. A bed or a couch where partners could fuck. A room that was similar to a gym, except that the apparatus was kinky.

  This was not like that.

  She knew it at once as soon as he unlooked the heavy door and pressed it open. When she paused for a moment on the threshold of the dark
space within, he took her hand and pulled her through.

  The air was warm and humid. "I've turned on the air conditioning, but it'll take a few minutes to cool down. I'll show you around in the meantime."

  She was blinking into the darkness, having just come in from the bright sunlight. She couldn't see a thing. There must not be any windows, and he hadn't switched on any lights. "Why is it so dark?"

  "A dungeon should be dark, I think. It's a metaphor, after all."

  "A metaphor for what?"

  "Cruelty. Control. Pain." His voice sounded different—harder, colder. "Forbidden desires that we civilized individuals usually keep repressed." She heard him move a little away from her and a dim light came on to their left. She also saw a faint glow on the wall next to the door where they had just entered. An electrical panel of some sort, which he was now standing beside. There were some tiny lights there, all red except one. That must be the light he had just illuminated in the corner.

  "This is a little freaky."

  "It'll be fine," he said in his usual voice. "Remember it's playacting. Theater."

  He took her arm and drew her toward the lighted corner. The only thing illuminated was a single isolated chair. The chair looked ordinary enough, made of wood with a straight back. Except that there were leather straps attached to the legs, arms and spine of the chair. And, no, it wasn't ordinary, she realized as they came closer. The seat was split. It would support the thighs and legs on either side of a big empty space.

  Her cheeks reddened as she imagined herself strapped into that chair. Naked, of course. She would be unable to move while he stood over her and did, well, whatever he wanted.

  "That's one," he said, moving past the chair and flicked another switch on the wall. It let up the next area, where there was an X-frame up against the wall, complete with restraints for fastening a submissive to the frame. She would be pinned there, arms and legs widely spread, unable to free herself, her body open and vulnerable.