The Dani Collins Erotic Romance Collection: Mastering Her RolePlaying the Master

by Dani Collins

  For a second they were both still, and she realized his breath was hissing with exertion. Not as much as her. She was sweating and aching and a sob of final opposition escaped her throat, but at least she hadn’t been a complete pushover.

  Neck strained by the pull in her hair, muscles trembling as she continued to resist his grip on her, she whispered once more, “I hate you.” Because she did. She really, really did.

  He only held her like that until she ran out of strength and wilted into subjugation. Vanquished. The loser. Always.

  Then he released her hair so she could loll her head forward and transferred his grip on her hands.

  “Be still,” he commanded when she began to struggle again. His tone was perfectly neutral. Not strained, not angry, not tender or caring. “I want you to understand why this is happening to you,” he told her. “So calm yourself.”

  She could barely breathe, pinned across his lap on the padded bench with her wrists manacled by his grip. Her legs couldn’t move.

  “It’s happening because I’m stupid,” she managed to pant, heart blistered with disappointment and sorrow. “I trusted you and Eloisa. I hate you both. You’re horrible people. Just like—” No. She wouldn’t tell him. Maybe he already knew, maybe Eloisa would tell him, but something stopped her from admitting she was Ann. Not here. Not now. Not like this. It would make her look all the weaker and more useless.

  “Who?” Porter prompted, having trouble holding on to his control and reaching desperately to maintain his grip on the scene. This was way more than he’d bargained for, and he could barely process how it had escalated into the realm it had.

  Swiping at his eye to clear his vision, he realized she’d split his eyebrow with her elbow. He was still catching his breath, aware of places that would turn up with more bruises tomorrow. Fuck. When he’d first realized she meant to fight him, he hadn’t seen this coming.

  She stubbornly said nothing, only held her position across his lap with stiff resistance, her tension a sign of remarkable endurance. A part of him admired that, but he couldn’t afford to soften.

  “Are we talking about your Dom?” If the man was dealing with this sort of defiance, no wonder he’d sent her out for training. Even Porter was taken aback. He deliberately took this moment to regain mastery over himself, her and the scene.

  While a distant internal voice, one he’d never heard this deep in a club like this, questioned whether she was really playing?

  The whole point of a safe word was to allow a sub to struggle and intensify a scene, but he found himself teetering between trying to give Violet the outlet she might need and fearing that he was damaging her.

  Damaging them.

  She sniffed.

  A few tears were to be expected. This would have been an emotional outlet as much as physical one for her. Still, when he set a reassuring hand on the smooth curve of her ass and she jerked in rejection, he felt a pang of dismay.

  He left his touch there, needing the connection before they continued.

  “Vi, I want you to say your safe word. Then we’re going to have that talk I mentioned, about your experience. Then, if you want to continue, we can, but you can’t do this to your Dom. He needs to know your limits before you lose control like this.”

  “Fuck you, Porter. You’re going to do whatever you want to me anyway. If this is your way of getting access to a woman’s cunt then you are one.”

  He traced the line of her thong to where it disappeared into her crack. “That’s quite a mouth you have.”

  “Yeah, and it was wrapped around your cock yesterday. This is the thanks I get? I’ll never forgive you. Never.” Her tone rasped with sincerity. She let her head hang off the bench and sniffed again.

  “Violet,” he said gently. “I want you to say your safe word.”

  “You say it,” she bit back. “You end this if you really intend to, because I don’t think you do.”

  He paused in tracing the line of her ass cheeks, so beautiful, but so tense. Her shoulders were a frigid line of angry defensiveness.

  “If you say the word, we stop,” he insisted. “Say it now, so you’ll understand that it really does work.”

  “And you’ll beat me before I leave this room, because that’s what kind of man you really are. Get it over with and let me out of here.”

  His brain stalled on what kind of man you really are then slowly ground through the rest of what she’d said. Was she genuinely inviting the punishment she seemed to be asking for? The thought, Do it, and you’ll never see her again, slid insidiously into his consciousness, like a stiletto into his heart.

  With an abrupt, instinctive move, he brought her up so her ass was in his lap.

  She tried to scramble away, but despite her wiry strength, he easily overpowered her, keeping her in his lap while he forced her chin around so he could see her face.

  The wounded desolation in her eyes made him suck in a breath.

  “Fuck, Violet. That’s what the safe word is for. Don’t let it get this far.”

  She tried again to fight herself free and he only held her closer and tighter, realizing how cold her skin was. This wasn’t a sub who’d challenged him to up the excitement during a struggle. It was a desperate woman going into shock out of fear.

  With another curse aimed at Eloisa and his own stupidity, he rose with her in his arms and shouldered through the side door into the after-care room. He stripped her in seconds, not letting himself dwell on how pretty her pale figure was, just brushed aside her confused resistance and sat her in the prefilled tub, shoes on the edge where he could remove them.

  Ann slouched herself into the sudden comfort of blessedly warm water and blinked at the unexpected change in scenery. This room was somewhere between a first-aid clinic and a boudoir with its elegant shelves of jars and tubes and bandages and Japanese screen and filigreed freestanding mirror reflecting an army cot. Yet it had the atmosphere of a womb with its low lighting and plush towels and this inflated seat inside the claw-footed tub that hugged her very soothingly.

  She watched Porter take off her shoe and set it aside, then ease her foot into the water. He did the second, face like granite, making her curl into herself under the water, apprehensive.

  He was angry. She had thought he was angry in the other room, but that had been a man frosted with purpose. Here, even though his emotions seemed equally controlled, he was smoldering with fury. His touch was gentle, but his hands shook. His jaw pulsed with tension where he ground his teeth. The waves of aggression pouring off him made her tighten into an even smaller ball.

  But he didn’t speak to her, didn’t even look at her. He only turned away to remove his watch and give another roll to his damp sleeves, baring himself to his elbows, before he wheeled a round stool to behind her head. She sat up to look behind her and he only made an adjustment with something on the edge then said, “Put your head here.”

  It was a cushion for the taught muscles at the base of her skull. He drew the wet tendrils of her hair out of the tub then pressed her to rest back. A cup scooped water from near her shoulder before he wet the top of her head.

  “Isn’t that pouring onto the floor?” she asked, trying to sit up again.

  He set a firm hand on her forehead to hold her in place. “There’s a basin to catch it. Just relax and don’t talk for a few minutes. Wait until you feel better.”

  The gentle sluice of warm water continued, prompting her to instinctively close her eyes, even though it wasn’t trickling into her face.

  He paused and a scent came into her nostrils like honey and vanilla. Both his hands smoothed over her head and gently pulled through her hair. Blunt fingertips dug in, working up a lather. The slushy sound and slow massage soon had her releasing the tense grip she had on her emotions.

  Which was scary, because huge feelings were standing behind the wall that his slow massage thinned with every swirl of his fingertips against her scalp.

  “Porter, I don’t understand.”
She opened her eyes, but they felt gluey and full. Tears sat heavy and stinging on her eyeballs. Her throat thickened.

  He paused a moment before continuing his scrolling massage. “Do you know what a cuckold is?”

  “A man whose wife cheats.” She tensed, wondering if he thought she was married.

  “That’s what most people think. It’s actually a man who enjoys watching another man fuck his wife. He directs it.”

  Her breath stopped as the possibilities within such a fantasy tantalized her. Wicked feeling returned in a sinful warmth throughout her body and pulled a tingling excitement from her scalp and shoulders and breasts. What was wrong with her that she found voyeurism so arousing?

  “I participated in such a ménage a few years ago.”

  “Eloisa,” she breathed, realizing why he was telling her this.

  “Si. She’s a very sexual person. We enjoyed ourselves, perhaps too much for her husband’s liking. He was controlling in many ways. Very destructive. I took her away from him for her own safety.”

  Her heart dipped and looped through every word, squeezing tight as he admitted to enjoying Eloisa’s body, then squirming in discomfort at feeling a type of kinship with Eloisa. I understand being controlled by fear. Was she exactly like her, falling for Porter out of the same sense of gratitude? His grim sounding, I took her away from him, wasn’t far from the way he’d talked of taking Violet away from the man he thought she belonged to. No wonder he broke hearts like match sticks.

  “But you left her. She’s angry with you for that.”

  “Rescue is not empowerment. She was merely transferring her dependence onto me. I never wanted to marry, but she decided we should. Searching for an underwriter for her fantasy club is how she wound up married to such filth in the first place, so I gave her a generous donation toward setting up this one, providing her the means to stand on her own two feet without any man. She’s headstrong enough to feel crossed by someone who says no to her, but what I did was hardly a crushing blow. And even if she doesn’t think we’re square, even if she finds my upcoming marriage insulting—it’s only a formality for God’s sake, nothing more—she still had no right to draw you into our conflict.”

  I am your conflict, she thought, but only said, “She isn’t insulted. She’s scorned. She loves you.”

  “What is love?”

  He asked the question in a weary, austere rumble.

  With a pang of sadness, she realized she had only a vague idea herself. Her mother had loved her father. She didn’t remember him, but her mother’s grief and lack of desire for a meaningful life after his death was proof. Raina had loved her husband, Fonzo. Aside from observing them, the rest of her knowledge came from books and movies, all glossy and bright, never gritty or hard or unrequited.

  “Love is…wanting to see that person all the time,” she hazarded, trying to define what she’d seen between her friends. “Admiring them for their best qualities. Knowing they understand and accept you.”

  “Eloisa doesn’t accept that I have no interest in monogamy. I admire her—she’s intelligent as well as beautiful. She’s sexually accomplished and open, but I don’t need to see her every day. She craves variety, too. Quite honestly, as much as she enjoys men, I believe she prefers women. So as far as I’m concerned, she’s merely being territorial and it’s misplaced because I don’t belong to her.”

  No interest in monogamy. Thankfully he couldn’t see her flinch.

  “Two Doms don’t make a good pair, anyway, and she knows it. That’s how she knew I wouldn’t be tempted by anything she offered and dangled the kind of woman she thought I couldn’t resist instead.”

  “A natural submissive,” she murmured, feeling the words catch inside her chest like the worst hangnail peeling a strip from her heart.

  His hands stopped, then he smoothed them down, lightly tugging her hair as he skimmed the lather from her tresses.

  “Not quite,” he said. “More like someone in need of Domination.”

  The pull in her scalp was almost painful, but she was so ensnared by what he’d said, she held herself motionless to his gentle hurting. “What’s the difference?”

  He combed his fingers into the soap-matted length, continuing to pull in a way that brought tears to her eyes. “Whether you realize it or not, you needed what happened between us in that other room.”

  “No, I didn’t!” she insisted, swelling with outrage. “You wanted to hurt me—”

  “Shhh, listen,” he commanded, setting a heavy hand on her forehead again, pinning her in place.

  She choked a semi-hysterical laugh at the shadowed ceiling, eyes hot, throat tight with protest at how easily he controlled her.

  “Let’s go back to the wolves for a minute,” he murmured, slicking a final layer of soap from her hair. “Part of the pack mentality, part of what holds it together, is a lack of retaliation when one gets aggressive. You were looking for an outlet, Violet. I saw the defiance in you from almost the first time we spoke. You needed someone strong enough to control that energy because you haven’t figured out how to do it yourself yet. I’ll admit I could have handled our scene a lot better, but the fact you refused to use the safe word demonstrated a terrific amount of trust in me.”

  She considered that as he removed his hands from her hair and the uncomfortable tugging ceased, leaving her with a tremendous sense of relief. And a deep vulnerability. Had she attacked him almost as a test? To see whether he’d really do it?

  “Regardless of that,” he murmured, “Eloisa ought to have seen you don’t belong here. I’m not happy.” He dipped the cup and slowly rinsed away the last of the suds, cupping a hand at her hairline to keep the water from running into her eyes, not offering anything else until her hair was clean and he’d squeezed most of the water out. He draped a towel draped over her head and, still seated, rolled the stool so he sat beside her.

  As he reached across her to take up a facecloth from the shelf, he gave her a strange look.

  “What?” she prompted.

  He shook his head as he dipped and wrung out the facecloth. “You remind me of someone, with your head covered like that.”

  “Who?” She quickly lifted a hand to brush the towel off so it dropped away.

  “You need to stay warm.” He reached for a fresh one.

  “Who, Porter,” she demanded, catching his hand to prevent him.

  “My fiancée.” The ironic twist he put on the word told her how removed he was from seeing his upcoming marriage as real. “She’s nothing like you, though.” He evaded her weakened touch and gently began swiping at her face with the damp facecloth. “Lacks your killer instinct.” He pointed to his brow where blood congealed in a dark red lump and was a smudge of rusty red across his temple.

  The mark made her insides tremble. She hadn’t known she was capable of that kind of violence. She hadn’t been quite sane in those moments and if he hadn’t held himself under such tight control, she suspected they’d both be nursing a lot worse injuries right now. It was a disturbing thought, one she didn’t know how to further talk out.

  He didn’t give her an opportunity, distracting her by taking care as he washed her face. That worried her on a different level. She didn’t doubt that her makeup was a mess, but he already had Ann on his mind. Would he recognize her if he washed her clean?

  Fresh tears, like water seeping from a stress fracture, gathered and traced down her temples when she tried to blink them away. “You don’t need to do this,” she insisted.

  “I do. For me. Relax.”

  “It’s not that,” she said, deflating. Maybe she should just let him recognize her and deal with his reaction and Eloisa’s consequences. She felt so defenseless, though. She highly doubted he’d hug her with delight. He was mad that Violet had been drawn in here. How would he react if he realized his even more docile fiancée was haunting Eloisa’s forbidding halls? She wasn’t up to another confrontation and pile of drama.

  A shaken sigh escaped her, h
opeless and overwhelmed.

  “I have to marry her, Violet,” he said with deep sincerity, dabbing the tears away with the tongue-like cloth. “I realize I’ve led you on to some extent. You’ve done the same,” he accused with quiet gruffness. His mouth firmed. “Maybe it wasn’t intentional. We react very strongly to each other. That’s why I failed to see exactly what you needed earlier. I thought you were more like me, that you fit into my world. I wanted you to, but you don’t.” He paused in washing her face to let his meaning sink in. “Places like this aren’t for you. And the way you respond to me, as a man, I highly doubt that other man is for you. I want you to tell him so.”

  The other man was him. She swallowed, recognizing in her head that this was ironic to the point of hilarity, but not finding it the least bit funny. Led him on. Had she? Of course. That’s what Eloisa had pushed her to do. She’d gone along because she had wanted to know more about the man she was supposed to marry, but she’d wound up embracing the opportunity to become Violet, never contemplating the point when she would have to reveal herself as Ann.

  Now he was telling her she wasn’t right for him in either guise. That hurt so much it halted the breath in her lungs, making her chest and throat and eyes burn.

  “What if…”

  He held the cloth poised, waiting.

  “What if I want to be with him anyway, and this is what he likes? What if it’s the only way I could be with him?” The words sounded desperate and stupid, like Eloisa accepting a nightmare of a marriage to make her business dream come true.

  “Vi, it’s like if he’s gay and you’re straight. If you’re not both into the same thing, it will never work.”

  She turned her face away from his touch, needing a minute to collect herself. She knew he was right. That bleak room next door, with its plethora of ways to induce pain, wasn’t for her. But she hated that it meant neither was he.