Tempt Me

by Caitlin Crews

  This, however, required a whole lot more than a speech on her part.

  And this is what she knew already. Whatever she did, or didn’t do, she was never going to get Conrad Vanderburg out of her head. She’d tried already and failed. Miserably.

  More than that, she was fairly sure he had changed her body, and her, forever.

  She didn’t think she could go back to thinking that a good night with a lover meant her lying there, sphinxlike, acting lofty and mysterious when once again he came and she didn’t. Talking about closeness, and choosing to have control of her own orgasm, and then not having one.

  How could she go back to any of that when he’d taken a wrecking ball to everything she thought was true—about her body, about what she was capable of, about the things that she could want and feel and need?

  Rory understood that this would all remain true even if she got up from her seat right now and let herself back out of this gloriously Gothic church of his.

  And the rawness inside her grew bigger and bigger, more unwieldy, more insistent.

  She tried to imagine what it would be like if she left. She couldn’t help thinking that no matter what it might demand of her to stay, leaving would be the kind of regret she might never get over.

  And she had no illusions. If she left, there was no way that Conrad would let her come back.

  It’s just sex, she told herself stoutly. Kinky sex, that’s all. Why are you being so dramatic about it?

  And that helped. That put her back on familiar ground. She was a goddamned sex positive, progressive, proudly kink-friendly woman. Even if, until now, the kinkiest thing she’d ever done had involved playing with candle wax with a boyfriend in college. The same boyfriend who had introduced her to girl-on-girl porn, which had played a huge part in her deciding that she must be pansexual.

  She realized she was waiting for Conrad to say something else, but a glance his way—at all that brooding, weaponized patience—made it clear that he wasn’t going to do that.

  So Rory would have to do what was necessary.

  It really was necessary, she told herself. Because even if she hated every single thing that happened with this man—which would certainly be a change from what had already happened with him—it would be experience.

  She was supposed to be the kind of person who collected experiences. That was part of her brand.

  And she almost laughed out loud—granted, a little bit hysterically—at the thought of what Conrad would say if she mentioned her brand just now.

  Rory braced herself. She took hold of the skinny little string of the bag she liked to wear out to dates and things, because it was so little and easy, and slipped it off her shoulder. She placed the bag on the table closest to her, and maybe she made a little production out of that. Eating up minutes.

  Dawdling, her father would have said, only makes dread into a decision.

  For God’s sake, this was not the time to think about her father.

  Yet in that moment, Rory suddenly realized exactly why her father had been so appalled that she’d wanted to talk about her sex life with him. She’d never understood before. All the sex she’d ever had was about as meaningful as a sneeze. Why not debate and discuss over food with family? Why not talk it up all over the place, because what did it matter if everyone knew her thoughts on every last detail? They were only thoughts.

  But she understood, at last, that when other people talked about sex they weren’t talking about their thoughts and philosophies and what ifs. They were talking about action. About actual acts. And all the acts Rory had ever taken part in had been about as intimate and vulnerable as a high five.

  But that wasn’t true for everyone.

  Because everything with Conrad already felt more intimate, more raw, more meaningful or powerful—in the sense of consequences, in this body that no longer felt like her own—than literally all the sex she had ever had.

  That made a different sort of sensation go through her like a long, sad ripple.

  And then Rory banished her father from her head and at the same time, put her hands on her knees and tried to imagine how she was going to make herself do this. It should have been simple. Sliding out of the chair, getting down on the rug—no big thing.

  But it felt...huge. Like flinging herself off a cliff.

  Like changing her life, as he’d said.

  She looked at Conrad for help, but he remained as implacable as stone. As if he could sit there, watching and waiting, until the end of time.

  Maybe that was comforting. She blew out a breath. Then heaved in another one, because oxygen no longer seem to be doing the trick.

  She shifted a little and realized that her pussy was ridiculously wet. That there was that low, throbbing ache that made her wonder whether, if she just squeezed her thighs together, she could make herself come just like this.

  Just at the idea.

  And then oddly, she felt her eyes well up, even as her nipples prickled to life again, poking hard against her tank top.

  Something shifted inside her, the way it had when she’d been standing outside this church earlier. It was the sense that she was already ruined, so what was a little more? Rory wanted to call that defeatist, but she had the sneaking suspicion that it was nothing more and nothing less than that wholescale surrender that he’d been talking about.

  The very word made her want to sob. It made her want to put her hands between her legs and make herself come, over and over.

  It made her want him.

  It made her feel as if she was caught in a terrible undertow, tossed and rolled by the waves and then dragged out to a sea she hardly knew—

  And then finally, in the end, it was such a simple thing.

  She slipped off the chair. She took herself down to the rug.

  Rory knelt there in front of him, her chest heaving and her pulse a drum inside her, as if she’d performed an Olympic feat.

  For a moment, the noise inside her head was so loud, and her body shook so much, that she thought she might crumple down into a puddle—

  But Conrad smiled.

  A genuine smile, and it changed everything.

  Everything inside her seem to...lift. Then spin a bit, like hope.

  He sat forward, and that was when it occurred to her that she wasn’t simply kneeling, which was bad enough. She was kneeling between his legs, in front of his chair.

  But she didn’t have time to worry herself to death over that little detail, because he was sitting forward and putting that palm of his to her cheek.

  His hand was big and hard, and she knew from last time that he burned hot to the touch. But his palm felt cool against her cheek, which only made her flush harder, because she understood in a flash that he could tell. That he could see all these reactions she was having, no matter what she might say.

  Conrad brushed his thumb over her cheek, and she felt everything inside her settle. All that noise, all that jangling and worry, smoothed out into a kind of humming.

  Like once again, he’d used a tuning fork on her, and all she could think to do was offer him what little music she had in return.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said.

  And for a terrifying second, Rory thought she might actually burst into tears. Great, racking sobs. The sort of thing that would leave her messy and red-faced and swollen eyed for days—

  But somehow, she managed to hold that all back.

  Somehow, she managed to keep herself in one piece. Nothing more than eyes too blurry to see and a sob that had nowhere to go, because she held her breath.

  Like her life depended on it.

  “It’s all right,” he told her, his hand still on her face and his voice so calm and sure she wanted to melt. “Tears are a good thing. You can let them out. I promise you, little one, that there is nothing that you could show me, or do, t
hat I can’t handle.” His thumb moved against her skin, her hot cheek, as if he was rubbing peace into her with every stroke. “There is no too much here.”

  It felt like a far worse surrender when tears flooded her eyes and then tracked down her cheeks, no matter the horror in her. And no matter what he said.

  But true to his word, he simply let her cry—and that made her cry harder. One big sob, then another, and his hand stayed where it was. She even sagged against him, there against the hard certainty of his thigh. And his other hand came up to hold her there too, smoothing its way over her hair.

  Then, after the storm took her and shook her, it let her go.

  And Rory felt...washed clean.

  “I must look...” she began, as his hands helped her kneel upright again.

  “You look beautiful,” he told her, matter-of-factly.

  “I know that’s not true,” she started, wiping at her face.

  But he caught her hands and drew them away. And then held them, so there was nothing for her to do but look up at him. Rory found it hard to breathe, yet again, because the way he was looking at her was so intense she was sure she must have caught fire.

  “Stop thinking about how you look.” Conrad’s gaze was deep. Dark. Another demand. “Think instead about how I see you. You look beautiful, Rory. You look vulnerable. Open and honest. You could not please me more if you tried.”

  And again, it was as if she suddenly grew wings and could fly. As if she was already soaring somewhere high above Paris. When instead, she was kneeling down in front of a man because he’d asked her to.

  He was still toying with her hair. He’d dropped his hand from her face, but he held a long strand of her hair between the fingers of his other hand, and he was...simply playing with it.

  And for a long while, he concentrated on that, with so much focus and intensity that she found herself shivering hot and cold once again.

  “Here’s what I want you to do with your hands,” he said after a while. As if it had only just occurred to him. “If you’re kneeling the way you are now, sitting back on your heels, you can rest your hands on your thighs, palms up. If you’re kneeling up, I’d like your hands in the small of your back. Do you understand?”

  “Do you really... I mean does it really matter...” He shifted that look of his from her hair to her. Steady. Implacable. Her pulse skipped. “I mean... I’m just...there are so many details. Aren’t you afraid it will get lost somehow in all the rules?”

  “The details are what make it fun,” Conrad replied, and that gleam in his eyes made her think he was laughing at her. Again.

  “I thought it was the sex that was fun.”

  “Sex is always supposed to be fun, Rory.” He didn’t shake his head, but she had the impression he could have. “If I were to indulge in a little spot of vanilla sex, I would expect that to be fun, because it’s sex. Everything else is like spices. Some people don’t like spicy food at all, which is perfectly fine. Other people like a mildly spicy food, and enjoy it at that temperature to their heart’s content. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Sure. Ball gags and cilantro. Totally the same thing.”

  Rory was so close to him now, kneeling there before him. She could see when that gleam in his eyes turned to something else. Something that made her think instead of how stern he could be. And all the uses he might have for that hard hand of his.

  She repressed a little shudder.

  “Just like any other kind of sex, the kind I prefer is highly individual,” Conrad said, that patient tone laced through with something more like steel. It made her sit a little straighter on her knees. “You can go into any club and expect to see certain trappings, but every practitioner is different. We all want different things. We have different enthusiasms. Different things get us off.”

  As he spoke, he wrapped that glossy black rope of her hair round and around his finger.

  “For example, some people like a little hint of pain with their pleasure.” He tugged on the hair he held, and she gasped at the little pinch at her scalp. While at the same time, she felt her nipples pinch, and her clit throb. “You, for example, respond beautifully to pain.”

  “I don’t...” But she didn’t finish that sentence.

  Conrad eased back on that tugging pressure. “Some people like quite a lot of pain, and only through it do they find their pleasure,” he said. “It’s all in the details, Rory. Like anything else in life, it’s an infinitely customizable menu.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  And when his mouth curved, she remembered the pointed comment he’d made about how she hadn’t asked him that first.

  “If I were to get philosophical about it, I would tell you that what turns me on the most is radical trust,” he said, and the quieter his voice got, the more intensely his dark blue eyes gleamed. “You put yourself in my hands, literally, and take whatever I choose to give you, trusting that what I will do with it will not only make us both come, but, truly, make us better people.”

  There wasn’t anything particularly sexy about what he said. And still everything inside her reacted as if it was. She wanted to pick her hands from where they rested on top of her thighs, just as he told her, and do something with all that greedy energy. All that throbbing, greedy heat.

  “And if you weren’t being philosophical?”

  “There are many dominants,” Conrad said, a different gleam in his gaze. “But I tend to skew more toward high protocol. With a healthy amount of discipline.”

  Rory felt as winded as if she’d run up six flights of stairs. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I expect, and demand, that you speak to me in a certain way. Using certain words. And that you assume the appropriate positions that match those things.”

  “That...doesn’t really tell me anything.”

  “If we were in a club, I would expect any submissive who approached me to do so on their knees,” he told her coolly, his gaze never shifting from her face. “I would expect them to sit before me as you are now, in either of the two kneeling positions I described to you, but keep their eyes lowered unless I asked them to look at me.”

  She thought maybe her mouth dropped open at that.

  Conrad’s eyes crinkled in the corners. “I insist on being addressed respectfully. And I take a dim view of being spoken to unless I’ve issued an invitation to do so. That’s a basic overview of high protocol.” His gaze moved over her, and she knew he could see how fast she was breathing. There was no hiding it. “As for discipline? It can take any number of forms, but I’m a big believer in maintenance spankings.”

  Every conversation with him made her feel as if she was being buffeted by high winds while standing on some unprotected mountaintop. This was no different. Every word he said seemed to spark a new fire inside her, even as her mind reeled about and tried to keep up.

  “Okay. Wait. What about all that...bowing and scraping and whatever else is hot to you?”

  “All of it.” And again, his laughter was in his gaze, if not out loud.

  “Doesn’t that make you...”

  But there were some things even she didn’t dare say.

  Conrad knew. How did he always know? “Rory. Are you asking me if there are some who are drawn to this particular lifestyle because it accords them an architecture they can build around their innate bullying behavior? Of course there are.” He shrugged. “But that’s true of anything—of any people in any kind of relationship. Whatever our gender, whatever our sexual identity, there are no spaces—anywhere—that are one hundred percent safe from people who might manipulate those spaces to their own ends. But I will tell you that the people in the spaces I inhabit, while certainly not perfect, tend to be significantly more self-aware than the average puppy dog of a boy you might find in a bar.”

  “They’re self-aware about the
way they like women to kneel in front of them and call them...what? My liege?”

  “Sir, generally. Or Master, depending.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, his dark eyes glittering. “But what on earth makes you think that it’s only women who kneel?”

  Rory blinked at that, a bit shocked with herself. Because, of course, the internet had been filled with images of all sorts of people in all sorts of submissive poses. Why was it she couldn’t seem to remember that all of this could apply to all kinds of people who weren’t her?

  Maybe she was as selfish as he’d suggested she was.

  She didn’t know what to do with that possibility. “You’re right. I knew that. I...”

  “Do you really want a seminar on BDSM throughout the ages?” Conrad asked, with a hint of that amusement again. “I prefer more practical applications of philosophy, but you can waste all the time you want, Rory. I already know how this works.”

  But that other thing he’d said was still rattling around inside of her. “Well, but... I also want to know what you mean by maintenance spanking.”

  The way he almost smiled then struck her as deeply unholy. It was like a completely different note rang through her then, wicked and wild.

  “Maintenance spankings are when the spanking is simply part of the calendar. Once a week, every night, whatever works for the relationship. Meaning,” he said when she frowned at him, “I would not wait for you to do something wrong, then spank you. I would spank you not only whenever I pleased in the general course of things, but also on a schedule.”

  “A schedule?”

  “I find that expectations and anticipation lead to the most delicious places,” Conrad told her.

  “Is that how you...keep them obedient?” she asked, feeling as if she was flailing around, trying to get the vocabulary right.

  Or maybe it’s not the vocabulary you’re worried about, but how much you long for all these problematic things he’s talking about so casually—but she didn’t want to listen to that voice inside her.