For a long time, she dozed in and out of whatever space she was in. Conrad relaxed against the chaise, stroking her hair with one hand and opting not to pay too close attention to the perfect weight of her there against his chest. The way her face fit there in the crook of his neck. Or the way she held her hands up in front of her, clasping them together, right there against his heart.
He had always had the courage of his convictions—maybe to a fault—but that didn’t matter here. It couldn’t. She was brand-new to the scene, and there was no way to tell how she would feel on the other side of her first BDSM experience. Some new submissives retreated into shame and self-recrimination, afraid of their own desires and the pleasure they’d received from things they were afraid to name in the light. Others went in the other direction, so desperate for more of that same sweet drug of submission that they took any risk to get another hit.
Whatever route Rory took, the last thing Conrad needed to do was start acting like he had aspirations to be her master when all she needed was a dominant for the night. An introduction, not a claiming.
He couldn’t believe that word was in his head.
Conrad shook his head in the dark, wishing once again that his friends could see this. He could hear Dorian laughing from a thousand kilometers away in Berlin.
Eventually, Rory stirred. He saw her eyes flutter. She screwed up her face and stretched a little and then she lifted her head, looking around as if she hadn’t the faintest clue where she was.
“We are out in my garden,” he told her, before she became alarmed. “Drink some water. Eat something.”
Rory pushed herself into a more upright position, slowly. Very, very slowly, as if she wasn’t entirely certain her body still worked in the same way in had before. Conrad watched her closely, seeing the instant she started remembering what had happened tonight—because her cheeks began to look flushed again.
But she obeyed him, no doubt still stumbling her way back out of subspace and into her own head again. She picked up the glass of water and gulped at it, greedily. Then she ate a little, looking almost guilty.
And only when she’d demolished the plate he’d brought for her and drank the rest of the water, did she pull even farther away from him to wrap that throw even more tightly around her.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked, her voice rough and sleepy.
Conrad stayed where he was, lounging there with one knee up and one leg straight. He reached over and helped himself to that hair of hers, so glossy and so silky to the touch.
“Inside where you left them, I would imagine.”
She nodded, vigorously. “Well. I guess I’d better—”
“Rory.”
She stilled at the sound of her name in his mouth, and he liked that far too much. He reminded himself that this wasn’t about him. He had a duty here. And it wasn’t to satisfy himself as much as it was to make certain that she was satisfied, in every possible way, so that she would have a healthy introduction to the lifestyle. Safe, sane, and consensual, the way it was meant to be.
He was more than happy to lecture others on how they ought to treat newcomers to the scene, but he had never felt this invested before. In her, not the scene.
In her, full stop.
“There are two parts to a scene,” he told her, getting his lecture on again, because that felt like solid ground. “Both equally important. One part gets all the attention because it usually has equipment, and vanilla people are afraid of it. All those scary whips and chains. But this part is called aftercare, and it’s necessary.”
“Aftercare,” she echoed him, and he knew that particular note in her voice now. She sounded lost.
He tugged her into his arms again and held her there against his chest, making a soothing sort of sound.
“Aftercare,” he confirmed. “Sometimes it involves attending to bruises or marks, depending on how rough and exciting things got. And that’s important, but the most important component is an emotional resetting.”
“You don’t have to worry about me getting emotional,” she told him, very seriously. “I don’t do that.”
“Everyone does that.” Conrad found himself resting his chin on her head because it fit there so nicely, as if... But no. He wasn’t going to analyze it. “Remember what I told you. The point of this is intimacy. You can’t have intimacy without emotion, or sustained intensity without vulnerability. Aftercare allows you to process intimacy, emotion, and vulnerability, while we slowly regain our equilibrium.”
She smelled like him now, and he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t enjoy that. He did. But he also felt her harsh intake of breath. “We?”
“Of course, we,” he said, and he didn’t sound the way he should. Aloof. Unmarked. “I took you apart—I need to make sure that I put you back together. That’s my job. And it’s also my job to protect you. To make sure that you’re in the right state of mind to go rejoin the world after what happened between us.”
“Oh,” she said, an odd note in her voice. “This is just a mandatory thing, then.”
“It should be mandatory, yes,” Conrad said darkly. “Of course, it varies, because people have different needs and philosophies. The main purpose of aftercare is to make sure that everyone is okay on every level.”
She shifted and looked up at him, her gaze vulnerable and direct. “Are you okay?”
It took him back, though maybe it shouldn’t have. But he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had asked him that. Normally, in club situations, the submissive might share some feelings—usually threaded through with thanks and some angling for a repeat—and then they would both go their separate ways.
But there was something about Rory, damn her. And the solemn way she regarded him, as if she knew more about the state of his heart than he did.
“I am,” Conrad replied. He wanted to say, more okay than I’ve been in some time, but he didn’t.
He wouldn’t.
It was only when his heart started beating a little too hard that he realized that one of her hands was stretched out over his chest as if she was holding it in her hand.
“Come,” he said, feeling grumpy with all the things he felt, but shouldn’t. “Let’s get you in that hot tub.”
She frowned as he shifted her off him. But when he stood up and walked over to the large tub, she followed him. The tub was done in wood so that it seemed almost to blend into the garden all around. The water bubbled quietly, the soft light inside the tub illuminating the benches that lined its walls and sending a sweet little light dancing around the gazebo.
A man liked to see who he brought out here in the dark. Especially when she was as perfect as Rory.
He tested the water with his fingers, then nodded for her to climb in.
She continued to frown at him. “Are you...giving me a bath like a toddler? Sir?” Her frown deepened. “Do I still have to call you Sir?” When he only eyed her, she let out a small sound of frustration. “Do you want me to call you Sir?”
Rory continued to frown at him, so Conrad set about removing his own clothes. And watched, torn somewhere between amusement and sheer lust as she...gaped at him.
“I’m glad you appreciate me, little one,” he rumbled at her when he finally stripped off. Her eyes had dropped to his cock, which was already ready for another round. “But I do need you to get into that tub.”
She gulped and then obeyed him, climbing into the hot tub and making a sound of appreciation as she slid into the water.
Conrad followed, sinking into the heat and sitting on one of the built-in benches. Rory stood before him, her breasts above the waterline as she tied her hair into a knot on top of her head. And then she submerged herself to her chin, letting out a deep, long sigh that seemed to come from the very center of her.
“Tell me about that clit ring,” he said, idly, as he lounged on the bench
across from her. “You don’t have any other piercings. Okay, your ears. But nothing else quite so interesting.”
She moved her arms in the water, as if feeling the weight of it against her fingers. “I guess I wanted it because it seemed cool. You know, a conversation piece, anyway. It’s always a surprise. And usually a good one.”
“That’s not the real reason.”
Her gaze flew to his, then back to the water. “No, that’s not the real reason, but I didn’t think it worked.”
“Because the real reason is...?”
“I wanted to feel,” she said, her voice cracking a little on that last word, her gaze trained on the surface of the water. “I wanted to be...more. I thought it would help.”
“But it didn’t.”
“It was a conversation starter.” Her smile was rueful. “It let me think that I was kinky and mysterious, I guess. But until tonight, it was really just jewelry.”
He didn’t think there was a single part of her that was just anything, but he didn’t say that. It would be too much, surely. Too dangerous tonight.
“I like it,” he told her instead.
She smiled, though the smile seemed fragile. “Whatever else it is or was supposed to do, I like it because it’s wearable art.” Her gaze moved over his face, searching for something. “Do you want to know why I really moved to Paris?”
It surprised him not only that he did, indeed, want to know—but that the wanting was an intense thing that seemed to grow inside him as she gazed at him. He restricted himself to a nod.
“I love art,” she said. Shyly, he thought, as her smile began to look self-deprecating. “When I went to the Musée Rodin, I cried. I always thought that I could stare at a Manet for a day or two, and at the Musée d’Orsay, I have. And then I go back to my flat and take pictures for social media and pretend they’re the same, when I know they’re not. I can’t draw or paint or even take a good photograph of anything, unless I’m in it. But I love art all the same.”
She kept her gaze on the bubbling, frothing water. “If you can’t make art, you can make your life art, I guess.”
“Rory.” Her name had sounded so silly to him when he’d met her. Such a strange diminutive of the far more beautiful—and apt—Aurora. But now it tasted sweet on his tongue and to his ears it might as well have been a song. “You are the art. You don’t have to make it. You are it.”
She lifted her head, her lovely eyes dark. A different sort of sheen in them.
And when she smiled, it was like dawn breaking, bright and hopeful.
“Do you think it’s possible that your whole world can change when you least expect it?” she asked.
“That’s the only way the world changes,” Conrad replied. Maybe a little too gruffly.
And he shouldn’t let himself do this. He was good at the usual banter. The usual game. Easy conversation, nothing too demanding, keeping everything light and easy so it was no hardship at all to cross back over to the real world.
“Come here,” he said, his voice stern as if it was an order. Though he feared it was something far closer to a request.
And she did, skimming her hands over the water as she crossed the tub. When she reached him, she stood there before him, achingly beautiful, her gaze open and her mouth soft.
Conrad reached over and pulled her close, so he could curve his hands around her neck and rest his thumbs on either side of her throat. He could feel her pulse kick into high gear—and his did the same, to match.
And then he did his job.
“You seem to spend a large quantity of your life doing things so that others see you in a certain way. But you can’t curate the best parts of life, Rory. You have to live them.”
“You live in a converted a Gothic church,” she whispered, because of course she was going to argue. “Talk about a curated life.”
“Answer me this,” he said, because this was what he did. He opened them up and they told him how they were broken, and then he fixed them. Even if he couldn’t seem to recall the face of another woman, just then. There was only Rory. “What would you do if you had nothing to prove?”
She jerked in his grip as if he’d spanked her again. The look in her dark eyes was something like betrayal. “What would you do?”
He held her gaze. “I’m doing it. I don’t have anything to prove.”
“Really?” she asked, too solemnly for his peace of mind. She shook her head. “You keep a dungeon in a church, Conrad.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable with my life, Rory,” he gritted out, and he knew as he said it that it wasn’t as true as it should have been.
Worse, he thought she knew it, too.
“What is...” She pulled in a breath, and he could hear that it was ragged. He could see emotion in her eyes. And more, he could see the reflection of himself, not quite as composed as he should’ve been. “What is this, Conrad?”
“You tell me,” he said, in a voice so low he hardly heard it.
But she did. Because something shifted, there on her pretty face. She smiled, which was bad enough.
And she leaned forward, as if pushing herself farther into his grip.
Or deeper into your heart, something in him contradicted.
And then she ruined everything, and kissed him.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE HADN’T MEANT to do that.
Or maybe she had, Rory thought, in the last seconds that she was even capable of thought, because kissing Conrad was like magic.
That stern mouth of his was so hard. So impossibly ruthless and beautiful. And even though she felt him stiffen, he kissed her back.
And of all the things that had happened since she’d met him, all of it so confronting, life-altering, and impossible to get her head around—this was almost...sweet.
Or it would have been, if she couldn’t feel the tremor in the air between them. The hush of anticipation. That little spark that reminded her that what was between them was fire, not sugar.
She capitalized on the little moment before the flames kicked in. She kissed him because she could. Because she’d wanted to since almost the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. Because he was letting her.
Because he tasted like everything she’d ever wanted.
And then he made a low noise, grasped her head firmly between his hands, and took over.
And all that sweetness skyrocketed into something else.
Something spectacular.
Conrad claimed her mouth, boldly. Unapologetically.
He wrapped his arms around her, and Rory clung to him, kissing him back as he rose from the water and let it cascade all over them.
“Hold on,” he growled against her mouth.
An order. An invitation. She didn’t care which—she just wrapped her legs around his torso and clung on for dear life as he carried her out of the tub and over to the chaise they’d been lying on before.
He bore her down, coming down on top of her. Hard.
She could feel everything. His chest, crushing her into the chaise with that delirious weight of his. The wetness of their skin, cool against the summer night. The faint sprinkling of hair on his chest that seemed specifically put there to tease her poor, sensitive nipples.
He was so hard, so heavy, and best of all, she could feel his cock between them. It pressed hard against her belly, and Rory felt herself begin to shudder.
As if he didn’t have to be inside her to make her pussy so wet and hot, or the rest of her start to shake. As if this was enough.
Still he kissed her. Again and again, as if he couldn’t get enough.
The way she couldn’t get enough.
Rory kissed him, filled with thanks and emotion and art. All the parts of her she’d trotted out into the light and let him see. All that vulnerability and hope.
She kissed him as if
her life depended on it.
As if she’d been living all this time completely unaware what her life was supposed to be, but his mouth on hers had revived her. Renewed her.
She’d started this night in the shadows outside his house and now she was here in his garden with him on top of her, and neither one of them was quite who she’d imagined they were when she’d come here.
And Rory knew that she would never be the same again.
“Reach up and grab the chair,” Conrad ordered her, that stern voice of his as authoritative as ever, if lanced through with the same fire she felt burn in her. “And hold on for dear life.”
Rory thought her heart might actually claw its way out of her own chest. She kept pulling in breaths as best she could, but they sounded like sobs.
But, of course, she obeyed him. She didn’t think twice about it—a far cry from how she’d started this evening with him. She reached up and grabbed hold of the slats, exulting in the way that made her back arch, so she could present her breasts to him. Because she knew he liked that.
Rory thought a person could spend a lifetime trying to please a man like this.
And loving every moment of it.
Because the way Conrad expressed his pleasure made her entire body quake, a new kind of hard-edged excitement that was already pulsing through her again.
While she’d been following his last order, he’d found another condom and was already rolling it on.
Conrad knelt above her on the chaise, then, and the look on his face was...savage. A kind of storm crashed through his eyes, but there was still that intense, glorious focus on his face.
Something in her melted at that. At the evidence that even when she pushed him, she was safe.
He moved between her legs and reached over to one of the tables beside the chaise. He pulled something out, a small tube, and squirted something into his hand. As he warmed it between his palms, the look he narrowed on her was...pitiless.
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