That impossible connection that had haunted him since the last time he’d seen her.
Nothing changed when he touched her. Neither one of them stood up, started yelling, or tipped over the table. There were still improbable cats, winding this way and that. But at the same time...everything changed.
He felt that click inside him. That bright edge. That space between them was only theirs, filled with desire and surrender, power and pleasure.
It was tempting to imagine that with a single touch, he could feel the truth of her. And of him.
That whether it was a simple touch of hands, or the darker games they’d played that night, it was all the same. And would always be the same.
God, how she tempted him.
“You came to find me,” she said after a moment, her voice soft. And threaded through with something like wonder. “I have to tell you, I really didn’t think you were going to do that.”
“What happened between us was unusually intense,” he said, gruffly. “I should have checked in on you sooner. In person.”
She sighed a little and looked down at their hands. “To discharge your duties, of course.”
Conrad felt that like a slap upside the head.
He had walked out of his office when he never, ever interrupted his workday. He’d been uninterested in carrying on with his usual club activities, because he simply didn’t feel the need any longer. There was only this. There was only her.
And pretending otherwise was perilously close to the kind of lies he’d always detested.
But he needed to do his duty no matter what he wanted. For her, not him.
No one had ever said that duty was easy. Or that it gave anyone what they wanted. Hadn’t he spent his life learning that lesson?
Why should this be any different?
“I have duties where you’re concerned, whether you like it or not,” he told her, keeping his gaze and voice stern.
He watched her melt at once. He watched her wriggle in her seat, then put the cat down to one side as if she needed to concentrate fully and totally on him.
Something he obviously approved of, he thought, as he felt his pulse drop down into his cock, then begin to drum.
“I introduced you into a lifestyle that means a great deal to me,” he continued. “One of the things I feel strongest about is that brand-new submissives not be taken advantage of. By me or anyone else.”
“Has someone taken advantage of me without my knowledge?” She laughed. “I understand that you must think I’m foolish in many ways, Conrad. But I’m a little more sturdy than you think. Or I wouldn’t have taken myself off to live in a foreign country, all alone. And then stayed here, for a good year, taking care of myself.”
“I don’t think you’re foolish,” he said, still concentrating on the touch of her skin against his as their fingers twined. “Or if I do, I find myself charmed by it. But that’s not the point.”
She smiled again, more faintly this time. “I don’t see why it couldn’t be the point. Would it kill us if it was the point? For a minute or two?”
And he felt the weight of the past month, bearing down on him, but still. She made him want to laugh. She always made him want to laugh. He compromised with a smile. “You know you’re charming.”
“I think I’m an endless delight,” she said, and her nose wrinkled up a bit as she looked at him, her dark hair falling to one side. “It’s what you think that remains a mystery.”
“That’s why I came to find you,” Conrad said, very seriously. “Because above all else, it’s important for you to explore who you are. To discover where submission can take you.”
Her eyes were still gleaming. “Is it a bus ticket?”
Conrad ignored that because her hand was in his, and he wanted nothing more than to pick her up. Wrap her in his arms, put a collar around her neck, and call her his. But he had responsibilities. Hadn’t he always? And whether he thought that was fair or unfair, it was reality.
And he would acquit his responsibilities appropriately, come hell or high water.
Even if that meant restraining himself around this woman who had somehow wrecked him in a single night.
That wasn’t something she needed to know, he thought. Yet.
“I assume you’ve already experimented,” he said, amazed how much it cost him to keep his voice even. Easy. “How were those experiences?”
Rory regarded him for a long moment, a frown gathering between her eyes. “Which experiences?”
He made his gaze direct. “Many submissives find their first experience overwhelmingly addictive. As you did not show up at my door again, I’m assuming you went off to find the power dynamics you now know you enjoy wherever you could. And this is Paris. There are clubs everywhere.”
Conrad felt as if he was having an out-of-body experience. Because he’d had this conversation many times before. Usually when a submissive had found it impossible to let go of him and had required him to gently, if firmly, guide her in the right direction. To tell her that everything she was feeling was normal, but not as personal as she believed.
And never once in all the many times he’d had versions of this conversation had he ever found that the thought of that woman with another...
Infuriated him.
Even back in the early days with Marie Jeanette, when he’d been so certain that they were well suited to each other forever, he never felt like this. As if she truly belonged to him, in every possible way. Her soul, her sex, inarguably his.
He ordered himself to calm down.
Rory pulled her hand from his, and he didn’t like that, either, but he let her go. This wasn’t a scene.
Since when had he had trouble telling the difference?
“I think Paris sex clubs are your department, not mine,” she said, suddenly unreadable. Her dark brown eyes were opaque. Even that lush mouth of hers was in a neutral line.
“Then I will be happy to be your guide,” he told her, proud of how calm and generous he sounded.
She stared at him for so long that time, almost as if she was frozen into place, that he could no longer continue to block out the chirpy Japanese pop in the background.
But then Rory cleared her throat, and he forgot everything, save her. “My guide,” she repeated.
“I can tell you which dominants would be good fits for you, and which would be best avoided,” he said, still fighting to keep his voice as cool as possible.
He watched her swallow, as if her throat was tight. And he flashed back to that night. To the depths of her submission, her glorious surrender...and how the hell was he supposed to move on from that?
Because for all his talk about exchanges, he had never felt anything like that before—as if the two of them were entwined at all those different points of pain and power, pleasure and release, but one.
And then she’d kissed him. He’d lost control, and he wasn’t sure he had ever felt so good, so right, in all his life.
But this was about her, not him.
And he tried to look...benevolent. Or whatever she needed to see so that she knew she was safe. That she could experiment as she wished—as she should—and he would...wait, he supposed.
He would have to.
“I want to be very sure that I’m understanding you,” Rory said, sounding a bit stiff. Her gaze was still unreadable. “You tracked me down. I know you have my phone number so you probably know where I live. But how could you possibly have found me here?”
“That was a rhetorical question,” she said when he made as if to answer. And Conrad saw the flash of what he very much believed was temper in her eyes. “You had to want to find me. You had to go out of your way to do it. And now I’m finding it hard to get my head around the possibility that the reason you did that was so that you could...counsel me on how to fuck other men?”
Something shif
ted in him. Blood, maybe, heating up in a way that was not precisely wise. Or safe, for either of them.
“Perhaps you don’t need my counsel,” he managed to say without succumbing to the fire in him. “I’m sure you have puppies aplenty.”
“I’m done with puppies.” And her eyes flashed, telling him that it absolutely was temper. And quite a lot of it, if he wasn’t mistaken. “That’s why I like to come hang out with cats these days. And just to be perfectly clear, I haven’t been trolling around in sex clubs, either. Because it turns out, Conrad, I don’t really want to just...be tied up.”
The only surprising part about this woman, he reminded himself, was that she never ceased to be surprising herself. He never had any idea what she would say. And he had never imagined that she would say something like that. He thought of how she’d melted. How she’d delivered herself into his hands, and come so beautifully—and so often—that memories of it still woke him in the night.
“I was under the impression that you loved being tied up,” he said, trying to sound neutral.
She scowled at him, and even leaned forward. Were she his, she would have to account for that kind of aggression. Likely while getting spanked.
But he needed his cock to calm down, or he never would.
“I like it when you do it, you dumbass,” she threw at him.
And he was so astonished he actually laughed, but that only made her madder. She started brandishing her finger at him, and he was...astounded, certainly. But captivated all the same.
“I don’t need to experiment with submission,” she said furiously, “or whatever the hell you just said.”
“But you should.” He tried to sound patient. “You should view this as the beginning of your journey—”
“I’m not on a journey, Conrad,” she said, throwing her words at him, though that gaze of hers never wavered. “I’m not interested in submitting. I’ve never had the slightest urge to do any of those things, ever. I’ve always liked to be the one in control. The only difference now is you.”
His heart was kicking at him. That sounded a little too close to the things he wanted, but did not dare allow himself.
“I understand that BDSM can bring up very intense emotions,” he began.
And she snorted. Inelegant, graceless, and still he wanted nothing more than to get his hands on her.
“Are you going to pretend that that’s not the point?” she asked him. “Because you told me it was. You can’t claim that it’s all about intimacy and vulnerability and then pretend you’re surprised when that’s what happens.”
“Are you lecturing me on BDSM?”
“I’ll leave the lecturing to you, Professor,” she said, somehow both dry and hot at the same time. “But you can stop trying to foist me off on random other dudes in leather who happen to be prancing around Paris, doling out spankings and paddling on every street corner.”
“So you have dated,” he said coolly.
“I only want you,” she said, matter-of-factly, throwing that down in the middle the café table. A squirrelly looking tortoiseshell cat jumped on the table between them, looked back and forth between them, and hissed. But Conrad hardly noticed.
“That’s not a decision you can make after only one night.” He kept his eyes fixed on her, though his ears rang. “You need to separate actions and the person you’re acting them out with, because the truth is, they may not be the same.”
“Why?” she demanded. “As someone once said to me, I know how to drive a car without knowing how the engine feels. Or does that only apply to you?”
“I’m the one with the experience. You may think that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do.”
“Then why did you come here?”
There was a note of something else in her voice, then. Exasperation, maybe. And something else that clawed at him. Some kind of futility that he hated to hear in her voice.
“I know it was one night,” Rory said, her voice as turbulent as the look on her face. “Two nights, if you want to be technical. And I told myself everything you said to me here, and more. I know exactly how to go back to your house, but I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to be that girl, clinging to your trouser leg and begging for more.”
She blew out a breath. “I had already told myself that when I came to your house that night that no matter what happened, that would be it. And I stuck to it. But my feelings didn’t change, Conrad. I don’t think they’re going to.”
He needed to say something, but all he could seem to do was stay where he was, trapped in her gaze. Her honesty. All her vulnerability, there before him.
“And I was perfectly happy to sit with my feelings and figure out a way forward,” she said fiercely. I didn’t ask you for anything. But you came here and I want to know why.”
“I’ve told you—”
“That’s your excuse. Why don’t you tell me the real reason? Or does honesty only work one way?”
She could not have said anything that devastated him more.
He was surprised she didn’t feel the earthquake that rocked through him, razing Paris to dust outside, while he could do nothing but stay where he was.
Caught in that gaze of hers—and called out.
“I want to see how it plays out between us,” he said, as if from some great distance, where he was still in control of himself. “I want to explore our dynamic. But I know it’s too soon for you to commit yourself to anyone, particularly in the ways that people in the lifestyle commit themselves. I was hoping that I could be one of the dominants that you play with. I was thinking of you, Rory, though this level of insolence makes me wonder why I bothered.”
“You love this level of insolence,” she shot back, lighting up with temper again. “For two reasons. First, because I’m betting that nobody talks to you like this. They all bow and scrape, scurry around, and I’m not even talking about sex when I say that. And second, because you like to sit over there and imagine what consequences you can visit upon me whenever I’m something less then scrupulously polite. Don’t bother denying it. I know you do.”
“Do you now.” Something in him stirred, dark and greedy. “You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t quite sift through all of that invective and rudeness to find the part where you either said yes, you would like to explore our dynamic, or no, you would rather not.”
She leaned forward so abruptly that the cat there hissed, then jumped off the table.
“Everything you told me BDSM could be, it was,” she said, intensely. “I have never felt so vulnerable, or exposed. It took me a good two weeks to feel like myself again—that was how profoundly changed that night left me. And that’s not all. I haven’t posted a single thing online in a month. I stopped cleaning houses, because that’s not art, and I don’t know why I ever pretended it was. I stopped going on dates. My friends think there’s something wrong with me, but there’s not. I’ve never felt better. I know exactly who I am, and exactly what I want, and neither of those things would’ve been possible without you, Conrad.”
“Rory—”
Her brown eyes looked something like wise, then. Almost sad, he would have said, and that killed him.
“I don’t want to ‘explore dynamics’ with you, Conrad,” Rory said, very distinctly. “I want so much more than that. I want to marry you, and I don’t even believe in marriage.”
He must have made a face, because she laughed. And then she reached over and took his hand, reminding him suddenly of the way she’d kissed him in that pool, changing everything.
This time, Rory smiled when she pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed his palm, the same one he’d used to spank her until she came apart. “I’m in love with you, Conrad. And don’t tell me I’m not, or that I don’t know my own mind or heart. I do.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
RORY HAD IMAGINED this scene a thousan
d times over the last, long month, but every time she had, she hadn’t imagined that she would feel like this.
So alive.
Hopeful and a kind of outsize version of happy—or almost happy—at the sight of him. Something like supercharged—plugged in again—because he was here, and everything seemed to crackle with electricity around the edges near him.
She had looked up from what she considered her primary form of self-care these days to see him coming toward her, and if she’d been entertaining any doubts about what had been happening in her heart for the past month, they disappeared.
Just like that.
Because even outside that Gothic church, out of context, and in the last place she had ever expected to find him in all his brooding maleness, Conrad was magnificent.
He made her glow with happiness, simply with his presence. He made her squirm in her seat, so instantly was she soft and wet and ready for him. She felt as if she’d been ready for him since she’d last had him.
He made her all kinds of things. Even mad, when he looked at her so calmly and talked about experimenting with others—but not the kind of mad that made her want to storm away, burn bridges, or figure out ways to forget him. This was a kind of mad she’d never felt before. The kind of mad that made Rory want to sit here in this café with cats and coffee, and keep talking to him until they understood each other.
And all of that, she had to believe, was love.
Rory had always thought that love was the sort of thing that would build up over time, like dripping sand through her fingers until it became a castle.
But instead, one night had ripped her wide-open, showed her who she was and what she wanted, and that was it. She was done.
And as Conrad stared at her now, looking as close to dumbfounded as she supposed a man so stern and austere ever could, she only felt more certain.
It wasn’t going to go away. It wasn’t going to change. She had known that beyond the shadow of a doubt when she’d been certain she might never lay eyes on him again. She knew it now, while he was here.
All she had to do was touch him, and it was like that collar he’d put around her neck. It affected her breathing. It was impossible to ignore. Something held them both in a tight, unbreakable grip.
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