“I collared and claimed a woman once,” he told her, and for once, his dark eyes looked like a storm. “That means—”
“I know what it means, Conrad.”
Rory didn’t tell him that she’d spent an inordinate amount of time this last month studying the BDSM lifestyle. Not just looking at sexy pictures, though she’d done that, too. She’d read books, a thousand articles, and had even gone to a few lectures.
But that was something she could tell him later.
Because she had to believe, now he’d tracked her down in what he didn’t need to tell her was a very unlike-him move, there would be a later. Hopefully a lot of laters.
“I would have told you that we simply changed,” Conrad told her, sounding something like bleak. “People do. But it’s been pointed out to me that I misjudged her from the start. And I can’t be sure that I won’t make a similar mistake again.”
Rory understood that was supposed to set her back, but she only shrugged. “Everybody has problematic exes. That’s why they’re exes. My college boyfriend could only get it up if I wore white cotton panties, lay on my back in corpse position without moving, and let him drip candle wax on my nipples. Totally not a serial killer, I’m sure.” She grinned at him. “We all make mistakes.”
Not for the first time, his eyes did that thing where she thought he was about to tip over into a temper, but instead, he laughed.
“I have no place to put any of that.” He ran a hand over his face. “What I’m telling you is that I—”
“Will never trust again, blah blah blah,” she interrupted him.
Rory felt his hand tense, but she didn’t want to let it go. And she reveled in it when their eyes clashed, because she could feel the dominant in him roar. She had the immediate, overwhelming urge to slip off her chair and find her knees on the floor, and only remembered that they were in public at the very last second.
She managed to breathe, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about the ache in her pussy.
“If I were you, Rory,” he said, stern and dark and authoritative, which made her heart beat faster, “I would be very careful with how dismissive you plan to be during this conversation.”
And the desire to please him warred with her longing to save them both the only way she could. By risking his displeasure now in the hope it would lead them where she knew—she knew—they needed to go.
“Conrad,” she said, very seriously, “haven’t I proved that you can trust me? I’m not saying that it isn’t hard, because I know that it is. I thought that getting onto my knees in front of you would kill me, but it didn’t. It made me stronger. It made me understand myself better. And everything else that happened that night just made everything more and more clear. I want you to do the same.”
One of his brows rose, making him seem dark blond and more dangerous than usual. Her breath caught. “I will never kneel.”
She found herself smiling. “I would never ask you to kneel. Perish the thought.”
Again, that ring around them seemed to tighten. And when he pulled his hand from hers, she felt a shot of desolation, straight through her. But all he did was lift it to her neck and hold it there, where he could rub his thumb over her lips, her cheek. Or simply hold the weight of his hand there, like the grip she felt all around them.
Like eternity.
“You are absolutely nothing that I would ever want,” he said, and something about the way he looked at her as he said it made it sound like an endearment, not an insult. And his hand was on her skin, so she found herself melting instead of bristling. “You are too brash. Too mouthy. You say whatever’s on your mind, and what’s on your mind is always...extraordinary. You make me laugh, Rory, when no one has managed that in years.”
“I sound terrible,” she whispered.
His eyes crinkled in the corners. “You are.”
And again, that should have hurt her feelings, but he was smiling. He was looking at her the way he had when he was inside her, fierce and bright, and she felt spellbound. If that was terrible, she would commit herself to being as terrible as possible forevermore.
“You came out of nowhere,” Conrad said, his voice low and dark but all that bright light in his gaze. “My cock is prepared for anything. But my heart...”
“I know you have one,” she said quietly. Intently. “I felt it beat.”
He looked as if that hurt him. As if she’d swung hard and landed a blow.
“I don’t make spontaneous decisions,” he told her, severely. “I am a rational, measured, meticulous man, in word and deed.”
Rory leaned her cheek into his hand.
“I love you, Conrad,” she said, calmly. Because when he was touching her like this, when she was lost in his gaze, no matter what else was happening in her body or her head—she felt still. Calm. Whole. “I don’t care if that’s not rational and measured and meticulous. It’s a fact. No one’s expecting you to drop down on your knees or, God forbid, become a switch—” and neither one of them smiled, but the look they shared warmed, all the same “—but I think that just this once, you should trust me. See what happens.”
An eternity seemed to tick by. A muscle in his jaw tensed.
“If we jump into this,” he said, and her heart flipped over inside her, “I don’t think it’s going to be halfway. Are you ready for that? No brakes. Just you and me and all the intensity we can handle. And while we’re on the topic of intensity, there will be no one else. When I claim something, I keep it to myself.”
It took everything she had to keep her expression neutral, when inside she was melting. Jumping up and down. Filled with a hope so encompassing that it almost hurt.
“I’ve never claimed anything,” Rory said, solemnly, though everything in her was a single, solid scream of yes. “But you better believe that I’ll be more than happy to claim you.”
“I’ve never jumped off a cliff in my life,” Conrad said, a note of something like wonder in his dark voice. And a light she hardly dared believe in there in his navy blue gaze. “Why do you make me feel like that might be a great idea?”
“Because you trust me.” Rory was unable to keep the emotion out of her voice, her eyes, her. “And I trust you. And everything else will sort itself out.”
He shook his head, but his grip only tightened. “I don’t think you know what you’re signing up for. When I told you about maintenance spanking, I wasn’t kidding.”
She shivered at that, that delicious, spiked kind of terror going through her once more when she’d thought she would never feel it again. It kicked up everything inside her, turning it into that thick, pulsing desire that only he created in her, and it headed straight for her clit.
“I’m sure I’ll hate them,” she said, and smiled.
His eyes darkened with promise. “Only if I do them right.”
“Just as long as you do it.” She burrowed more deeply into his hand. “I promise you, you can trust me to take what you give. All that you give, Conrad. All that you are.”
His stern face changed, then, lighting up as he reached to hold her face in both his hands. Caressing her and trapping her at the same time, and it made her heart seem to spin in place. “I’m going to love you something terrible, aren’t I?”
She let her grin get wicked and insolent, just for him, the man who hated brats but couldn’t stay away from her. “Conrad, you already do. Or you would have thrown me out of your house the second you found me your secret room and never let me back in.”
Something flashed in his eyes, as good as vows from another man, and then he was kissing her. A deep, wild claiming, right there in a cat café.
He kissed her like he owned her. And better yet, he kissed her like he was hers, body and soul, the way she’d hardly dared let herself imagine he could ever really be.
But oh, how she’d hoped.
&nb
sp; Then he pulled away, smoothed her hair back from her face, and smiled at her.
And Rory felt as if they really had taken a dive over a cliff, but instead of falling, they were flying. Soaring high, with no fear at all of any hard landings.
Not as long as they were together.
And when he pulled away, his eyes had gone stern again, and the spinning in her heart sank through her, making her molten hot and fearful in the most exciting way possible.
“Conrad—” she began, but he put his finger over her lips.
“That’s enough now, I think.”
Just like that, everything around them shifted. Like a shimmer in the air, and suddenly, they were in that red-hot circle that was only theirs.
And Rory understood in a flash that this is how it would always be. That they would shift between their different worlds, wherever they were, at his whim.
“No talking,” he told her, his voice a dark command that she didn’t just hear. She felt it. Everywhere. “We’re going to get up from the table. You’re going to take me back to your flat, and when we’re there, you’re going to strip down and present yourself to me. I’m going to inspect my property. And then, Rory, there will be a reckoning, which I doubt very much you will enjoy.”
She was so happy she thought she might die, or come, or break down into sobs, right there.
Instead, she stood with him, unable to contain her joy. Because it was streaming down her face. It was the way she was breathing, or not breathing. It was making her cheeks hurt from the wideness of her smile.
And inside, she quivered as if he’d set her on fire.
Especially when his hand settled around her neck like her favorite clamp, then propelled her outside when she’d settled her bill.
“We’re going to have a long talk, you and I,” he told her as they walked, a delicious threat in his voice and Paris around them like a song. “We’re going to talk about insolence. The astonishing use of the word ‘dumbass.’ And when you’re finished experiencing the consequences for both of those things, to my satisfaction, we will have a little talk about maintenance. My favorite.”
But when he slanted his beautiful dark blue gaze her way, out there in all that sunshine, she knew that his favorite was her.
Then, and always.
And he would prove it to her one spanking at a time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CONRAD HAD ALWAYS assumed that he would get married with great pomp and circumstance, as suited a man of his fortune and position. His attempt at a great vanilla wedding had been just that sort of thing—stately and stuffy, so every business associate he’d ever had could come and gawk.
Even then, when he’d balked at the madness surrounding what had been, to him, little more than a business arrangement, Chriszette had always indicated that her children’s weddings were for her, not them. Conrad had really never seen any reason to argue with that. He didn’t care enough about weddings to care whether or not he enjoyed his.
But he hadn’t been sorry when it had all fallen through.
And now there was Rory, bright and hot and not in any way a lie.
Unsurprisingly, she had all kinds of opinions on weddings. And she lectured him a little too intensely about the evils of the historical marriage mart, whatever that was, the wedding industrial complex, and her feelings about proclaiming her role as chattel with a blood diamond from his homeland on her hand.
She paid for those lectures, of course, but that only made her rant at him more.
Accordingly, they celebrated their engagement—which involved Conrad ordering her to pack up her things and move into his church with him roughly two or three days after he’d found her in that ridiculous cat café—in private. In his little chapel, with the light streaming down her body as he carefully tied her to his Saint Andrew’s Cross.
That night he not only introduced her to his whip, he claimed her as his by switching out her clit piercing for one of his choosing. With a nice big stone with no blood on it. A bigger, more aggressive piercing that made her come screaming at the slightest touch and necessitated she take a solid week to get used to walking with it.
Conrad thought that was an excellent opportunity for her to think about what she was signing up for.
Because he was a man who did everything slow. Who prided himself on doing it right.
Except when it came to her.
Nothing about Rory and him made sense, because it all made too much sense to explain. They fit together and that was the end of it.
“I’m going to say this as clear as I can,” her father boomed at him when they visited Rory’s family in Nashville. Her mother had claimed to adore Conrad on sight, but big Marty Morton had taken a moment. “That’s my baby girl. I don’t understand a single thing that comes out of her mouth, but if you break her heart, I’ll take your head off with a pocketknife.”
Conrad grinned and lifted his drink in Marty’s direction. “I will hand you that pocketknife if that happens, and take my beheading like a man.”
And when the other man had muttered something gruff to Rory that sounded like about gotdamn time, he’d taken that as the best blessing he would receive.
That was how Conrad Vanderburg, head of his family and corporation and lauded throughout the business world, married Rory Morton, internet “influencer,” within two months of meeting her.
Their wedding was so private—on a solitary beach in the Philippines, with just the two of them, their officiant, and the breathtaking blue sea—that Rory only uploaded a single photo of it to her social media account.
It was a picture of Conrad looking stern and indulgent at once, while she was a vision in white, the wind making her skirts flow everywhere, and a look of such joy on her face that it made his heart ache.
Rory didn’t wear his ring, but she did wear his tattoo. The one he dreamed of that first night, that marked her as his, indelibly. It wasn’t visible in that picture, but he knew it was there. He saw it every time he stripped her naked—a great pleasure he indulged in often.
He had that photo framed and placed on the wall in their living room.
So he would never be tempted to forget himself again. To drift off into all that dire gray responsibility that had weighed him down forever. Nothing could be dire when she looked at him like that.
Because with Rory, he found he could let go, a little. That wasn’t to say that he shirked his duties, or suddenly discovered the urge to kneel. Hardly.
But she made him laugh. He had always been all intensity, all the time, but they shifted in and out of the different levels of their dynamic as it suited them.
Or rather, as it suited him.
“You?” his sister asked that first Christmas, when Conrad announced that he would be coming with a woman—but had announced upon arrival that, in fact, Rory was his wife. “Eloped? Has the world ended?”
Conrad opted not to analyze the look Dorian gave her, because it spoke of too many things he chose not to recognize. Especially when Erika flushed a little.
But Rory laughed, big and bright and entirely her.
“I’ve corrupted him,” she said. “Utterly.”
Dorian laughed. “At last.”
“I approve,” Erika said immediately from beside him, and when she smiled at Conrad, it was as if something else eased, then. Something he hadn’t known he’d held so tightly, until now.
He might have been a hard-ass. His sister might have been a problem. But maybe that had only mattered when neither of them were happy.
But now they both were almost too happy to bear. And the woman he’d almost married, Erika’s best friend, who he would have made utterly miserable, was happy, too. As if all those near misses and old resentments had been necessary to bring them all here.
Maybe that was hopelessly mawkish. But what could Conrad do? He was unduly influenced by
his very own pet American.
In the new year Conrad bought her an art gallery so she could pursue the things that really mattered to her.
They thought she was a joke at first. They called her snide names and made insulting references to her social media presence, but underestimating Rory was always a bad idea.
She was a force to be reckoned with, as she proved, with hard work and what the snotty art magazines called her surprisingly incisive eye for new and unexpected talent.
He loved her to distraction.
“I love you,” he told her one rainy, Parisian evening.
She’d come home late from her gallery, bubbling over with excitement at the painting she’d sold that day and buzzing around the kitchen as if she hardly noticed he was in it.
But that declaration stopped her, the way it always did. She smiled at him, that beautiful, melting smile that wrecked him, then made him, and that he never wished to do without.
“But you’re late,” Conrad pointed out, his voice taking on that edge they both loved. He watched her shift. He watched her body change, moving seamlessly from the high-powered gallery owner she’d become to the woman she would always be—his. “You know what tonight is.”
Her breath caught. Her eyes got that sheen.
“I know that it’s maintenance night,” she began. “But—”
“No excuses, please,” he said, quiet and implacable. “You know the rules. You were late. Twenty-three minutes late, by my count.”
Her eyes got wide. He saw that beautiful flush work its way over her skin.
“But I—”
Conrad only shook his head. And her words tapered off.
Rory took a ragged breath. Then, without having to be asked, she slowly, gracefully, sank down to her knees before him and held her arms behind her back.
His beautiful wife. This woman who took what he gave her and gave it back to him with her glorious and complete surrender, making them both whole.
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