And now we were going to get to the difficult parts of our conversation.
“You’re absolutely right, but this will be me bringing it up with him. Not you.” I leaned back. “Hands behind your back, please. If you absolutely must speak when I haven’t asked a question, you’ll ask permission to do so. The rules I’m about to give you aren’t negotiable. If you can’t live by them, you’ll need to stand and put your clothes on. I’ll take you home, and nothing will change. We tried, it didn’t work.” I took a breath. “I don’t think they’re draconian. There shouldn’t be a problem.”
Chapter Five
Squatch
I hoped to the bottom of my heart she could live with them, because I hadn’t been kidding about them being non-negotiable. I’d long ago realized that if I ever brought someone into my life, she’d have to live by these rules, at a minimum. Well, not the first, which was specific to our situation. I’d had no idea I’d fall for someone who worked for us.
“Basic work issues, questions, and needs will still go to Bobcat as before. Well, Dementor for now. However, anything involving us, you come to me. If Bobcat or Mad Dog need to be brought in, I will do so. Under no circumstances do you ever blindside me with something when it comes to my club or my brothers. Punishment will be severe, and if it happens frequently, it’ll mean we can’t continue as a couple. I understand you seemed to think I intended you to speak with Mad Dog this morning, but I have to think that you knew you were blindsiding me. There will be consequences. They will not be extreme, but I believe you had a niggling doubt about whether you should talk to me first or just bring it up with Mad Dog.”
I let that sit in her psyche a few seconds before asking, “Am I wrong?”
She kept her gaze on my lips, which was impressive. Most submissives instinctively look you in the eye when they prepare to speak. Had she been trained for this already?
“You aren’t completely wrong, Sir. I thought I should talk to you, but I was afraid you’d want to put it off, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to get it over with.”
“Thank you for being honest. Can you tell me the difference between not lying and not being honest?”
“It’s possible to tell the truth without being honest. I can’t think of a specific example off the top of my head, but I understand the difference.”
“Eye contact.”
She met my gaze, and I told her, “There are a few things that go beyond this power exchange. Things I won’t punish you for because it’s outside the scope of our relationship. Things that mean maybe we don’t have a relationship worth putting effort into anymore. Dishonesty is one of those things.”
She opened her mouth to speak. Closed it. Nodded agreement.
“Good girl. You have something to say?”
“It’s a two-way street, Sir. I need you to be honest with me, too.”
“How about I promise to be honest with everything not club related. We can have this conversation again a month from now, and you can make a decision about what you do and do not want to know when it comes to the club.” Because if I couldn’t trust her with club stuff a month into a serious power exchange relationship, that’d be a problem.
“You’re the Sergeant-at-Arms. You hurt people for the club. If I’m going to accept you, I have to accept all of you. In a perfect world, you’d only hurt bad people, but we both know this world is far from perfect, Sir. I’m fine with having the conversation now, but if you need a month before having it, I can wait.”
I sat back and took a breath. She’d surprised me with that.
“How do you know I’m the Sergeant-at-Arms?”
“I listen, Sir. I don’t remember who said it. I’m sorry. Maybe Mad Dog, maybe Bobcat? I don’t know, Sir. I went home and looked it up. It means you’re the one who carries out whatever the club votes to do. It means you step in if club members are fighting.” She grinned, but kept her eyes focused on my mouth. “It means you’re the club’s bad-ass, Sir. My tiger appreciates this. She respects the wolf, and that doesn’t happen often.”
Good to know. It was time for me to get to the outline of how our relationship was going to work. These were the things I’d long-ago decided that any woman I shared space with would have to agree to.
“You’ll get spankings just for the hell of it, because I want to spank you. Sometimes I’ll grab you and spank you, other times it will seem formal. I don’t expect you will ever confuse one of those sessions with an actual punishment. Once you’ve experienced both, we’ll have a conversation about the differences. No one in my life has ever had problems differentiating the two. It’s unfortunate that you’ll experience the punishment side first, but I can’t let the conversation with Mad Dog go, so we’ll get to that when we finish here. Eyes back on my cock, Kitten.”
Her gaze shifted immediately, and I continued.
“You’ll move in with me. At the end of a month, if we agree this is working, you’ll give up your lease. If there’s a problem getting out of it, I’ll speak with your landlord. I will not involve myself with your finances during the first month, but you need to know that if we move forward, I will control everything. You’ll pay your expenses out of your income — gas, car insurance, makeup, clothes. Everything else goes into a savings account, and you’ll agree not to touch it. I will allow you to keep dancing and going next door until you have a set amount of money saved up. Enough you can leave me and support yourself until you can begin to bring in an income again. You’ll tell me that amount, since the goal is that you won’t stay with me because you have no other choice.”
If I’d fallen in love with someone who had no way to support herself, I’d have put twenty-grand into a safe, given her the combination, and told her if she wanted to leave me, the money was hers, but once she took it, we were over forever. It was important to me that a woman didn’t stay with me because I was supporting her.
Since Kitty would never let me just give her money, I planned to match her funds so it wouldn’t take as long for her to reach whatever goal she set. The wolf was not going to be okay with her stripping for long, and he’d be less okay with her taking johns next door. Once she told me the amount, I’d tell her I intended to match the funds she put in. She already had thirty grand in a savings account. How much more would she want? But I wasn’t going to focus too much on finances today. Time to hit the other high spots.
“You’ll wake me with a blow job, and we’ll figure out a morning routine that works. My guess is you’ll need the shower first since it takes girls longer to get ready. We’ll go about our day. Punishment for things done at home will happen immediately, at least to start. Punishment for things that happen away from the apartment will be dealt with before we go to bed.”
“My safeword is Eugene.”
Her dad’s name. Subtle. I’d researched her when I realized my wolf had a thing for her. She’d been home schooled, and her life was mostly a mystery. I knew her parents’ names, and I had the address where she’d grown up. Google street maps told me there was a heavy-duty security gate to get onto the property, and the satellite view told me jack shit. It was just forest. I couldn’t see houses. She’d left home after the big battle, got a cheap apartment, and started stripping.
She wasn’t going to like this next part. The biggest chance of her standing up and getting dressed was about to happen, but I can smell true distress, so if another shapeshifter doesn’t trust me to know when to stop based on smell, they have no business playing with me. I’m either trustworthy or I’m not, and if I’m not, why are we bothering to pretend?
I met her gaze and gave it to her without apology or justification.
“I don’t honor safewords. You either trust me to know what you can take, or you don’t. Which is it going to be?”
I parsed the scents rolling off her. Fear. Anger. Arousal.
No. Not anger. Exasperation? Aggravation? I couldn’t put a finger on it, but it wasn’t full-blown anger.
The most important th
ing though, was that I didn’t scent rejection.
She sat for nearly five minutes before I scented acceptance. She’d looked down, focused on my shoes, while she worked through it. Finally, she looked back at my dick and said, “I trust you, Sir.”
Warm emotions rolled through me, and I nearly had to catch my breath. She trusted me.
“Thank you. I hope to never give you a reason not to. Communication is key. Feel free to use the safeword, just know I get to decide whether to honor it. Personally, I’d prefer you tell me the problem, rather than using your safeword, but I understand sometimes it’s easier to use it and then explain the problem. However you need to communicate, the important part is that you do.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“I didn’t ask a question. You aren’t to speak right now. Consider that one demerit. You have fifteen demerits already, because you went to Mad Dog without talking to me first. This makes sixteen.”
She gave a tiny nod and I once again scented acceptance. So submissive. So ready to hand over her power, but only because she trusted me.
“Outside of work, you’ll only orgasm with permission. You’ll only touch yourself with permission.”
Another nod.
I stood and took my belt off. I scented fear and arousal. She’d soon learn punishments were all about fear. Again, I regretted we were having to start this way, but it couldn’t be helped.
“There are no orgasms for a minimum of six hours after a punishment. Stand and walk to the door of my bedroom. There’s a chin-up bar. Grab it and hold on.”
I have to bend my legs to do chin-ups. I was hoping it’d be the right height, so her feet still touched. Turns out, it was perfect. She was on tiptoe, her body stretched beautifully.
“There aren’t a set number of strikes per demerit. It’s more about how long you cry than how many times the belt lands. If you let go, I’ll put you on the floor, bind you with your legs spread and raised, and your pussy will get it instead of your ass and thighs. I suggest you hold on.”
Punishment sessions don’t include a warmup, so I hit her hard right off the bat. Ten times, one after another without a pause. Her screams filled the room and echoed back. She wasn’t crying yet, but she wasn’t far from it. My apartment was at the back corner of the complex, which meant only two neighbors were close enough to hear. One wasn’t home, the other was probably beating off. Mad Dog put me back here for a reason.
A round of twelve more had her closer to tears, and then fifteen more had tears streaming down her face. Sixteen demerits. Now that she was crying, she’d get approximately another one hundred and sixty strikes, but she’d never know my formula. It’s possible I’d make them twice as hard and only give eighty, or ease up on them a tiny bit and give her two hundred. I needed a way to make the pain work out for the number of demerits, but this little kitten didn’t need to know what she was in for. I could sense it from the start — some submissives do best knowing consequences so they don’t misbehave, others need it to be an unknown, else they’ll make a risk assessment before they break a rule.
Kitty wanted to submit. She didn’t want the power of knowing what she was in for if she broke a rule.
I gave her two more rounds of sixteen and stopped.
“What’s one hundred and three plus seventy.”
“I don’t know!”
“It isn’t difficult. One hundred and three plus seventy.”
She shook her head, and I pinched and twisted her nipple. “Seventy plus three.”
“Seventy-three!”
“Plus one hundred.”
“One hundred and seventy-three!”
I pinched her nipple harder and pulled it away from her chest. She was a natural C cup, and beautifully shaped. I love the way tits look when you contort them out of shape.
“One hundred and three plus seventy?” I asked again.
“One hundred and seventy-three!”
“Good girl.”
I let go of her nipple, watched her boob form back into its naturally perfect shape, and then stepped behind her and struck another sixteen times. Her screams made my dick throb, and then her sobs when I gave her a small break made it pulse faster.
The math served two purposes. It kept her out of subspace, so she’d feel every strike, and it kept her from counting how many times I hit her.
“Seventeen times three.”
I counted to ten in my head before I reached around and grabbed the same nipple. “It isn’t that difficult. Break it down.”
Kitty
My mind wanted to splinter, but I focused. Fifteen times three. Fifteen plus fifteen plus fifteen is forty-five, add six and you get, “Fifty-one!”
He let go of my nipple and stepped behind me again. I braced for the belt, hoping I could keep from screaming so much this time.
By the time he finished, I was a mess. My heart raced in my chest, and I felt my thundering pulse with every nerve ending in my body. Even my toenails moved up and down as my blood pounded through my veins. I could smell massive bruising — not surprising since I’d felt every blasted stripe of his belt.
And those damned math problems had made it impossible to sink into my mind. I winced inwardly when I cursed in my head, but it felt good to think it.
My hands were wrapped so tightly around the chin-up bar, Squatch had to help me move my fingers off so I could let go. He took me to bed, made me blow my nose, washed my face with a cool washcloth, and then held me against his massive chest with his tree-trunk sized arms around me, but it wasn’t claustrophobic. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.
I cried and then sobbed until his chest was soaked, but he merely held me and rubbed my back, with an occasional kiss to the top of my head.
When I was finally breathing something close to normal and my tears had stopped, he told me, “Six hours until you can change. You can do it when you wake tomorrow, and then I’ll eat and head into work. I should only have to be gone a few hours. I’ll rearrange my schedule so I’m off on Mondays with you, after tomorrow.”
I shook my head. My pulse raced again, and I couldn’t help it. “I can’t change here, and I’ll need three hours after, before anyone can see me.”
He froze behind me. “Why do you suddenly smell terrified?”
I took a breath and blew it out. When he’d given me all those rules, I’d known it would come to this. It was crazy to think I could move in with him and keep my secrets. If I was smart, I’d tell him this wasn’t going to work, and I’d leave.
But we’d started this dance, and he wasn’t going to let me get away with that. I knew it without even trying.
So, I took another breath and tried to find a way through the potential minefield. “We’re headed into something beyond safeword territory. You know how you had rules that weren’t negotiable? This is like that. I have a few requirements, and if you can’t live with them, this can’t work. I will never change around you, and I need at least three hours after I change before you or anyone else can see me. What’s more, I need you to never tell anyone this. Doing so can put me in grave danger. Also, just asking around about tigers could draw attention to me that could put me and my family in danger. You must never talk to anyone about my oddities.”
He rubbed my back and kissed the top of my head. “I agreed to tell you my secrets at the end of a month.”
“I can never tell you. Only my father or uncle can, and I can promise you that neither of them will.” Not to a wolf, and especially not a wolf I was submitting to. They would lose their shit.
“So, to recap, I can’t see your tiger, and I can’t see you in human form for three hours after you’ve changed. I can’t ask you about it, and I can’t talk to anyone else about it?”
“Right, and there’s something else. If you figure it out, or even just part of it, I won’t be able to talk about it. I’ll need you to just let it drop.” Because I wore brown contacts to cover my iridescent blue eyes, and he was bound to notice at some point, but I needed h
im not to.
He was silent a long time. Three or four minutes, at least. He held me, and snuggled me, but I couldn’t snuggle back. I’d finally broke through that damned wall he had around him, and if I lost him this quickly, I’d be devastated. I hadn’t thought anything with him would be possible, but now it was, and I couldn’t have the rug pulled out from under me so quickly.
I’d agreed to give up my safeword because I trust him. Before we were a thing, he’d once looked me over from head to toe after I’d been next door with a client and known I needed food and another five minutes before I walked back into Blaze. I have no idea how he knew, but he did, and he didn’t suggest I stop by the vending machines and grab something, he’d ordered me to. He’d know if something was wrong in a scene, and he’d stop. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he’d back off if he realized I was in true distress, so I’d agreed to give up my safeword even though Brooke had told me it was something I should never, ever agree to. Now, I had to hope that by showing him how much I trusted him, that he’d want to return the favor and trust I had no other options. I have to hide who I am, and there’s no way around that.
Finally, he said, “We’ll revisit this again in a month, then at our three-month mark, and then at six months. I have to tell you that I’m not likely to be okay with it beyond six months. It’s your secret to tell, which means by Concilio rules, you can tell me. Perhaps you have special tiger rules that say you can’t, but at a certain point, this becomes a test of trust. I’ll need you to trust me with your secrets eventually.”
Unless I could convince him of why that was impossible, which is what I’d have to do. Of course, this was probably only going to last a few months, anyway, which meant it wouldn’t be an issue at six months. I finally allowed myself to relax back into him, and he kissed the top of my head again.
“Unless you’ll heal by Tuesday, you have to change. I’ll take you to your apartment tomorrow morning and leave you. I don’t want to do that, but I don’t see a way around it. If I’d known there were issues around changing, I’d have used a punishment that doesn’t leave marks.”
Squatch (Rolling Thunder MC Birmingham Book 4) Page 4