She licked her lips nervously. “There’s a woman with her dress undone and hanging down at the waist,” she said, speaking so softly Dylan had to lean forward to hear her. “She’s got clamps on her nipples, except they look different than what you used on me.” Zoë hugged herself, covering her breasts in what Dylan guessed was an unconscious gesture.
It had been incredibly hot when he’d tied Zoë’s hands behind her back while she knelt naked on his bedroom floor waiting to receive his cock. Her sweet, breathy gasp of pain when he’d clipped the alligator clamps on her nipples had been music to his sadistic ears. Though he’d wanted to hold out for as long as possible, when her mouth closed over his cock, he was a goner, barely managing to hold back his orgasm for more than a few minutes before giving in to her incredibly sensual, skilled ministrations.
“Probably clover clamps,” he suggested. “We’ll try those when you’ve had a little more experience. They can be rather intense.”
Zoë reached for her glass, looking adorably flustered as she sipped her wine.
“Go on,” Dylan urged. “What else do you see?”
Zoë set down her glass and returned her focus to the dungeon. “There are two men, one on either side of her. She’s bound to one of those X crosses. They’re, um, they’re whipping her breasts.” Dylan could hear the whisper of leather against skin. Zoë hissed in sympathy, rocking slightly in her seat.
There was the distinctive sound of a woman’s cry of pain, and Zoë gasped, “Oh! One of the guys flicked her nipple and the clamp flew off.” The woman screamed again. “Oh my god! He did it to the other one!” Zoë hugged herself tighter, her teeth worrying her lower lip, her eyes glued to the scene. “Okay, phew. They’re removing the wrist cuffs. Oh, one of the guys is helping her off the cross. Aw, they’re kissing and people are clapping.” She looked at Dylan, flashing a relieved, beautiful smile in his direction.
Sara reappeared with two glasses of ice water, followed by Matt, another of the staff slaves, who carried a tray bearing their dinners. Matt, like Sara, was essentially naked, save for the black leather codpiece covering his package. Matt, who belonged to one of the club’s owners, was tall and muscular, his body shaven smooth. He had lettering tattooed on either deltoid—Hank’s on the right, Boy Toy on the left.
They set the food on the table. Sara refilled their glasses and inquired if Dylan needed anything further, still ignoring Zoë’s black lacy panties resting on the white tablecloth. Dylan tucked into the delicious, perfectly cooked steak with gusto. Zoë, he noticed after a moment, was barely picking at her food. “Is it okay?” he asked solicitously. “If you don’t like it, we can order something else.”
“No, it’s delicious,” Zoë said hastily. She smiled shyly. “I don’t know. I just don’t seem to have much of an appetite right now. There’s so much to take in.”
Dylan nodded. “So there is. It’s hard to remember that newness—that sense of discovery and awe when you first put your toe in the waters of a BDSM lifestyle. I’m jealous of you in a way—everything is shiny new and filled with potential.”
He picked up her panties and brought them to his face, inhaling her sweet, delicate scent as she looked down at the table, obviously embarrassed. He tucked the panties under his thigh and reached across the small table to lift her chin. He looked into her eyes and said gently, “You don’t need to be shy with me, Zoë. And you don’t need to be shy here at The Vault. Everyone here gets it. This isn’t a tourist club for gawkers who think it’s trendy to pay a cover charge to get into some sleazy S&M theme club down in the city. This is a members-only safe place where people come together to explore and share their love of the lifestyle.”
They watched in silence a moment as Sara preceded Master Tom, who was followed by his two slave girls, both of whom were completely naked, their legs chained together so they were forced to hobble in tandem behind him. Tom settled at a nearby table, the two women kneeling on the floor side-by-side next to him.
Zoë turned back to Dylan. “I have to say, I feel, I don’t know”—she shrugged, her eyes sliding back to the threesome—“intrigued by all this, but kind of out of my ken. Everyone seems so relaxed, so comfortable.” She waved her hand in a vague way around the room. “I don’t know if I could ever get used to being so vulnerable, so exposed, in front of strangers like that.”
Dylan stroked her soft cheek with two fingers. “First, let me say this. In the short time we’ve been together, you’ve pleased me tremendously. You should know, there’s no right or wrong here, as long as you do your best and give of yourself with honesty and grace, which I believe you have done, and then some.”
Zoë smiled at this praise. “Thank you, Sir,” she said with such simple submissive grace that Dylan’s heart clutched hard in his chest.
“Answer me this,” he said, forcing himself to keep his focus. “If on Friday morning someone had told you you’d spend the day in some guy’s BDSM dungeon doing the things we did, and that not only would you handle it, but you’d revel in it, would you have believed them?”
Zoë laughed, shaking her head. “No way, José! I can barely believe it myself.”
Dylan nodded. “Exactly my point. But here’s the thing—you were open to the experience. You didn’t shut down and close yourself off from your feelings or reactions. You gave it, and me, a chance. That’s what we’re doing tonight. I don’t expect you to strip and walk into that dungeon and climb up on that cross. I don’t plan to force you into anything you’re not one hundred percent ready to do. It will be your call, Zoë.”
“But I thought it was the Dom who was in charge?” Zoë queried.
“The Dom is in charge, yes, but ultimately it’s the sub who calls the shots. It’s that whole concept of a consensual exchange of power. As soon as you withdraw consent, on whatever level, for whatever reason, that’s a game changer. Now, some folks get into it a little deeper—a Master/slave relationship might remove some of the consent, or rather, it’s agreed upon that the slave gives up his or her right to refuse, but even then, it’s a kind of fiction, if you will. The underlying consent of the basic tenets of the relationship still remains.” He shrugged. “Who knows, you and I might eventually want the added intensity of a Master/slave connection, or we might not. But the bottom line is, it’s about what we want, as a couple, same as in a vanilla relationship.”
“Relationship?” A corner of Zoë’s mouth quirked into a half smile. “I agreed to a weekend, but here we are talking about next week, next month…?”
Dylan swallowed hard, keenly aware how very much this mattered to him. What had started out as a kind of lark—a bet with himself regarding Zoë’s submissive potential and his ability to expose and nurture it—had turned into something much more, and more quickly than he could have imagined. Several snappy retorts leaped into his brain, but he shook them away. Now wasn’t the time to prove how clever he could be. He would lay it out there, and let the chips fall where they may.
He stared into Zoë’s luminous, dark eyes. “I won’t presume to speak for you, but I will tell you this—I’m thirty-three years old, Zoë. I’ve been in several serious relationships, though it’s been a while since I put my heart out there. Like you, I work a lot of hours on the day job, but I’m coming to realize that isn’t the be-all and end-all. I want to focus more on what really matters in my life.”
He put his hand over hers. “I saw something in you and it spoke to me. I took a chance, but I never dreamed our connection would be so instant and so complete. I’m not saying we should get married tomorrow”—he gave a small, self-conscious laugh, but Zoë’s intense, receptive expression gave him courage to continue—“but I want more than just to complete the terms of some bet, and I hope I’m not being presumptuous to think you want more, too. I guess what I’m saying is, yes—let’s go crazy and use the R word.”
Zoë said nothing for a long moment. Then she placed her second hand over his, the light pressure of her fingers sending warmth through h
is body. “Let’s do,” she said, an impish grin lighting her face. “Let’s go crazy.” Then she laughed. Dylan felt as if his heart had suddenly sprouted wings, and he laughed with her.
He pointed to her plate. “Maybe you want to eat a little something before we venture into the dungeon?”
She looked down at the untouched food on her plate and then back up at him as she reached for her fork. “Wow, I just realized I’m starving.”
Chapter 8
After Sara cleared away the remains of their dinner, Dylan fixed Zoë with a dark, sexy look. “Shall we, sub girl?”
Zoë glanced through the archway to the dungeon beyond. “Yes, Sir,” she whispered, pushing back her chair.
At the first scene station Dylan took her to, a naked man hung upside down by his ankles, his head only inches from the floor. While a second man secured the sub’s wrists behind his back, a woman held a penis-shaped gag to his lips. He opened his mouth wide. She slid the phallus in and buckled the straps around his head.
The woman picked up a small wicker basket from the ground nearby and held it toward the male Dom. He reached in and took a handful of clothespins. She did likewise, and set the basket down again.
Several more people had gathered to watch the scene, all standing a respectful distance from the station, all silent. With quick, practiced hands, the pair attached clothespins to the suspended man’s scrotum, penis and nipples, the wooden pins fanning out in tight circles. Zoë could almost feel the pinch as the spring-tightened tips closed over delicate flesh, but the bound, gagged man seemed to accept the torture with a calm stoicism.
Once they were satisfied with their handiwork, the pair each produced a short-handled single tail whip. Zoë drew in a sharp, sudden breath of shock when the male Dom flicked his whip in the direction of the clothespins ringing the sub’s right nipple. One of the pins flew off, leaving a dark, angry mark in its place. The sub jerked in his restraints and issued a strangled cry of pain. Unable to control her reaction, Zoë found herself yelping softly along with him.
Dylan’s arm came around her shoulders. “Remember,” he whispered into her hair, “this is fully consensual.” Zoë nodded, but leaned gratefully against him, unable to look away.
Standing on either side of their sub, the two Doms took turns snapping off the clothespins, one expert, agonizing flick at a time. As the man jerked in his bonds, his face red and contorted, Zoë whispered, “What if he needs to use his safeword?”
“Hand signals,” Dylan whispered back. “If there’s ever a time you can’t speak, you agree on a hand signal or some other gesture to take the place of a safeword. When you’re in a position with me where you can’t speak, your silent safeword will be the opening and closing of your right fist.” A thrill of nervous anticipation shivered through her at these words. He hadn’t said if she was ever in a position with him where she couldn’t speak, but rather when.
When the last clothespin was flicked away, the woman knelt beside the suspended man and removed the gag. She stroked his face gently with a small cloth as the other Dom used a kind of pulley mechanism to lower the man to the ground.
Dylan and Zoë moved to another scene station, this one containing a large woman dressed in a tight satin dress, bound on her back to an inversion table and tilted so her head was lower than her legs. Three men were clustered around her, their cocks fisted in their hands, taking turns thrusting their erect shafts into her open mouth.
Dylan, his arm still around Zoë, led her past that station toward an ajar door at the back of the dungeon. “This second dungeon is for more intense scenes,” Dylan murmured as they crossed the threshold. The lighting in the second dungeon had a red cast to it, creating an eerie atmosphere. A half-dozen people were standing quietly along the wall, four men and two women, all of them facing the center of the room.
Zoë followed their collective gazes and her mouth fell open in shock as she took in the scene before them. A slight woman with large, dark eyes and a shaved head was suspended by chains that hung from the ceiling, shackled to her wrists. Her slender, naked form was pulled taut by her bonds, her feet forced up on tiptoe. A large, shirtless man in jeans, his torso covered in tattoos, was carefully inserting long, thin needles in a circular pattern around each of her nipples. Thin lines of blood ran down the girl’s breasts from some of the insertions, droplets splattering to the plastic mat on which she stood.
At the sight of the bright red blood, Zoë felt suddenly woozy and a little sick. She buried her face in Dylan’s chest. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said softly, stroking her hair. Zoë took several deep breaths, reminding herself of Dylan’s previous words: This is all consensual.
“Look at her face, Zoë,” Dylan urged quietly. “Tell me what you see.”
Steeling herself, Zoë forced herself to look again, this time focusing on the girl’s face. The sub was staring at her Dom with what could only be called adoration, her eyes shining, her lips softly parted, no evidence of pain or suffering in her features. “Pain is a very subjective thing,” Dylan added, his voice close to Zoë’s ear. “Erotic suffering can be transcendent, in the right circumstances.”
They watched for another long minute, until Dylan whispered, “Had enough?” to which Zoë gratefully nodded that she had.
They returned to the dining room, where Dylan introduced Zoë to Hank and Michael, the owners of The Vault, along with a few other people sitting at the long bar that ran the length of the room. They engaged in casual small talk, as if the scenes, involving whips, chains and even blood, going on beyond the archway were the most normal thing in the world.
For this particular venue, Zoë supposed, they were. Both exhilarated and exhausted, she was eager to leave when Dylan made their farewells and led her to his car in the parking lot behind the converted hotel. On the drive home from the club, Zoë’s mind was teeming with images and thoughts about what she had witnessed that night.
She was glad Dylan wasn’t compelled to make idle conversation. He seemed comfortable with the silence as he focused on the road. It was as if he instinctively understood she needed to time and space to process the events of the evening, and her reaction to them.
As they undressed and prepared for bed, Zoë couldn’t resist stealing glances at Dylan’s muscular, broad frame. Had it been a typical relationship with the usual sort of guy she had found herself with over the years, she wouldn’t have hesitated to make it abundantly clear she was ready and willing for a little pre-sleep sex.
With Dylan, however, she found herself content to wait for his signal. He was the one in charge, and as odd as it was to admit to herself, she found she quite liked it that way.
When they lay down together, her mind and body were still thrumming with sexual excitement from the evening’s adventures, and she doubted she would be able to fall asleep very quickly, not with this sexy, naked man holding her against his warm, hard body.
Yet she must have fallen asleep, her rest deep and dreamless, because when next she opened her eyes, the sky outside the window was the pearly gray of predawn. Dylan was awake beside her, his hands moving sensually over her body. She lay still, savoring his touch on her breasts, her belly, her thighs.
When he finally rose over her, nudging her thighs apart, she was more than ready to receive him. Wrapping her arms around his back, she pulled him down, a guttural moan of pure lust wrenched from somewhere deep inside her. They made love for hours, by turns rough and gentle, finally stopped only by sheer exhaustion.
The next time Zoë opened her eyes, the room was flooded with sunshine, the sound of birds twittering outside the windows, and for several sleep-fogged seconds she had no idea where she was. There was no undercurrent of steady traffic punctuated by the beep and clang of garbage trucks and the angry honks of impatient drivers. The bed was impossibly comfortable, one of those mattresses that mold perfectly to the body, and the sheets were soft and cool against her bare skin.
Dylan was still asleep, a sexy five-o’clock shadow
whiskering his strong jaw. He was on his back, the sheets pushed down to reveal his muscular, smooth torso and, as her eye trailed down the lines of his body, she saw the tip of his cock peeking just above the sheets, its erect outline visible beneath.
Zoë scooted silently down on the mattress until her face was level with Dylan’s hip. She lifted the sheet and leaned over his erection, tenderly cradling his balls in her hand as she closed her mouth over the head of his cock.
At first he didn’t move or react, his breathing deep and even. Zoë took her time as she glided her tongue down the length of his shaft to take him fully into her mouth. She lifted her head and lowered it again, creating a gentle friction with her lips as she moved.
She was startled by his hand, which suddenly closed over the back of her head, his fingers curling into her hair as he held her down. He pushed gently but insistently until she was fully impaled on his shaft, her nose pressed to his pubic bone. Her heart began a rapid tattoo against her sternum, her windpipe blocked by the way his cock was lodged in her throat. Panic began to edge its way through her system when she tried to lift her head to breathe, and his large, strong hand prevented her from moving even a fraction of an inch.
Her lungs began to burn, and there was an uncomfortable pressure building in her head. Was it happening already—was he purposely putting her in a position where she couldn’t speak, and would need to use her signed safeword? Her right hand was caught beneath her side, her left hand still curled around his balls. Would the left hand count? Could he even see it?
She pushed again against his firm hand, trying to lift her head, managing to gurgle a sound of distress. All at once he let go, and she fell back against the bed, propelled by the force of her movement.
Gratefully she sucked in air, not sure if she was angry, or excited, or both. Before she could sort out her feelings, Dylan was on top of her, his fingers closing tightly around her wrists, which he jerked hard over her head as he shifted between her legs, forcing her thighs apart.
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