Seriously, Rae was a terrible, awful liar. She would have been reamed in front of television cameras.
Georgie asked, “Are you going to The Devilhouse tonight?”
Lizzy would see The Dom tonight. Her skin chilled, but her core heated.
Rae said, “I’m supposed to.”
Georgie said, “Then you’d better go. Do you want to ride with us? It’s Lizzy’s turn to be the designated driver. She can drive my car if you go.”
Lizzy bobbed her head cheerfully, wanting to know what the hell Rae had seen.
“I think I’d better drive myself, and Lizzy should go early, anyway. What time are we supposed to show up?” Rae stared at her phone.
“Like, nine,” Georgie said.
“Okay, like, nine.” Rae fled through their shared bathroom.
Lizzy said to Georgie, “She was so lying.”
Georgie rounded on her, her angry face red and right up next to Lizzy’s. “Are you going to do it? Are you going to fuck everything up by telling The Dom that you’re all mushy for him?”
He had given Lizzy pain, and the weakness had left her body. “Yeah. I’m going to do it. Don’t try to stop me, Georgie. I am the Rock of Gibraltar and of the company of leaves. I may fuck myself over, but I have to do this. I don’t want to be weak anymore.”
The Dom-Date: 4
That afternoon, Lizzy left early and drove her red sports car through the afternoon heat to The Devilhouse, on the verge of turning around and running for the hills the whole time. Sun streamed in the side window and cooked her pale skin. The heat stung her arm, but she didn’t move it.
Fear was weakness. Pain was weakness leaving the body.
She parked next to Georgie’s Lexus in the parking lot, up by the doors. That was weird. George hadn’t said anything about getting to The Devilhouse early. She must have paperwork to do or something.
Lizzy didn’t bother changing her clothes yet for the Saturday night debauchery. Still wearing little-girl jeans and a blue tank top, she strode through the white halls of The Devilhouse, marching fast, not giving herself a chance to turn around.
Fear was weakness.
Lizzy knocked and walked straight into The Dom’s office without waiting for him to answer, before she lost her nerve.
The Dom sat at his desk, spine straight, studying a tablet that lay flat on his glass desk.
Sunlight from the huge windows overlooking the garden glared on his golden hair and the right side of his face, throwing his left side into subtle shadows. His blank expression suggested nothing.
Lizzy backed up a step, touching the door.
~~~~~
On the center stage of The Devilhouse’s main theater, amid the silent and empty warehouse-sized space of the nightclub, the stage lights’ harsh shadows cut The Dom’s pale face into disjointed triangles. The last traces of sweat from the long-gone dancers wafted through the air, and the abandoned nightclub seemed emptier for it.
“Say your safe word.” The Dom still spoke that complex, nuanced Russian that terrified Lizzy.
“Nyet,” she said.
“Say safe word and I will stop.” The Slavic words vortexed in her head, sucking her down.
“Never.”
“You have chosen a safe word that you will never say?” His measured tone threatened her. If she admitted it, everything would stop, and she wouldn’t ever find the bottom of this darkness.
“I would say it,” Lizzy said, “if you pushed me too far, if I couldn’t handle it, but I can take anything. You can’t hurt me.”
“The stripes on your skin suggest otherwise.”
“That’s nothing. Go ahead. Try. You can’t hurt me.” Her breath came in panting gasps, and sweat dripped off her hair. It splatted on the cement stage and left a damp circle.
The Dom crouched beside her so that his face was right in front of her turned head. Small lines around his blue eyes scared her. “I can hurt you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“You want me to hurt you?”
“You can’t break me. Do your worst. I’ve been through far worse pain than you ever have.”
The Dom’s eyes, dark blue like the fathomless ocean, glinted in the darkness. Lizzy had never seen him angry. As far as everyone knew, when The Dom got mad, he got a little cooler and more controlled.
His voice rumbled, and his steady blue eyes were as cold as polar ice. “Your best event was the vault.”
With those six words, The Dom peeled the skin off her.
He watched every horrified twitch of her face and raised his head to lay a soft kiss at the top of her spine. His breath brushed the short hair on her neck.
Her body clenched, tightening from her crotch to her neck. A cry tore from her throat.
His deep voice was as dark as black velvet brushing her skin. “It happened in Beijing.”
Lizzy sucked in her breath to scream her safe word, but The Dom flipped a switch.
Orgasm ripped up her spine, shattering the agony.
~~~~~
His huge, strong hands were on her for hours, blurring the boundaries between her past and herself and pain and ecstasy, until he had finally wrapped her in a blanket and soothed her, cradled in his arms, exhausted and trembling.
“You won’t tell anyone,” she whispered.
The Dom’s voice was soft, almost kind. “Never. I would never divulge such secrets.”
She slept in his arms for over an hour, and then he took her home in the early dawn light.
A Sapphire-Eyed Cobra
Lizzy shut The Dom’s heavy office door behind her and leaned on it, drawing deep, calming breaths. Sunlight slanted in the long window that overlooked the garden area outside, where the groundskeepers were mowing the emerald grass. All the bushes out there was manicured, and the grass was trimmed to green velvet. The Dom insisted everything be perfect, and now she was about to splash a huge rock into the proverbial pond of The Devilhouse, splattering everything with mud.
She asked him, “Can we talk?”
The Dom glanced up at her from scrolling pages on the tablet, which seemed to be floating in the air on his clear, glass desk. His blue eyes looked darker than usual, almost deep-ocean blue. He went right back to scrolling down the tablet. “Yes. Come in.”
She closed the door behind her and leaned her head against the hard door for a moment, gathering strength. Jerseyan sarcasm would derail this. One chance.
She couldn’t dive right in. She wasn’t strong enough. Her body held too much weakness. “How long have you known about Beijing?”
The Dom looked up. Hints of wariness in his eyes startled her. “Since I saw your name on your application.”
She was stripped all over again. “But that was years ago.”
He nodded.
“You never said anything to anybody?”
“Of course not. You obviously prefer to keep it private.”
“Were you in Beijing?”
“No.” His easy answer dismissed the idea.
She didn’t need to ask him if he had ever been a gymnast. First, The Dom was way too big, far too tall to have ever been a gymnast, and second, she would have known him. Since she figured that he was somewhere in his middle thirties, he would have been near his peak when she started competing internationally when she was eight. They would have had friends in common, if not coaches. “Do you follow gymnastics or something?”
“Not particularly.”
“Have you ever been to the Olympics?”
The Dom blinked, and he paused.
Was that too much information to ask of him, whether he had ever watched a live sporting event?
Lizzy waited. He might refuse to answer, but she wasn’t going to withdraw the question.
“Once,” he said, finally. “Turin, Italy. For the winter games.” He glanced up at her, and his hard glance shredded her cover story. “What do you really want to ask me?”
Here it was, one shot, once chance.
She hel
d herself with pride, chest out, and she jerked chin up. If she had still had a ponytail, it would have twitched. “I want to be your sub.”
The Dom flipped his tablet screen-down on his wide glass desk and leaned back in his chair. His long legs stretched under the glass. He gestured with one hand toward the chairs in front of his desk.
Lizzy walked over and sat in the over-sized chair, a hamster huddling on human furniture. If she had scooted back, her feet would have stuck out, so she perched on the edge. His office smelled like chocolate, as usual. The tray with his afternoon empty cocoa cup still sat on the bar in the back corner.
He asked, “And why would you want that?”
“I need pain. I lived with it for so long that I can’t live without it. You’re a sadist—”
“Am I?” One blond eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch.
“Of course. You never could have done all that to me, said those things, stripped everything away from me and exposed everything about me, if you hadn’t wanted to, if you hadn’t liked it.”
He leaned back, rocking his chair back, just a small move. His lips opened a bare amount, and he inhaled. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought his lips were paler than usual, almost bloodless. He said, “Continue.”
“I don’t know what you’re hiding, but I’ll never pry. I will never strip that shiny, mirrored shell away from you. But listen, sadism is rooted in pain. You need someone who can take that pain from you. I can do it. I can take more pain than anyone you’ve ever met. My whole life was pain and deferred reward. I don’t know any other way to live.”
He said, “Perhaps it’s time to learn another way.”
“I’ve tried. I’ve tried for six years, and I’ve felt nothing that whole time. I thought I had destroyed my pelvic nerves when I ripped out all those muscles in my back. I thought that the steroids they gave me burned out the sexual part of me. I thought I was damaged. I thought it was permanent. You showed me that the pain is what I’ve been missing.”
“You’re sure?”
He sounded like he was relenting. Hope flared. “Absolutely.”
He leaned on his elbows, resting on the desk. “Are you sure that it wasn’t the attention? Or because it wasn’t conventional? Perhaps the emotional component?”
“I want to be a sub. I want to belong to someone. I want to be your sub.”
His head tilted up, and sunlight from the window glistened on his blond hair. “You just said two different things. Which is more important to you?”
Lizzy was caught short, so to speak. “I don’t know.”
The Dom said, “I am not in a position to take a sub.”
“Oh.” It felt like the ocean withdrawing from the shore, dragging her under the water.
“But you said that you wanted to be a sub. We could find you your own Dom, someone experienced, someone who could give you what you need.”
No. She wanted him. “I don’t know anyone else.”
His gaze at her was as steady as a sapphire-eyed cobra’s. “It would be a deeply submissive experience, to allow me to give you to someone else.”
The thought of being given like property scared her. The pop of fear must have shown on her face, yet she welcomed the fear because fear was weakness. If she saw it, she could grab it and destroy it. She needed to break through the weakness.
Pain was weakness leaving the body.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
The Dom said, “There is someone I would like to introduce you to.”
“Have I met him?”
“I don’t believe so.” The Dom’s tight smile chilled her. “He’ll be here in an hour. You might want to change your clothes. He liked the gold dress you wore at the membership party last week.”
Panic slammed Lizzy. “You didn’t tell him about me, about Beijing, did you?”
The Dom’s smiled softened. “I would never divulge such things. I understand the benefits of concealing one’s personal history.”
Lizzy was too grateful to be astounded at what he had said.
I Am Not A Sadist
Mannix sat in front of The Dom’s glass desk in his office and had the distinct impression that he was in a high-level business meeting.
A meeting of Doms was always a pissing contest, but Mannix felt like The Devilhouse’s Dom didn’t play by the rules. Every time Mannix brought out evidence of his own dominance, of his superior alphaness, The Dom flicked one of those weirdly blond eyebrows and dismissed it, refusing to counter, and then returned to the subject of Lizzy’s preoccupation with pain and how to handle her as if he was referring to a meeting agenda.
The Dom of The Devilhouse sat back in his tall, black desk chair and said, “I don’t believe it’s necessarily pain, though she thinks it is so.”
Frustration welled in Mannix’s groin. “So she’s the perfect sub, a true masochist.”
“I’m not convinced she’s a masochist, and she has never been a sub before. This should be on a trial basis. You should progress slowly. You shouldn’t even declare your relationship to be considered training for at least a month. She should not go to your house tonight.”
“Yes, of course.” Mannix would adhere to The Dom’s rules as long as The Devilhouse’s cameras were on them. After that, once he got her to his house, he and Lizzy would make their own rules.
Finally, after The Devilhouse Dom had detailed Lizzy’s experiences, he rocked back in his plush desk chair, nearly a gesture of irritation, and glared out the window. “I am not a sadist.”
He pronounced it the British way, saddest.
If Mannix had been in full frontal Dom mode, he might have taken advantage of such a weak spot, but The Devilhouse Dom had deflected him too much. He went with sarcasm. “Of course not. There are no sadists around here.”
A quick glance from The Dom suggested there was more sarcasm in Mannix’s tone than he had intended.
“It’s this place, The Devilhouse itself,” The Dom said. “This level of hedonism is unhealthy.”
“If you ever wanted to sell it, I’d take the health risk,” Mannix joked.
The Dom appraised Mannix as if totaling his net worth, perhaps finding it lacking. Mannix pulled back his shoulders, trying to improve the assessment.
The Dom said, “I might consider it in a few years.”
Mannix chuckled at him, covering his shock that his offer wasn’t met with outright derision or even anger. “Yeah, ‘God grant me celibacy and sobriety, but not yet,’ right?”
The hard edges of Dom’s stern expression smoothed. “Indeed.”
Lizzy’s New Dom
Lizzy waited in Play Room One, a garden-variety BDSM dungeon, pacing. Her sky-high heels ticked on the tile like a knife chipping at a stone prison wall. The black iron equipment—the benches and crosses and racks—seemed contrived, as if BDSM was all just a game like Georgie had said.
She had dressed again in the golden cocktail dress that she had worn to the membership party only eight days ago. Her breath whooshed so fast that the pale gold spangles over her bosom quivered, what bosom she had, anyway. She had brought her black pumps to wear that night at The Devilhouse, so she looked exactly like she had last Friday.
The new Dom must have been there. He must have seen her to have liked what she wore. The Dom—the real The Dom, and all these Doms were getting mixed up in her head—The Devilhouse Dom had said that the new guy had liked the gold minidress that she had worn.
Her hands shook, whether from excitement or repressing the urge to sprint out of The Devilhouse and not look back, she couldn’t tell.
Theo had been at that party.
Theo had certainly taken a long, blistering look at her body in that very dress that night. He had been interested enough in her to pry.
Maybe Theo was a secret Dom. He had said that he wasn’t into that, but that’s what a secret Dom would say, wasn’t it? He was a Devilhouse member, even though he had said that he had just joined. If he had just joined, he would be lo
oking for a sub.
Good God, if it was Theo, should she thank her lucky stars or slap the shit out of him?
She paced.
It probably wasn’t Theo.
Some random Dom who could show up at The Devilhouse with an hour’s notice was probably a retired guy, maybe an old guy, maybe an ugly old guy with sagging pectorals and a beer gut and a wrinkly dick who wanted to whip young flesh. A lot of fuzzy-headed old men had been at that party.
Lizzy reached for the doorknob, fully intending to dash.
The door opened and bumped her hand. She skittered backward in her high heels, bending her ankle. An old break there ached.
The Dom strode in. His reserved expression and dark blue eyes seemed grimmer than usual. She stepped back farther, schooling her face to not look like a Victorian virgin on her wedding night.
She could always leave. The Dom would back her up.
Probably.
Nah, he would back her up.
Behind The Dom, another man walked into the dungeon. He was an inch or so shorter than The Dom, but only professional basketball players were taller than The Dom so he was still really tall. Meaty muscles bulked under the new guy’s black suit jacket, which Lizzy recognized as stylish, probably from a high-end designer. He wore it over a white shirt, open at his thick neck, and black jeans.
The new guy’s black hair fell in shining waves over his shoulders, and his startling, star-blue eyes burned through her.
Dear God and all the angels in Heaven, it was Mr. Smolder.
Lizzy almost fell to her knees and thanked her stars for her deliverance from crusty old Doms and stalkery county attorneys.
Yet, disappointment nudged her. She had almost convinced herself that Theo was out in the hallway, waiting for her, wanting her, but he wasn’t.
Yeah, well, fuck Theo, anyway.
The Dom said, “Lizbeth, may I present Mr. Mannix Bonfils, a Dom in search of a submissive. Mannix, this is Ms. Lizzy Pajari, who is considering the submissive lifestyle.”
Mannix Bonfils stepped forward with an aggressive swagger and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Pajari.”
Falling Hard (Billionaires in Disguise: Lizzy, #1) Page 13