by Lilia Moon
Amusement streaks in her eyes. “I got that part. Now tell me why he gave them to you.”
I raise an eyebrow at my boss. “You’ve changed, lady. Three months ago you’d have turned the color of your shoes or swallowed your tongue or something.”
She raises an eyebrow right back. “I hang out with the owner of a BDSM club and a bunch of people who run a betting pool on how long it will take them to make me blush.”
I didn’t know that. I study the amazing woman who has somehow managed to step into a totally different world and do it so well that the natives tease her like one of their own. I glance down at the photos sprawled over my work surface. “Maybe Harlan sent porn to see if he could make you blush.”
She snorts, which I’m pretty sure is something she’s picked up from Ari. “He’ll have to get in line behind the new clients I just interviewed.”
That’s not usually her job. “How come Meghan didn’t talk to them?”
Emily grins. “They want spankings as wedding favors.”
I laugh. “Poor Meghan.” Leo and I can at least talk the talk, and Gabby’s holding her own in some way I don’t even understand, but Meghan’s the least comfortable with our new associations. Not because she has a closed mind—she totally doesn’t. She’s just not a fan of the ground under her feet shifting, and Fettered registers pretty high on the Richter scale.
“She’s doing okay,” says Emily quietly. “I’m not going to let who we are change more or faster than we can all handle.”
That’s why she’s the boss and I’m just the chick who takes care of the details. “You’re a good friend.”
“I am.” She sits down on the other side of my makeshift desk. “I’m also your friend, so spill. Why’s Harlan sending you sexy pictures?”
I go with the easiest version of the truth. “They’re testing a new tool for Fettered members to use. Scene brainstorming.”
Emily’s eyes are bugging out again. “You’re going to play with Harlan?”
“Is that so hard to imagine?”
She opens her mouth to say something and then closes it again and runs her finger along the edge of one of the photos. “No, actually.”
That might be more disturbing than the answer she didn’t say. “He’s issued the invitation. I’m pretty sure these are just meant to torment me while I ponder.” And to plant very visual, very specific details in my head, damn him.
Emily’s surveying the pictures now. “So you’re supposed to pick what attracts you?”
“Something like that.” I give her the evil eye. “It’s not a group project.”
She laughs, but she hasn’t taken her eyes off the porn. “No, but I think I maybe need to get a set of my own.”
Oh yeah—Emily’s changed. Big time.
Which is part of my problem. I’m not sure I want to. Not all fast rides are heading in a good direction, and I don’t know where I want this one to go, or whether I even get to pick. Harlan doesn’t seem like a guy used to sharing the steering wheel. I sweep up the photos and stuff them back in the envelope, and then I swing past my startled, grinning boss and head for the door. “I’m going to see a man about a thing.”
If he can bring this to my turf, I can damn well take it to his. And I don’t need electrical tape as an excuse.
Chapter Seven
Scorpio
The walking distance between our offices and Fettered is just about right to work up a good head of steam. I know because this isn’t the first time I’ve arrived at the club pissy and on edge.
I am, however, pissy and honest. Harlan sending me porn at work is not the problem here. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give him a free pass. I head in the front door this time and wave at Ari and Quint at the bar as I pass through the outer sanctum. “Looking for Harlan. I’ll catch you in a bit.”
Ari looks up from a stack of paperwork taller than her drink. “I don’t think he’s in the dungeon.”
Quint shakes his head. “He’s in one of the private rooms with Milo, installing the new sex chair.”
Ari grins. “That chair rocks. I need to find someone to lock me up and ravish me.”
Quint ruffles her hair. “Sorry, darlin’. I’m busy tonight.”
I grin at both of them. “You guys have really weird work conversations, you know that?”
“What?” Ari shrugs her shoulders and gives me an intentionally clueless look. “You can watch if you want.”
She knows I don’t want. “I’m one of those annoying types who comes here to drink your cocktails and mingle with the interesting people and doesn’t actually step up and do anything fun.”
Quint pours what looks like lemonade into a glass and pushes it across the bar in my direction. “You’re not a tourist—you’re a friend. There’s a difference.”
Damn the Doms of this place and their ability to see right through me. “Thanks.”
He nods his head at a stool. “Sit. Drink. I’ll let Harlan know you’re here.”
I give up and slide onto the stool. Quint makes killer lemonade, and I’m a smart enough tourist to know better than to walk into one of Fettered’s private rooms, no matter what the people inside claimed they were going to be doing.
Ari watches Quint walk away, and then gives me the kind of look that says I’m not out of the frying pan yet. “What’s up with you and Harlan?”
That’s not something I know how to answer. “He wants to know why I don’t play.”
She sips her lemonade. “Fair question. Do you know the answer?”
“Yeah.” I can lemonade-sip anyone under the table.
She waits a moment and then laughs. “Gee, Scorpio, do you want to talk about it?”
Probably not. “Tell me about Milo’s new chair.”
She flutters her eyelashes at me. “I can give you a tour later.”
Easily one of the coolest things about Ari is her flexible, wide-open generosity. She’ll consider doing almost anything that might help someone else be a more fulfilled human being, and even though she’s making this offer as a joke, I also know she’d be willing to make it real in a heartbeat.
I squeeze her hand. “Thanks.”
She sobers, and her eyes are smart and wise and compassionate. “It’s gotten real, huh?”
It has. I hear footsteps behind us, and know without looking that real has just arrived. Ari slides off her stool and picks up her paperwork and lemonade. “I have stuff to go take care of.”
Harlan’s voice rumbles at my back. “Milo could use help testing the restraint mechanisms.”
Ari snorts. “This time I’m locking him up first.”
I laugh. I’ve heard that story. Being Milo’s alpha tester is a risky job.
She slips away, and the footsteps behind me get closer. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
I slap his envelope down on the bar. “Really? You bring me porn at work and figure I’m just going to obediently drop a few pictures in your mailbox?”
He shrugs, pours himself some lemonade, and slides onto a stool beside me. “Maybe.”
Being this close to him is like holding an electric guitar right before the first chords rip. He’s always made me sit up and take notice, but it’s getting more potent. I’ve never had a problem appreciating a big, sexy bad boy—muscles and ink are both in my happy zone. But this is more than that.
He sees me, pushes on me, and those are a totally different kind of electricity.
He puts his hand on the envelope. “Did you look?”
“Yeah.”
He drinks his lemonade and doesn’t say anything.
He also knows when not to push, and that makes it a lot harder to stay pissy. “I was at a wedding a couple of days ago. Brittany, our old receptionist. She hooked up with a grape farmer and now she’s heading off to Tuscany to eat spaghetti and have many babies and be stupidly happy.”
He’s grinning. “Some parts of that sound pretty good.”
I close my eyes. One smart-ass comment an
d he’s nailed it. “That’s just it. There are parts of that I want.” I sweep my hand around the club lounge. “And parts of this I want. And parts of the punk-rocker musician thing I did for ten years that I want. But none of them are mostly right, if that makes any sense.”
I open my eyes to find him studying me, intense and serious. He lifts a hand and barely touches the nape of my neck. “Why’d you stop the music?”
The man who sends me porn and makes my neck yearn probably deserves something more than my usual pat answer. “I loved making music. I played lead guitar, was a solid back-up singer, wrote some of the songs. My band was pretty good—good enough to keep ourselves fed if we worked hard at it.” Most musicians couldn’t say the same thing, so by our own standards, we were a success. “It was the in-between that was hard. We rode the good edges with the music, and too many of the bad edges when we weren’t playing.”
Still with the intent eyes. “Drugs?”
“That and a bunch of other stuff. Not my thing, mostly, but I watched a lot of friends self-destruct. There was nowhere good and fulfilling to go between the music. Nowhere to live that wasn’t an edge. Too much emptiness and too much bleeding.” I can feel the exhausted loneliness rising in my ribs just talking about it.
His hand slides down my back. “So you found a way out.”
“One day Emily overheard me sorting out gig logistics with some guy at a bar and offered me a job. I thought she was a raving lunatic.”
Harlan’s cheek dimples. “But you took it.”
I shrug. “The pay was good, and she promised I could wear whatever I wanted to work and use as many curse words as I needed to get the job done.” And something in her eyes had promised to be my friend.
She still doesn’t know that’s the part that sealed the deal.
His hand is stroking my back like I’m an oversized kitten. “That’s why Damon opened Fettered.”
I blink, and finally meet his intense eyes head-on. “What?”
“Lots of people in the BDSM world are living edge to edge. Fettered supports doing that safely, but it’s also the good and safe place to come in between. That’s why we have squishy couches and Pictionary nights and people dropping in all the damn time just to talk.”
I’d seen all that and assumed it was just part of Damon’s very smart marketing plan. “It’s a family.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
The rest falls into place. “And you’re the den mother. The one who keeps the edges safe when people choose to play.”
He’s ducking my gaze now, and he almost looks embarrassed. “Yeah. Something like that.” His fingers trace over the lines of his tats. “I know what it is to need edges. And to need something in between.”
I look at the strong, beautiful tribal lines of his ink. It’s time to ask where he’s trying to drive this thing, because if I don’t want to be a passenger, I need to get off this bus really soon. I put my hands on the envelope. “So what’s this?”
Chapter Eight
Harlan
Subs pin me to the floor exactly never. Scorpio just has, and she’s not even my sub yet.
I look at her and try to figure out the answer to a question that should be obvious, but somehow isn’t. “It’s an invitation.”
She’s staring me down just fine. “Scenes are about finding edges, right?”
Yeah. Especially when your Dom is a hard-ass, and I am. “Usually. Especially for the sub.”
She takes a long, slow breath. “I think I come hang out here because you’re all people who know what it is to seek out edges, to need to do that, and I like soaking that in. You feel like my tribe.”
“You don’t get enough of that other places.”
She shrugs. “I get other things. Work makes me feel useful and needed, and they’re my friends and they don’t bleed every day, and I need that too.”
I’ve been at her offices enough to know the adoration is mutual. They’re as tight as we are, and I know exactly how rare that is. But the woman in front of me is still hungry. “But they aren’t edge seekers.”
She grins. “Well, Emily is surprising me.”
She’s surprising the whole damn universe. “She’s doing it because she loves Damon.” And Leo does it because he loves his partner, but I don’t know how much Scorpio knows about that, so I keep my mouth shut.
Besides, this isn’t about love. It’s about helping someone who might belong in my lifestyle find her way there. I’ve got a really big comfort zone with that, even if this thing somehow keeps wobbling outside of it. I touch the envelope again. “This is edge. For sure. But it sounds to me like you want some of that in your life—you just want it balanced with some healthy stuff in between.”
Her eyes are big, but she’s nodding.
I take the leap. “I think we’re the same on that. I’m in a lifestyle that defaults to edges, but part of my job is to hang out here and help make that in-between space, for me and for everyone else.”
She’s smiling. “Big scary Dom and den mother.”
I give her a hard look. “You’re totally going to ruin my street cred if you keep saying that shit.” If she says it where Damon and Ari can hear, it’s going to end up on a damn t-shirt. One that they try to make me wear.
Scorpio just smirks and sips her lemonade.
She’s way more immune to my hard looks than a sub should be. I go back to the story I’m trying to tell. “You found yourself a life that has the warm and safe that you need, but it doesn’t come with enough built-in edges, so you come hang out here when you need a hit.”
She winces. “Yeah. Something like that. Or I go clubbing or bungee jumping or whatever.”
I’ve been a Dom, and a good one, for fifteen years. And I’m in absolutely virgin territory right now. I tap the envelope again like it’s my touchstone. “This is an invitation to the edges. But it’s also an invitation to play with someone who shares your need for something good and strong and real in between those edges.”
Her eyebrows slide up really slowly. “What does that mean?”
I have no fucking idea. “That you play with me and join this tribe instead of getting your high secondhand. And in between, we stay aware and figure it out and cobble together what works.”
She’s just plain staring now. “Like what?”
I feel the very unmanly need to babble. “Like you drop by with cookies or because you need a cuddle. And I drop by with a screwdriver to do stupid shit that doesn’t need doing and get a hit of the sweet and light in your office and maybe you choose to be part of that sometimes.”
She’s grinning now, and I can see I’ve just said the right thing, even though I felt like a total idiot saying it.
Time to get this thing back to stuff I know how to do. I rip open the envelope, pull out a couple of pictures, and slap them onto the bar.
Scorpio glances at them. “No.”
So much for floggers and high heels.
I pull out a few more, careful to position them this time so I can see her eyes.
She scans them, and then touches the middle one, smiling. “Punk-rock gear and fetish wear are pretty much the same thing.”
I can teach her the error of that assumption later. One’s designed to be a whole lot easier to take off. I lay more pictures down.
This time, her nose wrinkles. “Eww. No.”
I look down at the photos, trying to figure out which one set her off. “Rope bondage?”
She shakes her head. “Maid costume.”
That has my Dom radar going off big-time. “Why?”
Her eyes spark. “Do I need a reason?”
“No.” I keep my voice away from the bossy end of things. I don’t get to demand things of this woman—not yet. “But if you have one, I’d like to hear it.”
“Sorry for biting your head off.” She looks it. “The whole servant thing pushes a lot of buttons for me. Being treated as less. Not something I want to go anywhere near. Slave’s even worse.”
; She’s not going to like the next question, but it’s my job to ask it. “Tricky territory that you might want to explore when there’s enough trust in place, or hard limit?”
She flashes mad and then confused and then curious, rapidly enough I have to work to keep up. “How the hell do I tell that?”
I push the other two photos out of the way and leave the one of the woman in the seriously scanty maid costume. “When you look at this does it make you feel aroused and ashamed, or aroused and scared, or is it just a turn-off?”
“Turn-off.” Her answer comes quick and sure.
I’ve walked countless newbie subs through trying to make sense of their own reactions. I fucking love how well she sees herself and how willing she is to look. “Okay. Then that sounds like a hard limit for you.”
She’s eyeing me. “And that’s no big deal?”
I wink at her. “If your Dom’s not an asshole—and he isn’t.”
She glares. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
I let her last word hang in the air and pull out three more pictures. This time, I see the thing in her eyes I’ve been watching for. Softening. Yearning.
And then avoidance.
She pushes a woman in restraints my way and grins. “I like this one.”
I’m really good at my job because I can see all the reactions, not just the obvious ones. She’s telling me the truth, but she’s doing it to cover a truth she doesn’t want me to see. I look down at the picture she’s willing to talk about. A gorgeous woman in soft leather cuffs, tied to a headboard, a hairsbreadth away from orgasm. Eyes wide open and looking at her Dom.
Oh, yeah. I could work with that. Ari is a goddamn genius.
Scorpio’s watching me, a little nervous and more than a little aroused. If she was my sub, I’d be sucking those gorgeous, hard nipples of hers as a reward for this gift she’s just offered up. Since she’s not, I have to content myself with words. “What do you see when you look at this?”
She runs her finger down the edge of the photograph. “Surrender that’s not weak.”
In four words, she’s just defined the kind of sub she wants to be. The kind of sub she needs to be. And everything in me wants a chance to walk with her while she goes there.