Show and Tell: A Forbidden Flowers Story

by Lynne, Donya

  Her mouth fell open.

  “Destination?” the driver said.

  She quickly rattled off her address.

  Another text arrived before she could even formulate a response to his last one. “Once I knew the beautiful woman in the backless, bronze dress was you, my thoughts raced with all the ways I wanted to make you scream, make you moan, and make you come. Ways that would make us both breathless . . . doing things to that fine body of yours that Perseus and his meager cock would never be able to do to you.”

  Oh. My. She gulped past the cottony feeling in her throat.

  “I think I would like to hear these ways and things you speak of.”

  “Then go home.”

  “Already on my way.”

  “I know. I followed you out.”

  She gasped and cranked her head around to peer out the back window. Headlights glared into her eyes, but she could just make out a man in a black tuxedo standing at the curb, watching her cab merge into traffic. But she was too far away—and the window was too dirty—for her to make out his face.

  Her phone pinged one last time.

  “You need to start paying closer attention to your surroundings.” He followed it with a wink emoji.

  Damn him and his gift for always getting in the last word.

  Resigned to the fact that she had missed catching more than a passing glimpse of him, she faced front in a huff. If only she hadn’t buried her face in her phone waiting for his next message, she might have seen what he looked like.

  There was nothing she could do about it now. She would just have to be patient. Something Jenna wasn’t exactly good at.

  As the cab crawled through traffic, a barely contained sense that she was on the verge of embarking on a deeply metamorphic journey stirred in her blood. She had told Warren she wanted it all tonight. Everything. She wanted the reality of being his submissive. And he had told her he wanted that too.

  Which meant she was closer than she’d ever been to living out the fantasies she’d begun having after her first boyfriend spanked her with the back of a hairbrush when she was seventeen. The sex afterward had been incredible. Mind blowing, really.

  But she had never admitted to her boyfriend that it was the spanking that had gotten her so worked up, and he ended up never doing it again, because, as he told her later, he’d felt “weird” about it. He had only done it because one of his friends had said he’d done that to his girlfriend and gotten off on it. But after he tried it for himself, it made him feel like a pervert.

  So, sadly, there’d been no more spanking. Or any kinky fuckery of any kind. Sex with him had become so vanilla after that, that it had lost all taste. It became as normal as normal sex could be. And normal sex for Jenna was boring sex. Stale, lackluster, and tedious.

  But at such a young and inexperienced age, what could she have done? She had barely understood her desires herself, let alone possessed the wherewithal to articulate them to someone else.

  So she had closeted her sexual fantasies and kept them her own dirty little secret, not sure what to make of them and a little scared that if she told anyone about them, they would think she was sick in the head.

  But her desires had never gone away. On the contrary, they’d grown stronger. So strong that she’d begun writing about them. Then she turned what she wrote into stories. Then she began publishing those stories. Until she had a whole new career.

  Now, here she was about to discover—much like the heroines she wrote about—just how deep her personal rabbit hole was.

  Because after a month of playing at domination games over the phone, she was finally—officially—Warren’s submissive.

  Chapter Seven

  Warren did call her an hour later. And, as promised, he had told her all the things.

  Things that got Jenna wet and made her nipples hard. Things that slicked her skin with sweat. Things that made her insides quiver, her pulse race, and her breath hitch.

  He told her that the longer he had followed her through the museum, the more he’d wanted to lead her on a scavenger hunt to some obscure corner away from the crowd by doing to her what she had unknowingly done to him. He would have texted her hints and photos to lead her to him.

  “What would you have done to me once I found you?” she asked.

  “I would have fucked you.”

  Then he explained all the ways he would have fucked her, planting salacious images in Jenna’s thoughts she would never forget even if she lived another hundred years.

  And then, when she was so turned on she would have done anything he asked, he told her to stand naked in front of her bedroom window, with one hand on the glass as she masturbated with the other.

  When she was only seconds away from coming, he told her to stop. And for once, she obeyed. Not because she wanted to follow orders for a change, but because she wanted to stave off her orgasm for as long as she could just to keep him talking.

  He told her he was in his playroom, lust drunk as he gazed at his St. Andrew’s Cross while imagining her strapped to it, her bare skin marked with red slashes from where he’d flogged her. She heard the slap of leather on leather in the background as he brought the scene to life as best as he could over the phone.

  And just when Jenna didn’t think she could restrain her orgasm any longer, he told her he was going to come and gave her permission to come with him.

  And they did. Together. Her body seized almost violently at the same moment he grunted with a ragged mix of pain and pleasure that sounded like his soul was ripping through his skin.

  When it was over, neither spoke for a long time. Just breathed. Hard. Heavily. Like it was a labor to take in oxygen.

  After forever had passed, he quietly cleared his throat and said, “I’ve never looked forward to training a submissive as much as I’m looking forward to training you, Jenna.”

  She could only agree, too far gone to even question him.

  Before the call ended, he took down her address and email and promised to send her a contract first thing in the morning. Then they said good night, and Jenna fell into a comalike sleep filled with dreams of all the things, waking twice as she came in her sleep. Such were the depths of his hold on her.

  For the next several days, Jenna spent her days working, and her nights trying to work. She was so preoccupied with reading and rereading the contract Warren had sent her, as well as with when they would see each other again, that she struggled to get words written on her next book while Delano and Josephine’s book was with her editor.

  It wasn’t that she was unfamiliar with what becoming a submissive entailed. She had done enough research to have at least a decent amount of knowledge regarding what was expected of her that nothing in Warren’s contract surprised her. She just wasn’t sure about how much of what was described in the finer points she would enjoy.

  Anal plugs, for example. She had used them and liked them. She had no problem with Warren using them. Or with spanking, flogging, or being tied up. But genital clamps? And nipple clamps? And wax play, being whipped, and Japanese bondage? She didn’t know if those would get her off, make her feel silly, or simply shut her down.

  When he called her the following Wednesday, she expressed her concerns.

  “Have you ever used genital clamps or nipple clamps?” he had asked after listening to her worries. “Or shibari?”

  “Shibari?”

  “The technical term for Japanese bondage. But you might hear others at the club call it Kinbaku.”

  And here she’d thought all bondage was just “bondage.” Silly her.

  “No.” She hadn’t done most of what she’d read about in the contract, but she’d fantasized about a lot of it.

  “Are you open to giving them a try?”

  She was certainly curious. But she didn’t want to sign a contract that gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted if she decided that she didn’t like certain things after she tried them. “Yes.”

  “Then mark those
items that concern you, and write a statement on the back page that there are certain facets of the contract you aren’t sure about yet. We’ll take it as we go and revisit those items later.”

  After she agreed to his compromise, he turned the conversation toward the coming weekend.

  “How would you like to join me Saturday night?” he asked.

  “At the club?”

  “Yes.”

  “As your submissive?”

  “As my guest and submissive-in-training . . . and because I’m dying to see you again.”

  She was dying to see him too. Because she still didn’t know what he looked like, which put her at a disadvantage since he’d seen her at the Met.

  “What will be expected of me?”

  Did he plan on initiating her by stripping her down in front of the other members and showing her off? Would he tell her to blow him in front of a group of onlookers?

  More importantly, why did those thoughts send a pulse of heat through her core?

  “Think of it as a sort of orientation,” he said. “You would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement, of course.”

  “Of course.” She knew that what went on in the club stayed in the club and that NDAs were common protocol.

  “And you should know that, as your sponsor, your behavior will reflect directly on me, so I expect nothing but complete adherence to club rules.”

  “Which are?”

  “I’ll email them to you.” He paused. “So, is that a yes?”

  This was what she had signed up for, wasn’t it? All the leather, domination, and bondage she could ever want. If she hadn’t wanted to go to the club with him, she wouldn’t have agreed to more.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll have a car pick you up. Be ready by eight.”

  A car? He wouldn’t pick her up himself?

  “What should I wear?”

  “I’ll take care of that. I’ll send my stylist to your apartment tomorrow night to take your measurements and make sure you have appropriate attire.”

  “But what if I don’t—”

  “I will send you something to wear, Jenna. And you will wear it. No questions asked.”

  Her mouth fell open at his commanding tone and the way it provoked her pulse into a higher gear. She bit her lip and took a shaky breath. Sir Warren excited her, especially now that she’d felt his touch.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. He had made it clear three weeks ago during one of their first phone calls that when he took on the role of Dom, she was to call him Sir or Master. Now felt like one of those times.

  “Very good.” He paused as if giving her a moment to consider the implications of disobedience. “When it comes to the club, you will do as I say. You will follow my orders to the letter and defer to my judgment. Is that clear?”

  She recognized his Dom voice from their many phone conversations. He spoke more authoritatively and crisply when using his Dom voice, as if he were an army general commanding his troops.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Then my stylist will be there tomorrow, you will give her what she needs, and I will send you something to wear. And I want you to get some rest. A sub’s first time at the club can be a little . . . overwhelming.”

  “Even for me?” After all, BDSM and sex clubs were what she wrote about. She’d seen a lot of pictures and had read a lot of accounts of what to expect. Surely that gave her a leg up.

  “Reading and writing about BDSM is not the same as experiencing it. That’s like saying someone can learn karate from pictures in a book. Pictures only show so much. It’s the firsthand experience and one-to-one teaching that create mastery.

  “Seeing what goes on at the club is daunting for a first-timer, even one as knowledgeable as you. I’ve seen virgin subs go in on an adrenaline rush, knowing full well what to expect, then crash before the night was over or a few days later after the high wore off.”

  Jenna had read about submissives coming down hard after a scene. And with Warren driving the point home so firmly, maybe she should rethink her approach and schedule Sunday as a day off from writing so she could nurture herself instead of power through. She could pick up some nourishing soup and a few comfort foods from the market down the block and lounge on the couch watching movies, napping, and reading books all day.

  “A couple of years ago,” Warren said, continuing without missing a beat, “one of the other Doms brought in a virgin sub who came down so hard after she went home that she got sick and ended up missing two days of work.”

  Someone had actually gotten sick from their first experience at the club? Wow. Jenna wasn’t sure whether to be scared or even more excited.

  As if he realized he might have just scared her, even if only a little, he quickly added, “But I don’t want you to worry about that. I’ll stay with you afterward to make sure you’re okay, then follow up with you over the next few days. I’ll want to make sure you’re processing everything without any problems.”

  In the end, she had done as he’d asked. She had tolerated being measured and sized by his stylist—an elegantly coiffed and exotically beautiful Indian woman named Juti—went to bed an hour earlier both Thursday and Friday, then spent Saturday on pins and needles waiting for five o’clock. That was when Warren had told her that she could expect his assistant to come by with her outfit.

  And right on time, a few minutes before five, an attractive blonde wearing a beige tweed skirt suit with a rose-colored blouse showed up at her apartment with a large Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag.

  “I’m Francis,” she said, her voice melodic but firm. “Mr. Donovan’s assistant.”

  “Mr. Donovan?” Jenna asked.

  Warren still hadn’t told her his last name, even though she had given him hers on the contract she’d signed and emailed back to him Thursday morning before making herself a copy and overnighting him the original.

  Had Francis just slipped and let the cat out of the bag?

  Francis smiled as if realizig her faux pas. “Warren.”

  So, Donovan was Warren’s last name. Why did that sound so familiar?

  Recovering like a true professional, Francis raised the Saks shopping bag, her smile turning bright and cheery. “This is from Mr. Donovan. Your outfit for this evening.”

  First Juti, now Francis. Two beautiful women from Warren’s world had graced Jenna’s apartment in less than forty-eight hours. Jenna didn’t want her insecurities to get the better of her, but it was hard not to wonder—however irrationally—whether Juti and Francis knew what Warren was and if they’d had the pleasure of experiencing his unique talents.

  Jenna took the bag, and Francis peered politely into her apartment as if expecting an invitation to enter.

  “Mr. Donovan asked me to wait while you tried it on,” she said.

  When Jenna didn’t immediately step aside and invite her in but merely frowned in confusion, Francis added, “In case the dress he chose for you doesn’t fit.”

  “Oh.” Jenna fluttered her hand as if she had nothing to worry about. “I’m sure the fit will be fine.”

  She preferred to spend these last few hours before meeting Warren alone, not resisting the temptation to ask Francis if he had taken her to his dungeon.

  Francis’s smile turned into patient determination. “Mr. Donovan insisted.”

  Her eyebrows popped up. “Oh, he did, did he?” Jenna puffed out an indignant exhale.

  Maybe the fact that she still hadn’t seen his face and didn’t know certain aspects of his life when he knew so much about hers was getting to her. Or—okay—maybe she was a little jealous of the modelesque women he’d sent to her apartment like he was flaunting his harem.

  Which was so unfair to him, because he’d never once given her a reason to think he was seeing anyone or that he would treat her so disrespectfully.

  But she couldn’t help how she felt. Until she saw him, heard his reassuring voice, and felt his exhilarating touch, she was going to be a bit of a mess. Th
ere was so much at stake tonight, and she was more nervous than she wanted to admit.

  So Francis was just going to have to forgive her for being a bit snippy.

  “When you return to Mr. Donovan, perhaps you can tell him that, in the future, if he wants to ensure that the clothes he chooses for me fit, he should allow me to try them on before he spends an obscene amount of money on them.”

  A twinkle lit in Francis’s eyes as if she approved of Jenna’s feisty attitude. “Of course, Ms. Spencer.”

  “Please call me Jenna.”

  Francis tipped her head in deferral. “Jenna.”

  Jenna allowed her in and offered her something to drink, then excused herself to her bedroom, set the shopping bag on the bed, and pulled out two boxes.

  The smaller box held a pair of Saint Laurent black patent-leather slingback sandals with three-and-a-half-inch heels.

  Saint Laurent. As in Yves Saint Laurent!

  Okay, so maybe the dress had cost Warren more than a few hundred dollars, given that the shoes he’d picked out were at least six-hundred-dollar shoes.

  Just what did Warren do for a living that he could afford shelling out this kind of money on an outfit she might only wear once or twice?

  Pulling herself together after realizing her feet were going to be dressed by one of the top designers in the world, Jenna took a deep breath and lifted the lid off the bigger, square-shaped box.

  And nearly fell to her knees.

  Oscar de la Renta. The black dress he’d bought her had been designed by the one and only Oscar de la Renta.

  This had to have cost more than two thousand dollars, probably closer to three.

  Jenna owned a couple of couture pieces, including the dress she’d worn to the Met, but she had never been able to afford designer royalty like this.

  As she held her breath and lifted the dress from its regal nest of gold tissue paper, delicate angles of layered chiffon unfolded like liquid silk. The exquisite garment was topped by a backless, asymmetric bodice, and a cascade of black silk chiffon draped over one shoulder and down the back.