Chase released Sandy’s hand. This had been their sixth and final playtime together. She’d been so sweet to him—too good for him, certainly—but it wasn’t enough. He was starting to fear there wouldn’t ever be enough.
“Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to try.” Sandy raised her gaze to his, and he saw a deep well of sadness there.
“You might, perhaps, be a good fit for Michel.” As the owner of the K Club, Chase knew many of the members, their strengths and their weaknesses. He could pick successful pairs 90 percent of the time, except for himself, apparently.
Sandy nodded, and he stood, reaching down to help her up. A slight tremor still ran the length of her body, but she took a few deep breaths, and he could see her mentally sliding from subspace back into the real world. She didn’t say much to him as she donned her street clothes and he walked her downstairs to the front door of his club. She left in the glaring brightness of the midafternoon sun, and he locked the door behind her.
“Another one, huh?” Dusty said from behind the bar where he was cleaning.
Chase turned, his leather boots squeaking against the cement floor. “Yeah.” He sat hard on a bar stool, and Dusty put a half-empty bottle of their private stash on the bar in front of him. Chase grabbed a glass and poured three fingers of Scotch. They didn’t have a liquor license, and simply having the booze in the club was a risk, but Dusty kept it under lock and key, and they were the only two who knew it existed.
Chase took a healthy swig, and Dusty clapped him on the bare shoulder. “Sorry, man.”
Chase could hear the true concern in his friend’s voice. Many a night had he suffered through a lecture from Dusty on how he needed to find the right fit, to get over Suzanna. He’d been trying, really.
“This sucks,” he said, taking another gulp of the dark liquid. It burned its way down his throat, and he tried to clear his head. Suzanna had left him over five years ago, and he still hadn’t managed to find a permanent sub. A few women had been good fits for a couple of months, but no one long-term. He’d started to give up hope, taking any new sub in the area up to the “light” section of his club, the one members had dubbed heaven quite some time ago.
Dusty shook his head, his long straight hair swishing around his face. Chase had heard many a Dom gush about Dusty’s tuggable hair. “I know, dude, but don’t worry about it. You’ll find her.”
The confidence in Dusty’s eyes gave Chase a glimmer of hope. “You sound so sure.”
Dusty came around the bar to sit on the stool next to him. “I am sure. But enough of this crap.” He yanked the glass away from Chase. Only his old friend would risk the wrath of the Master, as they called him around here. “We need to talk shop, so nut up and put your girlie problems aside for a while.” Dusty was almost as good a business partner as he was a friend.
Chase groaned, running a hand through his short hair. He didn’t want to deal with the business. The fucking bureaucracy was killing him. That senator had Chase in his sights, along with the entire BDSM community. The man clearly believed it was 1950 and sexual deviance was to be run out of town by any means necessary. According to the latest letter, Chase was the root of all the evils in town, and the success of the club, along with its growing membership, was Chase’s fault and the result of his brainwashing the good people of Spartan, Nevada.
“What now?”
Dusty sighed, and Chase knew it couldn’t be good news. “They’re trying to file an injunction against the club to cease and desist any and all activities on the grounds of ‘sexual and physical abuse’ on the premises.” The line was delivered without emotion, but it was like a blow to the gut for Chase. How could his friend be so fucking calm with this shit?
Chase was ready to explode. No wonder Dusty had moved the Scotch glass well out of his reach. This club was his life. If they took it, he didn’t know what he would do with himself. His hands balled into fists, and his nails bit into his skin. The pain gave him something to focus his rage on. He wanted to strangle that damned senator.
* * * *
The dream was back. Liz clenched her thighs together, heat surging through her body. With her eyes closed in ecstasy, she waited, holding her breath for what he would do next. She knew she was dreaming of her fantasy man again, and she didn’t care. She was tired of fighting the wickedness inside her. She wanted to give herself over to the darkness. Here in her mind, where it was safe, where she could be sheltered and loved by the man who tormented her, she could let down her guard and allow the sinful desire to consume her.
Please, she begged herself, willing her thoughts to settle. She would let herself go. She had to. Or she risked losing her mind.
He ran a feather down the length of her body, from the tips of her fingers to the bottoms of her bound feet. Soft leather bindings stretched each limb tight as she stood with her back to the wall. He circled her nipple with the feather, and she shivered, desperate to rub her legs together and bring some sensation to the apex of her thighs. Anything to push her over the edge and end this unbearable pleasure. He palmed her breast, plumping it, massaging and torturing it.
He flicked the nipple with the tip of his finger, sending a jolt of sensation to her core. It wasn’t pain, exactly, but that zap of intense pleasure/pain almost brought her to orgasm. But she held it off. He pinched her nipple next, twisted it between his expert fingers, and then swiped his wet tongue over her peak. Every tug shot heat to her sex.
His mouth latched on to her nipple, pulling strongly, and she gasped. Yes! This was what she needed. What she’d been denying herself, fighting against. And for what? Because of some screwed-up sense of right and wrong?
The heat of his mouth disappeared, and a second later, cold metal encircled her nipple. She screamed, yanking against the restraints as he slowly tightened the clamp around her nub. Her body bucked, begging for release as her mind finally surrendered. She would have her release when he allowed it and not a moment before. A strange sense of freedom suffused her, and she let herself relax.
“Silence,” he ordered.
He closed another clamp over her second nipple. Pain wrapped around her, slight but amazing in its intensity. She bit her bottom lip, silencing her protests, her moans, her screams.
The feather returned to her collarbone, trailing light tickles along her skin, across her chest, between her tingling breasts. He circled the outside of each areola with the feather, the tickling caress contrasting with the tightness of the clamps. Her knees threatened to give out, but her bound arms kept her body stretched open, leaving all her skin bare for him to tease, to torture.
He blew warm air over her nipples, the feather trailing down her abdomen to tantalize the spot just north of where she needed his touch the most.
“You’ve been naughty, haven’t you, Lizzie?”
She nodded.
“Answer me!”
“Yes, Sir,” she squealed. God, she loved when he punished her. She was naughty on purpose so she could receive his special reprimands. He loved to punish her almost as she loved his harsh discipline.
She heard the feather whip back and tensed. It swished at her sex, a light tap of pressure against her sensitized flesh. He’d shaved her bare there only yesterday, and the skin was so fresh, so raw that the slightest touch made her quiver. The nipple clamps tightened, and she cried out.
“Are you sorry?”
“Yes, Sir.” Surrender. Abandon. Freedom.
His hand cupped her sex, and she flexed her hips. He smacked her clit with the tips of his fingers, fire spreading in their wake. Liquid heat pulsed through her channel, trickling down her leg. “Bad girl. Don’t move.”
She whimpered, the sensations around her melting her insides. He would always be good to her. Always help her, cherish her, protect her. And she lived to please him. She knew it wasn’t PC, knew she should want to be independent, strong on her own. But what was so wrong with needing another person, man or woman?
The clamps tightened again,
the pressure this time almost too much. He knew where her almost was so well and always kept her on the right side of too much.
“I’m going to make you want to come now. I’m going to push you hard to that edge and bring you back again. And again. But you do not come until I tell you to. This is your punishment.” And she was going to love every minute of it.
His voice lapped against her like a thousand rushing waves, wrapping her in that cocoon of safety as her mind buzzed. Nothing could touch her here except him. Not bills or responsibilities, not reality. Only him. Her Master.
He cupped her sex, rubbing his palm over and over her sensitive nub. He spread the lips of her sex wider, and she fought the urge to close her legs, to keep him out.
“So pretty,” he whispered. He licked her clit, and she moaned. He licked it again, then pressed something hot and wet against it. She screamed at the burn, her thighs spasming with the tension of holding off release. Cold pulsed around the heat, and as he moved his hand from her clit to her navel in a wet trail, she realized it wasn’t something hot, but rather an ice cube he was teasing her with. He dipped the cube into her navel, keeping her open wide to the air that rushed over her exposed clit. As the ice began to melt, he rubbed it up her body, stopping at her nipple.
He held it there, the metal freezing around her nipple as the ice burned its very tip. She started to count in her head as the seconds ticked by, and still he didn’t remove the ice. The burning pleasure centered on that one small piece of herself as her nipple turned to ice. She forgot about the pulsing between her legs in the burn of pleasure/pain surrounding that nipple. Until he flicked her clit. Once. Twice. She cried out, little rockets threatening to explode in her head.
Then the ice was gone, the nipple clamps suddenly loose and falling to the floor. He removed his hands, pulling away all sensation from her, and she groaned, frustration and pleasure warring within her. She’d started to come. At least she thought she had. When everything balanced on the edge like this, it was sometimes difficult to tell until the orgasm shattered through her body.
She counted in her head again, waiting, anticipating his return. She reached one hundred in complete sensory deprivation.
“Good girl.” His voice purred with pride, and she felt a blush color her cheeks. Something hard pushed at her entrance. “So wet,” he said, slipping the head of a dildo into her.
It tingled and burned. Oh, he’d put that gel on the dildo. The warming gel always sent her rocketing into orbit. But she couldn’t let go yet. He pushed the toy inside her sheath, and she moaned.
He left it deep inside her and spread her folds wide again. His thick finger rubbed in a small circle on her clit, sending another lick of pleasure down her spine. He pulled his finger away, pushing her folds open farther with both hands. Then the tingling began on her clit. She screamed. He slapped her on the clit, and she bit down on her lip.
Don’t come, don’t come.
But she wasn’t sure how long she could stop herself. He tapped her clit again and again, a little harder each time. He slipped his finger between her folds, letting them close around it, and continued the tap, tap, tapping in rapid succession. Then he was plunging the dildo in and out of her, slamming it home.
“Are you ready?”
“God, yes, please, Sir. Please!”
“Come for me, baby. Right now.”
He thrust the dildo deep, pounded his finger against her clit, and she cried out, the orgasm flooding her body with heat, pleasure, and more than she could handle. She screamed and pulsed and quivered until she couldn’t stand any longer and hung limp in the restraints, her body clenching and releasing. The dildo slid from her sheath, and she shuddered, another wave of pleasure lancing through her. He undid the wrist cuffs, and she crumpled into his arms. After unhooking the leg cuffs, he carried her to the lounge chair in the corner and lay down with her, holding her close.
“I kind of like it when you’re a bad girl,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
“Mm. Me too.”
Chapter Two
Liz’s hands trembled as she held the phone to her ear. She was doing it. Crap.
“Sophia Benitez,” her agent said from the other end of the line.
“Hey, Soph. It’s Liz.” They’d been on a first-name personal basis for well over eight years now, and Sophia had become her agent two years ago. They were friends first, author and agent second. It was sometimes a hard balance to maintain, but they seemed to do well with it.
“Hey, chiquita, what’s up?” Soph asked.
Liz smiled at the familiar name her old friend used, though she wasn’t really anyone’s little one.
“I got your e-mail.” Dread welled in her gut. Was she seriously going to tell one of her closest friends that she would write one of those books? It didn’t seem right. When she put words on the page, it was like letting someone see inside her soul. She’d never let anyone see that deeply before, and she didn’t know if she could handle it. But those dreams were consuming her alive, and she already had thirty pages written and a loose plot in her head waiting to come out.
“You’re going to have to be a little less vague.”
Liz could hear Sophia’s fingers tapping on the keys of her computer. She could picture Sophia sitting at her desk in her home office, dark hair pulled high into a ponytail, manicured fingers flying a mile a minute.
“The one about the call from the publishers…for the, uh, BDSM books,” she finished in a rush, hoping if she said it fast enough, maybe Soph wouldn’t know what she was saying. Shoot. Could she do this?
“Oh, really?”
The shock in Sophia’s voice hurt, but Liz ignored it. It was her own fault. She’d made her dislike of the genre known for some time now. But if she was going to go forward with the book, she was going to go in whole-hog. She never did anything less than 100 percent. She rubbed her earlobe, thumb holding the back of the lobe as she moved the side of her finger back and forth along the front.
“Yeah. Well, I had this idea. You know how it goes sometimes. And it won’t let up. I blame you and all your e-mail calls for this stuff.” There wasn’t anything wrong with sex. After ten years out of her father’s house, she knew she finally truly believed that. But there was a distinct difference between sex and the kind of debauched fantasy she’d been indulging in.
Son of a monkey. Guilt swirled in her gut as memories flashed through her head. Her father’s ideas of sex education had been a litany of Bible verses, graphic STD photos, and making her babysit the brattiest kids he could find. It hadn’t worked. With another swipe of her ear and a deep breath, Liz pushed the past away.
Sophia chuckled. “Yeah, well, it’s a hot genre and the one the publishers are pushing pretty hard right now. I’d love to see it when it’s done. What are we thinking deadline-wise on your end? Because Marshall Press is doing a big release next year of a new kink line called Behind Closed Doors. It would be great if you could have it done in the next few months so we can shop it to them.”
Researched and drafted in a couple months? Definitely. Researched, drafted, rewritten, revised, and polished? Liz wasn’t sure about that. “You do love to challenge me, don’t you?”
“Kind of in the job description,” Sophia said.
“True. Uh, I’m a bit out of my element with this one, so it’s going to require some research time. I don’t know if that timeline is doable.”
“Okay. Get me a draft in eight weeks, and we’ll talk.”
“I have no idea where to start.”
Liz could picture Sophia smiling and shaking her head. “You always say that.”
“I know. Beginnings suck. But it’s more than that this time. I’m floundering in uncharted waters here.”
“Okay, I might have an idea. There’s a loop of BDSM authors another client is on. I’ll ask her to add you to it. Start there. Ask some questions. And of course I’m always a phone call away to talk knotted plotlines, character bios, and romanti
c subplots.”
“Thanks, Soph. I’ll get back to you soon,” Liz said and hung up the phone.
* * * *
Three weeks later
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I don’t have time for this.” Chase glared at Dusty across his desk. He knew he shouldn’t be taking out his frustrations on his partner. He was a class-A asshole, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Each day grew more difficult. No sub, the club in some serious shit, and now this?
Chase rubbed his temples, closing his eyes for a moment to block out the sight of his dark office that overlooked his club. The club they’d worked so hard to build and that they were in real danger of losing.
“It’ll be good for business. Every new title on the shelves that has a damned thing to do with shades of any color helps change the minds of people like that jackass senator.”
Opening his eyes, Chase shook his head. Ever the optimist, his Dusty. “People like him will never change their minds. No matter how many books are on the shelves, or movies in the theaters, or clubs like ours around the world. Some people will never get it. And whatever. We’re not asking them to join in if they don’t want to, but they have to stop trying to prevent us from doing it.”
Dusty flopped down into one of the chairs facing Chase’s desk. The leather creaked under his ass. Behind him, the barely lit club stared back at Chase through the one-way glass window of his office. Mocking him.
“She sounded cute on the phone,” Dusty said, drawing Chase’s morose thoughts back to what he needed to focus on. At Chase’s frown, Dusty shrugged. “What? She did. And maybe somewhat shy as well. Come on, it’ll be good for you. Help take your mind off things.”
They were meeting with their lawyer in the morning to go over a way to stop the injunction. The damned judge, no doubt in the senator’s pocket, had signed off on the piece of paper that said the K Club had to close its doors. That had been four days ago. The world was closing in around him, and it was getting harder to breathe.
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