YIELD - Emily & Damon (Fettered Book 1)

by Lilia Moon

  I gulp as I hit the word that makes me cringe the most. And then I do what he’s asked of me and look up and meet his eyes. “I don’t like the idea of punishment.”

  He studies me, but it doesn’t feel invasive. I feel like he’s really hearing me. “Hard limit?”

  I want to say yes, but something stops me. “There are a lot of things that happen in this world that I don’t understand, that don’t seem like anything two people would want to do together. Can you maybe tell me a little about why someone might want to be punished?”

  His smile is almost shy this time, and very gentle. “It matters that you’re asking, and not judging. Thank you.”

  I haven’t seen the softness of Damon Black before. The vulnerability. That he’s letting me see now flattens me.

  He breaks off a piece of his sandwich and holds it out to me. “Here. Try it.”

  I feel like a baby bird, but I take the bite and chew. It’s amazing. “Tonio likes you better than he likes me.”

  He laughs.

  I don’t want this man to punish me. I want him to hold me. To touch me. To help me find my way to freedom.

  His eyes get dark and serious. “BDSM is about role play—about stepping into a scene with safety and boundaries in place, and then playing with power and how that intersects with desire. For some people, there is enjoyment, within that bigger container, of setting up smaller boundaries and then either choosing to respect them or step over them. There are lots of words that can be used to describe that. The most typical ones are subs obeying and being punished if they don’t.”

  I can feel myself shuddering. “Hard limit.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” He watches me, silent for a moment. “I want to say two things here, because I think you’re reaching deeper into the psychology of this than most newbies do. The first is that many subs enjoy this and want it and explicitly build it in as part of their play.”

  I don’t get that, but I nod.

  He sighs a little. “In some Dom/sub relationships, it works exactly like you’re afraid of. But in many, it’s just a way to experiment with actions and consequences. By testing and reinforcing the small limits, you gain more trust to let yourself get closer to the big ones. Often it’s the sub very intentionally pushing those limits.”

  That sounds different, and possibly even appealing. “So you’re saying it’s a way to play with fire.”

  He laughs, and his eyes are full of sexy teasing. “Oh, yeah.”

  I’m rapidly rethinking my lines on this. “I think I need different words. Consequences sounds okay.”

  He’s full on grinning now. “Planning on pushing me, are you?”

  I can’t believe I’m even considering this. I scratch out punishment, write in consequences, and check it off as a soft limit. I look at my list. I have a lot of hard limits. I look up at him, worried. “Did I leave enough things open?” Maybe I’m way too staid and conventional to even be contemplating this.

  “More than enough.” He seems very sure of himself. “And you gave me clear guidance, which means I can lean on that and maybe take us into a few places that I wouldn’t go with a sub who couldn’t be this clear.”

  I blink at him. I don’t even know what those places are and I want to crawl into his lap and beg. “Did you just turn me being all uptight and particular into a compliment?”

  He holds out another bit of his sandwich, eyes twinkling. “Yes.”

  I’m letting a man feed me as I fill out a sex contract and try not to think about what it’s going to feel like when he spanks me. I nearly choke on the food in my throat.

  He reaches forward and turns the page on my paperwork. “Now we get down to the specifics of our arrangement. Monday, ten a.m., my place. No cell phones, no outside world for twenty-four hours. Can you pull that off?”

  Not a chance, but I’m going to anyhow. “Yes. Can I have your number to give Gabby in case the world sets on fire or my mom dies?”

  “We have a setup at the club to handle that. We’ll give them your emergency number. They’ll pair it with mine and know how to find us if it matters.”

  Of course he has a plan for this. “Do this a lot, do you?”

  He’s quiet for a minute. “No.”

  I wince at everything he’s loaded into that one word. I look him straight in the eyes and own my mistake with both hands. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I was going to walk into this without any assumptions, and I just made a big one. I don’t judge your life, Damon.” I swallow and keep going. “I’m just feeling a little in over my head here.”

  If a few thousand feet underwater counts as in over my head.

  His brow creases. “Is the contract overwhelming you? You can take all the time you need to read and understand it.”

  I need to keep being honest. “Paperwork is very calming. You’re overwhelming me.”

  His smile is back again, and totally dangerous. “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  Not in the neat, tidy life of Emily Madigan, wedding planner.

  He taps the contract pages. “I have requirements specific to how I like to work as a Dom. Total honesty—you answer whatever I ask, and you tell all the truth that you know. You look at me when I tell you to. You call me Sir when we’re playing. You don’t talk about anything that happens inside my place unless you run it past me first.”

  I can feel my inner lawyer protesting. “I can’t commit to secrecy. I’m going to need someone to talk to.”

  “Absolutely.” He’s already nodding. “It’s great that you know that and I’m happy to give you complete freedom to say anything you want to Scorpio, Doxy, Harlan, and Ari—is that good enough to start?”

  People who are familiar with his life and his club and won’t judge. I can feel myself relaxing. He’s not trying to muzzle me. “Harlan didn’t look like the talkative type.”

  He grins. “He isn’t—but if you need someone to punch me in the nose, he’s your guy.”

  I like this man very much. Even before we get to the part where he’s going to put his hands all over me.

  He leans forward, eyes glued to mine, and the rest of Seattle disappears. “One more thing, Emily. Your orgasms are mine.”

  I can feel the blood roaring in my ears. My whole reason for doing this. I want, so very much, to believe I can give him that power. “You’re going to make me come?”

  He keeps looking at me, and the glint in his eyes is as dangerous as anything I’ve ever seen. “No, sweetheart. I’m not going to let you come.”

  My mind’s having a hard time navigating basic English, probably because all my blood is dancing the macarena between my legs. “For twenty-four hours?” I remember the woman in the dungeon—she didn’t last five minutes.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just hands me the pen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emily

  I walk into my apartment and I can feel my cheeks flaming. This is insane. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, I have a pile of work taller than a four-tiered wedding cake sitting on my desk, and the last time I played hooky I was thirteen and the bookstore down the road from my middle school was having their going-out-of-business sale.

  I close my front door and lean back against the hallway wall, painted in tasteful, calming blue, hoping it will somehow put out the fire that has been raging ever since Damon Black looked me in the eyes and told me he wasn’t going to allow me to come.

  For an entire freaking day.

  I can’t even. I’ve spent fifteen of my thirty-two years waiting for an orgasm to happen while someone else was touching me, and now that I’ve found the man who I’m entirely sure can deliver and put myself into his hands, signed, sealed, and delivered—he’s going to deny me.

  Which I will think about later. I’m a grown woman, and nobody gets to tell me what to do.

  My body. My choices.

  I can hear him growling in my head.

  Slowly, giving in to the inevitable, I slide down the wall. My hand is
already unzipping my skirt, sliding down my belly into the fire between my legs.

  I groan as I feel how wet I am. Damon did this to me and he hasn’t even touched me yet. I slide my fingers through my wet folds, incredulous at the slick, wet heat. I didn’t lie to him—I have orgasms. Nice, neat, tidy ones with a vibrator and some lube before I turn out the lights at night.

  The one that’s coming now isn’t going to be nice and neat. I can hear myself panting, letting out these little mewls that don’t sound like me at all, and my fingers have barely moved. I stroke a small circle over my clit and something inside me dies and rises up again.

  I imagine it’s Damon’s warm, strong fingers between my legs—the ones he kept touching me with. His breath on my neck, telling me how hot this is. His thumb brushing my begging clit, doing things I don’t even know that I want yet.

  My hips move to let his hands have better access. To demand it. The fire pooling in my belly is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Even my nipples are hot and achy.

  I slide two fingers inside me, imagining they’re his. His would be bigger, and I would just get to take. To feel.

  The mewling is louder now, scratching to get out. I put a knuckle over the sensitive spot that has always been my old reliable and rub in tight, hard circles.

  I want this to be his hands.

  I can feel the moan rising in my throat. The need to be loud, to thrash, to be thrown on a bed and ridden hard until every last drop of this energy has been sucked dry from me because I can tell, even now, that this fire is just the beginning.

  I move my fingers faster, harder, zone in on the exact bundle of nerves that is screaming for release. I imagine Damon reaching for my hard nipples with his skilled hands and the dam breaks. My back arches, my head shoving my shoulders off the wall. I hear the sounds I’m making and I don’t even care.

  I don’t know how long it takes to come back to my hallway. I spend a lot of the trip imagining Damon’s tongue lapping up the river of wet we’ve just created together. He does things with his tongue I don’t even know are possible.

  I’d probably come again if any part of me were capable of moving.

  Eventually the crick in my neck gets my attention. I look down and realize I’m sitting on my welcome mat half naked, my skirt twisted around my waist and my thighs slicked with my own juices.

  I stare at the soaked panties in my hand.

  There’s sweat running down my forehead, rivulets of it, and I have just finger-fucked myself in my own hallway at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon.

  I am in so much trouble.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Damon

  I can’t believe she signed.

  I can’t believe I’m going to have a woman as responsive as Emily in my bed for an entire day and an entire night and deny her what her body so very clearly wants.

  Her mind has to want it too, but giving her the time and space she needs to come to terms with the woman that I’m very certain lives under her neatly packaged exterior is going to torment me in ways that I don’t even want to think about.

  Which is a good thing, because right now I need to stop thinking about Emily and her sexy ass and her big eyes and the way her skin flushes when she’s aroused, and get my act together. I need to kick a whole bunch of things into gear before I disappear. Clubs don’t run themselves, and also I need to get home sometime between now and Monday morning and clean up my playroom.

  Probably the rest of the place too, but there are things lying around in my play space that would terrify a newbie. Anyone who makes it that far usually has plenty of experience and a very clear understanding of exactly where all the boundaries are.

  With Emily, I’m not even sure which ones I want, and I need to get clear on that, too. No self-respecting Dom starts a training session without having his own shit as together as he can get it, and she deserves my very best. Trust is a thing I try to honor, and she’s giving me even more of hers than she realizes.

  I walk in the back door of Fettered and look for Harlan. He and Quint can run the place while I’m gone, so long as I shovel a couple of things off my calendar and take care of a few others before I disappear.

  Today is Wednesday. Five days for me to get organized. Five days for me to wait. Five days for her to change her mind.

  I make it halfway through the kitchen when Quint materializes at my side. “What’s up, boss?”

  I look at the guy who walked into my club four days after it opened and never left. He’s got an innocent face and the kind of muscles that say he’s gentle because he chooses to be, and the ladies line up for miles to get a piece of him.

  They’re usually pretty damn surprised by where they’ve landed. Quint’s an excellent Dom, but he’s the most demanding one I’ve got. “You clear to cover for me on Monday and Tuesday?”

  He shrugs. “Sure. Those are generally pretty quiet days around here.”

  They are, which is why we use them for our introductory classes, and I need someone keeping an eye on that if I’m going to be sinking into a newbie. My eyes nearly cross just thinking about what that will feel like.

  She marked sex as a soft limit. She’s going to kill me, and we haven’t even gotten started yet.

  “Boss?” Quint’s watching me with an interested look in his eyes.

  I know better than to let a very observant Dom watch me for too long. “Go grab Harlan and we’ll run through a few details.”

  He pulls out his cell phone and taps on it a couple of times. Customized app that pages any of the Fettered staff with a touch. Underneath Quint’s innocent face is a gold-plated geek. The app is his design, along with most of the other electronic gadgetry in the club.

  Harlan is lounging outside my office door as we arrive, looking like he’s been hanging out for hours. “You finally taking a vacation, boss?”

  I have no idea how to answer that. “Sort of. Working vacation, I guess.”

  That has both of them raising their eyebrows.

  I know better than to keep secrets in a place this small—and Emily’s better protected if they know what’s going on. Besides, they both got an eyeful of her reaction in the dungeon last night. “I’ll be spending a couple of days with the wedding planner who came to see me about Jimmy and Doxy getting hitched.”

  Harlan shudders, the tats on his arms rippling in protest.

  I laugh—he’s the original bad boy, and even the idea of marriage throws him into an allergic reaction every time. “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious.”

  He growls. “That’s what you say.”

  He loves Doxy, and he and Jimmy have been tight for years. He’ll stand up for them both, even if it kills him.

  I watch as he slings himself into a chair in my office and realize it’s not our lovebirds he’s thinking about anymore. He’s back into babysitting mode, and he’s got his mind on my new sub.

  I let him do his job, but I don’t have to like it. “We had lunch today, signed a contract. I’m not going to chew her up and spit her out. You know me better than that.”

  His stubborn look doesn’t budge a hair. “She’s greener than grass, boss. And softer than most we get in here.”

  Nobody knows that better than I do. “So, what—you think I should line all my handcuffs with pink fuzz? Hand her over to someone else?”

  He sighs. “I like her. Ari likes her. We like you, too. Just be careful, okay?”

  Quint isn’t saying anything, but he’s watching and listening and he saw me carry Emily out cuddled into my chest. A sub cracking before I even touched her.

  The two of them, reminding me just how big a job it can be to step into Dom shoes and wear them well.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emily

  I check off the third-to-last item on my list of manic details and look at the four faces around the table for our Thursday morning meeting. We’re ready for the weekend of weddings. We’ve taken care of every logistical thing I can think of, in an attempt to avo
id the two I don’t want to talk about. “That leaves us Jimmy and Doxy.” I take a deep breath. “Anyone who wants to be inside the location during their wedding needs to take a club tour.”

  Ari assures me their tour won’t be anything like mine, but just thinking about it is doing weird things to my knees. I meet each of their eyes so they know I mean what I say next. “This is not remotely required, okay? No judgment either way.” Even though I have no idea how to pull off a wedding in less than two weeks without every single one of them on board.

  “I don’t need a tour,” says Scorpio cheerfully. “I passed their visitor screen a few years back, been to a couple of their open nights.”

  Somehow this does not surprise me.

  “I don’t need to either.” Leo slides the last photograph into the front cover of the album he’s assembling. He multitasks better than anyone I know. “Sam and I are members.”

  Scorpio grins and high-fives him. “You top or bottom?”

  He waggles an eyebrow at her. “I never tie up and tell.”

  It’s all for show—I can tell that the two of them are suddenly on one side of an important line, watching the other three of us very carefully.

  After the events of the last few days I don’t even know which way is down anymore, but I know better than to judge. I can’t speak for anyone else, but they’re still exactly the same people they were when they walked into this meeting.

  I’m not sure I can say the same for me.

  I look Leo straight in the eyes and let him see everything I’m thinking. “Good. You’ll know where to get all the good angles for the videos then.”

  He doesn’t even blink, but something inside him totally relaxes. “Yeah. I’ll talk Harlan into letting me run some tests on the lighting.”

  All I can remember of Harlan is a leather vest, tattoos, and assessing eyes.