by Lilia Moon
My head is pounding in time to his words. “Look, I know, okay? I completely screwed up and you all covered for me and I’m going to be spending the next week making it right.” I look up and meet his eyes. “Really. Message heard, loud and clear.”
He’s just doing his job. The problem here is that I haven’t done mine.
Harlan walks over to the chair in front of my desk and takes a seat. “Want to talk about it?”
Not ever, but it’s rule number one in this building and I’m the guy who made it. “You’ve seen her, Harlan—she doesn’t belong here.” He’s seen as many newbies run scared as I have, maybe more.
He shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. She’s stood up better than I figured she would.”
He has no idea just how well Emily can stand up. “She went deep with me at my place. Hit subspace.” He’ll know exactly what that means.
It means I fucked up even worse than he thinks.
He blows out a slow breath. “She trusted you, big time.”
“Yeah. She tried to do that again last night and I bailed on her.”
“We all screw up some. How are you going to fix it?”
I’m not. “I’ll talk to her, but nothing’s really changed. I can be nicer about it, and I can keep my hands the hell off her, but—”
His eyebrow has gone up and it makes his whole face lopsided. “That is not a sub who wants your hands off her.”
Dammit, I know that. “You think I should make her my sub? Out a green-as-grass newbie as the next public face of BDSM in this town?” He knows how it will play. There’s nothing I can do about who I am. “What if it’s her the cops decide to cuff the next time?”
He winces, and I can see uncertainty land for the first time.
“I can’t do that to her.”
“Yeah.” Harlan nods, and his agreement soothes some of the raw inside me. “I can see that.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Ari steps inside the door and glares at the man with the tats. “You were doing really well until that last part.”
He rolls his eyes at her. “Gee, Ari—got something to say?”
“I do.” She looks straight at me. “If the Dom egos in this office can make enough space to hear it.”
I deserve that and whatever else she’s going to say to me. “How’s Emily?”
“Helping a bride with an anxiety disorder find the perfect wedding dress.” Her eyes are daring me to say something stupid. “And that’s the last update you get from me. The next one you need to get from her.”
When my staff are being this tough with me, I know I’ve screwed up about as bad as it gets—but I still don’t know how to fix it. “She doesn’t belong here, Ari. Not with me, anyhow. You know how hard it can be to be public, and you were in the lifestyle for years before you stepped out into the open.”
“Yup.” She’s nodding and not backing down an inch. “And I didn’t do it on the arms of Seattle’s hottest Dom, and nobody has ever confused me for a cute schoolteacher.”
“Right.” They were finally seeing my page, both of them. “I can’t put her through that.”
Ari raises an eyebrow. “Just like you can’t put poor little me through the ringer with some scary reporter or a couple of cops with rinky-dink toy handcuffs?”
I wince, because she’s got a mean right hook when she throws it—and she’s just warming up.
“Show Emily some respect.” Ari’s words are clipped and every damn one is aimed straight for my jaw. “From everything I’ve seen and heard, she’s earned it.”
She has, in every way possible.
The problem isn’t her. It’s me.
Chapter Forty-Six
Emily
Sleep and a good friend and ploughing through an exploding to-do list can fix many things. Today they’ve made space for clarity to emerge and for my heart to figure out what I want to do next.
I survey the picnic basket on the counter. Your Perfect Moment is far better stocked for this than my own kitchen. We often take a picnic to photo shoots—a little something for two people who are generally feeling overwhelmed and fed up with waiting and just want to get to where they’ve been aiming for months or years.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m aiming just yet, but it’s time to have a talk with the man I want to go there with.
I take one last check of the contents of the basket. The deli down the street has done me proud, as usual, and I’ve added my own favorite touches. Three bright-orange flowers in a small, square vase. A few of the chocolates that Gabby makes in her spare time. A folded red blanket with a warm fuzzy side and a side that does efficient battle against Seattle’s tendency to be damp.
I need to remember that I have more than one side too. I can collapse breathless into Damon’s arms or over his lap, but that doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered my ability to drive the rest of my life.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I grin and pick up the picnic basket. Damon taught me more than I thought possible about finding my power and setting myself free.
Now he’s going to have to reckon with it.
I hold that feeling of light, bubbling strength all the way to the park. I’m wearing a floral sundress, strappy red sandals that match the picnic basket, and I suddenly can’t wait to see the man I’ve asked to meet me here.
I walk into Gas Works Park smiling. It’s one of my favorite places in Seattle, especially in the long light of a summer evening. There are at least a dozen kites in the air, ranging from simple triangles to a dancing dragon piloted by two people who look like they could use an extra set of arms. The old, rusted pipes of this park’s original purpose hang out down below. Most people never see them—they’re too busy watching the float planes and the kites and the skyline of Seattle against Lake Union.
I head toward one of the few decently flat picnic spots up this high and start laying out my things. I don’t look around for Damon. Tonight it’s his job to find me.
I’ve just started unpacking the neat containers of food when I feel his energy looming behind me. I turn around, strawberries in one hand, chicken legs in the other.
His eyes undress me where I kneel.
I let him—and I remind myself that I’m more than this. I’m more because of this.
His smile almost hits his eyes.
I hand him the container with the chicken. “Hi. Thanks for coming.”
There is silence while we find our places, open up the food, start helping ourselves to some of the finger nibbles. I decide to be brave and move closer to him on the blanket.
He resists for a minute and then opens his arms, settling me in front of him, my skirt spreading out over both of our laps. I hand him a piece of chicken and lick my fingers. “I want to apologize. I skipped over all the talking parts last night and just tried to act, and you’ve taught me enough to know that’s not how this works.”
He sets down the chicken, and he’s quiet for a long time, just holding me. “It can. Once there’s enough trust and experience built up.”
I can hear the shifting sands in his voice. Damon Black, unsure of himself. I sit quietly, letting us both know I’m capable of walking with that.
His hands spread out over the flowers of my skirt. “People would make so many assumptions about you, Em.”
I’ll let him make this about me—for a little while. “It can’t be any worse than being a wedding planner who’s never been engaged.” I laugh and lean into his shoulder. “People assume I’m pretty much a stylish librarian.”
He groans quietly. “A really sexy librarian.”
I don’t say anything. I just feel. Trust. Believe.
He takes a long slow breath and holds it, his chest muscles tensing at my back. And then he squeezes me tighter against him and blows it all out. “If you’re dating me, people aren’t going to assume you’re a librarian ever again.”
If. He’s opening the door. It’s my job to show him I can step through it with my eyes wide open. “They’re going to assume I’m a very li
berated, very sexual human being who doesn’t care what people think of my choices. And quite a few are going to be pretty jealous of whose lap I’m sitting in.”
I can feel that I’ve surprised him.
I reach for the strawberries. I’m only getting started.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Damon
I thought I knew her.
I’m realizing in this moment that there’s so much of Emily Madigan that I don’t know yet, and I’m in awe.
I’m also against the ropes and about to go down for the count, and she knows it.
She angles her head and holds a luscious red strawberry to my lips. She’s smiling, but it’s tinged with sadness—and she wants me to see. “I’m a wedding planner, Damon. I’m used to people not looking beyond the first thing that they know about me.”
Her words hit me hard, because I’m the guy currently standing at the front of that line. Questioning her courage and her openness and how well she knows herself, even though she’s given me plenty of reasons to know differently.
I feel about three inches tall, and I don’t have any idea what to do about it. “I’m sorry.” I take a deep breath and get really honest. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“I don’t either.” She nibbles the strawberry herself and sounds utterly unfazed by either of our admissions. “But I figure it’s a bit like your contract. There are some general principles, and then we work out the specifics as we know them. If it ends up not working, then we sit down together and we say that and we walk away.”
I growl. “I don’t like that last part.”
She grins and pokes her finger into my chest, right over my heart. “You need to make up your mind about what you want, Damon Black.”
I do—but she’s unleashed her Dom now and he’s not thinking all that clearly. I wrap one hand around the back of her neck and pull her in. She doesn’t taste like apples this time. Her lips are warm and wet and remind me that I haven’t tasted her pussy yet and I shouldn’t have to go through the rest of my life not knowing what that’s like.
She kisses me until my cock wants to plunder her through my pants. The soft moaning sounds she’s making against my mouth are addictive and I know I’ll never get enough of them. I skim my other hand up her side and pull her face in closer.
She breaks away and pulls my ear down to her lips. “One night I want to come here and sit on your lap and have you slide inside me and make me come right here while we watch the lights of the city.”
The sound that comes out of me isn’t even human. “Have you ever been arrested?”
She grins. “Not yet.”
She’s stretching herself, right here, right now so that I can see. She’s blushing and it’s beautiful, and also scary as fuck.
I want to put my hand between her legs and finger her until she can’t see straight anymore and all she can say is my name. I move both hands firmly to her hips instead and tell them to damn well stay there. I have no idea why I want to push on her this hard, or why I think it’s only her that I’d be pushing.
I tip my face into her shoulder and breathe, realizing just how messed up I am. I’ve spent fifteen years in the pursuit of relentless self-honesty and demanding it of others, and I’m sitting here with a gorgeous woman who is telling me the absolute truth and I’m still making up shit inside my own head.
That has to stop. Even if this never goes any further than vanilla kisses in the park, I want to be the Dom she deserves. The man she deserves.
Ari was right, only she and Harlan didn’t go nearly far enough in chewing me out. Emily couldn’t do the scene at the club because I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold the space safe for her because I didn’t want to acknowledge how I felt. This isn’t about fucking her publicly—it’s about loving her publicly. And I let her throw both of us into a scene where that was on the table and I didn’t even know it.
I pull her tight into my chest and hold on and let her anchor me in this moment and this crazy, dawning realization lighting up deep inside where my best instincts have always lived. I could so easily love her. So easily go there with her and surrender to that. But that doesn’t happen in a dark and secret corner either. Loving Emily is never going to happen in the shadows.
I take a deep breath and kiss the top of her head. She wasn’t wrong when she walked into my club. Words aren’t going to fix this.
I tip up her chin. “Go home. Get some sleep. There are some things I need to do.”
She searches my eyes long and hard before she finally nods. “Okay.”
I walk away from Gas Works Park a man on a mission, already pulling out my phone as I hit the street.
I know what I need to do—and I can’t do it alone.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Damon
Sometimes penance is weird. I lay a hand on the small, very soft mattress behind me and know that for better or for worse, I’m never going to be able to be in this room again without this day on my mind.
Today is either going to be the day everything gets right in my world again—or the one that haunts me forever.
But whichever way it goes, it won’t be because I dropped the ball. This time I’m going to get it right and pray like hell she doesn’t safeword out. I won’t blame her if she does. This scene is classic arrogant Dom—push a sub right up against her edges and see just how far she can go.
In my defense, I’m putting myself there too.
I set yet another bright-yellow flower in another squat glass bowl and shake my head. This shouldn’t be soothing. It shouldn’t be reminding me of Emily in her yellow sundress, smiling at me with absolute trust in her eyes. I shouldn’t be feeling warm and goopy inside.
I’m doing up Fettered’s small-group scening room for romance, for fuck’s sake.
“You’re not so bad at that.” Scorpio crouches down beside me and surveys the sprawl of yellow flowers in bowls full of water and little round transparent rocks. “If you need a weekend gig, I’m pretty sure I can get you one.”
I’m deeply tempted to tie her up to something and leave her there. “Is it going to be this bad for the wedding?”
She snickers. “Don’t ask questions you don’t actually want the answer to.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
“Quit making him squirm.” Ari walks in with a stack of pillows in rich fabrics and grins at Scorpio. “That’s my job.”
I remind myself that I asked them to help. My interior-decorating instincts mostly run in the direction of sophisticated and dangerous, and that’s so not the vibe I need in the oasis. Not tonight.
I look around at the four black walls that I know will disappear when the lights are low. “Do we need to hang more lighting? Milo can rig anything we need.” I’ll help him. I need a job that isn’t quite so frilly.
“No.” Ari plops the pillows down next to me and miraculously manages to miss all my flower bowls. “Are these enough, or do we need more?”
I contemplate the scene I’ve mapped out in my head. “Maybe a few smaller ones, just in case.” I look around the room, seeing it as it will be. “And maybe ones for the audience to sit on too.”
She points to a neat stack of firm cushions over by the door. “Already thought of that.”
Of course she has. The two of them could have totally taken care of this without me. I’m here because I need to be. Because my hands need to touch every step of this. Because when Emily walks through this door, I want her to see me everywhere she looks.
I look down to discover I’ve turned a pretty length of yellow silk ribbon into a knotted mess. I’ve set up a thousand scenes in my life, and this one is doing things to my insides I’ve never begun to feel before.
I don’t know if my sub is ready, and I don’t know if I am either.
I need to be, or I’m going to crash us both into a wall again, and that’s just not something I can let happen. I start pushing my flower bowls out into a circle, interspersing them with the vanilla-scented beeswax
candles Ari dug out of our supplies. The bowls and the rocks and the ribbon came from Your Perfect Moment. Scorpio swears Emily will recognize them, even though they look like a thousand other bowls and rocks and ribbons to me.
The pillows are from Emily’s apartment. I reach into the duffle bag behind me and pull out blue silk sheets, the same ones that were on my bed three days ago, and place them on the small mattress.
Symbols.
Messages.
Ari sits down outside the river of candles and bowls and yellow silk. “The candlelight will sparkle off the glass beads. It’s going to be beautiful.”
I take her word for it. “Emily might never see it.”
She looks at me, and I can see the hope in her eyes—and the worry. “Or she might.”
I have no business asking an employee this, but I do anyhow. “She’s a brand-new sub who got dropped on her head two days ago by her idiot Dom. Is it even possibly fair to ask this of her?”
“Since when has that ever mattered in our world?”
I stare at Ari, lost.
She picks up a candle and lights it and holds it in both her hands. “We don’t care about fairness. We care about honesty, about finding edges, about truth, about being all of who we can be without shame and without hiding.” There are tears in her eyes, gleaming in the candlelight. “I don’t know what Emily will see if she walks into this room, but I see all those things here, and they’re absolutely beautiful.”
She’s just stripped me and everything in here entirely naked. I have no idea what to say in return. “Remind me never to fire you.”
Her smile is a little wobbly. “Done.”
She hands me the lit candle, and I watch its flickering light for a long time.
Scorpio joins us, holding a fancy embossed card.
I don’t need to read it—I know exactly what it says and just how hard it was to get it printed in an hour. Apparently companies who make swanky invitations aren’t used to rushing. I sigh. A rush print job is fairly pointless if you don’t actually deliver it. “Send Harlan.”