Daniel met her gaze. “Yes, exactly like that.”
“We have to be sure before we can go forward and rescue Mercy.”
She was clinging to that hope, that they would rescue Mercy. Daniel was beginning to share that hope. He leaned forward and kissed her. “Yes, we do. Her life could depend on how we go forward—how quickly, yes, but also how carefully.”
“Okay. Thank you for explaining.”
He squeezed her hand and then looked over at Rob. His brother nodded and, with just a look, let Daniel know they were on the same page. Rob got up from his keyboard and left the room, probably to make a phone call to one of his own contacts.
There was no way they’d take Colleen upstairs to give her what she needed right now, not with others in the house.
It didn’t matter that those others were also Doms and wouldn’t think anything of it. Colleen wasn’t yet at a place where they could do that. Eventually, they hoped to play openly at the club, regardless of who else might be there watching. So for now, they’d have to make other arrangements.
He knew Rob was as proud of Colleen as he was. She was keeping it together, and he knew how hard that was to do when someone you loved was in danger. He understood because it had happened to him. Just like that, his memory took him back in time to the days of his waning deployment, the last one, in Afghanistan.
It was the first time he’d even let himself think of Fereshtah since she’d been kidnapped, and then murdered. Hell, that feels like another lifetime, instead of just barely two years ago. The bastards who’d murdered her had dumped her body where they’d known he’d find it. He’d carried her to her family’s house, given her to her brother, and walked away, knowing his heart had been shattered beyond repair. Of course, then he’d gone straight to the small camp where her abductors were gathered, where he learned they’d held her. When he was finished, there’d been not one person left alive to tell the tale. The next day, he’d met with his commanding officer and asked to be sent home.
Daniel looked at Colleen, her gaze taking in the activity in her home, all of it work she didn’t really understand. She’d said she trusted him—him and Rob—and in that moment, he’d known his heart had been mended.
Daniel had told himself, when he’d stepped into Christopher Lyon’s private lounge in response to the man’s summons those few days ago, that he’d do whatever he could to help. Then he’d seen Colleen, knowing what had happened, and told himself that he was only taking her on in order to help a woman, a doctor—a rudderless submissive—in order to help her cope with a difficult situation, a situation with which he’d personally identified.
In the aftermath of Fereshtah’s death, he’d believed she’d been targeted because of her association with him. Now he could look back and recall how many non-combatants, how many innocents, had died in that war zone, for no reason except for the reality of war.
War brought out the worst in some people, people who didn’t feel they had to follow any of society’s rules. They tortured, because they could. They raped, because they could. They killed, because they could. Oh, some of them were sure to cite religious zeal as their motivation, but Daniel knew neither God nor Allah blessed the kind of mindless, senseless cruelty these animals carried out in their names.
Daniel wasn’t a man to revisit the past. Having just done so, he promised himself that he would do all he could to find Mercy and bring her back alive. There was no way in hell he wanted his woman to endure what he’d been through.
Since when is Dr. Colleen Duncan your woman?
The mental question echoed in his mind. He had believed he would never to have another woman, that he was never going to put himself in the position where he would suffer that kind of pain, that kind of loss, again. He’d planned their lives, his and Fereshtah’s. He was going to bring her back here to the States. She was so sweetly, so perfectly submissive, he’d imagined their marriage would be good enough. Yes, he and Rob had talked some about sharing a wife. But until he’d joined the Lyon’s Den, he didn’t understand such an ideal could truly be a reality.
Daniel had given up that ideal because his guilt had demanded that penance from him. But for the first time, he wondered at the small voice in the back of his mind that told him maybe marriage to his Afghani woman wouldn’t have been the way he imagined it. That she hadn’t been a true submissive. She wouldn’t have wanted to go to the club, and she wouldn’t have wanted to make friends among the submissives there. That had never, really, been her.
What he and Rob had already built with Colleen was real. New, certainly, but real.
Daniel looked at Colleen. At that moment, as if sensing his scrutiny, she turned to him, her head slightly tilted, her gaze on his…waiting.
Waiting for him to be her Dom. And in that instant, there was nothing he wanted more in the entire world than to be the man she accepted him as already being. The power of the responsibility, the honor of it, and the impact of her love for him—right there in her eyes for the world to see if they had the sense to just look—all of that, instead of flattening him, as he thought it might, elevated him.
A few short days ago he’d been just a man, a Dom, most certainly, but a sometime-Dom. A pretender. Now, his woman looked to him, and in a lesser way, his brother looked to him. He and Rob were Doms together, both of them seeing to the well-being of their submissive.
But Rob looked to him to take the first steps, to show the way—to lead. To control. As his younger brother Brian had done before he’d been taken by cancer.
Finally, after so many years of loss and war and life, he was home again, where he belonged. And where Colleen belonged, for what they needed to give her wasn’t at the Lyon’s Den. She belonged at his house, in his own personal playroom.
Chapter Thirteen
“This isn’t at all what I imagined a bachelor pad to be. I guess I was expecting an apartment with stuff strewn everywhere.”
“Ha! That would have been us, in our twenties, if we’d lived on our own that is,” Rob said. “We’ve matured since then. Not to mention the fact that Mr. Army Ranger, retired, here, has become a neat freak.”
“The Army changes a man,” Daniel said.
When Daniel and Rob told her they were bringing her here, to their place, she didn’t pretend to not understand. She nearly protested leaving her own house because Damion and Chance were working hard and she wanted to know the instant they knew something.
But they had a point. She didn’t need to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on pins and needles. She hoped they’d brought her here to take her mind off everything.
Daniel stood there beside her, letting her have a look around their living room. His hands were in his pockets, and she could almost believe he blushed—but figured it was a trick of the lighting. Rob came back into the room after having gone upstairs, and while she wondered what he’d been doing, she decided to try and stay in the moment.
“When I left the army, I decided I wanted someplace to call home, permanently. My folks had moved to Florida, but Houston was my place. My grandmother—Mom’s mom—had died about a year after Brian, and since I was her only grandson…” He shrugged.
“Brian? Was he your brother?” She’d had no idea Daniel had lost a sibling.
Daniel nodded. He walked over to a shelf in the corner, retrieved a framed photograph, then brought it to her.
Rob came to stand beside her as she looked at the picture. She expected to see a family shot or a moment captured between brothers. She looked up at Rob. “Is that you with Brian?”
“Yeah. We were best friends—blood brothers, in fact.” He gave her a soft smile. “We performed that clichéd nicked-thumb-to-nicked-thumb ritual when we were five.” He looked at Daniel. “I was more at home at the Welshes’ than I ever was at my own house. My folks fought day and night. By the time they divorced when I was fourteen, I was practically living with Brian and his family. And then, Brian got sick.”
“Brian died when he was
eighteen,” Daniel said. “Before he died, he asked me to be Rob’s brother, the way Rob had always been his.” He swallowed hard, and Colleen thought this was something rarely discussed between the two men.
They were opening the past, and they were doing it for her.
“The truth was I’d always considered Rob to be an extra little brother, so it was an easy promise to give. When I came back from Afghanistan, it was the most natural thing in the world to buy a house with my brother.”
“Sometimes the best families are the ones we choose, not necessarily the ones we’re born into. I know how that is. Ellie is family. Sort of like an aunt who came to stay with us after my folks died.”
“The best families are made,” Daniel said. He stroked her face gently. “We’ve started the process, the three of us, to build one of our own. Oh, I know it’s early days, yet. We’ll take it one day at a time. But you need to know, we’re yours—until you tell us we’re not.”
“What he said.” Rob bent down and kissed her cheek.
“We brought you here for a reason, pet, and not just to give you a change of scenery.”
Daniel only ever called her pet when he put on his Dom. That one word did amazing things not only to her libido but to her emotions, as well.
She slid into the protocol as easily as taking her next breath. “May I ask what that reason is, Sir?”
“You already have.” He grinned. “And I’ll be happy to tell you, as soon as you present yourself, properly, to your Doms.”
Colleen didn’t think. She just moved. It took hardly any time at all to undress. She folded her clothing and set it on the arm of the chair closest to her. Then she slid to her knees, the position easier, somehow, in this house that contained only the three of them.
“Very nice. If my eyes don’t deceive me, you’re wet already. Yes?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Good. We’re going upstairs in a moment, to our playroom. I have a spanking bench there and some lovely silk rope that has your name on it. Once we are there, I will bind you, leaving your bottom bare. Once you are bound and on the bench, Rob is going to select a paddle and give you a sound spanking. You need to go to subspace, pet, and that’s what we’re going to do. When you come back, we’ll provide aftercare, and then…then we’re going to fuck your brains out. How does that sound?”
Colleen could have sworn there’d be a puddle on the floor, thanks to her body’s response to Daniel’s voice and his plans. In that moment, she realized she needed what they were about to give her and that they’d come here in order to be private.
“That sounds wonderful, Sir.”
“What is your safe word?”
“Stat, Sir.”
He extended a hand to her and helped her to her feet. “Excellent.” He leaned in and kissed her, a fully carnal, deeply moving kiss that was over way too soon. His eyes glittered, and inside his pants, his cock had hardened. When he broke their kiss, he began to lead her up the stairs.
The room Daniel called his playroom was easily as big as the master bedroom of her house. In one corner was what she recognized from her research to be a small St. Andrew’s cross. On two of the walls hung all sorts of interesting things—handcuffs, blindfolds, paddles, and a few things she really didn’t recognize.
In the center of the room stood the only other piece of furniture in it. That must be the spanking bench. Padded, likely covered in leather, it dipped a bit low at the top and then the surface became concave at the bottom, with the edge elevated several degrees.
When they lay me on that, my ass is going to be up in the air. The realization sent a tingle of arousal through her entire body.
Rob stood beside her and inhaled deeply. The look he sent her—lust incarnate—told her he could smell her moisture.
She could do nothing about the blush that covered her face and headed toward her breasts.
Daniel approached her with a skein of white rope in his hands. “We want you to know that no other woman has been here. This room was built, at Rob’s insistence, against a someday I believed would never come. Everything in this room is brand new. Now, hold still, pet.”
Much as he had the last time, he began to weave a cradle of rope around her body. This time anticipation rather than nerves flowed through her. She recalled how good she’d felt with the ropes binding her. Of course, she’d felt that kind of snuggled in good last night when she’d laid between these two men. She’d felt safe and protected both times.
Had she dosed off while Daniel had been working? She looked down at the bar he’d placed between her legs. Where did that come from? With cuffs on each end, and each cuff around an ankle, she couldn’t close her legs.
They want to be able to touch me, maybe even fuck me. That thought splintered as that sense she’d felt last time, that warm, cozy and safe sense, began to fill her.
“Wiggle your fingers for me, pet.” Daniel’s voice sounded as if he was speaking to her through a mask. She did as he asked. “Good girl.”
I love it when he says that.
“Relax, pet. We’re going to lift you, now.”
The world tilted, and then she was lying on the bench. They’d turned her head toward the mirror. She blinked, somehow tickled that the sexy woman she could see in the glass was actually her.
The men stripped off their shirts. Rob walked over to the wall that held the paddles and returned with one that kind of reminded her of a cricket bat, though it was much, much shorter.
“I’m going to use my hand to warm you up, first, to get your blood flowing,” Rob said.
His voice sounded as if he spoke through a mask, too, even though he wasn’t wearing one. She met his gaze in the mirror and noted his raised eyebrow. He’s waiting for you to acknowledge what he said. “Yes, Sir.” Her own words didn’t sound as if they were said through a mask. She’d almost sounded stoned.
The slaps he placed on her ass felt nice, not in the least painful. He stopped after a few and caressed her, using his hand to squeeze first one cheek and then the other. Her bottom felt warm. He slapped her a few more times, caressed her again, and then leaned down, close to her ear.
“Colleen, what’s your safe word?”
“Stat, Sir.” Safe, sane, consensual. She’d read that in her research, and those three words seemed to be universally adhered to, at least by her men.
“Good girl. I’m going to start now. Will you count for me, baby?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Whack.
Colleen gasped at the force of the blow, at the sting that brought tears to her eyes…and then spread a sexy-sweet heat through her body. “One, Sir.”
Whack.
Whack.
Whack.
The heat curled like a lithesome snake, a ribbon of arousal that flowed through her blood stream and touched every part of her. No nerves ran between her clit and her nipples and her anus, but that was how she felt. Connected. Aroused.
Whack.
Whack.
Whack.
She counted, but it was hard to remember to give him the numbers. All connected, and here, yes right here, this is where she wanted to be. The part of her mind that was the scientist fell silent, allowing the woman to be, to rest, to float, to soar.
Whack.
Whack.
Whack.
Floating, safe. No one else, just me, just the sense of being at peace. How long has it been since I’ve felt so at peace? So beautiful here! Warm, no, more than warm. Sweet horniness licking me everywhere so that I want more, and yet…I just want to stay here for a while. I want to rest here for a while. I want to enjoy this gift. So nice. So very, very nice. Fingers on me, in me, gentle, caressing, lifting. Wonderful…
“Pet? Come back, now.”
The voice pulled at her, and she whimpered.
“We’ll take you there again soon. We promise. Come back to us now.”
Colleen blinked, and as she slowly regained awareness, she thought the process reminded her of the
time she’d had her appendix out when she’d been in college. That sensation of emerging from the anesthetic and becoming aware again, that had been very much like this.
“Good girl. We’ve got you.”
Daniel and Rob lifted her, and it didn’t take Daniel very long to free her from the ropes.
She felt as if hardly any time had passed at all. “Already?”
Both men chuckled. Then Daniel used a soft cloth to wipe her tears, tears she hadn’t known she’d shed.
“You were in my ropes for more than a half-hour, sweetheart. We’ll do that again soon because you seem to enjoy it so much. How do you feel, pet?”
“Good, Sir. My ass is really hot, almost stinging, but I kind of like it.”
“We’ll take care of that now,” Rob said. Then he picked her up in his arms and began to walk. He laid her down on a soft surface. She inhaled deeply and knew she was on Daniel’s bed.
“This cream will help.” The unexpected cold sensation made her suck in a breath. Rob was gentle as he smoothed the ointment on her ass. She had the sense he massaged it right in.
“You’ll sit tenderly for the next few hours,” he said. He set the jar aside then covered her with a soft, warm blanket. He lay beside her, facing her, and caressed her cheek. “How do you feel?”
She said the first word that came to mind. “Clean.”
He nodded. “You shed more than tears, little subbie. I think you shed some age-old baggage, too.”
“I never knew I needed to do that.”
“And now that you do?” Daniel came down on the other side of her, spooning her, though he was gentle as he pressed himself against her. The soft blanket came between them, and while part of her wanted it gone, mostly she just wanted these men close.
“Now that I do, I’ll never let that build-up happen again.”
“No, you won’t. We won’t let that happen. We’ll keep an eye on you, and when we sense you’re in need, we’ll tell you.”
“Yes, please, Sir.”
“We’re just going to lie here for a little while, let you rest with us.” Daniel moved and handed something to Rob.
Collaring Colleen [Tales from the Lyon's Den 2] Page 12