by S. E. Lund
"How many submissives have you had?" I said, trying to sound casual.
He pursed his lips for a moment. "Eight with signed contracts."
"Eight?" I said, turning to him, unable to stop frowning.
He gave me a guilty smile. "That doesn't include the subs I topped at play parties. I don't know how many there were. Maybe another six or so. You have to remember," he said, sounding a bit flustered. "Lara trained me and introduced me to a number of different subs. She was helping me learn what kind of Dom I was, so I went through quite a few in the first couple of years. It’s not easy to find compatible people."
I nodded, but still… He'd had fourteen or more submissives in five years? I'd been with three men during that same period, and two of them were really barely out of their teens.
He reached over and took my hand in his, lifting it to his lips to kiss my knuckles.
"You don't have to be jealous. I never felt anything for them other than a desire for bondage and to dominate them sexually. They were a more rewarding way of having an orgasm than jerking off. You're completely different."
"I'm not jealous," I said, maybe a bit too quickly. "I'm curious. And intimidated."
He smiled quickly. "Good," he said. "A Dom is supposed to be a bit intimidating. It helps get the sub in the proper submissive state of mind. When you think of me as your partner, you should feel my equal."
"I'm really not your equal," I said, considering him. "You're a neurosurgeon. I haven't even had a real job yet."
He laughed at that. "Kate..." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek briefly. "I'll let you in on a very well-kept secret." He focused back on the road. "Take away all the trappings of power, the accomplishments, the money, and underneath every mogul, however successful, is just a flesh and blood man. We all want the same thing, deep down."
"What?"
He glanced at me, smirking. "Hot sex with a really great-looking babe."
"Drake!" I pulled my hand out of his and punched his shoulder playfully.
"Just kidding," he said, laughing. He grabbed my hand back and threaded his fingers through mine. "No, seriously. Men fall in love more easily than women. When I finally met you, before our meeting with Lara, I wanted to ask you out, even thought I knew it would probably only be vanilla. I'd already plotted out a way to seduce you and initiate you into my depraved ways and so learning you were the sub I was supposed to initiate into the secret world of D/s..."
"You really were going to try to seduce me, you bad man," I said, still amused that he and Lara were conspiring about me. "I told Lara that the relationship would be purely research."
"Lara thought you needed a bit of encouragement. You know," he said, sounding guilty, a half-smile cracking his lips. "Find your 'inner sub'. I was more than willing to try because I'd already thought of it. I do love a challenge. I just had to find out how to push your buttons, so to speak."
"That sounds so…" I struggled for the right word. "Machiavellian."
"Oh, it's completely Machiavellian. I can't lie. I wanted to conquer you, Ms. Bennet." He shook his head, smiling to himself. "I thought I'd have you totally under my control in no time flat. How wrong I was…"
"What do you mean?"
He just smiled, pleased with himself that he'd successfully won me over, despite my initial refusal.
"You look like the Cheshire Cat," I said, noting his amused expression, his lips curving up in a smile. "The Cheshire Cat who swallowed the canary, to mix metaphors."
"Oh, I ate the lovely little canary. " He glanced over at me, grinning from ear to ear. "I had her for breakfast and lunch and dinner."
"Don't get too smug." I took my hand back, my arms folded across my chest, unable to keep a grin off my own face. "You're the one who came to me in the end, professing your love. Not wanting to be parted from me ever again."
His grin faded and he reached over and took my hand once again. "You don't have to remind me about that. I thought I'd lost you for good. I was serious when I said I don't want us to be parted again."
"And yet, you were going to leave me, leave Manhattan and go to Kenya without even a goodbye?"
"Kate, remember what happened to me the last time a close relationship ended." He said nothing for a moment and I thought about how his marriage broke up and that he'd been given a temporary restraining order. Finally, he sighed. "After you said it was over, I tried not to feel anything. I shut down emotionally so I wouldn't over-react. I went through the motions of my life, hoping that going to Nairobi would distract me enough to keep the emotions locked away. Luckily, Elaine called me to tell me you'd fallen in love with me and were miserable, or right now, I'd probably be in some bar in Nairobi with a colleague, drowning my sorrows in a bottle of cheap vodka."
"You'd probably be looking for a new submissive. Lara would be busy sorting through her list of hopefuls."
"No. I'd have been overly invested in my work and my music. After you?" He shook his head and turned to me, his expression intense. "A relationship with just a sub would feel hollow."
I smiled, butterflies in my stomach. We drove in silence for a few moments and I mulled over the prospect of not having him. What if Elaine hadn't phoned him? He might have already been in Kenya and out of my life for good.
"I'm so glad she did call." I had to clear my throat because it was choked up. "I haven't thanked her enough."
He kissed my knuckles again. "We had a lot of people behind the scenes trying to get us together."
"And one determined to pull us apart."
We cruised to a halt at a streetlight. "She can't hurt us now," he said and glanced at me, his gaze moving over my face.
I sighed. As happy as I was with Drake, I was still uncertain about our relationship. We weren't going to be a Total Power Exchange Master/slave couple. TPE scared me. I had to be equal to Drake outside of the bedroom – as equal as we two could get, given our personalities. Our power exchange was only in the bedroom, and even then, it wasn't total. We were very vanilla.
I watched his profile in the darkened car. It was perfect, his forehead high, sharp cheekbones, full lips, square jaw covered by the right amount of scruff. Long dark lashes over blue blue eyes. Tousled black hair.
"Does anything ever faze you?"
"Does anything ever faze me?" he said and frowned. "Does anything ever faze me. Let's see…" He turned his attention back to the road, chewing his bottom lip for a moment. "You." He glanced at me briefly.
"Me?" I said, totally surprised. "You control me so well. How could I faze you?"
"I don't control you so well, in case you didn't notice. With you, I'm a terrible Dom. I'd be laughed out of a dungeon if other Doms saw how much I'm wrapped around your little finger."
"What?" I said, laughing. "You're not wrapped around my finger. The other way around, Master."
"Ha," he said, shaking his head. "I'm convinced you call me Master to keep me happy. Kate, I'm usually much more firm with my subs than I have been with you. Other Doms would punish you far more than I have. They'd demand absolute obedience by now. No questions. No hesitation." He smiled sheepishly and turned to look me in the eye. "I'm a lousy Dom."
My heart squeezed a bit at that. "You're not happy with how things are between us?"
"Yes, of course I'm happy. Remember? Meat and potatoes all smothered in gravy?"
"I think you control me quite well."
He chuckled. "I can control you sexually fairly well, so far. But you made me break all my rules, Ms. Bennet, despite all my efforts to keep the parts of my life safely separate. You totally fazed me. I never thought I'd say it, but I enjoy you too much, especially when you resist me, question me. I'd do anything to keep you." He turned to me and smiled. "Love does that to you."
That sent a thrill through me. I fazed THE Drake Morgan, MD. Dr. Delish. Dr. D.
Master D loved me.
Master D, who went to dungeon parties, demonstrated the fine art of bondage and dominance to other aficionados. Wh
o had sex with and dominated up to fourteen submissives in the past five years.
The thought of him tying up other women and having kinky sex with them made me jealous. I squashed the image down and took in a deep breath. Drake never let himself get close to his submissives. He did everything he could to ensure they remained merely responsive bodies for his pleasure. I was different. We had too much history.
To me, Drake had become this mix of love and sex. Intense pleasure. Intense emotion. Drake wanted submission from me – it was his kink, but he would have taken me any way he could get me. Now, sex and love were totally mixed up and would stay that way because we were going to Africa together and would be living together.
I was still catching my breath from the suddenness and surprise of it all. So much had changed in so little time…
The roads at that time of night were fairly clear and soon we arrived at his apartment building on 10th Avenue and West 23rd Street, a few blocks from the Hudson. A renovated building, his apartment was worth a couple million. From what I'd read when doing research for the story I wrote on philanthropy, it was one of the oldest residential buildings in Manhattan.
Drake parked the car in his parking spot and we walked to the gray stone building. The concierge greeted Drake, holding the door open for us. The elevator took us to the top floor and before we entered, he stopped.
"Here," he said and slipped an arm under one of mine, picking me up.
"What are you doing?"
He smiled as my arms went around his neck. "You should be carried the first time you enter my apartment."
"Drake!" I smiled into his neck as he carried me into the luxuriously appointed entry. As I expected, the apartment had rich dark woods throughout and had been decorated in grays with Persian carpets on wood floors. Every exterior wall had huge floor to ceiling windows.
We stood in the entryway that had doors leading off to other rooms. He turned to examine me.
"So," he said, his eyes hooded. "What's your first impression?"
"Are you going to put me down?"
He nestled his face in the crook of my neck.
"I don't know…" he murmured in my ear. "I kind of enjoy holding you like this. It brings out the Dom in me."
"But I want to see it!"
"You can see it anytime you want, Ms. Bennet. All you have to do is ask."
I glanced at his face and he was grinning. Finally, reluctantly, he let me slide out of his arms to a standing position. He threw his keys onto a plate on a circular table in the center of the room. I walked into the living room, which looked out onto the red-brick building across the street.
I took in a deep breath. The apartment even smelled of Drake's cologne. "It looks just like you," I said, turning in a circle. "Sleek, high end, rich, dark, cultured."
There was a formal dining room that had been converted into a music room, with a baby grand piano, several guitars, and a wall-to-wall bank of bookshelves. Framed black and white photographs of famous musicians lined one wall – Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton, Miles Davis, a very young and pouting Mick Jagger.
"Are these your father's?"
He nodded, leaning against the doorjamb, his arms crossed, watching as I walked around and examined his things.
"He collected old photographs of the musicians and the bands he saw."
I stopped in the center of the room and glanced around before my gaze came to rest on him. This was the Drake I was coming to know. Besides surgery and D/s, his father and music were at the core of his identity.
I went to him and slipped my arms around his waist, leaning my head against his chest. He inhaled and embraced me back and the feel of his arms around me ignited my desire. I snuggled against his body, which was so warm and firm under his coat.
"I like this Drake Morgan," I said, looking in his eyes. "I'm seeing him a bit more clearly now."
"Oh?" he said, his eyebrows raised. "And what have you seen?"
"You seem so self-contained."
He sighed and squeezed me more tightly. "My mother had me after my brother died, so I was an only child."
I pulled back. "I never knew you had a brother who died."
Drake nodded and ran his fingers through my hair. "We've never talked much about personal things."
"Tell me."
He exhaled. "He died before I was born from a very rare and aggressive form of leukemia. My mother never recovered, even after she had me. I had to be independent after she left. I think I was a little too independent for married life and that's one reason why Maureen and I split. I was also reluctant to have children because of the chance of passing on the mutation that caused my brother's leukemia, and that was a sore point between us. As soon as she left me, Maureen had a child with her new boyfriend."
"Oh, Drake, that’s so sad." I pulled him more tightly into my embrace, my heart swelling that he felt close enough to me to talk about his late brother and admit that he had been a bad husband. "What was your brother's name?"
"Liam, after my father."
"How old was he when he died?"
"Five."
We stood like that for a moment, his warmth penetrating through his jacket, comforting me.
He sighed and ran his hands over my hair. "I don’t want to think about the past," he said softly. "Right now, I only want to think of me inside of you."
"I thought you had a patient..."
"I'll go later," he said and picked me up once more, carrying me into the bedroom at the back of the apartment, flicking on the light switch as we entered. He let me slide back out of his arms to a standing position, and then he took off my coat, leaving me standing beside the bed in his room while he went to the closet in the entry.
The room was huge, the décor modern, the wood dark, the coverlet luxurious. Heavy drapes fell to the hardwood floor but a sliver of moonlight flooded in through a part in the drapes.
On a table by a huge double-door closet was a thick photo album. I opened the cover to a black and white photograph of a naked woman, gagged, blindfolded and tied up in thin black strips of leather, the strips tied in intricate patterns over her body, surrounding her breasts, between her thighs, framing her shaved labia.
Drake had a book of bondage.
My pulse increased as I flipped a few pages. The photos were of various angles on the same woman, her long blonde hair falling over the end of the bed, her wrists tied together and held over the edge.
In one, a naked man leaned over her, a hand squeezing one breast, his face just out of the image. Although it was almost impossible to tell who the man was, I could see it was Drake by his chin with its characteristic scruff and square jaw. His cock was inside her, her knees bent and spread wide, each of her ankles attached to leather straps that were fastened to the foot of the bed.
These were Drake's subs. These were photographs of his rope work and of him having sex with them. It surprised me that he'd have a book like this, given his desire to protect his identity, but if you didn’t know it, you couldn't tell it was Drake. His face never appeared in any picture.
I felt like I was snooping, but I also couldn't stop turning the pages. The photographs were artistic, the lighting careful, the angles intended to create interesting shadows and compositions on the page. It was really very beautiful, despite the explicit content.
Drake entered the room with two shot glasses of vodka and came to an abrupt halt just inside the door to the bedroom.
"Oh," he said, his voice a bit hesitant. "I see you've found my book."
CHAPTER FOUR
I nodded without saying anything, unable to stop turning page after page. In one taken from the side of the bed, a man – Drake – straddled a woman who was blindfolded and tied up hands and feet to the bed frame, his erection between her lips as he leaned against the wall, his hands spread wide. The muscular cheeks of his ass were clenched as if he were thrusting. My body responded to the blatant sexuality, my muscles tensing. Yet, my throat was choked with jealousy.
There were several different women captured in the images. One was dark haired, anther was blonde with short cropped hair and tattoos. Still another was very tall and had dark hair and long limbs like a model. All were blindfolded, and unless they were performing oral sex, they were gagged. They were all restrained in various poses, some on their backs, others on their knees before him, yet others from behind. In one I could see clearly that Drake was performing anal sex.
I closed the book, my face hot, my body numb.
Drake put the vodka down on the table and turned me to face him. He took my chin in his hand and forced me to look in his eyes.
"Are you OK?" he said, his voice soft. "That's quite… personal."
"They're beautiful," I said, my voice cracking a bit. "The pictures are gorgeous and erotic at the same time. I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have opened it. I feel like a voyeur."
He smiled a bit at that. "I wanted them beautiful rather than pornographic. To me, D/s is an art. Photographs should convey that."
"Do you use them to, you know," I said, not really certain how to frame my question. "Get off when you don't have a partner?"
"No," he said, and smiled. "I mean, I have before. I'm not going to lie. But they're meant more as a tribute to my former submissives. I don't want to have any photos out there that directly identify me. I gave them all copies of their photographs in a special book."
He handed me one of the shot glasses. I sniffed it – Anisovaya, of course.
"You've hardly done anything with me, have you?"
He shook his head. "Don't want to go too fast with you. Besides," he said and held up his glass to me, indicating I should drink. "All this messy love stuff got in the way."