Damn right, Callahan, I thought sternly. That’s exactly what you are supposed to do. You are not ruled by your dick; you do have a brain and a conscience.
I got back to the bedroom, stripped to my boxers, and lay down next to her. She stirred in her sleep and mumbled something, and I grinned at the sleepy tone of displeasure. You did not wake Tia up when she were sleeping, not unless you were willing to get your head bitten off. My rabbit hated any interruption to her rest.
One hand reached out to curl around me as I lay there. She moved in her sleep, her one leg draping over my hips, and her head snuggling on my shoulder. My heart clenched, painfully, and so did my dick, and because it was Tia, and I was completely in love, I ignored my dick ruthlessly. I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep.
***
I was having the best dream. Tia’s hands were running over my body. She was tracing each and every muscle with her fingers, then lowering her tongue and following the same path. She went lower and lower and my cock twitched and jumped in anticipation.
“Fuck, Tia,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes closed.
Her warm hand slid under the waistband of my boxers, and found my cock. “I hope so.” Her voice was feather soft, and my eyes flickered open. This wasn’t a dream. “Tatiana.” My voice was gruff as I met her eyes, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted her so much, but I wanted all of her, and I wanted her to want me with the same need. Because with each passing moment, it became so much harder to do the right thing and walk away.
“What are you doing to me, rabbit?”
***
Tatiana:
He was right next to me. So very, very close, and I could feel every breath he took, every steady inhale and exhale. I wondered if he could hear my heart, beating like a trapped butterfly as I reacted to his nearness. It took so much effort to fight my need, to force myself into lightness, to pretend I didn’t want Liam with a deep, enduring ache.
He looked at me, his green eyes steady. “What are you doing to me, rabbit?” he asked. He pulled me against him so that my back was pressed against his chest. I looked at my reflection in the mirror on the dresser. I expected to look different. I felt different, with his body against mine. I felt soft, yet strong. Nervous, yet perfectly secure.
“I was touching you.” I responded to his question, my voice a thread of sound in the quiet room.
He responded by kissing my neck. I closed my eyes, unable to confront that reflection in the mirror. It was too much. He looked like my lover, but I didn’t get to stake such a claim on him. “There are strings attached,” he said huskily. “When you come to me, Tatiana, you don’t get to leave. When you come, you come to stay.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not looking for a quick fuck.” His blunt words shocked me. “I’m not looking for a one night stand. When you come to me, you come looking for involvement and commitment and togetherness.”
Liam was a Dom at Casanova, a BDSM club where submissive women threw themselves at him near constantly, and sex was always at hand. He was my best friend. I’d laughed with him. I’d dragged him to movies that he grumbled about seeing. We watched football games together, me cheering for AC Milan, and him cheering for the opposing team, just to rile me up. And if I were to believe the truth of his words, he wanted to be in a relationship with me.
If I believed the truth of his words…
I had three secrets. I’d already told him about the abortion. But the first secret, the one that shaped everything in my life was both my parents were still alive, and neither of them wanted me, or cared what became of me.
My father had been a visiting Russian politician, and he’d slept with my mother and abandoned her when he found out that she was pregnant. My mother had been eighteen when she’d given birth to me, and she’d been alone and afraid, and had left me in an orphanage to try and resume her life. On my seventeenth birthday, I’d found out I’d been cast away by both my parents.
There’d been three of us at the orphanage, three best friends, who were there for each other. Through thick and thin. Enzo, the oldest, serious and responsible. Antonio, always a daredevil. And me, of course. Yet when I was thirteen, Antonio had run away, unwilling to take the beatings anymore. The next year, a family had adopted Enzo.
I was the one left behind. Many people had visited the orphanage looking for children, yet year after year, no one wanted me. Until my body started to change, and then, I was faced with a different kind of wanting, a leering attention from men that frightened me.
As much as anything else, I’d had an abortion so that I wouldn’t impose the same pattern on a child.
I was a walking contradiction. I’d been abandoned willingly by my parents. I’d been abandoned unwillingly by Antonio and Enzo. Family after family had declined to adopt me. When most men looked at me, I was tits and ass and pussy, and nothing else.
Everyone except Liam, who had taken the time to get to know me. He’d never made a pass at me. He had waited for me to make the first move.
Did I believe the truth of his words?
“You want to date me.” I said those words out aloud, half-expecting him to laugh at my presumption. He was whole and I was broken. How could I even dare to want him?
“More than I’ve ever wanted anything before.” There was absolutely no doubt in his voice.
“Why?”
***
Liam:
She saw weakness when she looked in the mirror. I saw only strength.
Tainted by the way men treated her, yet she still let me in. Constantly judged and envied by women, yet Lucia and Alice were her good friends.
Everything she had built, she had built by herself, rejecting Antonio and Enzo’s help. Sometimes, she struggled, but she forged her own path, and god, I admired her for the way she’d never opted to take the easy road. She took night classes because she never went to university, and I hadn’t ever seen her slack off. She could so easily have become some rich man’s pet. She was beautiful and her body invited sin. Just the image of her kneeling, waiting demurely for me sent my cock aching hard.
But I wanted Tatiana for more than her body. I wanted her because when I asked her last year to be my friend, she’d responded with generosity and sweetness and kindness. I had felt myself starting to get cynical. I had started to take women for granted in my role as the manager of Casanova, and I had hated who I was becoming. And Tia had been there for me, and she’d prevented me from becoming a caricature of myself. She’d given me my humanity.
“Because I think we’ll be perfect together.” She turned to face me, looking doubtful. “We already get along well. The sex was amazing.”
She frowned. “Liam,” she protested. “That could have been a one-time thing. What if I can’t orgasm again with you? What then?”
“Do you think it’s going to change the way I feel about you, Tia? That’s never going to happen.”
She didn’t meet my eyes for what felt like hours. “There are things you need to know about me,” she said. “My mother got pregnant with me when she was eighteen. She’s alive. She lives in Siena. She just left me at the orphanage and went on with her life. My father went back to Russia. That’s why I had an abortion. I didn’t want to do that to my child.”
There was nothing I could say. I just enveloped her in my arms, and hoped that I could convey everything I felt for her in my embrace. Even more so, I was in awe at her strength, and I was in awe that she hadn’t come out of that experience bitter and hard. She was so sweet, my little rabbit.
“Was it hard for you to come here?” Though I hadn’t known, I was inwardly cursing myself. It couldn’t have been easy to see the Callahans, loving and untroubled, when her life had been so much more difficult.
“A little. It was nice though. I got to see a little bit of you that I don’t get to see in Venice.”
I kissed her. It was meant to be a brief kiss, one that told her that I loved her and I wanted her, and she was beyond preci
ous to me. But our kiss deepened. Mouths collided, need grew, tongues danced in a duet, and teeth nipped gently, and we were both panting by the time we pulled away.
She gave me the smallest of nods. “Okay.”
“Okay what?” Wait, did she just agree to date me?
“Okay, I want to date you too,” she said with a smile and a cheeky roll of her eyes. “Keep up, Liam.”
I felt a smile break out on my face, because heaven help me, these were the words I’d been aching to hear for the last year. I spanked her butt. “Brat,” I chided in response to the eye-roll, and her smile dimmed.
“There is one thing though,” she said. She chewed at her lower lip in obvious worry. “When was the last time you had a relationship with someone who wasn’t a submissive?” My face must have given her an answer. “Never, right?”
I nodded reluctantly. I opened my mouth to tell her this was not going to be a problem. I was entirely in love with her. But she shook her head. “Let me finish?” she asked. “Sexual compatibility is important.”
This time, I didn’t hesitate to interrupt. “Tia,” I said, lifting my fingers and gliding them over her jaw. “I don’t think we have any problems with sexual compatibility.”
“At the moment,” she said pertly. “But Liam, in a month, or in two months, I don’t want you to find some submissive in Casanova and fuck her. I want to learn. Train me.”
“Train you?”
“Train me to be your submissive. The way you would at Casanova. Show me everything.”
I gulped. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, my voice husky, but my cock was a steel rod at the idea of sweet Tia, tied up on a St. Andrews Cross, wriggling her butt seductively as I cropped that tight ass.
She moved her hand and stroked my erection through my boxers. “Actually,” she grinned, “if this is the reaction I get for even making the suggestion, then I’m definitely going to want to.”
“You aren’t going to enjoy it very much,” I warned her, amused.
She frowned. My tone revealed that I wasn’t exactly serious, and my words weren’t really a threat, and I could tell she was trying to figure out what I was talking about. Finally, she sighed. “Okay, I’ll ask. Why won’t I enjoy it?”
“Because,” I took her hand, still cupped around my erection, and placed it above her head, holding it in place with mine. “Submissives need to follow instructions,” I told her. “Submissives don’t reach out and grab their Dominant’s crotch whenever they feel like.”
She pouted sexily. “Damn it, I knew there’d be a catch.”
I was still laughing as I dressed for breakfast.
Chapter 11
Liam:
The rest of Christmas passed without incident. As I knew she would, Tia completely charmed my family. My parents regaled her with stories of all the crazy shit I did as a kid, which had her in stitches. ‘I’ll deal with you in Venice, Tia,” I warned her after one such bout of giggles, when we had a moment to ourselves.
“Yes Sir,” she replied sweetly. My cock was instantly rock hard at the promise implicit in her tone.
Margaret and Heather invited her to visit them in Dublin. Claire and Fiona both pumped her for information about all of their favourite actors, and whether she’d met them. She kept them entertained with genuinely funny stories about stuff that had happened to her on set, and they were completely entranced. Christophe, Claire’s boyfriend turned to me wryly at one point, and shook his head. “She’s way out of your league, Callahan,” he commented.
“And don’t I know it,” I replied.
He smiled and handed me a beer. “Still, that’s the general consensus among all my friends and family about Claire.” He eyed my sister fondly.
“Damn right,” I said firmly. Not that Christophe wasn’t a great guy, but Claire was my sister, and Christophe was lucky to be with her.
We slept next to each other at night. There was touching, because how could we lie next to each other and keep our hands from straying? But she was uncomfortable with the idea of sex underneath my parents’ roof, and I went along with her desires. We petted like teenagers instead. There was kissing. There was sucking those gorgeous nipples into my mouth, rolling them between my fingertips and watching her eyes fill with desire and her lips compress to keep from crying out. I ran my hands all over her body, and she ran her hands over mine, and when we slept, we spooned. Every morning, I woke up with a raging hard-on. I couldn’t wait to go back to Venice, have her spread her legs open for me, and sink into her hot softness. I’d never wanted a Christmas to go by faster.
We’d got out of the habit of exchanging Christmas presents in my family. However, my mother never saw a bar of chocolate she didn’t like, so Tia had brought her a big fancy tin of assorted chocolates as a ‘thank you.’ My mother beamed at Tia when she handed her the tin.
I loved my family. If it came down to it, I would pick Tia, of course. But I couldn’t deny that I was thrilled that my parents and sisters seemed to love Tia, and that she got along well with everyone.
***
We both flew back to Venice on the same flight. Tia’s TV show was on holiday break, and she had a week off before she had to be back in Dingle. On the flight, she looked at me. “Submissive training,” she said, her eyes bright.
“I hate the word training,” I replied. “You aren’t a pet. You don’t need to be trained. It’s just a big, elaborate game.”
“Ah,” she said. “But all games have rules, don’t they? I’d like to learn what the rules to this game are.”
Damn it. Tia was smart, and she wasn’t going to let this go. “A week,” I said. “Barely enough time to make a dent, really.”
“Why, is it that complicated?” She sounded worried and she wrinkled her nose. “Can I confess something? I saw you spank a woman a few weeks ago at Casanova.”
“Simona?” I asked, and her face fell. I quickly rushed to clarify. “I rarely do punishment sessions, rabbit. Or any other kind of session. I just set the rules of safe play. Simona’s the only person I’ve punished for months now, and that’s only because the person scheduled to do it didn’t show up.”
Her expression cleared, and I rolled my eyes at her. “You are special, rabbit. No other woman even comes close.”
She didn’t look convinced. “Anyway, I don’t think I can be hit that hard.”
“I wouldn’t hit you that hard,” I responded instantly.
She glared at me. “Liam, I don’t want you to take it easy on me.”
“Tia,” I said patiently, “I have no intention of taking it easy on you. I wouldn’t hit any new submissive that hard. One hard spanking like that, and it’ll feel like a beating to you, and you won’t get any pleasure out of it. Pain tolerance is a process. You can’t build up to it in a week.”
I lowered my mouth to her ear. “Besides, there’s more to dominance and submission than being tied up and spanked. It’s much more about mindset. I know some Dominants who won’t use pain at all.”
“So if it isn’t about being spanked, what is training?” Her eyes were dilated with arousal. I couldn’t wait for the damn flight to land. I wanted her desperately. Having her sleep next to me at my parents, her ass grinding into me as we spooned, and I couldn’t wait to get her all to myself.
“It’s about focus.” I was aware that it didn’t sound very exciting. “And awareness and trust.”
“How’s that different from a regular relationship?”
God, she was so smart, it was such a turn-on. “I guess it isn’t any different from the best kind of relationships. There’s a lot trust involved, and it’s more than just trusting someone with a riding crop. It’s a willingness to tell someone what you really want, and it’s about giving them the power to meet your needs.”
I pulled out my phone and flipped through my e-books, finding her a good basic reference book. “Read,” I instructed.
She grinned at me. “Trusting me with your phone,” she quipped, putting special em
phasis on the word trusting. “I have to say I’m honoured.”
“Read, rabbit,” I chuckled. “There will be a test.”
***
Tatiana:
He looked at me as we made our way from the airport into the city. “How tired are you?” he asked me. There was open heat in his eyes that promised pleasure.
There was no hesitation in my voice when I responded. “I’m not tired.” My voice sounded higher in pitch and somewhat breathless. I took a deep breath and tried for calmness. “What did you have in mind?”
Please, please, say sex, I begged inwardly. I’d been curled up against his body every night for the last three days, and the most I could do was touch him a little bit. It had been the most trying three days of my life. Unused as I was to sexual desire, the frustration was doubly hard to take.
He grinned at me. “In Cork, I seem to recall a very beautiful woman tell me she wanted to be trained as a submissive,” he said. “No, let me correct that. She wanted to be trained as my submissive.” The note of possession was clear in his voice. “I thought we could start.”
Prickles of anticipation wound their way through my body, along with some nervous tension that I immediately banished. If I didn’t trust Liam perfectly, I wouldn’t have asked for this. For me, sexual curiosity only bloomed in an atmosphere of complete safety.
I nodded, and Liam shook his head. “I’d like all my instructions acknowledged verbally.” His voice had changed. It was smooth and dark and hard.
“Yes Sir,” I replied softly. Once again, as I said those words, I was enveloped in a feeling of serenity. It was so freeing to turn myself over to Liam.
“Very nice.” We’d pulled up in front of Casanova. “Why don’t you go upstairs to my apartment, shower and wait for me in my bedroom?” He glanced at his watch. “Will forty-five minutes be sufficient?”
I nodded, then remembered what he said to me about acknowledging his instructions. “Yes Sir.”
His lips twitched as he continued his instructions. “Kneel by the side of the bed, put your hands behind your back, and wait for me.”
A Starlet in Venice Page 6