by Cassia Leo
Of course, neither had Georgie, but the university fitness center sported red-enameled metal lockers in the women’s locker room, so that probably counted.
He asked, “Is this a sports club?”
“Sort of,” she said, snorting inside, but she kept a straight face.
“So what are we doing in this empty building?”
“Let’s put it this way.” She grabbed his tee shirt and dragged him the one step to her. His chest warmed the back of her knuckles. “I’m going to show you some stuff. If it seems like fun to you, we’ll keep going. If not, we’ll go back to the music building and play our sonata.”
Alex had watched her closely the whole time she spoke, and little glimmers of light began to reflect in his dark eyes. “What is this place called?”
“The Devilhouse.”
Alex’s lips parted, and his eyelids flared slightly. “You don’t say.”
“Have you heard of it?”
“Only in hushed tones in certain circles.”
“Then you have heard of it,” she said.
He looked a little wary, but he smiled. “Lead on, Madam.”
“At least you know what to call me.”
Alex grabbed her around her waist, bent her back a little, and took her lips with a searing kiss. He nibbled down her neck, and she stretched as his teeth grazed her tendons and clutched his broad shoulders so she wouldn’t fall.
He whispered, “Maybe I’ll call you ‘pet,’ instead.”
Oh, he knew more than he admitted. “Certain circles, huh?”
“Indeed. Lead on.” He set her back on her feet and followed her out of the women’s locker room and through the hallways of The Devilhouse.
PLAY ROOM 1
Georgie
The deceptively office-like hallways of The Devilhouse meandered through the building like a labyrinth. Sometimes, Georgie surmised that it was to confuse clients so they would be more vulnerable. Other times, she assumed that the architect must have been dead drunk.
Alex walked along beside her, his long legs stretching and taking one step for every two of hers. His motorcycle boots clomped a little on the carpet, but he moved very lightly for such a big man, almost prowling, and like he had so much energy that the thick muscle on his shoulders and legs didn’t weigh him down.
But which room should she take him to? Alex was European, at least he had a British accent and said that he was from Monaco, so he had to be depraved and kinky, right? All those Europeans were, at least all the ones that Georgie had met.
Then again, there might be some sampling bias at work in that population.
Georgie strode through the hallways, leading Alex. The vanilla rooms might as well be a hotel or anybody’s living room.
Not the college sorority room. If he had wanted to fuck in a college-themed space, he had totally skipped his opportunity that afternoon. Seemed unlikely.
That left the more, ahem, specialized rooms.
Georgie glanced up at him, and Alex tucked a strand of his dark hair behind his ear. His eyes seemed unusually dark, even for him. “Are we almost there?”
“Sure.” Georgie opened the door to the lobby for Play Room 1, one of their most specialized rooms.
The waiting area inside looked like the lobby for the first circle of Hell. The red leather couches flanked black, wooden coffee tables. The carved door on the opposite side of the room loomed large and dark like a portal to Hades. The walls were even wallpapered in red.
Definitely diabolical.
She stole another quick look at Alex, just to make sure he wasn’t beginning to freak out. People who got this far usually had been vetted to make sure that they really were into the more extreme forms of sexuality, lest someone claw that red, flocked wallpaper off the drywall while trying to escape.
If Alex backpedaled, that was fine. He was just a two-night-stand, after all. Georgie’s calm had returned, now that no one had followed them into the parking lot and she was safe behind steel-reinforced walls. In a little while, they would go back to that hotel he had booked and have some fun, and then they would sneak into the Music Building for a little Moonlight Sonata, literally, or whatever Alex had written.
In a few days, he would be gone.
And maybe, she would be, too.
She hoped he wouldn’t bolt tonight, though.
Alex didn’t look like he was going to bolt. Instead, his mouth with his full lips curved up in a wider smile, and his dark eyebrows twitched up. His sultry glance at her was awesome.
Now, Georgie just had to dredge up everything that Rae and Mairearad had ever told her about being a Domme.
First, they had giggled and said that you had to look like you were in charge.
Maybe Georgie should have changed into black leather or latex fetishwear, but a floor-length dress and heels was not something that a submissive would wear. Subs like Glenda, The Devilhouse’s main admin, wore micro-skirts and pasties.
Surely, Georgie’s green dress was fine, and if it wasn’t, that was too—
A strong arm wrapped around her waist, whirling her around, and shoved her up against the wall. Alex’s body pressed her there, and with her very high heels on, the ones that squished her toes, he only had to bend his head before his mouth found hers, opening his mouth and sucking on her lips.
She raised her hands to slide her hand up his chest to his neck, but he grabbed her elbows and pushed her arms above her head, pinning her wrists to the wall. He bit her lower lip gently, then bent to rake his teeth over her throat again.
Near her ear, he whispered, “Safe word?”
Mairearad had told Georgie about this, and this meant that she wasn’t the Domme.
Georgie drew a deep breath, but everything felt like it was rushing at her, and not having to be in charge sounded pretty damn good just then.
She said, “Red.”
“Boring,” Alex said. “Something personal. Tell me what you never want to say.”
His teeth scraping the skin on the side of her neck sent shivers over her skin, and his hand clamped around her wrists was almost tight enough to hurt, almost. She said, “I quit.”
Alex’s fingers loosened on her wrists, and he breathed on her shoulder but stopped biting her. “Is that your safe word or are you telling me this?”
“That’s my safe word, ‘I quit.’ I don’t think I’ve ever said it before in my life, well, other than the walkout at work last week, but that was on principle.” She dipped her head and nipped him above the neckline of his tee shirt, where his neck met his shoulder.
He chuckled, a low, nearly sinister sound and pressed his teeth over the tendon that connected her neck to her shoulder like he was going to rip a chunk out of her flesh, but he barely scratched her skin with his teeth as he rose up. “Do you want a yellow word?”
Mairearad and Rae hadn’t mentioned that, but the stoplight connotation seemed evident. “So to go slower—” she ventured.
“Yes,” he said, running his other hand from her waist to the swell of her breast.
“Largo,” she said, the musical term that meant to play a section slowly and with dignity.
He chuckled against her skin. “Not grave?” The term for even slower and in a solemn tone.
“I don’t like grave. It’s too slow for anything but dirges.”
“‘Largo’ and ‘I quit’ are the safe words,” he repeated.
“Yes,” Georgie said.
Alex dropped her hands, and her arms fell. The blood rushed back into them, tingling her muscles.
He reached under her and picked her up, holding her around her back and under her knees, carrying her toward that dark door to Hell. Her green skirt dangled beneath her legs, swaying as he walked.
He carried her easily, almost effortlessly.
She didn’t feel so much like a bride as a virgin sacrifice.
Alex looked at her, catching her eyes. Wrapped in his arms, Georgie had a moment to study him, something that she really hadn’t done in
the very few days they had known each other. His dark eyes seemed so mysterious, long and dark-lashed like he was wearing make-up. She was so close that she could see the small pores in his skin, and he wasn’t wearing even the slightest bit of make-up on his clean-shaven face. Mascara would have blackened the blond tips of his eyelashes that barely caught the light, and his eyes were naturally so long and with an exotic curve near the end, just a little, so that he always looked like he was sizing her up for something spectacularly sinful.
Of course, at this moment, in The Devilhouse, that was probably exactly what he was doing.
Alex kicked the massive door, and it slammed open and banged the wall behind it.
Georgie might have felt guilty about maybe cracking the drywall, but the new owner had been such a dickweed that she was ready to flush a cherry bomb down a toilet, so a little drywall didn’t worry her in the slightest.
Play Room One was one of the standard dungeons. She had seen every room in The Devilhouse even though she had worked on the vanilla side, so she wasn’t shocked by the Dark Ages Decor. The pale yellow bulbs encased in iron-banded sconces lit the gray stone on the floor and walls and cast pale light over the various hulking instruments and devices of torture, or at least mutually consenting pseudo-torture.
Alex threw back his head and laughed out loud when he saw the room.
“I kind of expected you to run out screaming or stalk out, revolted,” Georgie said.
“You’ll get to know me better tonight,” Alex said. He dropped her knees and let her body slide down his front. The silk of her dress snagged on his jeans’ waistband and rode up as cool air washed over her ankles. Under his tee shirt and jeans, his chest, his rippled abdominals, and his hard thighs felt like he was carved out of smooth stone.
Her palms trailed over that hard, hot manflesh, and she could just do that all night long, preferably without all these clothes in the way. The cotton and denim would look much better wadded up on the stone dungeon tiles of the floor.
Pressed up against his chest, that green-grass and warm spice cologne that he wore on his skin filtered through his shirt, and she breathed it in. The sharp tang of lemon air freshener filled the room around them, and Georgie leaned in to rub her cheek on the soft cotton of his tee shirt, catching a whiff of his clean, masculine scent under it.
Alex stepped back.
Georgie stumbled, and when her high heel wobbled out from under her foot, her ankle tweaked. She caught herself.
He was still smiling. “Stay here. Face the door. Don’t look around. I want to see what we have here.”
“You want me to face the door?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
He stepped back toward her, suddenly looming over her. He looked down, and his dark eyes took on an ominous glare. His rough voice, still hoarse, deepened even more, though he was entirely calm. “I said, face the door.”
It was one of those moments of decision, one of those times when Georgie could fight or run, or in this case, submit.
She always ran. She was going to have to run again very soon, most likely.
Georgie was going to run in a few days. Anything else was denial. Technically, she was already running, because she had her bug-out bags and had no plans to go back to the dorm.
For the last six years, she had done nothing but run or prepare to run at a moment’s notice.
This time, though, she would call or email Rae and Lizzy and tell them good-bye.
And Flicka. This time, she would find a way to tell Flicka and apologize again.
But for now, she didn’t want to run.
George pivoted, slowly, and faced the door.
From behind her, Alex stroked her hair and whispered near the nape of her neck, “Very good.” His fingers trailed over her bare shoulders, and he brushed her dress strap aside and kissed her skin.
Even if she wasn’t going to run just yet, she felt like she was leading him on, first by asking him to come visit her, though that had been before she had known she was going to need to run again, and now by fucking him again.
Not telling him that he was never going to see her again was unethical, and she shuddered at the thought of that.
“You know, Alex, it’s okay if this is just a nookie run,” she said, still watching the big, black door. Carvings scrolled over its surface like smoke and fires. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in my life. It really can’t be anything else.”
He slid his arm around her waist, pulling her back against his body. The softness of his tee shirt brushed her spine. He whispered into her hair, “I mustn’t get involved in a personal relationship right now. If I don’t work as hard as I can, every moment that I can, it will all collapse, and so many people are counting on me. They don’t realize how precarious it all is. I’m holding it all together with just the strength of my will.”
“Yes,” Georgie said. “Oh, thank God. So, this—” She motioned over her shoulder, her fluttering fingers suggesting a connection between them. “—This is just for fun, right? Or it’s just a moment for us, but we can’t let it become anything else.”
“Just a moment for us,” he said, moving her hair aside and drawing in a breath that tickled the nape of her neck. He nuzzled her skin back there and whispered, “Just a moment suspended in time, where nothing else matters. We’ll stop believing in the rest of the world, because this is just a moment for us.”
His mouth paused on her neck for a moment.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
Alex’s breath was still suspended, like he was holding in the air. He said, “Yes. I think everything might be all right.” His teeth raked over the back of her neck. “Now stay right here, and don’t turn around.”
Cold air stole across her back as he stepped away. His footsteps tapped around the room, the pats of his black motorcycle boots on the tile floor pausing as he stopped. Georgie almost turned to see what he was examining, but she kept staring at that towering, closed door.
Could be anything, whatever he was looking at back there. Didn’t have to be something sinister, like a signal whip that would lay long welts across her back for days or, if someone didn’t know how to use it right, could actually cut into her flesh down to her spine and ribs.
Some clinks and snaps, even a metallic rattle, bounced off the gray stone tile on the walls.
Alex’s footsteps resumed a largo cadence around the room.
Georgie stared at that black door. She closed her eyes and imagined what he must be looking at, over to her left and behind her. The St. Andrew’s cross was over there, a black leather-covered X that a person’s arms and legs were tied to, spread-eagle. A huge apparatus that looked like the frame for a canopy twin bed stood over in the other corner, except that the posts and frame above were usually sturdy wood and, of course, painted black.
If Georgie had owned this place, she would have done something less expected, like paint one of the dungeons happy, sunny yellow and make all these bondage things out of natural wood so that it looked like a forest.
People probably didn’t come here to frolic in the woods like satyrs.
Alex’s footsteps stopped right behind her. “Did you turn around and look?”
“No.” Her breathy voice betrayed more trepidation than she would have preferred.
“Good.”
Something cold, very cold, touched her back and slid down her spine. Not ice, because it didn’t drip. As the chill descended, her dress loosened around her chest and stomach.
Alex had a razor-sharp knife and was slicing her dress off her body.
Whoa.
Yet, this dress belonged to The Devilhouse, and she was incredibly pissed at the new owner, Mannix fucking Bonfils, that very minute. Fuck it. Let Alex cut the damned thing to ribbons. She had a change of clothes in the car.
Her dress slithered down her body, leaving her naked except for, once again, a black thong in that cool play room. Alex was going to think that she wore nothing but thongs, which was only abou
t half true.
He whispered near her ear, “Good,” and his fingers trailed over her shoulders and down her arms. “Have you ever done this before?”
Outright lying to him was Georgie’s first impulse. If she admitted to being a novice at this, she would be at a disadvantage. He might despise her. Playing the innocent was not Georgie’s thing.
But she knew enough about BDSM to know that honesty was paramount.
She swallowed hard. “Nope. First time.”
“Really?” He leaned down and breathed all the way down her neck. “How enticing.”
“You into virgins, too?” she quipped.
“Not at all. Too easily frightened. Too boring. I’d rather have a woman who is good in bed any day.” He stopped. “You weren’t a virgin last weekend, were you?”
“Oh, God, no.” Her shocked laugh got a little loud. Virginity had not been Georgie’s problem for a good, long time. “Oh, Jesus, that’s funny.”
“I thought we both enjoyed it too much for that.” Alex nibbled along her shoulder.
“I’ll say.”
His hands rested on her hips, and he tugged her back against himself. His hard body under his clothes radiated warmth onto her back and ass. He slid his fingers under the thong’s elastic around her hips and slid it down to her ankles. “Remember your safe words?”
“‘I quit,’ and ‘Largo.’”
“Excellent.” His fingers slipped under the sides of her thong, and he pushed it to the floor. “Step out of it.”
Georgie kicked the little strip of elastic aside.
“Good,” he murmured and stroked her sides from her ribs, down her hips.
His encouragement warmed her as much as his heavy body standing just behind her, but she hesitated, trying to figure out if he meant that or if he was just manipulating her. Positive reinforcement hadn’t figured large in her childhood.
“I’m honored that you chose me to explore this side of yourself,” he said. “It implies a great deal of trust, especially for a man you met just a few days ago.”