by Joey W. Hill
Alice was never afraid of making mistakes. Of course, why would she have been? Alice’s mistakes had a way of turning into successes, whereas even Madison’s successes often turned out to be failures in disguise. She was afraid of doing the same to the store Alice had loved.
“Thanks for the box.” Hugging it to her, she stepped back. “I might do it. It beats surfing cable.”
Or dreading another day of the polite, get-away-from-me looks from her customers. If this could help her feel better about that, it might be worth it. But she wasn’t going to make him any promises about doing it. “Thanks for all the lessons. Professor.”
He didn’t say anything and she frowned, looking down at the counter again. “You make me uncomfortable when you stare like that.”
“I don’t think making you comfortable is what you need from me, Madison. But I do like to see you smile.” Pulling a magnet off the antique cash register, he handed it to her. “On the house.”
“Think of all the women on the Titanic who passed up dessert.” She couldn’t help it; she smiled, and it stayed there when his expression eased into the same.
“That’s better. I’ll walk you out.” He took her elbow. “When you stay late, you should move your car to the front, or let me know when you’re leaving, so Troy or I can escort you. It’s a safe area, but a deserted alley is still a deserted alley. Best not to take risks.”
Yet he and her dead sister had no problem pushing her to risk her sanity, with his not-so-subtle offers to unleash his Dominant side on her senses. Hell, he was already doing it, as if it was such an intrinsic part of him, he couldn’t help himself when he was around a submissive.
She flinched inwardly. Stop thinking of yourself that way. “It’s nice of you to do this, but I’m sure it’s fine.”
“I’m sure it is. I’m still walking you to your car.”
He was moving her down the center aisle, back past the fasteners, hooks, ropes. She tried not to think of all the ways they could be used. Dom Depot, indeed. But the danger was never the sword, but who was wielding it. Nice phallic entendre there, Madison. Alice would be smirking.
She set her jaw and stopped, pivoting toward him. “Even if I say no?”
She’d put the box under an arm and held out her other hand to bring him to a halt, which brought her palm in contact with his chest. He was solid muscle, and distracting curls of gleaming chest hair, revealed by the open collar of his shirt, tempted touch. They were only a few inches above where her fingers rested. She pressed them against his flesh, an attempt to quell the urge, and realized she’d conveyed something else.
He closed his hand over her wrist, then he closed the space between them. It was a gradual but inexorable movement, like tides rising. The words she intended to say went away as he held her gaze, a restraint as effective as the ropes behind her. Which kind of proved her point about the sword, but she wasn’t opening her mouth to make it.
Keeping his attention on her face, tracking her every reaction in a way that couldn’t help but make a woman feel like the center of the universe, he lowered her arm to her side. His grip shifted, and now that same arm was being slowly twisted behind her, her knuckles brushing her ass, then the small of her back. His knuckles pressed against the top of her buttocks as he held her hand. The position arched her body so the tips of her breasts almost touched his chest.
“No means nothing to me when it conflicts with your well-being, Madison.”
Her swallow was audible. “Let go of me,” she whispered.
“That’s not what you want me to do.”
“No, but . . . please.”
He did it with kindness, caressing her wrist before stepping back. “I’m walking you to your car,” he said firmly. When he gestured her to precede him, she turned back in that direction, trying to scrape up her shattered composure. As they moved toward the exit, he thankfully stayed quiet, though his hand settled on her back again. The gesture was so easy for him he couldn’t possibly know how raw and exposed it left her.
They were approaching her back door. He’d open it for her, and she’d get in her car like some dutiful puppet whose strings he’d managed to pull all the right ways, making him think he could do that tomorrow, and the next day.
She spun around and faced him, holding the box between them to ensure she didn’t make any unwise contact this time. “I get it. You think you’re some Master-Dom-guru who can bring people to the light through whips and chains. Well, that’s awesome for you. Go and start a cult somewhere. But I’m not signing up. As for what Alice told you, about giving me to you¸ that’s more of her bullshit. The type of things that made people think she was this amazing, quirky person who everyone wanted to be around, who everyone loved, who never had her heart broken . . .”
Her voice was shaking. She thrust the box at him. “You were her friend. You don’t have to be mine.”
He closed his hands over hers on the box and took it, but only to set it aside on one of her shelves. “I have no intention of being your friend, Madison. Not that way.” Then he curled his strong fingers over her nape, exerted pressure. “Come here.”
“I don’t want this. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do any of this.” She didn’t jerk away, just resisted him with counterweight, futile against a man who was twice her weight and at least half a foot taller. He put his other arm around her waist, using it like a lasso to bring her to him, one reluctant step at a time.
“Come here,” he repeated quietly. She’d never had a man talk like that to her, equal doses of irresistible command and compassion, gentle strength and authority, which had her body throbbing as much as her aching heart.
Once his chest took up her vision, he wrapped both arms around her, her hands curled tense against her sternum, mashed between them. “Just breathe. I’m sorry. That was too much, too soon.”
She stood in his embrace, rigid. But not withdrawing.
“I wanted too much, too quickly,” he said. “You have that effect on a man.”
“Yeah, right.” But she didn’t have the courage to look for the truth. Not right now. His arms felt too good. She should pull away. Instead, she leaned, a little bit.
“Did she . . . did she have a lot of bad days?” The words were muffled against his chest.
He sighed. “She said the good days always outnumbered the bad, until the end. That was when she called you. She loved you, Madison. You were the only thing she wanted, at the last.”
“Shit.” She closed her eyes tight, pressing her forehead against his chest. “I loved her, Logan.”
“I know that. So did she.”
“I don’t understand any of this. Especially what you felt about her, and how that relates to me. How that can be a good thing. I’m not her.”
He straightened, holding her away from him to give her a look that had an edge to it. “I told you I know that already.”
“Yeah, but what people say and what they understand about themselves are pretty different. For a long time I told people I wasn’t anal and I actually believed it.”
His lips twitched at that. Then his expression sobered and she suspected he was considering his next words carefully, a shift in the air that brought the tension back between them. She still didn’t move out of his grasp. The touch of his hands was something she couldn’t resist.
“At one time,” he said, “I found Alice very intriguing. Fascinating. I even entertained the idea of a romantic relationship. But as colorful and passionate as she was, she was really quite grounded.” He shook his head. “She explained she genuinely loved everyone so she didn’t have to risk her heart on loving someone. She told me you were the brave one. Despite having your heart broken, shattered and stomped upon, you kept looking for the right person to care for it. She said if you ever found the person you could trust enough to let go—the person who deserved your trust—you would finally find that.”
He cleared his throat. “She knew me better than anyone, Madison. She told me I didn’
t want her. I wanted you.”
She didn’t know how to deal with that, but tears were brimming, a response to hearing what her sister had thought of her. He took the hem of his shirt and dabbed her eyes with it, making her choke on a half chuckle. One nervous hand landed on his bare abdomen. Her fingers pressed into the hard ridges as his head lifted, a different awareness in both their eyes now.
“I need to get home,” she said, pulling back from him. She didn’t wait for his reply. Instead she grabbed the box off the shelf and pushed out the back door, aware of him standing in the entrance, watching her until she got into her car and drove away.
She felt as though she were fleeing the scene of an accident.
* * *
Hearing Alice’s perspective of herself floored her. She’d never really thought about it, because Alice had always seemed to have a lover . . . or two. But she’d never talked about marriage or commitment. Had she ever?
Madison was still pondering that when she fell asleep. She slept better than she had thus far, alone in Alice’s house. She’d slept in her clothes, Logan’s sawdust and aftershave scent lingering in her nose. When she woke, she found her arms wrapped around herself, and recalled a dream of strong male arms surrounding her, the way he’d held her at the store.
Usually when she had such dreams, the arms constricted, choking the life out of her. Alice had called them her emotional claustrophobia dreams.
She decided to stay at the house today. Thinking about Logan’s overly developed sense of personal responsibility, she realized she’d better call or he or Troy might show up on her doorstep. It was too early for them to be open, which relieved her of the possible chance of talking to him. If yesterday was an example of what being next door to him every day would be like, she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope. Or stay away.
As she listened to his voice on the answering machine, she told herself she would not call during off hours to hear that sexy timbre encouraging her to leave a message, telling him what she needed.
“Uh, hi, this is Madison. I’m going to work at the house today. I figured you’d wonder where I was if I wasn’t there, and I didn’t want you to worry.” The words sounded wrong to her, like yesterday had been a far deeper connection than it was, but there was no way to take it back, so she added, awkwardly, “I mean, I know you feel a responsibility toward me because of Alice. So that’s why I thought I better call. Bye.”
God, she was an idiot. Turning off her phone, she considered what she could do at the house, now that she’d committed her day to it. She didn’t have to hang out here. She could go into Charlotte, go shopping, go to a museum. She honestly didn’t want to pack up more of Alice’s belongings, decide what to keep and what to donate to the local charities.
Going upstairs, she stood outside the one room whose threshold she hadn’t yet crossed. It was the spare guestroom Alice had converted into what she called Wonderland, a quirky play on her name. Madison cracked the door, saw a glimpse of color and sparkles, and closed it again.
They’d loved playing dress-up as little girls. The fact they never gave it up had been their shared secret. Every time she came to visit Alice, they would spend at least one night in that room, with a great deal of wine and a full 100-count box of Russell Stover’s, playing dress-up with the vast array of costumes. Alice had started the collection with what she kept from her college theater days. The role-playing costumes she bought for the shop had augmented it considerably, things she’d liked enough to buy an extra in her own size. Fortunately it was the size she and Madison shared as adults.
They’d often been mistaken for twins, another reason Madison was so wary of Logan’s fascination with her. It wouldn’t be the first time one of Alice’s cast-off boyfriends thought Madison was a suitable second.
She leaned against the guest room door, remembering the last time they’d spent an evening in that room. She’d been twenty-six, on soon-to-crash-and-burn relationship number three. God, what she’d give to have that night back again.
* * *
“There are like two hundred outfits in here,” Madison teased her sister. “You’re a hoarder.”
Alice gave her a lofty look from the other side of the room. She was wearing a Marie Antoinette costume, complete with corset and long white-blond wig. The skirt stuck out on either side like a broomstick was beneath it. “This from a hooker.”
“I’m not a hooker. I’m a high class escort, versed in every form of sexual pleasure, called to service the world’s most powerful men. They give me diamonds.” Madison stretched out an arm loaded up with sparkly bangle bracelets, and crossed her legs in the micro-miniskirt that showed off the mesh stockings and stiletto heels. “I earn ten thousand dollars an hour.”
“Great. You can take care of us both when we’re old and gray and our boobs sag.”
“I’ll buy us plastic surgery so we’ll never look older. We’ll never get old and gray.”
* * *
Sighing, Madison left the room behind and descended the stairs. A shower seemed the most neutral decision. She stayed in there awhile, leaning against the wall, letting the spray roll over her. When at last she reached for the soap, lathered it up and ran it over her skin, her mind went to Logan’s hands. Resting on her lower back, closed over her wrist . . . her throat. She laid her fingers in the same place and closed her eyes. With the water drumming in her ears, it seemed safe, isolated, to think about it. To want his hands on her again. He surrounded a woman with his presence, his strength, those penetrating eyes. All the things she’d sampled from the Master with Vanessa, Logan offered as a full course meal.
She thought about the box she’d left on the kitchen table. In an uncertain mood when she arrived last night, she’d lifted the lid only long enough to fish out the key and drop it in a filled ice tray, telling herself that didn’t commit her to anything. Would he ask her about it, next time she came into the shop? She didn’t like feeling obligated. But he’d offered it to her as a way to help her. What else was she going to do today?
Dressed in a terry cloth robe, running her hands through her damp hair, she went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. As she added sugar and cream, she studied the box, then propped her hips against the counter, sipping from the mug. After a few moments, she sidled over to the box and folded back the lid. The cuffs were on top of the card deck. Noticing a folded note in between the two, she put her cup down.
Opening it, she saw what she assumed was Logan’s unexpectedly neat, even handwriting. Just like an old-fashioned schoolmaster. It was insanely easy to envision him with queued hair, tight breeches and a long coat. Take away the fancy computer at the front of his store, and she could see him standing in the same spot three hundred years ago, behind an antique register and a carved wooden counter. His woodworking shop had possessed power tools, but also a lot of hand tools, so she thought he wouldn’t feel out of place at all.
She’d be the student sneaking glances at his groin in the snug breeches and getting her knuckles rapped. Or kept after school and held firmly around the waist, clinging to his side as he applied that ruler to her backside. He’d make her pull up her skirt so it marked her skin through the thin drawers . . .
Thinking of her room upstairs, she wondered if Logan liked to play dress up. Did he wear leather and chains at his club? A pirate shirt and boots? The ridiculous thought intrigued her far more than it should. She turned her attention to the note.
Relinquish control—on your own terms.
Relinquishing control made her feel like she was trapped in a bucket, waiting for the bottom to drop out. A counselor who treated her for depression in her teens suggested she try to make a B instead of an A, saying she needed to stop trying to control everything, be a perfectionist in all she did. Fortunately, her mother had decided that was an asinine idea, but in this case, Logan wasn’t advising loss of control through a lower level of performance. He was presenting her with a way to see the store differently, help her excel with it. A p
retty unorthodox way, granted, but as she’d realized yesterday, her traditional sales experience didn’t mean squat there. It was an erotica shop, not Radio Shack.
Still, she hedged. She should return the box to him, say thanks but no thanks.
She left it there and went into Alice’s home office. For the next few minutes, she riffled through some estate paperwork. The idea of doing that repulsed her, so she wandered back into the bedroom.
She’d returned to Boston after Alice’s death long enough to hire a company to pack up her belongings and ship them here. Now she stared at some of those boxes, stacked against the lavender painted wall. Most of what she’d brought here had remained unopened, except for her clothes and essentials. What was in the bulk of them was impersonal to her, stuff she was likely to donate anyhow. Alice had a fully stocked kitchen of brightly colored, mismatched dishes. Why would Madison unpack her practical designer china, a set of six she’d never used, since she mostly ate out of reusable plastic frozen food trays?
Even with the logical explanations for it all, it was still surreal to her, how she’d simply walked away from everything. It was as if Alice’s summons had been the completion of one book of her life and the opening of this new one. Perhaps she’d been ready for a huge change, everything in Boston a reminder of what she didn’t have. Or what she’d been there.
Now she found the box with her few pieces of intimate wear and jewelry. Sure enough, she found the choker. And a black lace thong.
She’d never worn them together for a lover, but what was interesting was how often she’d imagined doing so. She’d envision the faceless male hooking his finger under the choker to pull her up off her knees and capture her mouth in a kiss. His hands would drop to grip her bare breasts, squeeze and pinch as she writhed under his commanding touch. She was always on her knees when he did that. He would blindfold her, so she could feel everything even more intensely.