She knew this was a no-win situation. “Yes, Sir.” She headed to the car, unable to remain aggravated at the man. Because she loved him, yes, but even more because he kept her on her toes. It was never dull around their home.
Complacency wasn’t a word Tony Daniels believed in.
It looked like he damn sure wasn’t about to let his slave believe in it, either.
“Good girl,” he said as he set the alarm before following her out the door.
* * * *
They were the second arrivals at John and Abbey’s just a little before six. Tilly and her men, Landry and Cris, were already there. Tony and Shayla were just getting out of their car when Loren and Ross pulled up and parked behind them in front of the house. Askel and Mallory would have dibs on one of the spots in the driveway, since he was bringing his portable suspension frame.
Loren wore a long, black trench coat that reached mid-calf over her stiletto heels. Tony held back.
“What’d you do to her?” he asked Ross.
“What?” Ross’ knowing smirk didn’t fool Tony in the least.
“It’s seventy-five out and she’s in a trench coat. What’s up?”
“Oh, she’s sporting a lovely rope harness under there.”
“Dammit. I should have thought of that.”
“You’re not eligible for your own prize.”
“Eh, true,” Tony said. “I guess that would be unfair. I still should have thought of that,” he said, glancing at Shayla, who suddenly found the sidewalk interesting. “Taken my time and gotten you properly tied up and then perp-walked you inside.”
“You’re just on a sadistic streak tonight, aren’t you, Sir?” Shayla asked.
“You sweet-talkin’ slave you. Let’s get you inside before I strip you right here.”
They all knew Tony wouldn’t do that, and Shayla especially knew it. But it did get her cute ass in gear and get her headed toward John and Abbey’s front door.
Now if this was Seth and Leah’s house, where the line of cars parked in the driveway and the surrounding vegetation provided enough cover, however…
Idea. Noted.
“Hey, is that against the rules, prepping in advance?” Tony asked.
“No one said it was,” Ross countered. “And I made the rules.”
“What are the rules?” Tony asked.
Ross grinned. “What rules?”
Both women chuckled. “You guys are too much,” Loren said.
Sometimes, Tony pushed Shayla hard, even farther than he knew she’d willingly go, for the sole purpose of making sure she’d safeword. He never wanted her to reach the point where she’d do anything he said and have total disregard for the consequences later, physically or emotionally. It was one thing to hear her say she would safeword.
It was more assuring to him for her to actually do it.
He’d seen too many instances over the years of couples going completely off the rails, one of the pair dragging the other along—and it wasn’t always the Dominant partner doing the dragging, either—and then the other one finally snapping and ending the relationship instead of putting the brakes on miles earlier and stopping the runaway train before it achieved terminal velocity.
He refused to let that be them.
And if Shayla ever failed to safeword for a circumstance where he’d deliberately put her in a no-win situation of that kind, it would be cause for him stopping the metaphorical car and having a very long, very detailed series of discussions with her about it.
So far, she’d never let him down. She’d always made him proud, even in those times when she’d had to bite the bullet and safeword.
Especially so, in those cases.
Because he never punished her for that, never punitively struck back. If anything, he rewarded her even more, wanting her to have that assurance that he’d meant it when he said slave did not equate doormat, in his mind.
Tilly already had the front door open for them when they reached the porch. “Hey, gang. John’s out back with the guys and getting the grill ready.”
They’d all just gotten inside and were putting their things down when Askel and Mallory arrived, Kel backing his truck into the drive. So the men trooped out to help unload and get the frame moved onto the lanai and set up.
Ross noted Loren was still wearing her trench coat. “Well?”
She arched an eyebrow at him.
“Are you cold? If you are, you can keep the trench coat on all night and not get a single orgasm out of it.”
Loren rolled her eyes, but finally untied the belt and unbuttoned the coat, shrugging it off.
From the rings on her pierced nipples hung little reflective red hearts. The rope harness—pink and red rope, of course—was an intricate macrame of symmetry and design. Her breasts, not tied so tightly as to make them change color, but enough to support and emphasize them, stuck out. The ropes wound around her, between her legs, down to just below her knees where each rope ended in a gauntlet. It looked like he’d tied the pattern functionally as well as decoratively, a secure hip harness having been worked in as part of the design.
“Check this out,” Ross said, a gleeful grin on his face. He walked over to Loren and grabbed both of the pink hearts hanging from her nipple rings. He pressed a button on each one, and they started flashing. “Isn’t that great? I found them at the pet store. They’re for dog collars.”
“Fantastic,” Tilly drawled. “We’ll make sure to screen everyone for epilepsy before letting them in.”
“Hold on, they have a steady on position.” He clicked them a couple of times and the blinking pattern changed. Another click, this time they stayed on. “And I have more stuff to add.”
“Marvelous,” Tilly said. “You realize everyone’s going to love that but not vote for you because they’ll feel sorry for someone else who, I don’t know, has a real life in addition to kinky shit, right?”
He pointed at Loren. “That is art, right there.”
Tilly crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, I agree, sensei. And you know I love you, but I’m going to call you out on this one. I think you need to represent the ‘exhibition category.’” She framed the term with air quotes. “You know, so you don’t unintentionally hurt anyone’s feelings?”
Loren rested her hands on her hips. “Told you, Sir,” she said.
“I thought you were just being snarky.”
Tony bit the inside of his lip to keep from laughing. His friend looked like a kid who’d had his favorite toy taken away, or his puppy got kicked, or something.
Tony had to hand it to Tilly. She knew how to assuage the man’s ego. She walked over to Ross and slung an arm around his shoulders. “Hey, everyone knows you’re aces with rope. Everyone’ll think you’re being horribly magnanimous and all that shit. And think of it this way, they’ll think you assumed you’d win, and look at her. They’re right, you probably would have won in a fair fight amongst a shit-ton of people who didn’t know you. Meaning they would have sympathy for someone else and vote for them,” she quickly added. “Think of it as a good thing. We won’t tell anyone.”
“What about Kel?” He hooked a thumb at their friend. “He’s a photographer. He rigs semi-professionally.”
Kel smiled. “I already told Tony that if we were the winners, he should give it to whoever got the next highest votes.”
“He did,” Tony admitted. “So did Scrye, although they had some drama with one of their daughters yesterday. They are now a positive maybe for the party, instead of a definitely possible, as June told me on the phone last night.”
“I thought Scrye was going to compete?”
“He was,” Tilly said, “until June reminded him of his professional status.”
“Dammit. What about Seth? He teaches shibari, for chrissake.”
“He’s not competing,” Tilly told him. “Leah is.”
Ross blinked. “You’re shitting me?”
She shook her head. “Nope. Seth’s taking one for the team.
He’s letting her tie him. He said he didn’t want anyone to accuse him of trying to stack the deck.”
Ross genuinely looked disappointed. “Well, damn. No one told me to eliminate myself in the rules.”
“What rules?” Loren snarked.
Tilly snapped her fingers. “That’s what we need,” she said.
“What?” everyone asked in unison.
She held her hands up in disbelief, as if she couldn’t understand why they hadn’t followed her train of thought. “A Sadie Hawkins rigging competition. Duh.”
Chapter Five
“I swear, I’m going to send her to a convent and enroll her and tell them to keep her until she gets some sense.” Mark knew June wasn’t ranting at her own reflection in the car window as much as she was at him, who was driving.
“She’s over eighteen,” he said. “You know as well as I do there’s only so much we can do.”
“I thought getting them into college would be the point where we knew we’d succeeded. I never expected her to do this. Her sister, yes. Who knew she’d be the reasonable one?”
Their older daughter, Sonya, had tearfully called June late yesterday afternoon from Gainesville, where she was attending college. Apparently, the boy Sonya had been dating was acting like an asshat. She’d just turned twenty-one a few weeks earlier, and the boyfriend, who was just a couple of months into twenty, wanted her to buy him and some of his friends alcohol.
And Mark wouldn’t let June, who had a concealed carry permit, drive up to Gainesville to confront the little shit.
That meant Mark had left work early and driven straight up there from Sarasota, on Valentine’s Day night, instead of having a nice evening at home with his wife. When he reached Gainesville, he hadn’t even gone to Sonya’s apartment first, which she shared with three other girls. June had gotten the boy’s address from Sonya and Mark made him his first stop.
It turned out the scrawny little kid who’d answered the door with a bit of swagger until he looked up and saw the man standing in the doorway was the jackass boyfriend in question. Mark outweighed him by a good hundred pounds, at least, and had nearly a foot in height on him. Hell, the kid was barely larger than June.
“That’s when I realized I should have let you gone up there and kick his ass,” Mark had told her. “Because he never would have forgotten that lesson.”
After Mark finished sitting the now terrified kid down and having a very long and one-sided heart-to-heart talk with him, he’d called Sonya and had her meet him there at the apartment.
That’s when she proceeded to chew the little asshat a new one and then told the kid to go fuck himself.
Mark hadn’t even given her parental side-eye over dropping the F-bomb in front of him. He was too damn proud of her.
He suspected she might end up making up with the little asshat, because that’s what kids did. But Mark was confident that if the little asshat tried to do something like that again, he’d think twice before asking Sonya to do it.
Especially now that he’d met Mark. Mark had shown him the concealed carry permit he kept in his wallet—because brandishing his gun would have been against the law—and Mark had promised that if he heard another bad word from his daughter about the kid, they’d never find his body.
Not exactly in those words, but close enough.
No, he wouldn’t have really done that. But Mark had four years of a drama minor in college while he was going for his accounting degree.
Combined with his size, his beard, and the fact that he’d changed out of his dress shirt and tie and into his black T-shirt and leather vest, which were in his rope bag in the trunk of the car—which June had been harping on him to unpack—he suspected the kid had been close to wetting himself.
He couldn’t help it if the kid—erroneously—assumed he was a big, bad biker dad.
Too bad it’s not prudent to play the see I told you so card about the rope bag in the trunk.
Not even he would push that with his wife. She might be his willing slave, but she’d go momma bear and terrify even him over those two girls.
One of the reasons she’d forced both girls to take martial arts classes while in high school. He’d made sure they could change their own tires and check their oil and fluids.
June had ensured they could kick ass and take names.
“I always thought Maren would be the one we’d have to worry about,” June continued. “The way she bounced around with boyfriends. I thought for sure she’d be the one we’d worry about.”
They actually saw Maren a few times a month. Her second year at USF in Tampa, she was living in a dorm there and not only pulling in great grades, but possibly in line to make it to the national collegiate championships for swimming. Likely wouldn’t make it onto the Olympic team, but she was damn good. Every spare moment she wasn’t studying, she was in the pool or gym training.
“She’s focused and dedicated. And, to be honest, she’s a little smarter than her older sister.”
He didn’t have to glance at his wife to sense June’s dark look.
“Well, she is,” he finally said. “Her SATs were better than her sister’s, and her GPA in high school was better. I’m not saying Sonya’s not smart. She is. I just think Maren’s smarter. We have empirical data to back that up.”
June let out a snort but didn’t answer. He risked a glance at the next stop light.
He’d returned home a little after six that morning and went straight to sleep until two hours earlier. There’d been a shit-ton of yard work he’d wanted to catch up on that morning, and his jaunt to Gainesville and back had totally farked those plans.
After they’d left the kid’s apartment, Mark had taken Sonya out for dinner, finally finding a hole-in-the-wall dive that wasn’t too packed, considering it was a Friday Valentine’s Day night in a college town.
There, they’d sat for two hours, talking.
He couldn’t even tell June all they’d talked about, because Sonya had asked him to keep it to himself.
And he’d learned early on that the only way to keep his daughters’ trust was to respect their wishes over something like this.
Sonya had admitted she was struggling academically, and her tennis game was suffering as a result. He’d listened without judgment and then offered up practical advice.
And had promised to drive up the next Wednesday to meet with her and a school counselor to see what could be done, if anything.
He didn’t want her to lose her scholarship. Yes, he could cash in some retirement funds to bankroll it. While that wasn’t the best option, letting his daughter start out her life eyeball deep in student loan debt wasn’t a good one, either. He’d rather write her a personal loan—on paper—and make her pay it back to him over the years.
June was the best wife and slave and mother to his kids he could ask for, but she had a deeply competitive streak their eldest daughter…didn’t. Once he’d sussed out the best plan for everyone, then he’d bring June into the loop, ease her into the situation, and hope she didn’t explode.
Hence his comment about Sonya’s intelligence.
No their daughter wasn’t dumb. But he sincerely hoped she settled down into a career as a teacher—which is what she wanted to be—found a decent guy to marry and stay married to, and then…
Well, that was pretty much it.
Maren was studying to become a sports therapist, and had mused on the possibility of going to medical school. If she really wanted to make it happen, he suspected it wouldn’t be a case of her calling them and asking for a handout. It would be her coming home for the holidays, announcing she’d made the switch, and then laying out a detailed plan on how she was going to make it happen without needing their help in the process.
Tenacious. Just like her mother.
Yet with the seed planted in June’s head now that maybe Sonya wasn’t quite as perfect as her sister, it would make the future a little bit easier on all of them.
He hoped.
They found a place to park on John and Abbey’s street just down from the house. “We’re only forty-five minutes late,” he said. “Not bad.”
She turned to glare at him.
“Sweetheart, let it go for the night.”
“I wanted to go kick his ass.”
“I know you did. I handled it. Tonight is our night. Okay? We’re going to have fun with our friends, eat some good food, and make merry. I’m going to tie you up, spank your ass, fuck you silly, and then take you home. And then tomorrow we’re going to sleep late.”
“What about the yard work?”
“Fuck the yard work. Just a few weeks back, someone was saying something about wanting to do more of this. Well, tomorrow, someone’s going to spend the day naked, collared, and on her knees sucking my cock while I chill out and watch hockey.”
She finally smiled. “I guess I need to let go, huh?”
He caught her hand and kissed it. “They’re good kids. Hey, she called you. That’s a win.”
“I still wish you’d have let me go with you.”
“It was better this way. I scared the piss out of him. If you’d been there, it would have softened the effect.” Tonight he was wearing a different black T-shirt, but the same leather vest, which was covered with various pins and patches from BDSM conventions and events they’d attended.
Had the kid actually looked at some of them, he would have realized Mark wasn’t a biker. They’d kept their BDSM activities from their daughters over the years, although they knew their parents had a 1950s-style dynamic in their marriage.
Which they’d told their girls was their choice, and didn’t mean it was how they had to conduct their own relationships. Mark had always worried about the girls, hoping they hadn’t picked up the wrong message.
The way Sonya had yelled at the kid was proof he’d been wrong there. She’d stood up for herself, called her mom, and then ended things.
Hopefully the kid wouldn’t try to weasel back into Sonya’s life. Or if he did, hopefully he’d think twice about repeating this little stunt. And, hopefully, he’d now respect Sonya more.
A Very Kinky Valentine's Day [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations) Page 3