Re/Paired

by Michele Zurlo

  KEITH WATCHED HER sexy ass sway slightly from side to side as she made her way down the hall. All week he’d been haunted by visions of her, what she’d look like naked, tied with that fine bottom in the air, her legs spread and red handprints all over her luscious flesh. She’d cry out for more and beg him to fuck her hard.

  His dick throbbed, and he chastised himself for the slipup. After so many years spent forcing himself not to think of her that way, one kiss had knocked away his control. One kiss and one request. “Train me.” Her soft voice haunted his dreams.

  Nothing would make him happier. But she’d ultimately grow tired of his need for constant and total control, and she would leave him. Kat wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. Even he questioned whether he could have a real relationship with someone who consented to letting him control every aspect of her life. He didn’t need a therapist to tell him he had issues with authority and letting women get close to him emotionally.

  No, she was better off not knowing how completely his head was fucked up. He’d already hurt her. And last night… He didn’t know what to make of what had happened the night before. Kat wasn’t one to play those kinds of manipulative games.

  He entered the little room and closed the door. A legal secretary sat at the long table, ready to record every word he uttered. It was better to keep things professional. Eventually their relationship would return to normal. She’d be back to teasing him and treating him like an older brother in no time.

  She assumed her seat and regarded him with cool brown eyes. He recognized that she was upset, and it nearly killed him to know he had caused it. The urge to take her in his arms, to kiss her and hold her close, was proving more and more difficult to beat down. It would diminish his acute yearning, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. He had yet to figure out how her behavior the night before played into anything.

  It was possible someone had climbed onto her balcony and accessed the condo that way. In order not to make a ton of noise, the person would need an extension ladder, and those things were unwieldy. After she’d kicked him out, he’d looked for evidence outside, but he’d found nothing. The entire incident just didn’t make sense.

  In the hallway by the elevator an hour later, she greeted Dustin Brandt with the same lack of warmth. He watched the pair, his senses attuned to find the smallest tells. The stiffness of her posture. Her plastic smile. His overly solicitous manner. What had happened between them to make Kat so formal and Brandt so apologetic?

  They disappeared down the hall and into room six. Keith had other business in the building. No reason he couldn’t swing by later and touch base with his buddy.

  And find out what else had happened to suck the joy from Kat. Malcolm’s words echoed in his head. “Take risks…put yourself out there… You’ll never know if you don’t try…”

  She’d said he wasn’t the only Dom out there. Did that mean she was going to ask someone else to train her? Did she plan to ask Brandt, or had she already done it? Son of a bitch. He breathed to control his rage.

  * * * *

  An hour later, the door to interview room six was still closed. It didn’t open for ten excruciatingly long minutes. From down the hall, he watched Kat exit the room first. Dustin followed close on her heels. He grabbed her arm. From the way she responded, Keith figured he’d said her name too.

  Kat might have turned back to face Dustin, but her gaze remained downcast. Dustin lifted her chin with one finger, an intimate, dominating gesture that set Keith’s blood to boiling, and he spoke to her.

  The expression on her face softened. Dustin’s finger fell away, and a small smile lifted the corners of Kat’s mouth. She nodded, and the pair embraced. When they parted, she turned and continued down the hall away from Keith.

  Dustin came toward him, lost in thought.

  Keith stood directly in his path and forced the man he thought was a friend to stop and focus on the moment.

  “Rossetti. What are you doing back here?”

  “I thought I’d take Kat out to lunch.” Though their paths crossed frequently as part of their work duties, Keith had only asked Kat to eat with him a handful of times. His schedule wasn’t usually so liquid.

  Dustin frowned. “I think she has plans with Buttermore.”

  Until that second, Keith hadn’t formed an opinion about the lawyer. The assistant attorney seemed nice enough, and he knew the man was friends with Kat. Keith took a minute to remind himself that he couldn’t go around punching her friends just because he objected to their gender.

  Still, he threw a petulant statement at Dustin. “And you’re okay with that?”

  His buddy shrugged and smirked. That snarky kind of expression seemed to be at complete odds with Dustin’s clean-cut appearance, but Keith wasn’t fooled. He’d seen Dustin do lots of things that were counter to the boy-next-door image he projected. “I don’t see why it’s any of my business.”

  Keith inclined his head down the hall, though Kat was long gone. “I saw you top her a minute ago. How can you say it’s none of your business?”

  That smirk grew. “I wasn’t topping her. I was talking to her about a private matter between the two of us. That doesn’t give me the right to dictate who she has lunch with or any other thing she might decide to do. She’s an adult, and she has a good head on her shoulders. She can make her own decisions.”

  “Touch her and I’ll kill you.” The threat was out before Keith could quell it, and he felt a little sick inside to realize he meant it. He’d kill any Dom who laid a finger on Kat.

  Dustin had the sense to drop his smirk, and his entire demeanor changed. The hint of danger that hid so well beneath Brandt’s exterior surfaced. He poked a finger at Keith’s chest. “It sounds like she made the same request to you that she made to me. My advice? She’s determined. If you don’t step in and take care of her, somebody else will. I’m not saying it would be me. But she’s an attractive woman. Eventually she’s going to ask somebody who’s outside your reach.”

  The warning made perfect sense. Somewhere deep down, he’d assumed she wouldn’t have the courage to repeat that request to another person. He thought she’d made it because she knew he needed his lover’s submission. He hadn’t thought she actually craved the submissive experience. The idea of her on her knees, head bowed in subservience, in front of another man, made his vision swim in shades of red. It was one thing for her to have a happily-ever-after with a vanilla man. This was different. This meant they were as compatible as he’d fantasized, at least on some level. He’d never wanted to punch something so badly.

  Dustin’s firm grip on his arm brought him back to the present. He inhaled and exhaled, using one of the exercises he’d learned in combat training, and got his temper under control once again.

  “Come on, buddy. You can’t see her like this. She hasn’t done anything wrong, and you’re about ready to go all primal on her ass. Let’s hit the gym. I’ll practice kicking some sense into you under controlled circumstances.”

  * * * *

  Katrina threw her briefcase into the backseat and sighed to welcome the end of another draining day. She wanted to go home and curl up with a bowl of her mother’s homemade ice cream and a Sandra Bullock movie. If she couldn’t be happy, then at least she could watch the evolution of someone else’s happiness. As long as it was fictional, it wouldn’t compete with the sad state of her life.

  She started the engine and turned the air-conditioning to full blast. Her blouse clung to her damp skin, so she pulled it away and leaned forward to let the cool air blow down her shirt as best she could.

  A series of chimes from her phone let her know that her mother was calling. Her jacket, which she had shed for the walk to the parking garage, lay on top of her briefcase. The phone was in the pocket. By the time she got to it, the thing had gone to voice mail. It was probably for the best. M.J. and his wife were heading out of town this weekend, and their parents had the grandkids for the weekend. No doubt they wanted Katrina t
o come over and relieve them from the rambunctious duo. No, thanks. Katrina hadn’t yet vacuumed out her car from the last time she’d spent time with her nephews.

  While her standards of cleanliness and behavior might be higher than her brother’s, she didn’t think they were impossible to achieve. She loved her nephews, but she liked them best in small doses.

  She shifted the car into reverse and froze. Something wasn’t quite right. With a frown, she glanced at her passenger seat. Empty. The cup holder that divided the two front seats held her cell but was otherwise unoccupied. She could have sworn she’d left an empty bottle of iced tea there. A quick survey of the backseat confirmed her suspicions. While nothing had been vacuumed, it had definitely been cleaned up.

  It was unsettling to know someone had gone into her car and cleaned it out without her permission or knowledge. This threw last night’s scare, which had faded from her mind in the course of the busy day, back into the spotlight.

  Nobody else had keys to her car. They’d spent the day with her purse, locked in her desk drawer. The extra set hung on a rack in her kitchen.

  An eerie feeling crept up her spine, crawling with agonizing indolence and caramelizing into a bone-chilling fear. Who the hell had cleaned up her car, and why?

  Lists of people ran through her mind, but she could think of nobody who would do it. She’d complained to Aaron, but he’d laughed at how uptight she was about those things. Keith knew she didn’t like a mess—neither did he—but he didn’t know she had one in her car. Did he? No. And he didn’t play head games. He wouldn’t do that to her, especially not after seeing how freaked out she’d been the night before.

  Her phone rang again, startling her out of the fear cage that had enveloped her body. She snatched it up, glad to have the pseudo company. Right now, she’d take a telemarketer, anything not to be alone. The display indicated Keith.

  “Hello?”

  “Kat? Are you okay?” His voice sounded hesitant, like he’d planned to say something else.

  No sense in telling him anything. He would advise her that she was working too hard, or worse—accuse her of manufacturing a reason to see him. She backed out of her parking space. “Fine. You?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. She heard the radio in the background, so she knew the phone hadn’t disconnected. This parking garage had amazingly good reception. At last he exhaled. She wouldn’t call it a sigh, exactly. It had too much determination. “We need to talk.”

  The frosty fear turned to leaden fear, the kind that pooled low in her stomach when she knew she’d displeased somebody. From his tone, she inferred that he’d realized she’d approached Dustin. Or he had more to say about last night.

  After the deposition, Dustin had lingered to talk to her. He hadn’t reversed his decision, but he did tell her that he admired her courage in pursuing what she wanted, and he’d help her find a suitable Dom. She’d felt nothing but relief for the rest of the day. Finally she was making headway with her quest. One day Keith would find her good enough.

  She gritted her teeth. “I think you said everything already.”

  It was too soon. She wasn’t trained. She had only a theoretical knowledge of domination and submission. And he still thought she’d lied about last night.

  “I’ll be at your condo when you get home. Don’t be late.”

  With that order, he ended the call, giving her no chance to tell him off. Did he seriously think he could talk to her like that and get away with it? What the hell had crawled up his ass and died? Malcolm had talked about Keith having his “moods,” but she’d always assumed her brother was exaggerating. After all, Mal wasn’t the most easygoing guy in the world. Look at how long he’d held a grudge against Keith for doing his job.

  The drive home seemed to drag on forever. She hit traffic coming out of the city that made her want to bang her head on the steering wheel or shout insults out of her window at the top of her lungs. She settled for swearing at her fellow drivers with her windows safely up.

  Keith’s car was parked in the visitor’s space outside her condo, and it suddenly seemed like her drive hadn’t taken nearly as long as it should have. She grabbed her courage and her briefcase. When she rounded the corner of her building and spotted him sitting on her stoop next to her potted flowers, wearing the same suit he’d had on earlier, she wondered if she’d jumped to the wrong conclusions. After all, he might be here because he wanted help with Malcolm. Perhaps he wanted to apologize for last night.

  He rose to his feet and held out his hand. She looked at it uncertainly. Did he expect her to hand over the house keys or her briefcase?

  The problem was solved when he took her jacket and the leather bag. The steel in his eyes matched his grim expression. “If you have plans this weekend, you have five minutes to cancel them.”

  She honestly didn’t know how to react to that. Nobody had ever said something like that to her before. “Why would I cancel my plans?” Other than Sunday brunch with her mother, Layla, and Layla’s mother, she didn’t have anything big planned. Saturday was for errands.

  He leaned close, stopping with his face so nearby that her eyes wouldn’t focus. “Because your Master told you to. You asked to be trained. Apparently I failed to understand how serious you were. Your training begins now.”

  She trembled, anticipation mixing with outrage. This wasn’t the Keith she knew. That man didn’t threaten or bully. He might coerce every now and again, but his intentions didn’t vacillate wildly from one day to the next.

  It took courage she didn’t have to push him back, so she sidled out of his way and tried to fit her key into her dead bolt. Lining up the key with the hole took more dexterity than she had right then. Her heart pounded, and blood roared in her ears. She’d asked for this, but she wasn’t ready for it. Was his goal to scare her off? If so, he was doing a damn good job. She’d never seen him like this.

  As her heart beat the rhythm of her fear, heat rushed between her thighs—just as it had when he’d kissed her last weekend. She felt him press against her back, crowding her to the wall.

  “Kitty Kat, bad slaves are punished. Turning your back on your Master and refusing to obey a direct order is definitely grounds for punishment.” His breath spread warmth behind her ear and down her neck.

  More heat radiated through her abdomen. He’d called her by that name once before, the same day he’d kissed her. The way he said it made her sound wicked, completely decadent, something she’d never been.

  “I didn’t agree to let you be my Master.” Her voice came out husky and a little hoarse, as if she’d been doing a lot of screaming. If she went along with what he asked, she probably would be doing a lot of screaming.

  “‘Red,’ my sweet slave, is the word you’re looking for. Say that, and I’ll stop whatever we’re doing and we’ll talk. ‘Yellow’ pauses the action. We talk and decide where we want to go from there. ‘Green’ restarts the action or keeps it going.” He didn’t move an inch.

  The pulse in her neck ticked hard against her skin. She had the sense he was waiting for her response. “You said we had to talk. This isn’t talking. You’re scaring me, Keith. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “This is what you asked for, Kitty Kat.” He took the keys from her shaking hand, moved her to the side, and disengaged the lock. “And you asked it from more than just me, didn’t you?”

  He released her and motioned to the opened door.

  She looked at the portal, knowing it led to either an escape from this strange encounter or entry into a foreign world. “You weren’t supposed to know that. Dustin said he’d keep it between us.”

  “He did. I’m just fucking awesome at putting together the little clues.” He looked her up and down, never altering the impassive expression on his face. “Like the fact that you’re incredibly turned on right now. Yes, you’re afraid. I see that too. You’re a smart woman. You should be afraid.”

  A BEAD OF sweat trickled between her breasts. Sometime
between his deposition and now, she’d loosened the top three buttons on her blouse. Cool air came through the open door, but she made no move to enter. She regarded him warily. Perhaps she thought that if they went inside, the negotiation portion of the evening was over.

  Or maybe she was rethinking the entire dynamic. Part of the reason he’d walked away last weekend was because he knew she didn’t understand the scope of her request. Maybe tonight she would realize that she was better off not knowing this side of him.

  He hooked his arm around her waist and pulled her over the threshold. “We’re letting the air out, Kitty Kat. We’ll talk over dinner. I brought food.” After giving back her briefcase and coat, he grabbed a grocery sack and his gym bag from where he’d set them on her porch. Then he closed the door and locked it.

  She stared at the gym bag, no doubt wondering at the caliber of torture equipment hidden inside. “What’s for dinner?”

  This wasn’t the time to let her change the subject. He inclined his head toward the stairs. “Up you go. I think we’ll discuss expectations, and then punishment. You’re racking them up.”

  Without further protest, she turned. He enjoyed the view as they headed up the stairs, and he counted the minutes until he could have her naked and over his lap. Admitting she’d sought out another Dom worked in her favor. He always rewarded honesty.

  The stairs terminated in a large area that served as the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room. It wasn’t as private as his house—he had a dungeon; she had a downstairs neighbor—but it would suffice for tonight.

  He set his bag down on the living-room side and carried the grocery sack to the kitchen. “What plans will you be canceling?”

  “None. I have plans to meet my mom, Layla, and Aunt Cindy for brunch on Sunday. I’m not canceling on my mother. Her wrath scares me more than yours.”

  She’d delivered her refusal with the appropriate gravity. He nodded. “I’ll allow that. It’s important to me that you respect your mother. She’s a good woman.”