The Dare Collection February 2020

CHAPTER NINE

THE FIRST WEEK after Berlin, Erika was…angry.

If that was the right word to describe the intensity of the emotions that jostled around inside her, fighting for supremacy, shifting and changing and sandbagging her every time she thought she had a handle on what was happening inside her.

Because she refused to accept that it had been a full-scale sea change.

She had spent two more days with Dorian.

Two more days filled with…more. With him.

Playing the kind of games she learned were called playing and games when they weren’t really playing at all. Not when they could change a person so completely. So profoundly.

Dorian had tied her up. He’d experimented with cuffs and collars and other binding things. He arranged her on that massive bed of his, attaching her wrists and ankles to the handy chains welded to those steel posters, and he taught her things about herself that she hadn’t known were there.

Over and over again.

And afterward, when she was lost in that buzzy, intense space that only he could put her in—where her mind and her emotions and her body were all one, all his—she told him stark truths she’d spent her whole life hiding from.

That she’d thought her father had left her, specifically, when he’d died. She had been the last one to see him and she had learned, during his illness, that good girls were quiet. Silent. Diffident and biddable at all times. And somehow, once he was gone, she’d decided that there was no point in being a good girl when people went ahead and died.

So she went in the opposite direction.

Hard.

She told him things she’d never really put into words before. That yes, as he’d suggested, a major part of why she’d dropped out of university was because she’d actually been good at studying and it made her feel like her old self again. Like that good girl she’d lost along the way, or not lost. That made it sound like something that had just happened. When she’d deliberately set about exterminating any traces of that girl who longed to please, bit by bit and year by year, until no one remembered she’d ever existed except Erika herself.

And though she never would have put it into words the way Dorian had, she’d shoved Conrad away, too. Because the people who loved her—who genuinely cared for her—died. Her mother was a safe space in that regard because as far as Erika could tell, she truly cared only about herself. Everything else was window dressing. Erika didn’t expect anything from her and the beauty of it was, Chriszette never disappointed.

She couldn’t believe the things Dorian got her to talk about.

He’d introduced her to a real flogger, not the hen-night jokey versions she’d thought were real before. He taught her the exquisite fear, twined as it was with an almost overwhelming sense of delirious need, for that arch of his brow that promised exactly the pain, punishment and pleasure she wanted.

She discovered she liked anything—sooner or later, and sometimes only because of where they ended up—if Dorian delivered it.

Erika found he could read her body with a fluency that should have terrified her. That did terrify her, sometimes. He knew how far to push her, and it was always further than she thought she could go.

He always asked her if she needed her safe word.

And then, when she gave him the green light, he used it push her limits. Over and over again during those two days that seemed like so much longer to her. Several lifetimes, at least.

Erika found herself caught between her own worst impulses, as if he’d tied her there. Deliberately. She wanted to run. She wanted to kneel. She wanted to lose herself in him on the one hand, and on the other, she wanted to prove her independence. Leap to her feet, storm out and make him regret that he had ever pretended to know her.

In his hands she was made of passion and dark greed, and rewarded for both. He made her cry and he made her come, and then he held her against him as she sobbed and slept and told him the stories she kept deep inside her and had never told another living soul.

She felt like a different person with him, and that was the real betrayal. In that brief span of time, a single weekend, she felt like the woman she’d secretly always wanted to be. Beautiful. Capable.

Lovable, something kept whispering inside her.

Dorian didn’t tell her he loved her and she wouldn’t have believed it if he did, but still. There was a look in his dark gaze. A certain gleam when he looked at her that made her wonder what it would be like. To always be here, with him, and a part of this powerful thing they shared. Part of this beautiful dance of mirroring, reflection and awareness.

Mixed in with blistering-hot sex and too many orgasms to count.

It would be a very lucky woman indeed who found herself kept forever by this man, she found herself thinking on that final morning. He’d bent her over the couch, where he’d spanked her that first night, burying his hands in her hair to hold her head where he wanted it. And he’d taken her with a brutal elegance that had left her wrecked in his wake.

Dorian had gazed at her before he’d left, tucking himself away into a three-piece suit that made him almost look like a stranger after the days of T-shirts, jeans and his dominance—were it not for that intensity and power of his that no suit could hide. He filled rooms with every breath, confidence and assurance stamped deep into his bones.

He looked at her as she panted and shook through the aftershocks. He looked through her, his mouth unsmiling and too much knowledge in his gaze.

He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said he would see her soon, indicating that he expected her to be there when he got back from his business meetings in Zürich.

“When I ring you,” he said in that tone that made every hair on her body feel as if it was standing on end, “I expect you to answer.”

It was almost as if he knew what she was going to do.

First, Erika had sobbed, there on that leather couch, where he’d first introduced her to herself.

Then she’d left, wearing the clothes she’d come in that first night and not capable of giving a single shit that she was on the streets of Berlin at midday on a Monday with her thong visible, her ass cheeks hanging out and a tiny, strappy little top that might as well have shouted her interest in bondage to everybody she passed on the street.

But it was Berlin, so nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.

And that stung, too. Because it was impossible to discount everything Dorian had told her when there she was, prancing down the street as if she wanted some stranger to pay her some mind.

He had introduced her to herself, then confronted her with all that meant, and she didn’t like it.

She’d gone back to her hotel, packed up her things and gotten the hell out of Germany.

But another fun fact about her madcap existence, about which she bragged to all and sundry as if she loved every second of it, was that she didn’t have anywhere to go. Not really. She lived out of hotels, or in the guest suites at friends’ houses. She’d been doing it so long that she’d long since stopped thinking too closely to be…rootless.

Untethered. Unattached.

If asked, she called it freedom. Pure happiness, she’d said a few weeks back. She’d been on her way to Berlin with a small stopover in Copenhagen to see the sort of friends who asked deep questions over wine, not because they were deep themselves, but because they liked to compete with their answers. The better to pretend their shallow lives had depth.

Erika was fantastic at pretending to be the happiest.

Are you happy? Dorian had asked her. Mercilessly. Or have you wrapped up hapless in a curated social media feed and forgotten that the core of all that glossy performance is emptiness?

In retrospect, what Erika was happy about was that she’d been gagged when he’d asked that question, because she still didn’t know how to answer it.

Nor did the answer come to her as she landed in England, and made her way to Devon, where her mother was living it up in a country manor with her latest conquest, who claimed a Windsor connection and spent as much time tramping about his property with his dogs as he did tending to his gout flare-ups.

Not that Chriszette was ever in the mood to entertain a full-grown daughter for more than the odd meal.

Erika was dispatched to a renovated carriage house far enough away from than main hall that Chriszette could pretend she wasn’t about, where she assured herself that she was perfectly fucking happy. And then fumed, like it was her job to prove it.

She was angry with herself for putting herself into that situation in Berlin in the first place. What had she been thinking? She was angry with her brother in general for being an overbearing asshole, and specifically for having such terrible taste in friends. She was angry with her mother, who could have taken maybe five minutes from her own narcissism to do a little parenting, back in the day, when her daughter was clearly acting out her grief—but hadn’t bothered. And certainly felt no compulsion to make up for that now.

And she was deeply, volcanically angry at Dorian.

Because she couldn’t help feeling that the only revenge taken had been against her. By her, which was worse, because she’d been correct in her initial assessment, if nothing else. Dorian was an excellent weapon.

“You’ll forget him in about forty-eight hours,” she told herself, out loud and with great confidence, when she sat down on the side of her carriage house bed, high in the eaves. “Less, probably.”

Because forgetting about men was something Erika was very, very good at. But Dorian wasn’t like other men. He didn’t fade away, out of sight and out of mind.

For the first time in her life, Erika was plagued with insomnia, hollow-eyed and up at all hours, because her body wanted what it couldn’t have. It wanted Dorian’s body next to hers, holding her tight, when she’d spent her entire previous life asserting with great confidence that she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cuddle while she slept.

She never had, before.

But then, there were a lot of things she’d never done before that weekend in Berlin with Dorian.

And toward the end of that first week and into the second week after she’d left him, Erika mostly just cried.

She felt tossed out to sea and abandoned while wave after wave of old, ugly emotion found her and sank her. Over and over again.

She almost thought it would be easier to drown.

But Dorian didn’t let her.

He didn’t call every day. Perhaps every other day. Sometimes he sounded terse, busy, and she hated that she felt particularly special that he made time for her. Other times he sounded tired, and she wished she could have the opportunity to soothe him. But he always sounded like him. Dark and richly textured and him.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said when she picked up the phone, the way she often did. Because even if that was true, she still obeyed him. He’d told her he expected her to answer and here she was, answering. Every time. “But you asked me to answer when you rang. Behold my obedience.”

“I never doubted you, Erika.” His voice did magical, terrible things to her body. Her nipples pinched so hard she could feel that line of sensation spiral down into her clit. She was wet instantly. Soft and ready for whatever he might do to her. “Are you ready to talk about your feelings yet?”

“I talk about my feelings all day every day,” she lied, and pretended she didn’t feel a little kick of pleasure when he laughed. “It’s true. I stop people on the street and download my every last emotion. I’ve already made a lot of new friends that way.”

That was slightly less of a lie, if a person counted storming about in England’s greenest hills and shouting at passing sheep.