About the Authors

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative-writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

RACHAEL STEWART adores conjuring up stories, from heartwarmingly romantic to wildly erotic. She’s been writing since she could put pen to paper—as the stacks of scrawled-on pages in her loft will attest to. A Welsh lass at heart, she now lives in Yorkshire, with her very own hero and three awesome kids—and if she’s not tapping out a story she’s wrapped up in one or enjoying the great outdoors. Reach her on Facebook, Twitter (@rach_b52) or at rachaelstewartauthor.com.

TARYN BELLE is the pen name of Cea Person, a bestselling Canadian author who wrote about her unconventional childhood in two memoirs, North of Normal and Nearly Normal, both published by HarperCollins. She is a former international model and a businesswoman, running a swimwear company with merchandise popularized by celebrities such as Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson. She loves playing board games with her husband and three children, hosting dinner parties in her Vancouver home and crafting out.

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CATHRYN FOX is a wife, mom, sister, daughter, aunt and friend. She loves dogs, sunny weather, anything chocolate (she never says no to a brownie), pizza and red wine. Cathryn lives in beautiful Nova Scotia with her husband, who is convinced he can turn her into a mixed martial arts fan. When not writing, Cathryn can be found Skyping with her son, who lives in Seattle (could he have moved any farther away?), shopping with her daughter in the city, watching a big action flick with her husband, or hanging out and laughing with friends.

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Also by Caitlin Crews

The Billionaires Club

The Risk

Hotel Temptation

Unleashed

Undone

Untamed

Also by Rachael Stewart

Mr. One-Night Stand

Mr. Temptation

Naughty or Nice

Also by Taryn Belle

Tropical Heat

In Too Deep

Also by Cathryn Fox

On His Knees

On Her Terms

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Dare Collection February 2020

Teach Me

Caitlin Crews

Getting Dirty

Rachael Stewart

In For Keeps

Taryn Belle

Under His Touch

Cathryn Fox

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90634-4

THE DARE COLLECTION FEBRUARY 2020

Teach Me © 2020 Caitlin Crews Getting Dirty © 2020 Rachael Stewart In For Keeps © 2020 Cea Sunrise Person Under His Touch © 2020 Cathryn Fox

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Teach Me

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Getting Dirty

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

In For Keeps

Back Cover Text

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

Under His Touch

Back Cover Text

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

About the Publisher

Teach Me

Caitlin Crews

Read the first book in the Filthy Rich Billionaires trilogy by USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews!

“Here, now and until I say otherwise…the only thing you have to worry about is doing exactly what I tell you to do.”

Socialite Erika Vanderberg has been planning for this night for months. Years. All so she can finally gain entrance to Berlin’s most exclusive sex club. Erika is here for one person: Dorian Alexander, her brother’s best friend and her secret childhood crush. Only, now her childish crush has been replaced by something hungry, raw and oh-so-wickedly adult. And the moment Erika sees Dorian—his dark eyes intent and focused, that hard body—everything comes crashing into place.

Yes, she’s submissive. And yes, she desperately wants to surrender to Dorian over and over again. Oh yes, please.

But Erika has spent her life pretending to be a spoiled little socialite who pushes everyone away. Submitting to this delicious man and all his heady power won’t change who she is—will it? After one taste, there is already a dark hunger between them…one that threatens to unleash who Erika really is.

Harlequin DARE publishes sexy romances featuring powerful alpha heroes and bold, fearless heroines exploring their deepest fantasies.

Four new Harlequin DARE titles are available each month, wherever ebooks are sold!

To Rose, in hopes you’ll perform this one, too.

CHAPTER ONE

SHE WAS IN.

Finally.

Erika Vanderburg tried to breathe as elation and anticipation coursed through her in equal measure, as if in time to the deep thump of the music that wound its way around and through the crowd and seemed to rest against her clavicle. Like a heavy hand.

The notion made her warm. Maybe too warm.

Concentrate, she ordered herself.

She’d worked too hard to get in the door to waste her one chance…fluttering.

No one could simply walk into the infamous Walfreiheit Club, though many tried. The line of hopefuls stretched for acres on its once-a-month semipublic exhibition nights, like tonight. Some waited outside every night and never got in. And though Berlin was a city filled with sex clubs to suit any mood or experimental phase—or all of the above, all at once—Walfreiheit was its most exclusive.

Erika had been trying to get in the door for going on six months now. She would fly in the night before, then spend the day treating her jet lag at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin, her favorite hotel in the city. She liked to take her time selecting an outfit from the high-end shops on Friedrichstrasse before relaxing in the hotel’s five-star spa. The routine was familiar now, and got her ready for a long night of waiting in line with the rest of the hopefuls outside the converted old building in East Berlin. All of them trying to look appropriate, whatever that meant when the place in question was an upscale bondage club. And when the opportunity to enter was entirely at the whim of whoever was at the door.

She had been reminding herself—sternly—that there was a point to all this, despite the annoyance of being denied entry month after month, when one of the terrifyingly calm and formidably solid bouncers had pointed straight at her. Erika had frozen solid.

“You,” he’d said in German, then shook his head at the dark-haired woman next to Erika who surged forward. “The blonde.”

Erika had been certain that he’d shake his head at her when she moved toward the door, but he didn’t. He opened the rope and waved her through. It was on her to somehow…not fall apart with sheer giddiness as she was actually let in.

The Walfreiheit Club specialized in kink. Specifically BDSM, though it was whispered that definitions were kept loose to better serve the imaginations and desires of its exclusive clientele. Members played as they liked within the walls, and membership was never automatic. No amount of money could buy someone a place if the other members didn’t vote them in. Unanimously. There were always stories about this or that celebrity or tycoon trying to buy his way in, only to be summarily denied, because the club did as the club liked. Always.

In the same vein, on exhibition nights, the men on the door made their selections from the vast line outside according to their fancy. Selected hopefuls were brought inside to the large, cavernous foyer where Mistress Olga waited, dressed in full fetish gear—though what was actually terrifying about her was the arch amusement she wore on her distractingly beautiful face.

Erika had not been prepared for Mistress Olga. She wasn’t sure a person could be prepared, especially because the bouncers outside were only collecting a group of potentials for the mistress to sort through. Which she did.

With brutal precision.

The tiny yet ferocious woman reputed to be the most sought-after Domme in Berlin threw out most of the people who’d waited in that foyer with Erika at a glance. She sauntered down the line, flicking a finger to dismiss each person she didn’t like. She nodded at a stunningly pretty-looking man. She studied a woman with a bowed head, then murmured an assent. By the time she’d reached Erika, she’d gotten rid of most of the people who’d been let in. And she stood there, magnificent in her spike-heeled boots that stopped midthigh, training her very cool, assessing look all over Erika until Erika rather thought she might scream. Or otherwise embarrass herself beyond repair.

She would never know how she managed to just…stand there.

“You will do,” Mistress Olga pronounced, in crisp German.

Erika had been ushered into a smaller foyer, this one in all black. She and the other two selected were met by another woman, this one clearly not a Domme. Or so Erika assumed from the way she bowed her head to Mistress Olga. The three of them were made to fill out extensive paperwork, were given bright yellow wristbands that they were warned sternly not to take off, and were then treated to a long list of the club’s rules and regulations.

The truth was Erika would have agreed to absolutely anything to get inside.

She’d played around with various outfits for months. How did a person broadcast the necessary submissiveness required in a place that took its sexual roles very seriously while also making sure to advertise to one specific person exactly what he’d been missing all these years? She’d fiddled with different attempts to hit that sweet spot every month. Tonight she wore a strappy little top that cupped her breasts and lifted them up, but left most of her shoulders and her midriff bare. And a tiny little skirt that flirted with the bottom curve of her ass. The only other thing she wore was a thong that peeked up over the waistband of her skirt.

It wasn’t her most subtle outfit. But what was subtle about sexual escapades that started with a frank negotiation of terms, needs, expectations, desires and limits? Erika had decided to fully embrace what she was walking into.

Though that had seemed more like a power move before she was actually doing it.

“All right,” she muttered to herself beneath her breath as the huge doors were opened and the three lucky selections were led through into the wall of noise and simmering dark. “You need to settle down.”

The main floor of the club was big, soaring up from the open space where most of the crowd was gathered to a second-floor gallery that offered views of the action down below. And, the club submissives had told them, private playrooms. Not that a person sporting a bright yellow guest wristband would be allowed up there.

There was a bar against one wall, though that, too, was subject to strict rules. No more than two drinks for anyone who wanted to play, no exceptions, and no drinks for yellow wristbands at all. Alcohol is a privilege of membership, they’d been told. There were a number of small, private seating areas tucked into nooks along the dark walls, and then a wider, more open collection of sofas and tables and comfortable-looking chairs, which Erika assumed were as much for aftercare as for socializing. She’d read all about it.

There was a dance floor, and there were people out there working off their energy and anticipation—or maybe that was just her—to the seething, brooding electronic music that filled the space. And made everything feel edgier. Cut through with danger.

But beyond that, Erika knew thanks to the hand-drawn map they’d been shown up front, lay the dungeon. Here there be dungeons, someone had written in bold letters and they’d all laughed on cue—and had all sounded equally nervous, to her ears.

She pulled in a breath now, then let it out in a rush. Because she knew without a doubt that the dungeon was where she would find him.

And she would finally be able to set her plan in motion.

There were butterflies in her belly as she began to make her way through the crowd, her gaze skimming over couples in leather and latex or jeans, submissives in various chains and collars or merely kneeling at their dominants’ feet. She took an extra moment to admire two buff, beautiful men on the end of their top’s leash wearing bridles and jaunty tails.

She skirted the edge of the dance floor, her feet bare against the hardwood. It felt strange to be barefoot in a club, but it was deliberate. Submissives are encouraged to go barefoot, they’d been told at the desk, where they’d surrendered their phones, wallets, coats and bags, as well as their shoes.

Erika would have worn clown shoes if asked, and had thought it was a silly request meant to make the club more mysterious—but now she got it. The wood beneath her feet felt silky and warm. It was one more sensation to add to the mix. The heat of so many bodies in one space. The cool prickle of air moving over the flesh she’d left uncovered. She could feel her pulse pick up as she wove her way through the crowd, carefully keeping her gaze averted from anyone she passed.

Especially if they had that particular look about them, too calm and too direct, that she knew meant they were dominants.

Erika was wearing the costume of a submissive, and she’d experimented a little with the whole power-exchange thing, but she intended to explore it further with only one very specific person. Starting tonight.

It had taken her six months to get in the door tonight, but she’d spent years working her way here, one way or another. She’d danced nearly naked beneath the desert sky one summer, then experimented in the red-light district out there in Black Rock City. That had been illuminating, if dusty, and it had spearheaded her own little journey. She’d followed her libido wherever it took her, aware that there was a restlessness in her but never sure quite how to address it. She’d tried partying. She’d tried spiritual retreats. She’d done yoga in Santa Monica and she’d surfed in Bali. She’d hiked and she’d communed and still, that restlessness had dogged her.

That had been true since she’d dropped out of university after her second year, but Erika had felt an enormous sense of relief when she’d packed up her things and left Oxford behind. She’d felt less sanguine about her choices when her officious, tight-assed older brother, Conrad—in his role as head of the family that he’d assumed after their father had died, which Erika felt he’d taken to a little too readily and far too sternly—had cut off her financial support.

“I’m not supporting you while you waste your life,” he’d said after he’d summoned her to his palatial home in Paris.

She’d rolled her eyes. “I’m actually getting a life, Conrad.”

“Get it with a job, then,” he’d retorted.

And could not be swayed, epic asshole that he was.

Erika had gone right out and found herself a job in a dive bar in New Orleans, because she was sure that would gall her uppity brother, and she’d had every intention of paying her own way to make her own fun. But then her dramatic, theatrically self-involved mother had swept in and restored Erika’s access to the family money, because the only thing Chriszette Vanderburg feared was not having strings to pull on to control her offspring.

At first, Erika had resisted, because she didn’t want to answer to anyone. Especially not a member of her family. But Chriszette had implored her and Erika had given in because Chriszette was difficult to ignore and harder still to deny, and that was how she’d ended up acting like a paid companion when her mother was between torrid love affairs. And having to find new ways to ask for money without ever being so crass and vulgar as to ask for it the rest of the time.

But what she’d really missed in that time was not Conrad, who could shove his tough love up his own ass as far as Erika was concerned. She didn’t care if he treated her like a walking disaster, because really, he always had. What she missed was the occasional access to Dorian.

She shuddered a little, involuntarily, as that name—his name—rolled through her the way it always did.

Dorian Alexander was her older brother’s best friend, stretching back to their boarding school days. They had been thrown together at age eight and had been fast friends from the start. She had heard Conrad refer to Dorian as his brother.

But he was not Erika’s brother.

The last time she’d seen Dorian, it had been at the family charity ball his shipping magnate grandfather threw each year in Athens. Erika had gone with her mother, who liked to order her daughter to serve as her date at such things when she didn’t have a lover on hand. And yes, if she was honest, Erika had accompanied her mother to an event she could have talked her way out of for the distinct, petty pleasure of flaunting herself in front of her brother.

Conrad had been icily civil. Though Erika had seen that telltale muscle going wild in his jaw and had smugly enjoyed the satisfaction of shooting him an unmistakable middle finger simply by turning up and not begging him to reconsider.

Dorian had not followed Conrad’s lead. He had been distinctly uncivil when Erika had chirped a greeting his way, and her stomach had knotted up with a strange heat when he’d stared at her. Unsmiling.

“Why don’t you dance with me?” Erika had asked him, feeling reckless and daring. Where Conrad was infinitely disapproving and always annoyed by Erika’s existence, Dorian had always been…stern. But there was something about the particular intensity of that sternness and the frank way he looked at her—at everything—that had always made Erika feel…silly.

That night she’d decided to lean into the silliness. And besides, she’d been wearing a sparkly dress that bared most of her back and hinted at her ass. Okay, more than hinted. She’d wondered how long he’d stay stern if he had his hands on her.

“I don’t dance with little brats in the middle of temper tantrums,” Dorian had said. Calmly.

And she’d never understood how he could do that. How he could look at her in a certain way, usually while saying obnoxious things to her, and it only made her want to giggle. Or maybe melt. Or worse, both, while the knotted heat inside her seemed to thump its way lower the longer he looked at her.

“That sounds like Conrad-sourced propaganda,” she’d said, laughing.

Because she was afraid that if she didn’t laugh, she’d do something far more embarrassing.

Dorian did not laugh. He was a tall, extraordinarily well built man. That had been true when he was in high school and Erika had seen him on the odd holiday he’d spent with Conrad’s family instead of his own. But time clearly loved him. He looked as if he was chiseled from stone, his lean muscle honed to perfection. His dark hair was closely cropped, yet somehow gave the impression he’d only moments before run his fingers through it. His eyes were a cool coffee brown, excruciatingly intense. Powerful. His cheekbones were so high they made Erika think of arias.

And his mouth was always set in that firm line. She’d spent a lot of time staring at it over the years, so she knew its every slight quirk and the raw sensuality that seemed to brood its way out of him no matter how stern he looked at any given moment.

But the look he gave her at that ball in Athens was pitiless.

“Is it propaganda or simple truth that you flounced out of university and refused to return?” he asked coolly.

“I wouldn’t call it flouncing.”

She expected him to launch into a screed on the importance of education. Or to discuss the firsts he and Conrad had received when they’d gone up, because of course they had. She’d wanted him to, really, because surely if he was horrendously boring and too much like Conrad she’d stop feeling so lit up when she saw him.

Dorian was not the only person around who disliked Erika, well she knew. But he was the only one whose dislike she felt so keenly. And the only one whose dislike did not result in her immediate indifference.

But Dorian did not wax rhapsodic about the dubious charms of an Oxbridge degree as expected. “Your brother has far more patience with willful disobedience than I would,” he’d said instead.

“I’m not sure I would consider cutting off his only sister very patient,” Erika had replied, not sure why she felt flushed. With a surprising wallop of what couldn’t be shame, surely. And something else she hadn’t wanted to name. “But I suppose your mileage may vary.”

“I don’t negotiate disobedience,” Dorian had said in that same quiet, intense way. His gaze was fierce and disapproving and, worse, made her shiver. “I punish it.”

Erika hadn’t known what had come over her then. It was part of that flush that seemed to deepen by the moment. Red and everywhere and what was happening to her?

She’d tilted her head to one side. “How would you punish me?”

Dorian hadn’t smiled. If anything, he’d looked more forbidding. And harder, somehow, though he didn’t move or shift as far as she could see. Erika had felt herself go a little weak, even as she’d felt herself get wet and needy between her legs.

Right there in a fancy dress, in a room where her mother and brother also stood.

And that restless thing in her…settled. Into a kind of expectant stillness she’d never felt before in her life.

“I generally start with a spanking,” he’d said very distinctly. “And not the kind you’d think was fun, Erika. The kind that would encourage you to change your behavior.”

“Or what?” she managed to ask, though her voice was barely above a whisper.

His eyes had gleamed. And she could swear there was something like a curve to his hard mouth. “Or I would be even more disappointed with you than I already am.”

And it was at that moment that a great many things about her older brother’s best friend came together for Erika. With the force of a blow—or, perhaps, that spanking.

Dorian had sauntered away as if nothing had happened. As if Erika was breathing normally and wasn’t the least bit overheated and reeling. The genteel crowd had swallowed up that gorgeous body of his, dressed in black tie that somehow managed to suggest that he was from another time.

Her blood had thudded inside her, making her heart feel heavy and her head light. And the sense that he’d spanked her without putting a hand on her only seemed to grow, turning into an ache. An ache that spread, then went deep.

All the whispers that followed in Dorian’s wake made a different kind of sense suddenly. The very specific way certain women looked at him, as if they knew a secret about him. Erika had always thought it was simply because he was so powerful, with all that Alexander family money augmented by the tech company he’d gone and started himself after university. Apparently feeling that where there was one fortune, there might as well be two.

And when she began looking specifically for rumors about Dorian Alexander in darker, more shadowy places… Well. That was when she’d really found him. And it hadn’t taken a whole lot of digging to learn that Dorian was famous for a great many things in the wider, more civilized world, but when it came to sex he was a king of a whole different sort.

In fact, they called him Master.

Her schoolgirl crush flipped inside out and turned into something far more edgy.

Particularly because, the more she thought about Dorian and spanking—and Dorian spanking her, for that matter—all her vague fantasies and all her sexual explorations seemed to spark into something new. And much, much hotter.

She’d experimented with light bondage and a few tame scenes in clubs in New York. London. Lisbon. She’d spent a particularly hot and steamy winter down under in Melbourne, playing top and bottom games with some new friends. And anytime it got to be too much, playing dominance games with tops who were never quite what she wanted, she thought of Dorian.

Master Dorian, as he was known. Master Dorian, who had used to scene quite a bit in the clubs—especially in Berlin, at the Walfreiheit—but did so less and less these days. Master Dorian, who was a legend and a favorite fantasy of pretty much every submissive she met.

Master Dorian, who had nothing to prove, had never given a submissive his collar and was the only thing Erika could take from her brother that he would miss.

He’d had no use for her as a supposedly spoiled rotten socialite, sure. But would he feel differently about her as a submissive?

It was time to find out.

She felt her pulse pick up when she saw the displays as she made her way into the dungeon. A pretty girl strapped to a table while her Domme applied all manner of wicked-looking clamps to her, murmuring encouragement as she shuddered and squirmed. In the next room, a Dom was working his submissive into a series of intricate and beautiful shibari knots, as if she was an installation piece, there with her ass in the air and her face to the floor. One scene bled into the next. Threesomes. Fireplay. Suspension. One erotic fantasy brought to life after another.

But the biggest throng of onlookers had flocked to the biggest space, toward the back, and Erika headed in that direction. Even though she felt something shiver over her, like foreboding.

Because she knew what she would see. They’d all heard the whispers out there in line, that Master Dorian was picking up his whip tonight for the first time in ages. That he was putting on a show.

But God help her, she wasn’t prepared.

Dorian stood on a raised dais, facing a Saint Andrew’s Cross. A woman was strapped to it, straining against her bonds, moving her head back and forth in erotic distress. That alone made Erika’s belly quiver.

But Dorian took her breath away.

He looked darker and more dangerous than she remembered him, dressed in dark trousers, boots and a black T-shirt that managed to hug that remarkable chest of his like an obsessed lover. Every single one of the muscles she’d marveled at when he was clad in black tie was on display. And more, like his mouthwatering expanse of sheer abdominal fitness.

And it was hard not to appreciate his glorious corded arms as he wielded that lethal, deliciously terrifying whip.

Erika’s mouth went dry. She felt her eyes go glassy, but she couldn’t look away. She felt rooted to the spot as surely as if it was her up there on the cross, writhing, tears wetting her own cheeks while cuffs kept her exactly where he wanted her.

Meanwhile, Dorian made the whip dance.

He was murmuring in a low voice and the woman responded, and it took Erika some time to understand that he was telling her exactly where each strike would land. Then he waited as she writhed, moaned.

But each time she quivered. Then said distinctly, “Yes, Master Dorian. Please.”

Yes, Master Dorian. Please.

The words jolted through Erika like a live wire. Like the kiss of that terrible whip, landing precisely where he said it would.

He was controlled, precise. Beautiful and terrible, like an angel. He moved like a furious dancer, a dark and mighty cloud, and Erika thought the whole crowd was as breathless and undone as she was.

And for the first time since that party in Athens, Erika thought to ask herself what in the hell she was thinking.

All her little sex games were just that. Games. But Dorian was very plainly the real thing. She’d been charging up a gentle slope and calling it a mountain, and it was only now that she understood the enormity of her error. She wanted to poke at her brother, not…this. A whip and a crowd and that hungry, greedy thing she could feel turn over inside her and bare its fangs.

She didn’t want that. Erika felt exposed, even though she stood with everyone else, and knew no one was looking at her. Still, she felt vibrant with embarrassment and panic. Most of all she felt deeply, remarkably silly. Foolish.

The brat he’d called her, and more.

She needed to leave. Now. Before she made an even bigger fool of herself.

But she couldn’t seem to tear herself away. The scene on the dais went on. The whip licked over the submissive on the stage, bringing her closer and closer to that brutally perfect end that Erika could feel all over her. Her own nipples were hard. She was much too wet. She wanted to squirm but she didn’t dare move. Or she couldn’t move.

And then, finally, he asked and was answered with a sob. But a yes, Master Dorian, please, all the same. Dorian shot out his arm. The whip cracked.

Then landed with merciless precision on the submissive’s exposed clit.

The girl on the cross screamed, her body shaking wildly as she arched into a climax, her body like a bow against the cross. Out there in the dark of the audience, rooted to the floor and still bright red with the realization that she shouldn’t have come here at all, Erika felt her own body clench and tremble, as if she was on the same slippery edge.

That was when Dorian stopped. He looked out toward the crowd and the murmurs of appreciation. He looked as if he might smile.

But then he saw her.

She felt the impact of those fierce, intense eyes. She saw the flare of recognition.

And without a single hand upon her—without anything but that outraged gaze of his—Erika felt herself catapult straight over that edge.

Hard.

CHAPTER TWO

HIS BEST FRIEND’S little sister was coming right there on the floor of his club.

That it was impossible—that she shouldn’t be in the club, or dressed like that, or witness to his particular enthusiasms without his knowledge or approval—didn’t change the fact that it was happening. Right there before Dorian Alexander’s astonished eyes.

Her climax rolled over her, and he could see entirely too many things about little Erika Vanderburg, then, that he understood in a flash he would never be able to unsee.

Her plump, high breasts and her hard and proud nipples that poked out from behind the top she wore, begging for his mouth. Or better yet, his clamps. Her exposed abdomen, a sensuous display of softly toned female flesh that quivered with the force of her orgasm. And low on her hips, so low he could see her thong poke up above the waistband, she wore a skirt so tiny it hardly deserved the name, making him think that if she shivered that much more he might actually catch a glimpse of her pussy, too.

The mental image he’d carried around forever of little Erika, maybe age ten, with pigtails he wasn’t sure she’d ever actually worn, went up in smoke.

His gaze shot back up to find hers. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and flooded with arousal. And something else the dominant in him was delighted to see looked a whole lot like the kind of panic that made a good scene sing.

Dorian had been reasonably aroused throughout his whipping demonstration, because he loved what a whip could do to a trembling, beautifully bound woman who let it kiss her and carry her off into bliss. He didn’t understand anyone who claimed they didn’t.

But looking at Erika—and that ferocious orgasm that still held her in its grip—he was suddenly as ragingly turned-on as if instead of a demonstration he’d been deep in a scene he expected to end in his own release.

That’s Conrad’s little sister, something in him protested, but his body didn’t seem to care. His body saw only a lovely submissive, flushed and wide-eyed and panting—just the way he liked them—and all she’d been doing was watching him whip someone else.

Dorian couldn’t permit himself to focus on that, so he focused instead on what he was supposed to be doing on that dais in the first place. Which was demonstrating one of his hobbies for the assembled club members and tourists here on one of the club’s exhibition nights. Only a split second had passed, he was sure of it, despite the fact that to him it felt like a lifetime or two—but it was still a loss of focus.

It didn’t matter how long it was. His lapse of attention galled him. He was no novice, for God’s sake.

He moved over to the cross, murmuring to Angelica as he released her from her cuffs, soothing her as they both waited for her permanent dom to climb up to the dais and take charge of her aftercare. Dorian had to make himself focus the way he should have been already, because what was important here was caring for Angelica, not a bratty little sub—

Sister, he snapped at himself. Bratty little sister. Of his best friend. A man who was more family than friend, as a matter of fact, and who Dorian knew would be distinctly unamused at the idea that his wild-child baby sister knew a club like Walfreiheit existed. He didn’t want to think about Conrad’s reaction to the news that she was going around climaxing in public and, worse still, because of Dorian.

When Angelica was off the cross and in her dominant’s care, Dorian’s responsibilities to her were finished. He handled his equipment and packed it away, then straightened. He turned slowly, not entirely convinced that Erika hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. Though why he would conjure up such a maddening little brat he spent very little time thinking about unless she was right there in front of him, he had no idea. He searched the crowd, half expecting to find no trace of her. He would find a blonde sub who reminded him of Erika instead, and the good news was, he would know exactly what to do with her. He would tie her up, make her scream and cry and come, and exorcise this strange demon he hadn’t known lurked about inside him.

But Erika was right where he’d left her. The actual Erika Vanderburg, his best friend’s little sister, in the disturbingly succulent flesh. She stood stock-still on the hardwood floor, gaping at the stage.

At him.

When their eyes met again, Dorian could feel the temperature rise, then sizzle.

He told himself it was sheer outrage.

Her eyes widened. Dorian lifted an arrogant brow in reply. It was usually sufficient to make submissive knees bend. Hers appeared to tremble, which sent a kind of shock straight through him. And even up on the dais he could see the gulp of air she took in.

He wasn’t surprised when she turned around and dived through the crowd as if she actually believed she could run away from him. Here in this club that in some seasons had operated as his second home. He wasn’t surprised, but still, the fact she was trying to escape him made something in him, dark and hungry…wake up.

Then focus. On her.

Intently.

He jumped down to the floor, following her through the crowd. He was aware that the people parted before him to let him through, the way they always did. He was vaguely cognizant of the usual congratulations and sultry little come-ons from the hopeful unattached submissives who followed him around in packs on nights like this, but he was focused on his quarry. He stalked her through the crowd, feeling a kick of satisfaction as she looked around wildly—then turned deeper into the dungeons rather than out toward the bar.

He followed, nodding at his friends as he passed. He was in clear pursuit of Erika, and he didn’t have to say a word to explain himself. Master Dorian stalked no submissives when they all flocked to him, and here he was, going after this one.

She might as well have worn his name around her neck.

A not-unpleasant thought.

Which really should have horrified him.

It did, he assured himself. Of course it did. No matter why she’d come here.

Though the notion that she might have come tonight to play with others filled him with a hollow sort of heat that took him a moment or two to realize wasn’t simply temper.

It was deeper. Richer.

He recognized his own rare possessiveness—and should have turned around right then and there.

But he didn’t.

She was walking faster, very nearly running while doing her best not to look as if she was doing any such thing. Dorian followed, taking the opportunity to control his breath. To settle himself down. To make sure that he was in complete control of himself, as he always fought to be, no matter what Erika Vanderburg was doing here or that bright fire that burned in him and seemed to spell out her name.

Erika made another mistake, cutting toward what he imagined she thought was a hallway. And it was, but Dorian knew the far door was locked on a night like this, when nonmembers roamed the premises and didn’t have permission to wander all the different areas of the Walfreiheit Club as they pleased.

He slowed down, checking in with his control again and trying to separate the dominant in him from her older brother’s best friend—no matter his cock’s take on the matter. By the time he made it to the mouth of the narrow hall that usually functioned as a shortcut to the club’s offices, Erika was already turned back around, clearly having realized there was no escape.

Then she saw him.

She jolted as if he’d used his whip on her, which, predictably, made him imagine doing exactly that—though that was a privilege she would have to earn.

No, he reminded himself. Not her. Not Conrad’s little sister.

Dorian followed her into the hallway, casually blocking any possible exit. The hall was narrow and not exactly brightly lit—but not so dim he couldn’t see that her eyes were wide. And he wasn’t sure how he’d never noticed before that they were a particular shade of blue that reminded him of his grandfather’s island nestled out there in the Aegean Sea.

He couldn’t say he cared much for the comparison now.

He stopped when he was a foot or so away from her. He folded his arms over his chest, widened his stance and waited.

And Erika quivered. He could see the pulse in her neck, banging out exactly the sort of rhythm he liked best. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, betraying her anxiety. He had made a study of the female body in various degrees of erotic distress and he could read her easily. And still, she pulled out that careless, reckless smile of hers that she had to know always put Conrad’s teeth on edge.

It reminded him, as nothing else could, what an eternal pain in the ass she was and always had been.

“Oh,” she said carelessly, as if this was a chance meeting at some desperately boring society event. Some overdressed, overstuffed ball or other. “Hi, Dorian.”

He knew distantly how he ought to feel about this. Unamused, certainly. Even annoyed, because this was a complication he hadn’t foreseen and Dorian liked surprises only when he could control their outcome. Which was to say, he didn’t like surprises. His childhood had cured him of that. He should have been thinking through how best to break the news to Conrad—and, of course, how quickly he could bundle Erika out of the club, into some decent clothes, and then dispatch her back to wherever it was she had come from. He knew that was what Conrad would have wanted.

He knew how he should feel, but instead, the things that beat in him were all too familiar…for very different reasons. She looked flushed and ready, her feet bare and her skin exposed, her pretty breasts thrust toward him while she fought to catch her breath. She looked like a brand-new submissive in the grip of the frenzy that often made them adorably reckless. She looked good enough to eat.

And Dorian might have found himself jaded and restless of late—wondering if it was time to stop playing and start thinking about settling down into the life his grandfather wanted for him, and wanted to see before he died—but a pretty blonde submissive with that particular hot awe in her eyes and a slight tremble to her lips…

Well. He wasn’t dead yet.

“Try again,” he suggested softly.

She shifted from foot to foot again, and it took every bit of his considerable willpower to keep his hands to himself. But Dorian was anything but newly minted. He knew very well the power in simply…waiting. Expectantly.

He studied her as he did, wondering how it was he’d never paid such close attention to Conrad’s little sister before…

But even as he thought that, he knew that wasn’t true. He’d certainly seen her when she’d turned up in a backless gown at his grandfather’s charity ball in Athens one year, enlivening an otherwise staid and boring gala. There had been that split second when he hadn’t known who she was, but he’d wrestled that under control. And done nothing more than chastise her a little.

He certainly hadn’t let her get him hard.

The Conrad’s-little-sister part, of course, had always governed his reactions to her, as well it should. He had to be ten years older than her. But when had she become this lush? With all that smooth, apparently blemish-free skin that made his mouth water as he considered how best to leave his mark—

No. She’s Conrad little sister. She might as well be yours.

But that thought didn’t really land. It certainly didn’t impress his cock.

Because he could remember that dress much too distinctly. Erika had worn it for the precise purpose of rendering her brother apoplectic, that much was clear. Dorian remembered murmuring something soothing to his friend, likely about the established brattiness of younger sisters—not that he had any personal experience in that area. Then he’d glanced over and found his eyes drawn to the mouthwatering line of a beautiful woman’s graceful back, bared entirely by a dress that flirted with the curve of her ass.

He could remember it in stark, unwavering detail. Even now, years later.

Maybe he’d seen Erika all along.

That night it had taken one second, maybe less, before he realized he was looking at precisely the dress that had his friend in fits. One second before he’d understood he was looking at Erika. He’d sternly reminded himself that Erika was ever and only a brat. Ungrateful, immature. Forever embroiled in her juvenile attempts to poke at Conrad. Pigtails. Freckles. Stuck in amber at ten years old.

That was how he knew her. It was the only way he knew her.

But now his cock was heavy, she was in his club, and he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t eyed her then exactly the same way he did now. Like a dessert he couldn’t wait to get his teeth in.

A sweet little bite he wanted to taste. Over and over again.

Some men saw a pretty thing and wanted to lock it away in a tower somewhere. Dorian, on the other hand, wanted to mess it up. But only if she begged.

He almost had to adjust himself.

“This is so funny,” she was saying, brazening her way through this in a way he almost had to admire. She squared her shoulders and held his gaze boldly, as if she was up to any challenge he might put to her. Which he doubted very much. “What a surprise to run into you, of all people. I’m in town for the weekend. One of my friends was talking about his favorite clubs a month or so ago and I couldn’t resist checking them all out. There’s one in Singapore that—”

“Do not lie to me, please.” His voice sliced across hers and stopped her dead. “You’re well aware I live in Berlin.”

She dared to roll her eyes at him, and Dorian’s brows rose in sheer astonishment. He couldn’t recall the last time a submissive in this club—or anywhere else, for that matter—had presumed to treat him with such blatant disrespect. They were usually far too intimidated. He should have been furious. He was. But even so, that spark in him bloomed into a hotter, darker fire.

“It’s a big city, Dorian,” she declared, lifting the stubborn chin that anchored her heart-shaped face—and he really should not have been noticing things like that about her. “I had no idea that if I wanted to find you, which I didn’t, all I had to do was poke my head into the nearest den of iniquity.”

“No one pokes their head into Walfreiheit. You had to wait in line. You had to be dressed appropriately, yet evocatively. And then you have to make it past Mistress Olga, who has an unerring eye for posers and too-casual visitors. Would you like to try telling the truth?” Her lips parted, and he enjoyed watching her cast around for an answer. And enjoyed it even more when she didn’t. “My mistake, Erika. I assumed this must be some kind of social call. That you’d come here to seek me out specifically.”

“Of course not.” But the pulse in her neck told him otherwise. Interesting. “Why would I? I already know that you’re Team Conrad. I prefer to avoid his minions whenever possible.” Again, that reckless smile. “You know how it is.”

He understood she was trying to provoke him. And she was—only not in the way she likely imagined.

“How fortunate, then, that you should run into a familiar face,” he said quietly. “In the midst of your heretofore unknown exploration of power exchanges in all their glory. I had no idea you were hiding a thirst for submission beneath your fluffy, spoiled exterior.”

Her eyes widened further. She started to say something, but it came out as a breath instead. He liked it. Poor little submissive girl. So afraid of what she wanted.

Dorian needed to remind himself that she wasn’t just another new submissive. She was Conrad’s baby sister. And this couldn’t happen.

But he didn’t walk away.

“Well,” she said nervously. “I mean, I can’t say that I wanted to see a familiar face here. Nobody wants to see a familiar face when they’re watching a grown man whip a naked woman until she…”

Her voice petered out. Dorian only watched her, keeping his expression just this side of a scowl until she flushed again.

“Until she came,” he supplied. “And so did you.” He smiled faintly when her throat worked, but no sound came forth. “If this is not a specific social call, that means you are here to play like anyone else. And I regret to inform you that you have already shown me entirely too much disrespect.”

“What are you talking about? You’re the one who followed me down a dark hallway to loom over me and frown dramatically. Maybe you should be concerned about respecting me.”

Dorian studied her, unsmiling. “This is primarily a BDSM club and you present as a sexual submissive. Do you know what that means?”

“Of course I know what it means.”

“Is that an incorrect label for you? The girls at the door are usually much better at teasing out our visitors’ secret wants and needs. Surely they told you that the pink wristband you’re wearing announces your preferences to all and sundry.”

She scowled down at the wristband in question and tugged at it. It sat next to the yellow wristband that announced she was here only for the night, which was why she had no bright blue wristbands, one for each alcoholic beverage patrons were allowed if they wanted to participate in any play.

“I can’t hear you,” he prompted her. “Is that the wrong wristband?”

“This club is obsessed with labels. You know that, don’t you?”

“Indeed it is. Let’s be clear that you as a person can be as complicated and contradictory as you please outside these doors. In here, however, everything is boiled down to its essence. What you want. What you need. And what you are prepared to negotiate to get it.”

Her rebellious chin lifted. “Plus neon wristbands.”

“If you are certain a label cannot contain you, perhaps you had better ask yourself if that’s the truth. Are you so terribly complex? Or are you terrified that if you took the trouble to look inside yourself you would find that at heart, where it matters, you are remarkably simple after all?”

She jerked at that as if he’d slapped her. And he wondered if she knew how dark her eyes got, telling him secrets he doubted she wanted to share.

“The only thing you know about me is who I’m related to,” she threw at him, as if he’d mounted a vicious personal attack. He filed that away. “So maybe you should take the opportunity to ask yourself why you’re such an egregious asshole to a person you hardly know.”

Dorian smiled. “Is it clear to you that I am a dominant, Erika? And was that clear from the moment you saw me here tonight?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “But I…”

“Kneel.”

Dorian was in absolutely no doubt of his own power. He enjoyed playing with the wielding of it. And he might have been thrown by the sight of Erika Vanderburg dressed like a submissive wet dream, but he didn’t think it was a coincidence that she was in Walfreiheit. He didn’t believe she was on a club tour and had accidentally happened on him here.

Couple that with her complaints about “labels” and he had no particular reason to think that she was submissive, either.

Or more accurately, he knew she was a submissive. He could see it every time she looked at him. That longing to yield, but only to a worthy dominant force. To pit herself against his will and chase her own surrender into all the places polite society feared to tread. What he didn’t know was whether or not she would allow herself to play with that need in her, or if she was the sort of person who preferred to pretend she never entertained any dark fantasies there in the privacy of her mind.

There was only one way to find out.

“What did you…?” she managed to get out while goose bumps marched down her arms and told him more truths.

“Do you need me to repeat myself?”

He watched, more fascinated than he wanted to admit, as she waged an internal battle. He could see it. Ordinarily he would have no trouble admitting he was fascinated and hard, but this was different. Because while watching a woman fight to do the very thing they both wanted—when she was as aroused by the notion as she was afraid of it—was one of life’s greatest pleasures, in his experience, this was Erika.

He didn’t know if she would do it.

Or what would happen if she did.

Dorian kept his expression impassive as he watched her struggle there before him. Her pretty face broadcast every last one of her emotions, making it easy to watch her cycle through defiance, longing, fear and a bright flash of straightforward need.

He didn’t help her. He only waited, wondering how exactly she would handle this if she was not, in fact, as submissive as he thought she was.

“Did you say…kneel?”

She sounded almost hopeful. As if he might change his mind.

“You do not have to do anything you don’t want to do, Erika,” he told her, his voice low and his gaze hard. “Safe, sane and consensual aren’t simply words we throw around for fun. But I should warn you, this is not a club where submissives balk at something as simple as kneeling to show respect. You can negotiate high protocol with whatever Dom you like, but they will all expect you to kneel. You might as well practice, don’t you think?” He waited a moment while she breathed a bit too hard. “If submission is what you want.”

“I just… I mean, I only…” Her eyes were slicked over with panic, but he could see the way she kept dancing from toe to toe. Dorian knew this dance. He knew that if he reached between her legs he would find her wet and hot. Better to let her dance it out. “I mean, maybe…”

“Is it our personal connection that has you so flustered?” he asked. Pitilessly. “Would you prefer I summon one of the other masters?”

She appeared to like that even less.

Which he could admit he liked a great deal more.

“I guess… I guess I thought there would be more of a buildup. This feels a lot like going from first to fourth gear in about twelve seconds, doesn’t it?”

“Erika.” Her name made her shiver, then still. “If this isn’t what you want, I will escort you to the bar. You can have as many nonalcoholic drinks as you like, perhaps dance to the music, and feel exhilarated that you were this close to so much edgy deviance. We always expect a certain number of tourists on nights like this. There’s no shame in it. But you need to tell me what you want.”

“I want…”

“If you don’t know how to say it, you can start the conversation very simply.” He tilted his head, indicating the ground beneath her feet. “Simply kneel.”

She moved her hands to her belly, as if her stomach was knotting up. Or fluttering. Or any other of the lovely, delicious reactions she could have been having.

She shot a glance behind him, almost wistfully. But Dorian didn’t move.

And in that moment, when she pulled her gaze back to his and her cheeks got even redder, Dorian had to ask himself what it was he wanted. Did he want her to kneel? Or did he want her to break, flip out and prove that she had come here only on one of her bratty excursions calculated to irritate Conrad more?

It was more than a little confronting that he didn’t quite know the answer.

Liar, something in him whispered. You know what you want.

As if she heard, Erika blew out a breath.

And then, as Dorian watched, his best friend’s little sister sank to her knees on the floor before him, tilted up her face and surrendered.

CHAPTER THREE

ERIKA HAD NEVER knelt before a man in her life. Not…just to kneel. And certainly not because she’d been told to kneel. If she’d ever been in this position before, there had been action. She’d been doing something. Usually something that put all the power back in her hands. Or her mouth, more likely.

This was not a blow job. This was…completely different. It was electrifying.

She couldn’t breathe, and she wasn’t sure that she would ever be the right temperature again. She felt much too hot, nearly feverish, though she knew she wasn’t sick. It was that fire in her that seemed to burn and burn and burn, hotter and wilder the longer he looked at her so sternly. Erika was sure that her face was the color of ripe tomatoes. She was shaking, everywhere—inside and out—as if she’d done something extraordinary.

And all he did was gaze down at her, his expression uncompromising.

“Very pretty,” he said after a moment.

Erika wanted to say something sarcastic. Poke at him, maybe. Or perhaps make a joke. Anything to lighten the mood, or make the fire in her dim a little, or counter the bizarre sense of relief she felt that he’d complimented her, but that didn’t seem to be possible. She couldn’t make her mouth do what she wanted it to do.

Because the more he gazed down at her, apparently perfectly happy to stand there all night, the more she was aware of all the other parts of her body. The way her thighs felt, splayed wide beneath the short, short skirt she’d chosen to wear. The cool kiss of the floor beneath her knees and shins. Her bare toes were cool, and it felt like a notable, erotic contrast to how confined her chest and her breasts felt in the strappy top. When she’d put it on earlier, it had felt almost loose, but not now. Now she thought another deep breath would pop the straps, and expose all of her to him.

That notion should have scared her, but it didn’t.

Or it didn’t completely scare her.

She could feel her heart, beating so fast it thudded in her ears like her own personal drum. And like a thick pulse in her pussy, a staccato beat in her nipples and a riot in her chest. Everywhere else, her exposed skin felt much too warm.

Erika didn’t really understand any of this. She didn’t understand the reaction she’d had to Dorian with a whip in his hand. A whip. She didn’t understand the roaring, greedy thing that had walloped her in that crowd, that had made her come and then made her run, like opposite sides of the same too-hot coin.

She’d thought that she was so edgy when she’d played around with handcuffs and a blindfold and a soft little flogger thing, but she’d been kidding herself. This was like a completely different language, and she didn’t know how to speak a single word of it.

She couldn’t find the words, but he’d told her to kneel and she had.

And really, Erika didn’t understand why kneeling before a man didn’t make her angry. Why, instead, what coursed through her felt a whole lot more like that same dark, greedy hunger that had taken her over earlier.

When Erika had always preferred her orgasms sweet and quick, spring showers to dance in rather than the crash and immensity of a sea that could eat her alive.

“I normally prefer submissives to keep their eyes lowered at first,” Dorian said in that low voice of his that somehow made it sound as if what was happening between them was normal.

Because it was, she reminded herself sharply. And maybe with a touch of panic. For him, this was any old night at the club. The only difference was that she was his best friend’s little sister.

Something about that fact—which she’d known full well while she’d spent all these months trying to get herself into this very position, not to mention most of her life—twisted in her differently now. It made her feel even hotter suddenly.

Erika tried to focus on what he’d said.

“Why do you want their eyes lowered?” she demanded, and she did not avert her gaze. Instead, she glared at him. “Because you hate women?”

“Because I love what it does to a woman when she surrenders herself into my hands,” Dorian said. “By her choice. And your impertinence is noted. If I were you, I would rethink that glare.”

That shouldn’t make her thighs clench, but it did. And for a moment, she thought her pussy might take over again, catapulting her toward another climax she didn’t want and couldn’t make any sense of. She tried to fight it back.

And that gleam in his dark eyes made her think he knew exactly what was happening inside her. When he couldn’t. Could he?

“But I can tell you’re brand-new, Erika,” he said then, and he had to know how riled up she was, or why else would he sound so satisfied? “So I will give you more leeway than I would otherwise.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, that assessing look as cool as it was stirring. “And I find I quite like the way you look at me.”

Whatever snarky remark she’d meant to throw at him died there in her mouth. Because she couldn’t help thinking he looked more like a wolf. Poised to take the leap that would take his quarry down.

He looked as if he could pounce at any moment.

And it was hard, once again, to catch her breath.

“Let me tell you the rules,” Dorian said.

“They told us at the door,” she all but threw at him, filled to the brim with a kind of desperation she didn’t recognize. Did she want to poke at him—or please him? “Green light is yes, yellow light is I’m not sure and red light is stop.”

“Are you satisfied with that system as your safe word?” He studied her and he was so thorough. It made her ache. “Let me backtrack. Do you know what a safe word is?”

“Of course I know what a safe word is,” she said. Or really snapped. Making no effort to modulate her cranky tone. “I read Fifty Shades like everybody else.”

Dorian did not wince. Not exactly. And yet she was in no doubt that he’d come as close to rolling his eyes as she’d ever seen. “This is not the place to mention that book, if you please.”

And Erika realized that she hadn’t…forgotten she was kneeling, necessarily. It was impossible to forget. But it had changed into something else.

She felt quivery, the way she had before. It seemed to go straight through her, as if kneeling on the ground at Dorian’s feet had plugged her into an electrical current and it kept pouring into her. Making her sizzle and burn.

But the panic was gone. She felt calmer, somehow, when surely it should have been the opposite. Surely she should have been too outraged and weirded out to stay in that position—but the longer she stayed there, exposed and vulnerable, the more she started to feel something utterly contradictory.

Safe.

“What are your hard limits?” Dorian asked in that cool way of his. But not quite clinically, she could see. There was that intensity in his gaze. The way he held hers.

It was as if she was nothing but a bright pebble closed tight in his fist.

She had no idea where that image came from. Or why she reacted to it the way she did, everywhere—from a breath that shivered out too hot to that melting, aching fever in her pussy.

“My hard limits?”

“Repeating a question is not answering it, Erika. Try again.”

She thought she might be sweating. “Um. I mean…”

“I’m not familiar with those sexual practices. Enlighten me.”

“There are just so many things,” she said, because she had to say something. Even if it was desperate.

“Then perhaps we should narrow it down.”

One of his dark brows rose, and she had the vague notion that it made him look demonic. What it did not do was detract in any way from his appeal. Maybe, she thought wildly, there really was something the matter with her. But she didn’t rise from her knees. She didn’t bolt again, the way some part of her wanted to do.

But only so he can catch you, a voice inside her whispered, like another bolt of electricity.

“Do you want me to tie you up?” Dorian asked, his voice somehow managing to be matter-of-fact and silky at the same time. It felt like an assault. It made her think of that whip, arcing through the air and yet landing like a kiss. She couldn’t seem to stay still on her own knees. “Cuffs? Chains? And what would I do once I did tie you up? You seem to like the looks of the whip, but that’s hardly for beginners. A paddle perhaps? Or maybe you’d enjoy it if I gave you that spanking you so richly deserve?”

For no reason she could think of, Erika suddenly wanted to cry. She felt emotion well inside her as if she was bruised from the inside out. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, and found them lying open on her thighs, as if in supplication.

She thought she should do something about that, but she didn’t.

And she didn’t understand how the swelling emotion inside her could be so intimately connected with the greediness between her legs.

“I don’t think…” she started faintly.

But he wasn’t done. Dorian shifted position to lean against the wall before her, as if he’d never been so relaxed in all his life. She thought she might hate him.

Maybe she did hate him, but that was its own bright heat, like a lick. Right where she needed it most.

“There are so many things to choose from,” he was saying in that mild tone at total odds with the stern intensity in his gaze. “Cattle prods. Ball gags. Nipple torture. Watersports. Total sensory deprivation. Pony play.”

She was panting as if she was running. She still wanted to cry. And also slide her useless hands between her legs and make herself come hard enough that all these feelings went away. “I have a yellow bracelet on.”

As if she was brandishing a rosary at him.

“That means you cannot exchange bodily fluids, Erika. It doesn’t mean I can’t, for example, secure a ponytail in your ass, clamp your nipples and make you ride a spanking bench until you come. After making sure your ass is a nice bright red. Does that sound like the sort of thing you had in mind when you came here? On this magical mystery tour of your newly kinky sexual appetite?”

Her head shorted out a little, as those images tumbled around inside her. She felt as if she was drowning, the parts of her body he’d mentioned tingling as if he’d already done the things he’d said he would, though he still hadn’t touched her. She felt her own fingers digging into her thighs, but she was caught by the expression on his face.

A little too hard. A little too amused.

She got it, then.

He was trying to frighten her away.

And nothing that she’d felt tonight made any sense. Nothing since she’d found him on that dais, wielding that whip like a song. She’d come. Then she’d run. Now she was kneeling on the floor, staring up at him as if he could save her, when she was very much afraid that no one could. Because clearly she didn’t want to be saved, or she would have left the minute she’d seen that bullwhip in his hands.

But she already knew what would happen if she backed down. Dorian would be patronizing. He would call Conrad, who would be livid. And she would have wasted these months and accomplished nothing.

Erika couldn’t quite accept that she could have gone through what she’d already gone through and get nothing out of it.

“That all sounds great,” she said bravely. Mutinously. “I saw a pair of ponies on the way in. It looks…intriguing. Bridle and all.”

And then, for the first time in as long as she’d known him, she watched Dorian laugh. Not smirk. Not raise those brows of his. But actually laugh.

It was a rich, profoundly male sound. It slid over her like chocolate, thick and dark. And the strangest sensation washed over her, centering between her legs again, and she almost thought she might come again. Just from hearing him laugh.

“I believe you’d do it,” he said. And he shook his head. “That’s not a compliment. If you can’t articulate what you want and what you don’t want, you shouldn’t jump into it blindly. There are many places on this planet we can be coy about sex, but this isn’t one of them.”

“I’m not being coy.”

“No, you’re being thoughtless. Reckless. As immature as ever, and with far higher stakes than a backless gown at a charity ball we both know you wore to irritate your brother.”

That was exactly why she’d worn that dress, but that wasn’t the only reason she shuddered. “I’m glad you remember a dress I wore two years ago.”

“I remember the controversy.” The way his eyes gleamed made her stomach flip, in that peculiar mix of fear and hunger she was learning to associate with this man. “You enjoy controversy, do you not?”

“It’s Conrad who enjoys controversy, since he’s the one who causes it. I don’t know why you can’t see that, as his best friend. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

“If you were here for reasons that did not involve your brother, I would handle all this insolence, Erika,” he said, quietly. “But you are not, are you?”

And there was something about the very quietness that made her think of that whip again. Precise. Intense.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I’m allowing you to keep your eyes raised. I’m allowing you to talk back to me, glare and conduct yourself as if this isn’t a power exchange. These are gifts I could rescind at any moment.”

Could he see her heart slam against her ribs? “I thought I had safe words.”

“Do you feel that you need one? All we’re doing is discussing terms.”

“I haven’t agreed to anything.”

“You don’t need to agree to anything to employ simple courtesy, Erika.” And this time, his voice was a lash. A stark command. “When you’re on your knees or otherwise involved in a scene with me, you call me sir. Or Master Dorian. And I’ll expect you to address me that way every time you open your mouth.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

But she remembered where she was. They weren’t, in fact, standing on a ballroom floor in Greece in sight of her mother and disapproving brother. She had chosen to come here. She’d known what kind of club it was. That brow of his inched upward and she shook deep inside.

Even as her pussy flooded all over again.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said again. “Sir.”

Because over her dead body would she call him Master anything.

“Thank you,” he said, and she was certain that was an unholy amusement in his dark eyes. But his mouth remained stern, the way it always did. “It is not ridiculous. And no, I’m not on a power trip, which I’m sure is the next thing you plan to say. As insolently as possible.”

“Oh, come on. Surely your whole thing is a power trip.” His eyes flashed and she remembered herself. “Sir.”

“I’m interested in power, yes,” Dorian replied. “But it’s not a trip. There is no power without surrender of one sort or another. A fist is only as strong as the delicate fingers that make it up.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said crossly. But she was thinking of a hard little stone cupped in a palm. Fingers wrapped around it, making that fist. “And I don’t think any man ties up a woman if he doesn’t want power over her.” She saw his expression. “Sir. I thought that’s what is hot about it.”

“I do not want power over a woman,” Dorian said, very distinctly. “I want her to surrender her power to me. It’s the difference between demanding that you kneel before me or waiting for you to choose to do it yourself. Do you understand?”

And she wanted to rage something back at him, but even as she opened her mouth to do it, there was that emotion welling up inside her again. Still. That bruise getting bigger, making it so much harder for her to breathe, making her eyes prickle.

She felt protected, yet she was terrified. Overwhelmed, yet so wildly turned-on it was like she didn’t know her own body. And it hadn’t escaped her notice that he hadn’t laid so much as a finger upon her.

And sobbing on this hallway floor, she knew, was no way to do what she came here to do.

“I didn’t know you were this…” she started to say without thinking.

An odd look moved over his face then, and she would have called it regret on someone else. But not Dorian.

“I am all this and a good deal more than you can comprehend,” he said.

He pushed off the wall and moved closer, and it was better and worse at the same time. Sharp, impossible, until she felt heavy with longing and whatever kind of fear this was that made her head spin and her pussy wet.

He reached down, and fit his palm to her cheek, and to her horror, she felt tears well up in her eyes.

“I know why you came here, Erika. I imagine you thought you would simply show up before me wearing as few pieces of clothing as possible, and I would fall like a stone. I imagine this is the effect you’re used to having on men.”

“I didn’t—”

“Quiet.”

And as if shushing her wasn’t enough, he slid his thumb over her lips, and kept it there. Shutting her up whether she liked it or not.

And like everything else, she couldn’t tell.

“My desires run a bit deeper than a hot body,” he said, low and dark. “My needs require very specific outlets. I can fuck like any selfish fraternity brother you might have encountered out there, and I’ll get off, but it won’t truly satisfy me. So this offering of yours, while sweet, is doomed to disappoint you. You can’t give me what I need, Erika.” He studied her. “And even if you could, I will not be used as a tool to slap at your brother.”

Erika wanted to bite him, but she couldn’t seem to muster up the will to do it. Much less slap his hand away. Or really anything at all but sit there, his hand hot and strong as it curved around her face, wondering what on earth was happening to her.

Or how he’d seen through her so easily.

“I never said I wanted to use you.”

“Time’s up, kitten,” he told her, and it wasn’t until she followed his gaze down to her hands on her lap that she saw she was digging her own nails into her fists. Ha ha, she thought, angrily. A kitten with claws. “You’re not here to play, which means you need to go.”

“But…”

She could see from the look on his face that there would not be a second chance. She would never get back in through the doors of this club, that was certain. And she doubted it would matter if she tried to find him anywhere else. His office. His home. Whether he had her turned away by others or turned her away himself, he was done. His expression reminded her a little too strongly of the one he’d used on her all her life. Dismissive. Patronizing. Not at all the heat she’d seen before.

This was her only chance. And she might have misjudged things here, but it was only a matter of degrees, surely. The reality was that she’d watched him bring a woman to climax, and had come herself already. That alone was worth experimenting with.

She could handle him. She was sure she could.

“What if I want to play?” she asked.

“Very well.”

He stepped back, taking his hand and his warmth with him, and she was afraid those tears really would spill over from behind her eyes. Would he do what he’d threatened to do? Or had that been a promise? Erika didn’t know which part of it shot off the most sparks inside her. A ponytail? Or that spanking that had been haunting her since he’d first mentioned it two years ago?

Dorian’s dark eyes blazed. “If you want to play, you must prove it.”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

His mouth curved. “Don’t promise things you can’t deliver.”

He indicated the hallway behind him, and the club waiting for them, filled with people and music and all the kinky things Erika could imagine—plus a great many she couldn’t.

“Prove how much you want this,” Dorian ordered her. “Crawl, on your hands and knees, down this hallway and then out into the club proper. Keep going until I tell you to stop. You should be aware, of course, that the tiny little excuse for a skirt you’re wearing will almost certainly flip up on your back as you go. Does that thong cover you well, do you think? Or will everybody who looks at you be able to see exactly how wet and eager you are? With your ripe, juicy pussy right there for everyone to see and touch and comment upon—”

And it was too much. Pony play was outlandish but what he was talking about was a humiliation she could envision all too easily, all those eyes and him and the display that was all her and yet not at all in her control…

“Stop,” she managed to gasp out, while her heartbeat nearly bent her in half and that fever in her about took her head off. “Red light.”

“Yes,” Dorian said with far too much grim satisfaction. “Red light. Enough of this game, Erika. It’s time to take you home.”

CHAPTER FOUR

DORIAN MAINTAINED A penthouse in a quietly moneyed neighborhood that seemed far too settled for a man with his predilections. He was so kinky Erika had imagined he would live somewhere desperately cutting edge within walking distance of his club, but instead his penthouse reflected the old money he came from and the fortune or two he’d made himself. His place sprawled across the top of a luxury building that seemed a lot like a five-star hotel, which, once Erika thought about it—once she was capable of thought, that was—made sense for a man like him.

Edgy, yes, but also pedigreed.

He had taken her out of the club with a swiftness that left her off balance. But then, everything he’d done since she’d seen him on that dais left her reeling. He’d reached down and taken her hand in that hallway, pulling her to her feet as if she weighed less than a euro cent coin. And as far as she could tell, he’d been utterly unaware of the way the touch of his hand against hers…stormed through her.

His dark eyes had swept over her, through her, seeing everything with that same uncompromising gaze. Seeing things Erika couldn’t have articulated if her life depended on it. But oh, could she feel it.

He’d pulled her around until she was in front of him, then kept her there with a hand on the nape of her neck as he guided her back to the club proper. It was louder than before, or she was more sensitive to the sounds. The crack of leather against flesh. Moans and screams blending in with the pumping, seductive music.

Erika felt drunk. Wildly intoxicated, spinning and strange, when she was actually far more sober than she usually was in a club. Maybe that was why she did…nothing. She simply let him guide her, shivering a little because he was either really good at it or she was remarkably attuned to every little press of his strong fingers. Both, probably.

She was vaguely aware of him saying something to someone when they left that little hallway, but she didn’t think anything of it. She didn’t think, really. There was a riot inside her and his hand heavy on her neck, and she was still lit up from what had happened—and what hadn’t happened—between them. He led her through the crowds, past the bar and into a different foyer from the cavernous one she’d entered before. This one was all dark stone and dim lights, and all the things she’d surrendered earlier were waiting for her.

“Put on your shoes,” Dorian ordered her in an undertone, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the words.

It didn’t occur to her to disobey. Or even to discuss it with him.

Everything seemed dreamlike, or feverish. Or again, so deeply intoxicating that strands seemed to wrap around each other outside time. What she remembered was not how she bent and slipped her feet into her shoes, but instead that moment when she’d glanced up in the middle of it to find Dorian staring down at her. His face had been set in the same stern lines, but an odd gleam in his eyes made her wonder what tenderness looked like on a man like him.

And more, what she could do to earn it.

His hand settled on the nape of her neck again, and that was what she remembered most of all. The heat and the heaviness. The separation between his thumb and his fingers, and the way his middle finger rested on her pulse as if he was monitoring every last beat of her heart.

She had the strangest thought, as she simply allowed him to guide her out into the Berlin night, that she’d never felt quite so safe in all her life.

Though that thought didn’t make sense. Because whatever she was, it certainly wasn’t safe. Not with Dorian.

Surely she knew that now.

There was a car ride through the sprawling city outside her window, alive and kicking no matter the hour. The brash, almost punk-rock east gave way to the plump wealth of the west, the history of Berlin—torn apart and sewn back together—rolling out before her. It wasn’t until they arrived at his building, and he led her across a too-bright lobby into an elevator that required he release her to use his key, that she gathered her wits about her enough to remember that she had her own hotel room.

She realized that wasn’t accidental. He’d let go of her, ergo, she could suddenly think straight.

Erika stood across from him as the lift soared upward, knowing she needed to open her mouth. She needed to say something—anything—to break this spell.

But she didn’t.

She told herself it was natural. She was curious, that was all. She wanted to see how a man like Dorian lived. Was it whips and chains in a red room? Or a medieval dungeon in the lounge?

By that measure, the expansive apartment that appeared when the elevator doors lid soundlessly open was a disappointment. If a person wasn’t looking for iron spikes and spanking benches, it was exquisite.

Erika followed him into the great room, blinking as Dorian switched on lights. Then he moved farther into the apartment, seeming to pay her absolutely no mind as she looked around the loft-like space, with dark wood walls and concrete floors. She hugged herself as she stood there, taking in his aesthetic of clean, modern pieces mixed in with the odd, sumptuous rug that would not have been out of place in a sultan’s palace. There was astonishing, confronting art on an otherwise bare wall. Across the room, another wall was taken up with bookshelves that somehow managed to look clean and spare despite the tremendous number of books they held. So many books it seemed possible he actually read them, and wasn’t using them as a design element.

She didn’t know why it was so hard to imagine Dorian simply sitting down and reading in one of the deep, wide leather chairs or sofas that made up different sitting areas in the great room. He seemed too powerful to ever really be at rest. As if he had to be in constant motion, or standing over her the way he had in that hallway—or back in that ballroom in Athens, for that matter—or he would sputter out into darkness.

Erika didn’t realize she was staring intently at his books, looking for clues to mysteries she wasn’t sure she could name, until he walked back into the room.

And she didn’t hear him come back in. She knew he was there without having to hear his foot against the floor and without having to glance over her shoulder. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, like his hand had settled there again. She felt that now-familiar heat bloom in her all over again, coiling low in her belly and into her pussy. Only then did she look up.

Dorian stood in the opening where one room bled into the next, with massive windows all around so she could see the sparkle of Berlin out there in the dark.

“It’s late,” he said shortly. “I suggest you get some rest in one of the guest suites. They’re all located on this floor. I’ll call your brother in the morning.”

He might as well have slapped her back into awareness. Or doused her in ice-cold water.

Either way, Erika’s fingers curled into fists again and she suddenly felt much less fuzzy.

“Or, you know, you could also not call him.”

Dorian gave the impression of sighing and shaking his head without actually moving at all. Impressive for a man doing such a terrific impression of a stone wall. “That was a statement of fact, Erika. Not an invitation to negotiate.”

“All right, then.” She held his gaze, even though there was that part of her, quivering and soft inside, that wanted to lean further into all those things they’d only brushed against in the club. The part of her that wished she’d crawled before him the way he’d requested she do, exposed for all to see. She fought off a telling shiver. “You go right ahead and call Conrad. I’ll call your grandfather. He’s always had a soft spot for me.”

Dorian stared back at her. Erika felt the tension in the room surge toward an almost unbearable breaking point. But she refused to break. She refused.

Meanwhile, Dorian looked as arrogant as he did…astounded.

“You little shit,” he said in a kind of awe that she chose to interpret as affectionate. Or close enough. “Are you threatening to tattle on me?”

“I assumed that’s what we were doing here.” Erika was pleased she managed to sound, if not as calm as he did, far calmer than she felt. “If you’re going to tattle on me, why wouldn’t I return the favor?”

He tilted his head slightly to one side, his dark eyes focusing on her so intensely she thought she might bruise. But that wasn’t half as scary as the way he did nothing but…breathe. One breath, then another. She watched him visibly relax. Gaining his control, then slamming it back into place, she realized as she watched.

It was the hottest thing she thought she’d ever seen. No yelling. No insults. No other reactions—just Dorian handling himself.

She wondered what it would be like to be handled by him.

Her knees went rubbery. And far worse—or perhaps worse was not the right word here—it made her pussy clench, then ache.

“You are an inventive, insolent girl,” he said quietly enough after a moment.

It was not a compliment. And it took her a beat to understand what that note in his voice was, tangled up with the darkness in the disapproval.

She could swear that was disappointment.

Her heart thudded hard against her ribs at that, and there was something almost dizzying that tore her up, then settled in her stomach like regret.

Erika tried to ignore it. “So you keep telling me.”

“You are reckless. Immature and impetuous. And in so far over your head it’s a wonder you haven’t drowned yet.” He said those things calmly. As if he was making a grocery list, when she could see that particular intensity in his gaze that indicated otherwise. It was too controlled to be temper, but it lashed at her all the same. “You come into my club, you claim you’re there to play, but you can’t handle even the lightest conversation. That’s breathtakingly foolish.”

“I thought that was what exhibition nights are for.”

“What if it hadn’t been me?” he demanded. “What if it had been some other dominant who hasn’t known you all your life?”

“Then I imagine I’d be coming my brains out right now,” Erika shot back. “Instead of being lectured to death by my older brother’s irritating friend. You don’t know me at all, Dorian. You know Conrad. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not the little girl he thinks I am.”

“Then I invite you to stop acting like one.”

His voice was rougher then. Much darker in a way that made her breasts feel full again, with that sharp pinch in each that meant her nipples were already hard.

Why did everything Dorian do get to her like this? When he clearly thought so little of her?

“I don’t know what makes you think you get to tell me what to do.” Erika eyed him, then dug into her story, because she had no intention whatsoever of telling him the truth. Not now. “Everyone knows that Walfreiheit is the best BDSM club in Berlin. Maybe in the world. How was I supposed to know that Conrad’s school friend would be there the night I got in, flinging a whip around, and then up for a spot of bullying?”

“Oh, little girl,” Dorian said with a dark amusement that licked over her, then knotted up inside her. “I haven’t begun to bully you.”

“You’re the one who keeps threatening me with my brother. Do you run back to him and tell him every last thing that you do? Or do you only feel you need to report on me? I’m all grown-up, Dorian, and Conrad lost his right to comment on what I do with my life when he kicked me out of my own family.”

This time he really did roll his eyes. “Your mother seems to have cushioned that blow nicely.”

“And look at that. One more thing that’s entirely my business and not yours. At all.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Dorian told her. In that calm way that made her want to scream, though she didn’t. “Do you? Standing in my home and hurling accusations at me at three in the morning is not a particularly smart way to convince me of your maturity, Erika.”

“I don’t have to convince you of anything, Dorian. You’re not my friend. You’re not my brother. And when I tried to do the BDSM thing like anyone else might have in that club—”

“You safe worded out.”

But his voice changed. It took on that ruthlessly uncompromising quality she remembered from the club. And more, it had an instant effect on her. Her breathing changed. Her chest felt tight.

Suddenly she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from his.

“I was momentarily overwhelmed.” She said it distinctly. Almost loftily, trying to convince herself as well as him. “I didn’t realize that using a safe word meant being dragged out of the club into the street. You should have made that clear.”

“Careful,” he advised her. “Or you might get what you’re asking for. And then what?”

“Then let me be more explicit,” Erika threw at him. She stood straighter, ignoring that pulling sensation in her breasts, her pussy. Her whole body. “I went to that club for a BDSM experience. Not an older-brother’s-best-friend-acting-like-a-dick experience, because I’ve already had that, thanks. So if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to leave, go back and tell them I was spirited away against my will.”

“Really.” There was even more of that amusement then, so dark and dangerous she could feel the edge against her skin like a blade. “And what will you do when you’re there?”

“Whatever I feel like doing.” She smirked at him and knew the moment she did it that it was a mistake. But she committed to it anyway, because she was nothing if not brazen when it was only going to get her in trouble. “You don’t get to decide how I behave, Dorian. You don’t get to decide a damn thing I do.”

“Erika.”

His voice was a crack, like that whip of his. Erika felt her breath go out of her in a rush. All he’d said was her name, but it hit her like a command. Like his hand wrapped against the nape of her neck, guiding her where he wanted her to go.

All she could do was stare back at him, mutely, entirely too aware of her pulse going wild and her breath sawing in and out of her lungs.

“You don’t need to go back to the club to have a BDSM experience,” he told her. “Lucky for you, I’m a BDSM experience all by myself.”

“Lucky me,” she said. Faintly. Because the floor appeared to be tilted beneath her feet and she knew that couldn’t be real. It only felt real. “But maybe I want…a different experience. Far away from you and your threats to involve Conrad.”

His mouth moved into a curve that was in no way a smile.

“Tonight you have two options. Me, or sleep.”

She hoped he couldn’t see the way she quivered deep inside, and stood straighter to hide it. “This is Berlin. There are clubs everywhere. I can—”

“Erika, hear me on this if nothing else. You will not get into any BDSM club in this city. Tonight or ever again. It will take one call.”

Her breath went a little ragged, but she believed him. She’d heard entirely too much about his reputation over the past two years to think he couldn’t do exactly what he said he would.

“Me,” he said again. He angled his head toward the hallway that stretched off behind her. “Or sleep. Choose now.”

She was choosing sleep, obviously. She would meekly shuffle off to a bedroom like the biddable girl she’d never been, count to a hundred or something, then leave. Or maybe she would just leave now, without the charade. Because there was no way she was taking the other option. No way in hell. That little scene in the club had been more than enough—it had been too much, thank you.

But…something deep inside her whispered. But what if…?

After all, she’d spent so long getting here. And she might find this—him—more overwhelming than she’d expected, but there was no denying the fact it turned her on. Just as he did. And he was supposed to be the best. Maybe here in the privacy of his home, he wouldn’t scare her the way he had in that hallway. Even if he did, there wouldn’t be a crowd of witnesses.

And she still couldn’t think of a better way to stick it to her obnoxious older brother.

Blah, blah, blah, that voice inside her commented. What matters is that you’re wet. And very, very hungry.

Maybe that was the real point of all of this. The things that had happened tonight had left her balanced precariously on the edge of a very high cliff, and despite everything, Erika…wanted to jump.

She met his gaze again and wasn’t at all surprised to find him watching her in that intent, edgily patient way of his.

He didn’t pressure her. He didn’t have to. He was a wall. All she had to do was walk toward that wall or away from it.

“Have you decided?” he asked, as if he’d offered her a glass of water.

She nodded. Jerkily.

“Use your words, please.”

Erika swallowed, but her throat stayed dry. Half of her screamed at her not to do this—to get the hell away from him—but the other half was far too curious. And much too focused on that need between her legs.

That and the dangerous gleam in his gaze that she could feel inside her.

“You,” she said. “I choose you.”

And this time, the smile that spread over his stern mouth washed over her like heat. Or maybe she was already regretting her choice—

“Excellent,” Dorian said, and she thought he sounded pleased. It amazed her how much she wanted to please him. He didn’t move farther into the room, and she could have sworn he loomed over her all the same. “Let’s start by addressing your disrespectful attitude, shall we? On your knees. Eyes on the floor.”

“But—”

“You will speak only when spoken to,” he said, his voice that calm force that made her feel giddy and terrified at once. “You will answer any question I ask, and, Erika, let me be very clear. I expect and require total honesty. On your knees. Now.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t sound particularly sharp or angry. If anything, he sounded even calmer than before.

And still, that power he wielded hit her like a blow. That was the only way she could describe the massive force that seemed to push her forward, almost against her will. She didn’t think it through and worry over it from every angle. She sank down on her knees and found her hands on her thighs again. And it was easier than she’d imagined to cast her eyes down toward the ground.

Then there was nothing but her breath. Her panic and anticipation, tangling around into something else. Something hot and liquid that streaked through her, lighting her up and settling like a weight in her pussy.

And because she wasn’t looking at him any longer, he seemed bigger. As if he filled the vast room, taking up all the space and air. He made her shake, and he hadn’t done anything yet. She’d done it to herself.

She got it then, in a way she never had when she’d been playing with party favor floggers before. He made her want to do this to herself. He made her want the roller coaster of sensation and emotion.

It was like an adult magic trick. And she was still shaking.

“Very nice,” he said from across the room, and his approval made her flush, then feel as if she was blooming, somehow. “Obedience looks good on you.”

She thought he was goading her, but she was determined that he wouldn’t succeed. She glared at the floor and ordered herself to keep her hands out of telltale fists.

“Let me be clear about what is going to happen now,” Dorian said, almost conversationally. If she ignored that kick of command and heat wrapped up in his words and the way he delivered them. “I’m going to spank you. Your behavior tonight has been disgraceful. Keep those eyes down, please. And I would strongly caution you not to say whatever it is you’re about to say.”

Erika jerked her head back down, her heart pounding hard in her chest. She felt outraged. Insulted. How dare he call her disgraceful?

Her mind veered away from the spanking part.

“I want you to listen to me, Erika,” he continued, pitiless and relentless, and in exactly the same calm tone. And the steadier he sounded, the more wildly out of control she felt. Her eyes were blurry, and she told herself that was why it seemed as if her hands were shaking. “Ignore the noise in your head. Ignore all those lies you like to tell yourself and everyone else. Focus on me. Only me. Here, now, and until I say otherwise, the only thing you have to worry about is doing exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand me?”

She sucked in a shaky breath. “Yes, but—”

“Yes is a complete sentence, kitten.”

She had to bite her own tongue, actually bite it, to keep from snapping back at him. He was maddening. How could he sound so blasé when he was saying something so…

But she was the one who was still kneeling. She was the one who kept doing as he said. She was the one he’d threatened to spank and here she was, still kneeling here like she had no choice. When she had every choice. When this was her choice.

“We will use the same safe-word structure as before. I want you to tell me what that is, now. With no editorializing.”

“Green light means everything is good, fine. Yellow light means I’m not sure about something. Or I want to pause. And red light means stop.”

“Very good.”

He moved then, and she could track the sound of him, but she didn’t dare look up. It was more than that—it felt as if his hand was on the back of her neck again, holding her head down, when he wasn’t even near her.

It was only when she heard the sound of his big body against leather cushions that she realized he’d sat himself down on the wide couch that faced her.

“Come here,” Dorian commanded. “And I want you to crawl.”

Was she really going to do this? Erika slid her hands off her thighs, not surprised to discover they were damp. She leaned forward, putting her palms on the ground, and then she froze.

“Now, Erika,” Dorian said in that same implacable way. “And I already told you how I’d like it to look. I want to see that ass bared. There’s no one here but me, but go ahead and imagine you’re back in the club. The only thing you should be focused on, there or here, is me.”

She told herself he was a narcissist. A lunatic. An asshole of the highest degree.

But she was the one who slid her hands forward, then dragged her knees along behind. Once. Again. And then, without even meaning to, really, she was crawling across the floor.

She couldn’t say she remembered the last time she’d crawled anywhere. She felt foolish. Exposed again, and it didn’t matter that they were alone here. Her skirt slid to her waist, and she couldn’t seem to keep herself from imagining the picture she made: a wanton little slut, crawling across the floor to obey him.

The thought nearly made her come again.

She made it over to him, and found herself at his feet.

“Look at me.”

His voice was gentle enough, but with that steel beneath that made her feel as if she was on some kind of leash. She lifted her head.

And the look in his eyes took her breath away.

Dorian reached over and brushed his fingers over one cheek, then slid his palm to hold her there. Once again, the touch of his hand got beneath her skin. It made her want to squirm. Or worse, beg.

“Thank you for doing as I asked,” he said, and again, the approval in his voice made her heart skip a beat.

His palm was warm, but the gleam in his dark eyes was hot. And she felt stretched between the two, flushed and obvious and so needy it hurt.

“I expect you to take your punishment exactly like this,” he told her, as if he could read her mind. Or her greedy pussy. “I’m going to spank you. It’s going to hurt. This is not for your pleasure, though I expect pleasure might be one of the things you feel. You don’t understand boundaries, and I’m going to teach them to you. Thank me.”

She had to fight the wave of dizziness. Of shame and fury and still, that horrible curiosity that she was afraid was the truth of her.

“Thank you,” she gritted out, somehow.

His gaze was cool. One brow rose. “Thank you, who?”

At least she knew this one. “Sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I find that grudging tone disrespectful.” But his thumb moved over her cheek almost tenderly. “Such a pretty face, and yet, so deeply insolent. You told me you were a grown woman, did you not? Now is your chance to prove it.”

She opened her mouth, but something in the way his eyes gleamed stopped her.

“You have said a great many things tonight.” Dorian’s voice was even quieter, like thunder that rumbled so deep inside her only she knew what a catastrophe it was. And she couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. She couldn’t seem to do anything but breathe too hard, too fast, and burn. “But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You’ve spent your whole life writing checks with that mouth that your body can’t cash. Tonight, we’re going to settle your accounts.”

He dropped his hand, then sat back. “You may stand.”

Suddenly, crazily, Erika didn’t want to stand. She wanted to stay where she was, there on her knees at his feet, where it was safe.

When she knew full well there was nothing safe about kneeling in front of this man.

Dorian watched her intently. With that armored, intense patience that made her want nothing more than to do what he wanted. However he wanted it.

Something spooled out inside her, then, that had nothing to do with the way her mind raced. It felt long held. Secret and certain.

And the more it unwound itself within her, the less jittery she felt, even when she knew he wasn’t kidding around. Dorian had every intention of hurting her. Deliberately. Spanking her like a child, because he thought that would teach her something—

No, that thing inside her corrected her. Not like a child.

Because this was about sex and this was about submission, and ultimately it was about her choice to combine those things and let him pick the path they took. She could use her safe word at any time. She could be up and walking away from him right now.

The issue wasn’t that Dorian wanted to spank her. It was that deep down, Erika wanted to let him spank her.

Or she wouldn’t be here, at his feet, fighting herself while he waited. And watched.

And Erika couldn’t tell if she was shuddering because she couldn’t bear the thought, or because she was terrified of what she might actually learn from this. Who she might become when he was done with her.

But either way, she stood.

“Lovely,” he said, and it made her flush with that same strange pride. Then he patted his thighs, his dark gaze its own command. “Now lie down.”

CHAPTER FIVE

ERIKA MIGHT HAVE thought she was on the verge of being sick, if it weren’t for that blazing fire in her pussy that made a lie out of all the other sensations that sloshed around inside her. Her heart jolted, her stomach dropped, her skin felt stretched too tight… But still she burned.

And all Dorian did was sit there, almost lazily, watching her intently as she battled herself.

He did nothing to encourage her. He did nothing to hurry her along.

He only waited as if he was in absolutely no doubt that no matter her struggle, she would do exactly what he’d told her to do.

Because you want to do it, something in her whispered.

She was that hard, small stone in his palm, and he would make a fist only if she admitted it. If she allowed it. If she laid herself across his lap and submitted the way she wanted to, with every last part of the melty, swoony thing currently burning up inside her.

“Were my instructions unclear?” Dorian asked, mildly enough.

But nothing about the intensity in his dark gaze was mild.

Erika let out a breath that turned into something like a sob, and then she lowered herself over him.

It was awkward. His thighs were much too hard, and she was too…aware of everything. The way her breasts pressed into the leather cushion and how weird it was to crawl over another person like this in the first place. Much less for the reason she was doing it.

“I want you to lace your hands behind your head,” Dorian said, and she instantly felt calmer and more on fire at the same time.

It was like the more she melted, the more of her there was to melt.

And it was a lot different to hear him talk now. In this position. She shifted, and his hand came down to the small of her back, holding her there. Firmly, yet light enough that if she’d wanted to, she could have rolled away from him. Thrown herself on the floor, run for the door—

But she only exhaled. Loudly.

And stayed where she was.

“Hands, please,” he said calmly. But there was no mistaking the power in his voice.

God, that power.

Erika had spent her whole life careening about from one so-called authority figure to the next, always laughing when they tried to control her, because they couldn’t. They always backed down, or lost track of her, or proved easy enough for her to control. They had the position of authority, but not the power to back it up.

Dorian had the power. And she’d given him the authority, hadn’t she?

And she knew without having to ask that there was no possibility that she was going to control this, or him, or anything at all unless and until she uttered that safe word.

But she really didn’t want to do that.

Her skin was so oversensitized she thought she might come from the faintest breeze, and it seemed to get worse with every breath. Or maybe she meant better. She threaded her fingers together behind her head, and that changed things all over again. It thrust her breasts into the leather cushion beneath her, abrading her nipples through the strappy top she wore and making them pull tighter.

But she was far more focused on Dorian. His rock-hard thighs beneath her, muscle like stone, that made her feel deliciously weak. And that hand in the small of her back, holding her in place so easily—though it felt like a heavy length of chain to her. She could feel his heat. His strength. That power that she’d already spent two years chasing. She felt surrounded by him, and it made her body shudder in reaction. Or longing. It was hard to tell.

It was all the same, and she melted, and everything was much too hot—

He smoothed his other hand over her ass, flipping up that tiny skirt. She tried to imagine what he saw. Her bright red lacy thong stuck between her ass cheeks, painting him a picture. She could see herself and it made her hips rock a little, as if that could help her aching clit.

It didn’t. Especially when he widened his legs, effectively preventing her from rocking herself against him for any kind of relief.

More than that it reminded her, wordlessly, that he was in control. Complete and utter control, and saw everything. Every little wriggle she tried to make. Every expression on her face. Every flush that stained her skin.

For someone who had spent a whole life being both too visible and yet forever ignored, it was…gratifying. Terrifying. Electrifying.

“I’m going to pull your thong down,” he told her matter-of-factly, as if he was narrating the weather to a disinterested party. “I want your ass entirely exposed. It looks as if it’s never been touched. Has it?”

“No one’s ever really spanked me, sir,” she said to the leather beneath her. “If that’s what you mean.”

“I’m not surprised to hear that,” he said with what she thought might be a measure of satisfaction. “You’ve needed a good spanking as long as I’ve known you.”

She shuddered at that, and his hand moved, rolling her thong down over her hips. She expected him to pull it all the way off her, but he only left it tangled there above her knees.

Confining her, she realized. Making her feel dirty, tied down and, for some reason, so turned-on she wanted to cry.

Then he didn’t say anything. He stroked her ass in silence, warming each cheek with his palms. Roughly. He explored her, running his hands where he pleased, even delving into the furrow between her cheeks to press against the opening there.

Something arced through her, white-hot and greedy, a dark little gas fire of fear and longing.

“Has anyone taken you in the ass before?” he asked with that damned calm.

“N-no.”

“What a shame. Why not? Is it a hard limit for you?”

She wanted to kick him, but she couldn’t seem to move. “No. I don’t know.”

“Pick one or the other.”

“It’s supposed to hurt,” she said, scowling at the cushion beneath her. “Why do something that hurts?”

Though it occurred to her that the question was pretty silly, given her current situation. To his credit, though she had the sense he smiled, Dorian didn’t laugh.

“Because pain is temporary and, if employed deliberately and well, enhances pleasure.” He pressed against her tight bud again, then moved on. He rubbed his palms restlessly over her upturned cheeks, laying in a pinch here, there, then holding her down when she jumped. “I promise you that if I hurt you, when I hurt you, I’ll also make you come. Eventually. You may thank me.”

“Th-thank you, sir,” she managed to say, while she melted and burned, raged and wanted to sob.

“And you didn’t answer my question. Is anal play a hard limit for you?”

Erika felt the strangest trickle of something like relief then, when that didn’t make any sense. Why would she feel relieved when she was still waiting for a spanking of all things? And he was going out of his way to make sure she knew he never forgot a damned thing?

But in the next too-quick breath, she understood. That was why. He didn’t forget. He didn’t let things go. If he asked her a question, he expected her to answer.

He would not forget her or any detail about her, down to the dress she’d worn two years ago at a party in Greece.

He would not, for example, swan off to Cap Ferrat for the season as her mother had done one winter, forgetting that she’d left Erika alone on the estate south of Melbourne where they’d spent a span of years. She’d been seven. The staff had been lovely, but her mother hadn’t deigned to return until Erika lit a fire in one of the old, empty barns and the butler had finally given his notice, as he wasn’t a babysitter.

Erika had no idea why that weird, old memory was cropping up now. While she was close enough to naked and tossed over Dorian’s lap all these years later and in Berlin.

“Erika. Don’t make me ask you again.”

“No,” she whispered. “It’s not a limit. I would try it.”

“If I asked.”

“If you asked,” she agreed, her heart so loud inside her it hurt. “Sir.”

She felt humiliated and excited in turn, and the contrast lurched around inside her, making her squirm. And pant. And want to die—but not before he kept that promise that any hurt he dished out would come with a hefty dollop of pleasure, too.

Erika thought she might die if he didn’t keep his promise.

And then, to her horror and her delight, he reached beneath her and cupped her pussy in his hand. That was all he did. He simply…held her there.

She was the one who was quivering, sensitive and sweating with the force of a need that felt like madness.

“Look at this,” he said, sounding dark and approving all at once. “You can’t wait, can you? You’re desperate. Soaking wet. As if you’ve been waiting your whole life for someone to finally take you in hand. Is that what you want, Erika?”

She wanted to fight. She wanted to argue. And more than both of those things, she wanted to thrust herself backward and somehow make him move his palm hard against her, because she knew it would take only the slightest graze of her clit against him to make her explode.

But she didn’t dare misbehave like that. And he didn’t move his palm. As if he knew exactly what it was she wanted most.

“Yes, sir,” she made herself say, squeezing her eyes shut as storm after storm rampaged through her. She kept her cheek pressed hard against the leather, gripping her own fingers behind her neck—even though all that did was press her breasts harder against the sofa beneath her.

Everything she did made it worse. Or better.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, desperation making her voice shake. “I’ve waited my whole life for someone to take me in hand.”

“Not someone. Me. You want me, specifically, to teach you boundaries. To demand respect. To be the only person you’ve ever met who doesn’t allow your insolence to go unheeded. Don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

And it came out a moan, though he hadn’t really done anything yet.

All she was doing was lying here, in this remarkably exposed position, with his hand resting gently in almost the perfect place. And yet she was as turned-on as if he was fucking her. She’d had orgasms that were less intense than this. She was stretched out, gripping her own hands too tightly behind her neck, every part of her tense and waiting and so, so needy—

“You are in luck, little girl,” he told her, with a certain erotic menace that made her pulse kick at her even as she melted all the more. “Because I have no intention of going easy on you. I’m going to spank you. You’re going to count. You can sob, but you will lie still. You can cry out, but you will not fight me. If you use words, they will be of gratitude or your safe word and nothing else. Do you understand me?”

It was all storms and riot inside her. Why wasn’t she calling this off? Why wasn’t she rolling away from him, protecting herself, doing something to stop this?

Erika had played games before, with handcuffs and funny little floggers that tickled, and she’d thought she was practicing for this. But she’d never doubted that she was in complete control. Not once. The men she was with had teased her, but never hurt her.

This was different. Dorian wanted to hurt her. And would.

Or maybe it wasn’t that simple. He wanted her to allow him to hurt her, because the crazy thing was, she wanted him to do just that.

He saw her. He could list her sins, and had. He was the only one who could punish her for them—and then grant her absolution, too.

She might not be in control of him. But she was here because she wanted to be here.

It was as simple and as wildly, impossibly convoluted as that.

“Yes, sir,” she said and shuddered with the force of what she was agreeing to—but it felt as if she needed this. As if he was right, and she’d been looking for it all her life.

“Are you a reckless, thoughtless, selfish girl who needs this punishment?”

It was as if he could read her mind. She tried to control her breathing, and failed miserably. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you trust me to punish you as you deserve?”

She gave up on her breath, because she was sobbing. Big racking sobs rolled up from somewhere deep inside her, and made her body convulse. Her eyes were wet, her fingers so tight they were cramping behind her neck.

And still, all she could focus on was that blazing heat between her legs.

And him. Dorian.

At this moment, he was the whole of her world.

“Yes,” she managed to get out. “Yes, sir.”

He moved his hand from her pussy, and did it without so much as grazing a single part of her that would have kicked her deeper into that fire. And when his hand moved over her ass again, she could feel her own wetness.

The first smack shocked her.

It hurt.

“Count, please,” he ordered her.

“One,” she managed to get out. “Thank you, sir.”

“Excellent,” he said, and he was already rubbing the place where he’d smacked her, almost soothing it. But not quite enough to keep that deep red ache at bay. “Just like that.”

And then he got to work.

It was shocking. Excruciating. His hand was big and impossibly hard. And he was thorough. The pain of each precise smack jolted through her, making her kick her legs, but she didn’t roll off him. She stayed where she was, no matter the sting and the ache of it.

Erika counted. And thanked him.

And cried.

And he kept going. First he spanked one cheek, then the other. He smacked her in the crease where her ass met her thighs. He continued until her whole butt felt bright red and agonized, and then he started the same painful pattern all over again.

Again and again, until she wasn’t even pretending that she was doing anything but sobbing her eyes out.

She sobbed and she sobbed and he spanked her, and it fucking hurt. And she was strung out somewhere between the white noise in her head and the way her nipples were still too hard as they moved with the force of his smacks against the leather beneath her. Her ass was on fire, the pain outrageous and bright, and still, her clit ached and her pussy was so wet she hardly knew what to do with herself.

Dorian, by contrast, did not thrash about. He spanked her, that was all, but he did it in the same calm, considered rhythm as when he’d started. He didn’t speed up. He didn’t hit her harder or taper off into something lighter. He was laying down a lesson.

And all Erika could do was count. And sob for all the memories she didn’t want in her head right now, but seemed lodged in her chest anyway.

Though Dorian seemed determined to spank them right out of her.

When she counted all the way to twenty, he stopped.

It took her a moment to realize that, because she was still sobbing. He picked her up, so easily that it occurred to her he’d wanted her to crawl into that position with as much strained awkwardness as it took.

But that was something she would have to think about later, when she wasn’t so beside herself. He pulled her to him, cradling her against his chest. And then he murmured words that didn’t quite penetrate as he held her there, her ass sore and hot against his thighs and her face tucked against his collarbone.

For a long time, Erika cried. And it wasn’t until she was sniffling and calming herself, that it actually hit her that she was in Dorian’s arms.

And not only that, all the pain in her ass seemed to be radiating out and setting that raging fire in her pussy into some kind of inferno.

“If you keep squirming against me like that,” Dorian said, his voice so close, so dark, it made her shudder, “I will take it as an invitation to continue the lesson.”

She shuddered out a breath and stopped.

And then he lifted her, gripping her by the upper arms and holding her just far enough away from him that he could stare directly into her eyes.

The world outside had disappeared. There was only sensation, Dorian and that intense gleam in his eyes.

“You please me, Erika,” he told her, his voice grave. “You took that well.”

She couldn’t seem to think. Or speak. All she could do was hold his words close, unexpected light that made her heart feel bigger than it had been.

She pleased him.

Maybe that was enough.

And then, all she could focus on was that ache between her legs, made ravenous by the hot red ache he’d given her.

He set her on her feet then, there between his legs. Erika cast her eyes down without being asked, but she could feel the smile in his voice when he spoke.

“Turn around, please. I want to admire my work.”

She shuddered, but obeyed.

“Hold up your skirt, please.”

And she could hear her own breathing again—not quite a sob any longer, not simply a breath—as she stood there, staring at those books again. Pretending she wasn’t holding her skirt up high, her thong still tangled around her knees, baring the ass he’d spanked to his view. And also unable to think of anything else.

She knew he sat forward when he gripped her hips, then moved his hands painfully over her ass cheeks again.

“Stay still,” he ordered her.

And she tried. She really did try.

“Your ass is beautifully red and hot,” he told her after a moment. “I like all those tears on your face, Erika. I’m feeling magnanimous and very well pleased. Ask me for what you want. I might just grant it to you.”

She didn’t even think. She didn’t have to think. She knew exactly what she wanted.

Erika couldn’t have imagined that it would all go down like this, that he would scare her, then spank her and make her purge herself of some ugliness she wasn’t sure she even wanted to look at straight. But she knew what she wanted.

She’d only ever wanted one thing from him, above everything else. It was funny how clear it was now. All the world had seemed to narrow down to just one thing.

“Look at me,” he said, and she did.

She looked back over her shoulder to find his dark eyes blazing with the same intense heat she could feel coiled so tightly inside her.

“Ask me,” he ordered.

“Please, sir,” Erika said softly in a voice that sounded like belonged to someone else, but she couldn’t think about that now. “Please. Fuck me.”

CHAPTER SIX

DORIAN HADN’T MEANT to do anything but scare her.

But then she’d stuck her chin in the air, gave him that challenging look, talked about finding herself a different kinky club and… No.

He couldn’t allow it.

And somewhere in there, it had all changed from a lesson he could have imparted to anyone who needed to understand what a firm hand and some discipline could do, to…this.

His cock was so hard he thought he might burst. When he was never, ever out of control. Never with submissives. Never anywhere, for that matter.

She’s different, something in him whispered, but she was Conrad’s little sister, so that was impossible.

But at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to think about all the ways he had already betrayed his oldest and best friend tonight, because he wasn’t done yet. He had made Erika a promise.

And Dorian did not break his promises.

She couldn’t possibly know the picture she made, Dorian thought as he gazed at her now, or how badly he wanted her.

He had spanked her hard and she’d pinkened beautifully, so that high, round ass of hers was bright and getting redder by the second. He could see the pouting lips of her pussy when she bent forward slightly, still holding up that skirt to give him a better view. Her blond hair was a tousled mess from all that thrashing around on the couch, her face was tearstained, and her eyes were wide and glazed.

But best of all, bratty little Erika Vanderburg was looking at him as if she’d seen God. And better still, wanted some hard, wild communion.

He was so hard it hurt.

He’d never intended to do more than spank her. Teach her a lesson.

Liar, something in him laughed.

But she was looking at him with awe and greed and he felt the same thing return—and then some. And he couldn’t think about all the reasons why he shouldn’t do exactly what she’d asked him to do.

“Hands and knees,” he ordered her in a growl. “Right there.”

She rushed to obey him, and he almost laughed at the sight. She was so wound up, it hadn’t yet occurred to her how much she’d changed between the hallway at the club and here. How eager she was to obey him, with her pupils dilated and her pulse wild.

Erika liked a hard hand, he’d discovered. She bloomed under discipline. He made a note of that as if he planned to expand on that discovery—

But this wasn’t the time to second-guess himself.

Dorian reached into the drawer in his side table and pulled out a condom. He knelt behind her, freed his aching cock from his trousers and sheathed himself. Then he gripped her lush hips, making sure his hands pressed into her reddened flesh. She made a whimpering sound, but pushed back to get closer to him.

It made him smile.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he told her, wanting to sound cool but coming out gravelly instead. But that worked, too. “You may come whenever you like, but if you do not, you’re out of luck. You can’t touch your clit. You can’t rub yourself against me. I want you to submit, take it and see what happens. Do you understand me?”

Her head fell forward, as if she could no longer hold it up. As if the idea of submission on that scale made her weak.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered.

Dorian lined himself up with the entrance to her pussy, pressing his fingers into the curves of her ass because he knew it would sting. And remind her what she’d already taken. She shuddered, and he could smell how wet she was. How ready.

God help him, but she was a wonder.

He took a split second to admire her, there on her hands and knees, her ass red from his hand and her pretty pussy on display and ready to be split wide-open by him.

It was almost perfect.

“Put your face on the floor,” he told her. “Hands behind your back, please.”

She blew out a breath, then obeyed with a certain graceless alacrity that pleased him more than studied grace would have—because it meant she was too excited to contain herself. And better still, his grip on her meant he kept her pussy right there, pressed against his wide cockhead. As she shifted, he coated himself in her and had to hold himself back, hard.

When her hands were behind her back and her forehead was nestled against the oversoft, cushy rug beneath them, he wrapped one hand around her wrists and held them there. Maybe a little higher than she would have naturally, to make it fun.

“Thank me,” he commanded her. “For showing you this consideration and allowing for the possibility of your pleasure in the midst of this punishment.”

He felt the shudder work its way through her, and he loved the way goose bumps prickled all over her skin. She was so responsive. He was already thinking of all the wicked things he could do to make her shudder like that, over and over again.

Dorian hadn’t been this pleased and impressed by a submissive in a long, long while.

“Thank you, sir,” Erika moaned. “Thank you, thank you.”

And with absolutely no warning, he slammed himself home.

She came instantly, violently, with a scream that was like music to him.

He didn’t wait for her to ride it out. Dorian pounded into her, hard and deep, claiming her and taking her over and over. He fucked her through the wallop of that first orgasm, then straight on into a second one.

Erika kept screaming, prettier every time.

And still he kept fucking her at the same, ferocious pace, until her sobs and screams changed. And turned into his name.

“Please, Dorian. Please, sir. Please—please—please—”

He couldn’t have said what she begged for. Only that he took it.

Again and again, he took and she gave, and that was the beauty they made between them. That was the discipline and the desire, the coming together of two halves to make something much hotter, much brighter than either one of them alone.

Dorian made her come once more, and then, with a roar, he took his own pleasure at last.

And as he fell, he had the distinct notion that this time, he was well and truly damned.

Dorian did not typically spend a lot of his time questioning himself, his motives or his actions, because he’d spent a lifetime committed to honesty and openness in all things and that generally meant there was very little to question.

He was renowned for ferreting out secrets in the club and in the boardroom by dint of…simply asking. Then demanding honesty in return.

It was amazing how rare that was. So rare, in fact, that he’d heard it discussed in his office as his superpower. He’d always rolled his eyes at that, because if he had a superpower, he was pretty sure it had more to do with the kind of sex he preferred than a simple round of honest conversation.

Some people liked to claim he had been born confident, and he couldn’t dispute that. Dorian had always had a deep, invariable sense of who he was, what he wanted and what he was prepared to do to get it. That had come to him honestly. His father had been the disappointment in the Alexander family, lazy and addicted and good for nothing at all—but his inability to live up to the standards set by Dorian’s grandfather had merely given Dorian a good example of what best to avoid.

He did not lie because that was all his father ever did. He did not cheat because he had seen the pain his father’s various forms of cheating had caused, whether in his relationships or in the business. He was bracingly honest with everyone he came into contact with—especially himself.

But that was before his best friend’s little sister had turned up in his favorite club, sank to her knees and made something deep inside him hum.

As if he’d been waiting all this time to truly come alive.

He shook that unsettling notion off. And he concentrated on the practicalities instead.

Erika lay on the floor in a heap. Her eyes were closed, her face was still flushed, and her lips were parted. She was in the position he’d left her, as if she’d simply…folded into herself. Fully surrendered, fully his.

The woman of your dreams, a voice inside him pronounced.

Dorian rubbed a hand over his face, amazed to find he was less steady than he ought to have been.

He tucked himself back into his trousers, amazed that he had come so hard. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had gotten to him like that. And he didn’t feel empty and restless the way he did more and more these days, especially after sex. He wasn’t already thinking about the work he had to do or what his next extreme BDSM feat would be should he find a willing submissive to test it with him. He wasn’t already thinking about who that might be.

He wasn’t thinking about anything except Erika and that was…new. Like the feeling of deep stillness inside him that he knew he’d never felt before—and yet recognized, somehow.

Dorian didn’t know where the hell to put all that yet, so he shoved it aside. He reached down and plucked her up from the floor, shifting her to hold her in his arms. Then he carried her up the stairs to the master suite that took up most of the second floor. Her head was a soft and welcome weight tucked there into the crook of his neck, making the stillness in him feel like something else. Like religion, maybe.

He moved down the hall past his study, personal gym and sauna, and he didn’t bother to turn on any lights. Berlin was bright outside the many windows, casting the room in a dim kind of glow. And when he looked, he could see the first signs of dawn in the sky.

It should have been no more than another well-spent night in this anything-goes city. But that wasn’t how it felt.

Not when she was still groggy as he set her on her feet, there against the side of his bed with its four steel posters that he would very much like to tie her to. So groggy she hadn’t arranged her features in the usual way. She looked sweet. Defenseless. Wide-open and guileless, and Dorian’s ribs seemed to shrink. It was hard to breathe for a moment.

He couldn’t say he liked that at all.

Erika murmured something incoherent as he stripped her few clothes from her body. He laid her out on the mattress and left her there, murmuring a quiet order for her to stay where she was.

And she was exactly where he’d left her when he came back. He’d gone downstairs to the kitchen to fix her a little snack and a glass of water, with an electrolyte powder mixed in for when she was recovered sufficiently to tend to the inevitable postscene drop. He’d also found his preferred salve in the play bag he brought to the club, though he hadn’t used it in a while.

But that was one more thing he didn’t want to think about, because it felt…fraught. Fragile, almost, in this strange blue light of almost-morning with a woman he shouldn’t have touched soft and undeniably his in his bed.

Dorian shouldn’t have touched her, but he had. And that meant he had responsibilities. The kind of sex—and sex games—he liked meant there was no hit-it-then-quit-it option afterward. Especially not when things had gotten so intense between them.

Some submissives didn’t like to be touched afterward, but Erika had snuggled into him as he’d carried her. He wondered if she would feel that way with one of the fantasy dominants she’d imagined she’d find in the sex clubs he had every intention of banning her from—or if it was specific to him. To them, because she knew him.

Dorian really didn’t want to think about how he knew her, or how long he’d known her, and he was all too aware that the things he didn’t want to think about were starting to feel a lot like lying to himself. He wasn’t all the way there yet, but he had the creeping suspicion it was gaining on him. His jaw clenched on its own accord and he made himself loosen up as he sat down next to her on the bed.

She was soft and warm beneath his hands, and she smiled as he turned her over onto her belly. He took his time rubbing the liniment into the marks he’d left on her ass, taking more than a little satisfaction in the heat of her reddened flesh beneath his palm.

“I can’t decide if that hurts or feels good or both,” she said softly, as much to the mattress as to him, and when he looked up, her eyes were closed. As if she was talking in her sleep.

“Then it’s working.” He finished with the lotion and set it aside, then ran a hand down the elegant line of her back that had entranced him for a split second long ago—and that he had the sneaking suspicion would haunt him for a lot longer now. “Are you okay?”

Her eyelashes fluttered as she blinked at him. “Define okay.”

“Do you feel exposed? Vulnerable? Emotional?”

Her gaze was steady and much too blue. “Yes.”

And to his surprise, Dorian found himself smiling. “Good.”

“You wanted to make me feel things,” she said after a moment. “Didn’t you?”

“We can talk about it later,” he told her gruffly.

And normally he was remote, if caring, during aftercare. He tended to any wounds and made sure there were no physical complications. He held subs on his lap if necessary, made sure they got their energy levels up again. But he was not cuddly. He was Dorian Alexander. He did not snuggle.

And still, without thinking too much about why he was doing it, he crawled up onto the bed beside her. He pulled her to him and held her there against his chest. Which meant he was going to have to find another word to describe what it was he was doing, because it felt too good to be snuggling.

She shifted, and for another moment that made his chest too tight, he thought she might pull away. But she didn’t.

Instead, she settled against him, tucking her head against his chest and letting out a long, slow exhale.

And a knot in Dorian’s chest he would have insisted wasn’t there, because it never had been before, eased a little.

Unfortunately, that gave his mind leave to spin about at will.

Dorian had accepted his particular kinks and quirks a long time ago. Unlike some of the dominants he knew, he had never agonized about the things he wanted. His only concession to his supposed deviance had been to go out of his way to make certain that whoever he played with wanted the same things he did. The dynamic. The exquisite give to his take.

He took joy in the initial negotiation, the setting of terms and expectations. He reveled in building scenes and taking submissives on a ride. And even if he’d begun to feel more like one of those shabby old American theme parks of late, that didn’t change what he liked or who he was. All it did was make him more selective. It was edging up on a month, maybe two, since he’d gone to the club before tonight—when there had been a time he couldn’t get enough.

Dorian knew people thought it was a sickness, even in these so-called enlightened times. His father, for example, who had discovered his son’s predilections early and had spent years throwing it in Dorian’s face—and not only when he was out of his head. Dorian had been grateful for that, all things considered, because it had made it that much easier to cut his father out of his life. The way his mother and grandfather had done before him.

For him, always, it all came down to this moment. After the storm of play and passion, the simple trust of a well-pleasured, well-spanked woman. It was everything to him. It was the point.

And he had always enjoyed this moment, when surrender was absolute, and only trust remained. He didn’t snuggle through it, normally, but he always liked it. And tonight he couldn’t help noticing that he’d never felt so complete before. As if she wasn’t the only one who’d put an integral part of herself out on the table here tonight.

As if she wasn’t the only one exposed.

He didn’t like that thought at all.

And he really didn’t like, once it took hold, how that thought bloomed. And cascaded, because this wasn’t a random submissive woman he could have met in a club. It wasn’t only a surprisingly intense scene that had veered off and become something he hadn’t quite intended.

There was no getting away from the fact that this was Erika in his arms, naked, with a red ass he’d given her himself. Erika Vanderburg. Conrad’s little sister.

Dorian had never hidden his nature from his friend. There was no point when his father liked to trumpet it to the world at every opportunity. And, in fact, Conrad shared a number of his inclinations.

But he doubted very much that Conrad would find it even remotely acceptable for Dorian to be exploring those inclinations with Erika.

Erika seemed to be in some doubt about the situation with her older brother, but Dorian knew what she didn’t. Conrad loved her. Fiercely, stubbornly and perhaps too sternly—but he loved her. Dorian had been with him when he’d received news of their father’s death. And Dorian knew that one of Conrad’s major concerns, then and now, was how he was going to raise his spoiled, fragile little princess of a sister the way his father would have wanted.

Conrad had done his best to fill his father’s shoes.

Erika had flounced off and started referring to him as her enemy.

And Dorian, who had witnessed his friend’s struggle and had taken a dim view of Erika’s behavior himself, had repaid his friend’s trust and friendship by defiling the little sister Conrad almost viewed as more of a daughter.

Plainly, Dorian was fucked.

In his arms, there against his chest, Erika stirred again. Dorian needed to distance himself. He needed to repair the walls he should have kept between his cock and what he owed his friend—and fast.

But her face, her beautiful face, was open and vulnerable when she tipped it up to his. Her blue eyes were sleepy. And suddenly he couldn’t abide the idea of any walls.

“Lie down with me,” she said, and though she phrased it like an order, he knew it was a question. And an uncertain one at that.

Obviously Dorian didn’t cuddle up with his subs and sleep with them that way. He’d always imagined that kind of thing was better left to long-term relationships—which he had always been deeply allergic to.

Allergic? asked that same voice inside him. Or uninspired?

But all that unfettered emotion on her pretty face was easily the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

And the fact he was digging his own hole was clear to him. But he didn’t do anything to stop it. He set her aside and rolled from the bed, and she curled into a ball against his pillows and watched him strip out of his clothes.

He waited for that restless itch to wash over him, and told himself he would handle it for however long she slept because it was the least he could do for this woman he shouldn’t have laid a finger on—much less spanked and fucked and made cry. But it didn’t kick in.

Not when he crawled into the bed and pulled her tight to his front, one arm slung over her soft warmth. Not when they lay there like that, wound together like roots too tangled to ever be pulled apart.

She sighed a little as she burrowed beneath the covers, and he knew that sound. Surrender and safety. Beautiful, he thought.

And just this once, just because it was Erika, he let himself go.

Dorian held her close, matched his breath to hers and then, for the very first time, fell asleep with a woman in his arms.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DORIAN WOKE UP with Erika wrapped around him, tangled up in every possible way with her legs between his and her mouth against his neck, and stopped lying to himself.

She slept heavily and deep. He knew her scent now, and the heat of her skin, as if she was tattooed on him. And the memories of what they’d done the night before were now interspersed with what it was like to sleep in a sweet knot with her, turning this way and then the other as if they’d choreographed it.

As if he, a man who never slept easily or at all with another, couldn’t sleep unless he was in contact with her.

As if you will never sleep well without her again.

He could feel that weight in his chest, thick and deep.

But this morning, steeped in the reality his body had already accepted—since he had slept with this woman tucked up next to him and wound around him as if they’d done it a hundred thousand times before—Dorian stopped pretending he didn’t know what that weight was.

He had always been honest to a fault. It was part of what attracted him to BDSM and why he flourished in a subculture that prized communication, candor and authenticity above all else. He saw no reason to stop now, no matter that this kind of sudden awareness wasn’t exactly what he’d planned for this weekend. No matter how inconvenient the truth that lay there, beautifully naked beside him.

He took his time easing away from her because he wanted her to stay right where she was, her cheeks flushed with the force of her dreams and that ass of hers still red from his hand. He was hard, but then, he suspected that might simply be the Erika effect. If he claimed her, if she was his, he could look forward to mornings like this. To waking her up in whatever method he could devise to best take advantage, and his imagination when it came to the care and erotic torture of women who liked to kneel before him was boundless. And endlessly wicked.

Something thudded through him, and he had the distinct impression that it was the last of his defenses disappearing.

In what felt to him like a plume of smoke. Or maybe a bonfire.

There was no if about it, he acknowledged.

He had every intention of claiming this woman. If he hadn’t, he would never have fucked her.

Because deep down, he knew what he wanted. He always had.

His restlessness of recent months—the past year—had been because he’d stopped believing that he could get it. It seemed impossible that he could ever combine the two parts of his life. The heir to the Alexander shipping fortune needed to marry an appropriate wife. Dorian had always known that. Even his own father had done his duty in that respect, though Dorian doubted his brittle, elegant mother—now married to a sedate London financier who she could depend on to bore her in exactly the same way for the rest of their stodgy lives—would thank him for it. And Dorian had certainly met his share of kinky, delightfully debauched debutantes over the years, God bless them.

But none of them had inspired him for more than a night. Or in his case, a part of the night. The ones who played as hard as he did weren’t interested in anything but playing. And the vast majority of them were better at playing at debauchery than really giving themselves over to man who could lead them through the darkness of anything real.

He stood there, one hand on the steel post that he really was going to tie her to, one of these days. It was almost as if he could see it. As if it had already happened, when he knew it hadn’t.

Yet.

That word echoed in him like a premonition. Like a vow.

He pulled a light blanket up and over Erika’s body, little as he liked covering such mouthwatering nakedness. He would much prefer to lie back down, roll her over and lose himself in her again and again…

But he had some thinking to do. Some serious thinking to do.

And he doubted very much that he would get any of that done while he stood here, this close to slipping back into that bed, holding her hands over her head so her breasts jutted toward his mouth and waking her up the way he wanted to do.

Dorian showered, and toweled himself off, choosing not to handle his cock—because he had plans. He grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt on his way toward the stairs, and dressed before he jogged down them. When he reached the main floor, he found his mobile and checked his messages and email. There was the usual influx of work-related things he intended to ignore as much as possible. And there were also three messages on his personal voice mail.

All from Conrad.

And if he’d had any lingering doubts about the conviction he’d woken up with, it vanished then. Because Dorian knew he needed to have a frank conversation with his best friend today, but what he didn’t feel was any sense of guilt or shame.

Fuck that.

He padded into his modern, streamlined kitchen, and set about fixing himself his morning coffee. He answered the one or two emails that couldn’t wait, then tossed his phone onto the counter. Then he stood there, drinking his coffee and staring out his windows at his beloved Berlin. His grubby, beautiful, sprawling and unknowable city. He had lived here over a decade, had no plans to relocate and still found something new every time he walked down the street.

That was what BDSM had always been for him. Adventure and home in one. A refuge for a boy who had grown up on a steady diet of his father’s chaos, and a place where the man he’d made himself—uncompromising, brutally honest and as demanding as he was protective—was appreciated. Lauded, even.

And still, lately, he’d been thinking he was going to have to give it up. Because he needed to marry to carry on the family line in the time-honored fashion, he had no intention of treating any wife of his as shabbily as his father had treated his mother, and he didn’t believe that there was any possibility he would be lucky enough to find an heiress to please his grandfather who would also please him.

After all, it was notoriously difficult to please Master Dorian. His entire reputation was built on that essential truth.

And then here, last night, with the least likely person he could ever have imagined, he’d felt that particular stillness inside him.

Erika had pleased him. Deeply and completely.

And as she had told him already last night, his grandfather already loved her.

Dorian might have preferred a direct blow to the face rather than the sucker punch that realization felt like this morning, but he was nothing if not capable of rolling with what he found and making the best of it. It was what had made him his second fortune. It was also what made him popular at the club.

He didn’t have to glance at his mobile to see his best friend’s name again. Conrad’s name was emblazoned inside him, and the idea that a man he considered a brother would hate him for this disloyalty ate at him—but Dorian had never been one to hide from hard things. Hiding was akin to lying as far as he was concerned.

And the liar in his family was his father, not him.

He made himself a second cup of coffee and started thinking about solutions.

Conrad was an issue, but bigger by far than his best friend was the issue of Erika herself. Dorian knew she’d needed what had happened between them last night—desperately. Her submission to him had been real and raw and truly one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He wanted nothing more than to protect her. Help her.

And get them both off while he was at it. Repeatedly.

It was what he was made for.

He wanted to do his level best to use this particularly kinky spark between them to make them better people together than they could ever be alone. It was the sweetest, most dangerous game. It was the crux of the power exchange. He dominated, she submitted, and somewhere in there, her strength humbled him even as his power melted her.

It was Dorian’s favorite kind of fire, and he had never felt it burn as hot and as wild as it had last night. Because while clubs like his existed all over the world to create safe spaces for like-minded individuals to play at burning, it was still just play.

And what Dorian had discovered last night, when that fire had led him places he’d never thought he’d go, was that he wanted real. He was done with playtime.

But was Erika?

Because he could sit here and think through a thousand different scenarios to energetically explain his point of view until she surrendered the way he liked best, but if the only reason she was here was because she wanted to hurt Conrad… Well. That didn’t exactly fit in with all the futures he was building in his head.

He sat with that for a moment. And didn’t like it. Not when she’d given herself over into his hands so beautifully, so completely.

Dorian was hard just thinking about it. Hard and something more—in a kind of awe, really, at her ability to kneel. To submit. To bend to his will, and find herself brighter and more beautiful on the other side.

Fundamentally, he didn’t believe—maybe he couldn’t believe—that what had happened between them hadn’t gotten to her.

He figured it was possible she’d come after him for revenge, then found herself on her knees, significantly more compelled by their dynamic than she’d planned. Because the bedroom games she’d played before weren’t the same thing as the true, real connection that had blazed between them. No game could touch it.

And that connection was worth anything and everything, as far as Dorian was concerned. Especially when, until last night, he had truly believed that he would have to pack these needs of his away, meet a perfectly nice girl by regular means instead of in his club, where he could ask her for a list of her soft and hard limits, and sentence himself to a life devoid of all this glorious color.

He could get off by having vanilla sex, if he had to, as he’d told Erika last night. He had before, and he’d told himself that he would again. There had been times when he’d assured himself it wasn’t even a great sacrifice. Not when he had found it so difficult to find that true connection he craved out there in the clubs, and Lord knew that even vanilla sex was better than going without.

That was what he’d told himself. And he’d been more than halfway to convincing himself that he really, truly believed it. He’d even assured his grandfather that this would be the year he would start looking seriously for an appropriate wife.

And he had. He’d gone on a few perfectly nice dates with lovely women who did absolutely nothing for him. And he’d been gearing himself to simply…choose one and commit himself, if not to his own happiness, then to hers.

But today he found himself standing in a life that looked exactly the way it had yesterday, but was wrecked from the inside out. Changed entirely.

By one mouthy, spoiled, impossible brat who made his cock hard and his heart kick, even now.

Dorian set down his second cup of coffee, ran his hands over his face and accepted his fate. It was done, as far as he was concerned. And Master Dorian did not dither when he’d made up his mind.

He set about getting what he wanted.

And one thing Dorian was very, very good at was getting what he wanted.

He needed to get Erika to admit what had happened here between them, by whatever means necessary, and no matter what revenge fantasies she might have been cooking up in that fascinating little mind of hers.

He also needed to call his best friend, tell him what had happened—or at any rate, a highly sanitized version of what had happened, complete with a full accounting of Dorian’s intentions—and accept whatever reaction Conrad might have. Even if it was violent.

Dorian fully expected it to be violent.

But he was prepared to accept the consequences. If he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have done it.

He blew out a breath, picked up his mobile and dialed Conrad’s number.

Because there was no way he would be able to conduct the conversation he needed to have with Erika in the way he wanted until he talked to her brother.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Conrad said when he answered his phone. In the background, Dorian could hear the sounds of a major city. Paris, if Conrad was at home. Though in truth, the man traveled as much as Dorian did, and could be anywhere. Dorian hoped, given what he expected Conrad’s reaction to be, that it wasn’t Berlin. “Really. You’re not going to believe it. I’m getting married.”

“Funnily enough,” Dorian said, because there was no point doing any of this unless he was all in, “that was what I called to talk to you about. And I’m pretty sure you will believe it even less.”

Erika woke up when sunlight streamed in the windows, bright and warm on her face.

She knew exactly where she was.

Berlin. Dorian’s massive penthouse. Dorian.

For a moment, she let herself lie there as she was, curled up naked in his bed with the most extraordinary feeling that she…belonged there.

That she was safe at last. Cared for the way she’d always dreamed. And right where she was supposed to be.

But Erika knew better than to let herself get carried away with dreams that could never come true, no matter how at peace she felt in this bed. In this home.

She sat up gingerly, expecting there to be pain, but the ache in her butt was minimal and really almost…pleasant. Her pussy felt sensitive. Not exactly fragile, more…greedy. If anything, she wanted more of it.

More of everything. More of this. And more of him.

She shoved her hair back from her face, looked around and wasn’t surprised to find herself alone in the massive bedroom.

Images from the night before chased each other through her head, one more vivid than the last. Different emotions buffeted her, but it was as if she’d stuck her head out the window in the middle of a storm. She could feel the wind, but it didn’t sweep her away. And when she took a deep breath, then let it out again, she found herself smiling.

Because she felt like a new person.

She crawled out of the bed, running a hand down one of the dauntingly thick and sturdy posters, pretty sure she knew exactly what Dorian did with them. To her surprise, even after everything that had happened the night before, the notion sent a thrill spinning through her, pulsing its way down into her greedy pussy.

When she would have sworn up and down, her body rejected the very idea of morning sex, as a matter of policy. Apparently not Dorian’s kind of sex.

She padded into the bathroom and took her time in the oversize shower, letting all the many showerheads send hot water pounding into her as she slicked a body gel over her skin that made her smell like him.

She smoothed her wet hair back from her face when she got out, and wondered if it was because she knew Dorian that she felt so comfortable helping herself to his hairbrush. His products. And even one of his shirts. She tried to imagine what it would be like to wake up like this in the house of the random dominant man she’d pretended she wanted to find last night, but she couldn’t. She doubted very much that she would have stayed overnight. And if she had, she certainly wouldn’t have slept like that, crashed out in the deepest sleep she could remember having since she was a child.

Because when have you ever felt safe? a voice inside her asked.

Erika didn’t want to answer that. Because she knew the answer, of course, and it made her sad. She pressed a hand against her belly as she wandered downstairs, cataloging the faint pull here and whisper of something there, reminding her that she’d had a long and eventful night.

Had she ever.

She wished she was a lot more sore, she realized as she crossed the great room where she’d cried and come and had learned things about herself she’d never known were there. She wished her ass was far more sore than it was. She wished she could feel him, so long and thick and demanding as he’d pounded into her. The scrape of her breasts and her cheek against that rug as she’d come and come, his cock hammering into her to make sure she kept on going.

Erika wanted to wear him on her skin.

And she didn’t really want to ask herself if that was healthy, because it felt right.

She was too warm again when she padded into the kitchen, so bright with all the light of midday pouring in, and found Dorian there.

He was dressed in a T-shirt that made a symphony out of those arms of his that she appreciated a whole lot more this morning. And in new ways. Because of the pain he could inflict, the pleasure he could wring out of her, and the safety she’d found only and ever there.

But she kept that to herself as he fixed her with a dark, simmering look.

She could feel the tumble inside her. Something defiant that lit her up, and made her want to poke at him—though it was at odds with that shimmering thing that wound around and around, settled in her pussy and made her knees feel weak.

“How do you feel this morning?” Dorian asked, his voice polite. Cool.

Irritating, she thought and glared at him.

“I’m great,” she said. “Never better. You?”

“Erika. That wasn’t a random pleasantry. I want you to provide me with a detailed and honest inventory of your feelings. Can you handle that?”

And all that light tumbling around his sleek, pristine kitchen made her silly. Or bold. At the very least, it reminded her that it wasn’t last night. Not anymore.

“While I’m cataloging my feelings, maybe you can ask yourself why it is you have to be so incredibly patronizing.”

“I’m not patronizing you. You seem euphoric. I want to make sure you’re not peaking on your way into a serious drop.”

“I thought that’s why you brought me a snack last night.”

“What happened was intense,” he said gently, as if she might not have noticed. “Emotional responses to that kind of intensity and vulnerability often show up later.”

It was the way he said that, maybe. As if he knew things she didn’t—about herself. Erika found herself crossing her arms, even though she knew it made that shirt of his ride up her thighs.

Or maybe she wanted to linger for a moment in the way his dark gaze moved over the extra bit of skin she’d revealed. Because she felt a little bit like a junkie, desperate to see that flame blaze in his eyes again.

“If you have feelings about last night that you’d like to share with me, this is a safe space to do that,” he said in a remote sort of way, as if he was conducting a seminar on BDSM and was modeling appropriate behavior. And suddenly Erika was flooded with emotion, all right. Assuming fury counted. “No need to observe protocol. You can simply tell me how you feel, ask me questions or share any thoughts you might have that you think I should know.”

“I feel that you’re being unnecessarily condescending to a woman you had sex with when most people pretend to exchange numbers, have three seconds of awkward conversation and then leave. Will there also be a questionnaire? An exit interview?”

His dark eyes gleamed, and the power there almost made her gasp. But all he did was smile. Slightly. “Is there a way that you can share those sentiments without resorting to name-calling and insolence, do you think? Right now that’s a question. The next time I get you naked and on your knees, however, you may find there are consequences for such responses.”

Erika hugged herself a little bit harder. “All your life, you’ve been just like this. Aloof. Arrogant. Even when you were a teenager.”

“I’m delighted you were paying attention.”

He moved to an espresso machine that had its own countertop, and pulled two shots. Then he pulled out a carton of cream from his great steel refrigerator, poured a hefty dollop into the cup and slid it to her.

And Erika’s stomach twisted a little as she stared down at it.

“How do you know how I like my coffee?” Her voice was faint.

“You’re not the only one who pays attention.”

She felt shaky, suddenly. She wished she had something better to wear than one of his shirts with the sleeves rolled up. She wished her hair wasn’t still damp and clinging to her neck. She wished she could, just once, control herself before making a mess.

“I really am fine,” she made herself say. She lifted the coffee he’d made her and took a sip, then forced a smile. Because, of course, it was perfect. Exactly how she liked it. “Better than fine, now.”

“Why am I not surprised to hear that?” Dorian asked, and the lightness of his voice was at distinct odds with all that intensity in his gaze. It made her worry. It made her wet. “Most people have intense reactions to their first real BDSM experience, but not you, of course. Not Erika Vanderburg, recklessly careening through life, heedless and untouched by anyone or anything.”

And she might have described herself that way yesterday, but she didn’t like him doing it. Not today. It felt like a slap of his hand, and not because he was teaching her a lesson, but because he wanted to hurt her. A crucial distinction.

“I do not careen. I travel. I explore.”

He smiled again, but it didn’t exactly soothe her. He slid a plate in front of her, and it took her a few moments to realize it was…food. He’d put together a typical German breakfast of rolls, cheeses, meats and sausages. There were jams and honey, butter and mustard. Even boiled eggs.

And as she stared at the feast he quietly set out before her—matter-of-factly, really, as if he served her food every day of her life—Erika realized she was ravenous.

He’d known that, somehow. He’d known it in the same way he’d known exactly how to touch her last night to make her break, then burn.

Something deep inside her quivered.

But it didn’t keep her from eating.

“Why did you leave university?” Dorian asked, conversationally.

It was a strange question, but she had warm German bread and she couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything else.

“It wasn’t the right place for me,” she told him.

“Was it not for you or was it another way for you to practice self-sabotage?” he asked, his voice so mild she was starting to smile at him before his words penetrated. “That is what you like to do, is it not? You were a decent student, by all accounts. I believe your brother even praised you after your second-year marks came in—and you couldn’t have that. You only like attention when it’s negative.”

She swallowed, carefully, and set her roll down. Suddenly she wasn’t hungry any longer. “What is this?”

And though she was standing there at the counter across from him in his bright and happy kitchen, she felt as if she was back in that hallway. What was wrong with her that she wanted to kneel while he took her apart? Again?

Yes, please, something in her whispered.

But he wasn’t finished.

“When your father died, you went off the rails. Your brother took on all the responsibility, and you chose instead to make certain you were the enduring thorn in his side. I assumed that was because you were as thoughtless and empty-headed as you’ve acted over the years, but you’re not, are you? You only want people to think you are.”

“People think what they want.” She scowled at him. “And I never asked Conrad to take responsibility for me. It seems to have escaped both his notice and yours that I actually have a living, breathing parent.”

“Your mother might be the most truly self-centered human being I’ve ever met, and my father is an addict.”

He wasn’t wrong about Chriszette, and yet hearing him say that about her felt like a betrayal. Erika might complain about her, or want to complain about her, but she didn’t like Dorian doing it. Especially because he was right.

Now he was studying her like she was a book he was reading and finding lacking. Deeply, profoundly lacking.

For once in her life, Erika didn’t know what to say.

And the longer she stood there, gazing at him—or scowling at him—the more that feeling of well-being that she’d woken up with eroded.

Stupid, she thought, the sharp little voice in her head far too much like her mother’s. Always so stupid.

Because it really hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that while she had gone on a significant journey last night, he’d been…doing what he did. To Dorian, there was no connection between a moment in a ballroom two years ago and today. He wasn’t the one who had taken it upon himself to search her out. He hadn’t done “research” all over the globe, trying to figure out how to get next to her. While she felt profoundly altered by what happened last night, he didn’t.

Clearly.

Because the Dorian who stood there across a granite countertop from her looked exactly the same as he had when he’d tried to cut her down to size in Greece.

And suddenly, everything that had happened between them seemed dirty. And not in the hot way. Soiled, not sexy.

Why had she gotten on her knees? Why had she crawled? Why had she, a grown woman, let this man spank her like a child and then fuck her like some kind of whore?

And how had she curled up in his arms like all of that was a gift, then slept more soundly than she had in years?

She could feel her pulse everywhere, her heart in her throat as if she might get sick.

“Oh my God,” she said, soft and horrified, her eyes wide. “You hate me.”

Something changed, there in the intensity of that dark-coffee gaze. “I don’t hate you.”

“I think you do,” she said, shaken. “I should have realized. Here I was, thinking this was some kind of connection, and you were just…”

Dorian leaned forward, keeping his gaze trained on her, and she wanted to run away. Get away. But she couldn’t seem to move.

“Were you chasing a connection when you came into the club last night? Or was it something else?”

She laid her palms on the cool countertop, hoping it looked as if she was doing literally anything but what she was actually doing, which was holding herself upright. “What other reason could I possibly have?”

“I’ve wondered that myself since the moment you showed up,” Dorian said in that same relentless way of his that made her want to cry and made her want to touch him and left her messy straight through. “And the only conclusion I reached was that you really, really want to stick it to your brother and thought you’d use me to do it.”

Her heart was stuck in her throat. Or pieces of it were. And she didn’t understand why it was involved in the first place. “Because nothing could possibly be worse than getting tangled up with me, obviously, whatever the reason.”

“You’re beautiful,” Dorian told her, and what was wrong with her that she felt like the sun had come out from behind a cloud. “You’re smart and quick and funny. And I watched the strength you have in you, Erika. Over and over again. I watched you fight yourself. I watched you struggle and suffer, and I’m not being patronizing when I tell you that it was truly humbling to see you give yourself wholly and completely. To me.”

Her throat was dry, then. And her heart was a lost cause.

“But,” she prompted him.

Because if she knew anything, it was that when it came to her, there was always a but. Always.

You could be so lovely, Chriszette had sighed at her father’s funeral, but you’re so emotional. No one likes that much drama, Erika.

I know we’ve been friends for years, her supposed best friend ever had told her in boarding school, but I don’t really like you, actually.

I like fucking you, a great many of her lovers had told her, in one way or another. But that’s all it is. You know that, right?

You’re my sister and I love you, Conrad had said, frowning, after she’d announced she wasn’t returning to Oxford after all, but I can’t support this wasted life you want to live.

There was always, always a but.

“But I don’t understand how you can be the woman I saw last night,” Dorian said quietly, “so courageous in your surrender when you want to be, when the rest of your life is such a disaster.”

The more he spoke, the further away she got without moving an inch, and that was a blessing. Her own, personal gift. After all, she was used to being dressed down. Shouted at. She was everybody’s convenient punching bag, and there were only two ways to take that. You either curled in on yourself, a sad sack in every regard. Or you practiced your enigmatic smile in the mirror, pretended everything was a madcap adventure, and that it all rolled right off you.

Erika had always opted for the latter, because nobody got to see her suffer.

But you already suffered, something in her contradicted. For him. And happily.

“What about my life is a disaster?” she made herself ask. And she even smiled. “I have more social media followers than most celebrities.”

Because she couldn’t help but poke at the wound. Because it wasn’t bad enough that she’d woken up feeling safe and at peace, and it was ruined. He’d made an offhand comment to her two years ago and it had changed everything. She’d done nothing but think about him, all this time, and it had all led here. Where she was inviting him to make further cutting commentary, and…then what?

Did she really want to let him haunt her all over again? And probably worse this time?

“I’ve seen both sides of you now,” he said quietly, his gaze so intense it made her hurt. “And the woman I met last night was extraordinary. I spent hours this morning trying to reconcile her with this show you put on. You’re doing it right now. Why is getting attention the only thing that matters to you?”

“Because it’s the only way I matter to anyone.”

She said it without thinking. And instantly wished that she could claw those words back, shove them inside her mouth. Chew them up, swallow them down.

Her chest was heaving, and for a split second, Erika honestly and truly wished that she would die right there. Just keel over onto his kitchen floor, and be done with this.

Because surely that was better than suffering through that intent look on his face that she was certain would tip over into pity at any moment.

But it didn’t.

“Bullshit,” he said. Succinctly.

She felt it like one of those blows he’d rained on her ass last night. Sharp, shocking. Then the sharpness changed, into a dull ache that was almost worse.

When she had been naked before him, her hands behind her back and completely in his control, she hadn’t felt this exposed.

“You’re afraid,” he told her, his gaze steady on hers, though his voice was soft.

“Oh, please,” she threw at him, and it didn’t seem to matter anymore that she felt so…ruined. Ripped open, with the stuffing removed and no hope of ever shoving it all back into place. What the hell, she thought. “You should talk.”

“Me?” Dorian laughed, and it stunned her that she felt so many things and he seemed…fine. Just having a conversation while her world was on fire. “Little girl, flailing around throwing out accusations isn’t going to change the facts. You live a useless life by choice. I do not.”

“Of course not. My mistake. I thought this was supposed to be an honest conversation, not a self-congratulatory stump speech about how virtuous you are, when I’m standing right here, have known you for far too long and certainly know better.”

“I talked to your brother earlier,” Dorian said. Calmly.

Casually, even.

“Wh-what?”

“Conrad is getting married, Erika,” Dorian told her in the same unbothered tone, though his gaze stayed on hers. “He got engaged last night and his soon-to-be in-laws are throwing them a party. In England at the end of the month.”

Erika made herself laugh, though it felt like cut glass in her mouth. “Who would actually marry Conrad?”

And she felt a trickle of something like foreboding as Dorian studied her. For much too long.

“Lady Jenny,” Dorian said. He waited, and Erika was sure he could see that name fall through her like a sickening stone. “But you know her, do you not?”

Jenny Markham had been on Erika’s stair at Oxford when they were first years. They’d become fast friends, had spent their summers together, texted regularly and always got together when they found themselves in the same place. Given that the last text Erika had gotten from Jenny had been a week ago, with no mention of Conrad whatsoever, Erika was skeptical—to say the least—about this news.

But Dorian, who had not looked at her pityingly yet, seemed to be doing so now.

“Of course I know Jenny,” Erika said stiffly.

“Here’s what I need to know,” Dorian said quietly. “Is there any possibility that you can attend their engagement party and be supportive of your brother? And your friend? Or will it be business as usual for you, instead?”

People had thought very, very little of her all her life. There was nothing new in it. Nothing shocking.

But Erika found that further evidence of Dorian thinking the same as everyone else just made her want to sit down on the floor and cry.

She would never know how she managed to stay standing instead.

And he had an idea of who she was in his head, clearly, so she smirked at him. Useless. Disastrous. Afraid. She stuck her hand on her hip as if she was trying to be provocative. Just another example of stupid, attention-seeking Erika Vanderburg. Just what he wanted to see.

“I have no idea,” she said, not politely. “Are you going to make me?” She waited for his brows to rise, and that thunder to roll in across his stern, hard face, then made a face she knew he wouldn’t care for at all. “Sir?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

EVERYTHING WAS GOING as planned.

She’d walked into his kitchen with her hair wet, making her blue eyes look even bigger, wearing nothing but one of his shirts. He didn’t think she’d been trying to provoke him. Quite the opposite, this morning. She looked sleepy and sweet, and she gazed at him like he’d personally made the sun rise.

He hadn’t known how much he wanted to see her look at him like that. How it made everything in him settle. Then hum.

Now he wanted to see it all the time.

Conrad had not been amused. He’d been silent at first. That had been far better than the lethal clip to his voice when he’d spoken again.

My…sister, he’d repeated. My little sister and you. In your club.

Dorian had winced, but that was the thing about taking responsibility, wasn’t it? Sometimes it sucked. Sometimes it made people hate you.

But it was always the right thing to do.

I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, Dorian had said gruffly. But I have nothing but good intentions where she’s concerned.

I don’t feel anything, you prick, Conrad had snapped, except homicidal.

Dorian was glad the conversation was happening over the phone, or he imagined Conrad would have swung on him. And he would have taken it as his due, because he’d not only crossed a line, he’d done it in his own inimitable way. What older brother wanted to think about that?

You can try to kill me all you want, Dorian had told him. But that’s not going to change anything.

Conrad had made a frustrated noise. Then he’d gone silent.

Is she happy? he asked quietly.

I intend to make her happy, Dorian had promised his best friend. The only brother he had or wanted. I intend to dedicate myself to the task.

It had been a vow. And he’d meant it.

But that was the easy part, all things considered. Now he had to do the hard part, which was convincing this dragonfly of a woman—always alighting here, then buzzing off there, always moving, always changing—that he’d found everything he’d wanted in her. In one night. That yes, he knew his own mind and heart. That he’d spent his entire adult life committed to extreme self-awareness.

It was that or follow his father’s path. The lies, the self-deception.

Dorian had chosen to face himself in the mirror, no matter how unpleasant the sensation of cataloging his own flaws and working to change them.

He expected no less from the very few people he let into his life. Conrad had always been one of the few men alive who lived up to Dorian’s standards. He had no doubt that Erika would, too. He’d seen what she could be for him and with him last night.

And while he was busy celebrating that unexpected connection that had rocked him to his core, he also needed to make her see that she was worthy.

Of his interest and devotion, which he planned to lavish on her—in the way a man with his particular appetites did, that was—but also of all the other things she’d walked away from. The relationships she pretended didn’t matter. The empty life she pretended made her happy. All those things she’d made sure to ruin herself before anyone could take them away from her.

He aimed to give her the tools to take them back.

It didn’t take a psychiatrist to understand that a woman like Erika, who hid her truly sweet, soft, longing heart beneath so many layers of attitude and armor, had set out to destroy her relationship with her brother after their father died because that way, she lost him on her terms.

Dorian was ashamed he hadn’t recognized that years ago.

Then again, maybe he had. After all, he’d mentioned spanking to her in Greece. Had he sensed, even then, where they would end up?

“I can’t make you do anything,” he told her now, watching intently as her bravado faded. “You must choose, and accept the consequences of the choices you make. Are you prepared to do that?”

“Are we talking about my brother’s engagement party—or sex?”

“On some level, Erika, I think you and I are always talking about sex.”

Her eyes dilated and her lips parted, telling him she’d lost her breath. Dorian felt that intensity snap into place between them, stronger today. Because they both knew where it went. And that meant imagining where else and how hard it could go.

“I thought we were talking about a party,” she said, blinking like she wanted to clear her head. Good luck, little one, he thought. “And for some reason, you seem to think you can dictate my behavior.”

“You should know that I have every intention of dictating a hell of lot more than that.” He smiled at her faintly, over his granite counter and the food he’d prepared for her. He liked this. He liked her here, looking uncertain and mulish—and safe. “I’m a bossy man, Erika. Some people pay for the privilege of having me tell them what to do with their business affairs and their messy lives. All I require from you is that you let me. And thank me. Is that so much to ask?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? You seemed to enjoy it last night. Or were all those orgasms a decoy for your true feelings?”

She scowled at him. “Sex isn’t life. It’s just sex.”

But he could see the way she gripped the counter, her knuckles turning white, and he knew she didn’t believe that.

“Not the way we do it,” he said. “If I were you, I’d look at last night as a lesson.”

“Which part was a lesson?” she asked. “The spanking? Or when you fucked me, came hard enough to take the back of your head off and then cuddled with me all night long? Or maybe you mean you learned a lesson.”

Dorian was around the counter before he meant to move, and then it was too late. For her. He trapped her there, taking far too much pleasure in the little squeaking sound she made as she found herself with her back against the granite, his arms on either side of her like a cage.

He watched her face flush and her eyes go glassy. He studied the pulse that hammered in her throat. And the rich, sweet scent of her arousal spiced the air between them, making his cock even harder than before.

“I don’t like your tone.” He leaned closer, smiling when she jumped. He put his mouth on a set of goose bumps that rose along her neck. “Rethink it.”

“I don’t see why I can’t talk to you any way I like,” she retorted, sounding awfully tough for someone who was trembling slightly between his arms. And making no attempt to get away from him. “Or do you not see the difference between in a scene and out of a scene?”

“You called me sir, Erika. Do you?”

She flushed at that, and he saw some of that bravado leak away from her. “I was kidding.”

“Were you? Or were you trying to goad me into reacting negatively, the way you like to do in all areas of your life?”

Her mouth dropped open, and temper chased something like misery across her face.

“I wanted to explore extreme sex acts, not engage in a group therapy session,” she threw at him.

“Too bad, little girl. It’s one-stop shopping with me.”

She lifted her chin, and her struggle was all over her face. “You’re a terrible therapist. News flash—you’re not supposed to hate the client.”

Dorian stared her down, the dominant in him roaring in triumph when she flushed and lowered her eyes.

“I don’t hate you,” he told her, using his darkest, most dominant voice, because he knew she would hear him. Even if she didn’t want to. “Quite the contrary. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, Erika. And now that I’ve found you, I have no intention of letting you go.”

“What do you…?”

She was trembling, her eyes were wide, and she seemed to lose her train of thought halfway through. He liked it.

“But nothing comes easy, does it?” He shook his head sadly. “You found me. And guess what that means? Now you have to contend with me and all my demands. And believe me, Erika, they never get any easier.”

“I don’t want to contend with you,” she managed to say. “I just want to fuck you.”

“You can’t have one without the other.”

“Then I’ll fuck someone else, Dorian. Many someone elses. Repeatedly and enthusiastically.”

He smiled. “And how has that been working out for you so far?”

She flushed a deep, betraying red at that, pleasing him so deeply that it took all he had to keep from hauling her up against him. Her eyes got wetter and he knew that if he reached down between her legs, her pussy would be soft and hot and greedy for him.

“Surrender, baby,” he told her quietly. “I’m not letting you go.”

And he didn’t tell her how fully he meant that. He didn’t have to—not when she reacted as if he’d electrocuted her. He could see the fear on her face, and how quickly she covered it up with temper. Dorian had never wanted to wrap a woman in his arms so badly before, for the simple pleasure of holding and soothing her.

Without even paddling her first.

Necessarily.

“If you have such a poor opinion of my character,” she gritted out at him, though her eyes were too big and much too dark, “and this driving need to psychoanalyze things you know nothing about, why would you want me to submit to you in the first place?”

His smile deepened. “Because I want you to be the best version of you. I want you to make choices out of strength, not fear.”

And it shocked him a little as he said it, because he realized this wasn’t new. He’d been uniquely disapproving of Erika Vanderburg for as long as he could remember. But until she’d appeared in his club, he’d never been able to fully imagine her as anything but Conrad’s little sister.

“Not that you’re a wild egomaniac or anything,” she threw at him.

He let his smile cool and his gaze darken, and saw her shiver in response. It was that instinctive response she couldn’t control, no matter how disrespectfully she chose to speak to him.

“You have two choices now,” he told her with quiet menace. “You can leave. I won’t stop you or chase you. I had the concierge find you some more appropriate clothing should you require it, and I’ll have a car take you wherever you wish to go. No harm, no foul.”

Once more, he watched misery move over her face and had to order himself not to help her. It was her struggle. It was his job—and his pleasure—to make it all that much more pointed, sure, but he couldn’t do it for her. No matter how much he might want to.

He’d never experienced this so acutely before. He’d led many a submissive through a scene. But this was her life. And his, if he had his way. Theirs.

“Or?” Her voice was husky with emotion, just one of the many ways her body told him truths she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. “What if I have a taste for harm and foul?”

Dorian straightened, pushing back from the counter. He stood at his full height, aware of the way her mouth softened. He could see her pulse in her throat, rapid and obvious. Beneath his shirt, her nipples hardened to needy points.

Her body knew whom she belonged to.

“I’m going to leave the room for a moment,” he told her. “When I come back in, you can be dressed in the clothes I left for you on the chair. You can eat. Drink more coffee. I’ll leave you to it.”

Her breath was a scraping thing between them. “Or…?”

“Or you will be sitting on the table, completely naked with your legs spread wide, eyes closed and your hands behind your back.”

He watched her shudder.

“Maybe I have things to say to you,” she said, though her voice was thicker now. As was the scent of her need. “And I’m not sure I want all of my sentences to end in sir.”

“Noted.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t give her permission or argue the point, he just walked away. He went back out to the great room, where he’d left his bag, pulled out the item he’d found earlier and then took his time coming back.

And he wasn’t surprised to find her right where he wanted her. But he was pleased.

Everything in him went still, then hot. His predatory focus kicked in, hard. He wanted to eat her alive.

He intended to do just that.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he told her as he moved closer. “I won’t be happy if you pass out.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Baby, we’re deep in it now. Your usual safe word applies. If you continue to speak to me disrespectfully, I’ll respond. And I don’t think you’ll like it.”

He roamed toward her, feeling the sweet kick as the beauty of her splayed-open position flooded through him. She sat exactly as he’d imagined she would, stark naked on his table like his very own feast, her body flushed and soft against the hard black granite of the tabletop. Her hands were behind her back, just as he’d asked, making her breasts jut forward and up. Her eyes were shut tight, as if she had to frown to make herself obey. And in between her wide-open legs, he could see her pussy glistening with need.

She was perfect.

All he had to do was prove it to her.

“The only time you seem to behave is when I tell you to,” he said as he came closer. “Do I have to parade around an engagement party with you on a leash to make you behave appropriately? Because I think you know I will.”

When she only breathed, hard and fast, he reached out to run his palm over her shoulder. Then he took one of her pebble-hard nipples between his fingers. And pinched it.

She hissed, then squirmed, telling him she’d felt it in her pussy, too.

“Answer me, please.”

“No…no.” She panted. “I don’t need a leash.”

But he doubted he was the only one imagining it, then.

“I’m not punishing you, Erika,” he said as he continued to pinch her nipple, raising his other hand to treat her other one the same. She was instantly responsive, arching her back to press her breasts more completely into his palms no matter what expression she wore on her face. “I’m encouraging you. It would please me greatly if you did not take the occasion of your brother’s engagement party to make a spectacle of yourself.” He frowned when her eyes shot open, mutinous and mad. “Eyes closed. Now.”

She shut her eyes again, even as she flushed a bright red that he took for temper. And her reaction to her obedience, if he had to guess.

“I want you to wear something conservative that will cause absolutely no comment at all, unless it is a quiet compliment. The only attention you should be interested in is mine.”

She shuddered, hard.

Dorian continued, “I want you to congratulate Conrad, and his fiancée, and if while you’re doing it you can work in an apology for past behavior, I will be delighted. Do you understand what I’m asking of you?”

“I understand it,” Erika said after a moment while he plucked at her nipples. “But I don’t know what makes you think that after you spent all this time insulting me I would do a single thing for you.”

“I’ll tell you why,” he said.

Dorian moved between her legs, enjoying the contrast between her total nakedness and the fact he was dressed. He ran his palms over her thighs, then gripped them to yank her closer to the edge of the table. Only when her ass was on the edge did he again cup her lovely breasts in his hands. He moved his thumbs over her nipples, rougher than before, and enjoyed the way it made her squirm. Then he leaned forward, and put his mouth to her ear.

“You will do it because I want you to,” he told her. “Because it will please me. Because I want you to be the person I know you can be.”

Goose bumps marched down her neck, toward her collarbone. And below.

“Or I could gently suggest that you go fuck yourself,” she said, defiant to the last.

“Let me convince you,” he said, his voice a dark ribbon of sound.

Dorian bent down and took one of her nipples in his mouth, sucking hard. She arched into him. Her head fell back, and she made a helpless sort of noise when he moved his demanding mouth to her other nipple, and treated it with the same erotic roughness.

He indulged himself with her taste. She was velvet and rose and he was addicted. He pulled away, then used his hands again until both nipples were dry again. She was so responsive, he entertained himself imagining all the ways he could make her come with nipple stimulation alone.

But that was for another day.

Today, he had other goals. He pulled out the tiny evil clamps he’d retrieved from his bag. He clamped one nipple, and laughed at the noise she made. Then he clamped the other one, not at all surprised that she lost her head completely, jerking as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to get away from him or move closer to him, or something in between. Her hands were no longer behind her back, but in those adorable fists at her side.

“Hands behind your back,” he ordered her. When she obeyed, he rewarded her. “Open your eyes.”

And when she did, all that pretty blue was glazed over.

“That hurts,” she said, as if he’d betrayed her.

“You can take it.” And to prove it, he tugged gently on the chain that connected the two clamps, making her gasp again. “You will take it.”

And before she could say another word, he wrapped his other hand around the back of her head, and then took her mouth with his.

Finally.

He kissed her hungrily, thoroughly. He invaded her mouth, wet and dark and encompassing, the next best thing to fucking her.

And she kissed him back the same way.

Making him wonder why the hell he’d wasted all these years and all this time not doing exactly this.

Dorian kissed her until she went limp, and he kept going. He tried one filthy angle after the next until she was trembling beneath his hands, making needy and helpless noises in the back of her throat, and seemed to have forgotten about the clamps entirely.

So he tugged on the chain again, to remind her, and lapped up every greedy little noise she made.

He pulled away then, and stared down at her. She fought to catch her breath. Her eyes looked appealingly dazed, while her mouth was damp from his. Her color was high and good. She looked thoroughly debauched, and the clamps on her breasts made him so hard he almost hurt.

“What was it you wanted to say to me?” he asked her.

Politely.

“I don’t…”

“If memory serves, you suggested I was a coward.”

He watched her fight to access her brain again. He reached down and pushed her thighs farther apart, to the point where she had to strain the slightest bit to keep them open. Then he held her there, and waited.

“Why so quiet?” he asked her, a gentle taunt. “You came downstairs filled to the brim with insults. I’m beginning to think that all the trouble you cause with your mouth could be averted if you used it to do something other than talk.”

An image that made his cock pulse with his own dark need. But she hadn’t earned the privilege of sucking him off yet.

“Your rules are convenient,” she said, focusing enough to frown at him. “You change them to suit yourself.”

“Of course I do. Suiting myself is the whole point. If you concerned yourself less with following or not following the rules and more with pleasing me, it wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“But you don’t want me to please you,” she said, holding herself very still, no doubt because every breath made those clamps tug on her nipples. “You want me to break your rules so you can punish me.”

“Baby, I’m going to punish you one way or another no matter what you do.” He grinned. “That’s kind of the point.”

“Not for me,” said the woman who was dripping wet and trembling on the edge of an orgasm, all because he’d clamped her nipples. “I’m here for the sex.”

“You like your sex with some pain to accentuate the pleasure,” he said. He reached behind her and moved her arms, setting her hands down flat on the tabletop. “Ask me how I know.”

“Maybe as an experiment,” she lied, her eyes wide and full of shit. “Once in a while, as an adventure, and not because I need—”

“I think that’s enough talking, kitten,” Dorian said. Then he bent down, hauling her legs up over his shoulders and bringing his mouth down hard on her pussy in a single, swift movement.

He could feel her reaction go through her as she caught herself on the hands he’d moved for precisely that purpose, but that wasn’t quite enough. So he reached up, and tugged on that chain, knowing that it would send that exquisite pain narrowing through her body, lighting her up.

That was how he wanted her.

Lit up, bright red, sweet and soft against his tongue. He tugged on the clamps again, and she got wetter, like dessert.

So he ate his fill.

Dorian ate her hard, as demanding as everything else, because she made the most delicious sounds. Her clit was stiff and proud beneath his tongue, and when he took it between his teeth, she screamed.

He took her to the edge again and again, throwing her over every time, until he had to slide his hands around to hold her steady because she couldn’t seem to keep herself upright. He sank two fingers deep into the molten heat of her pussy, curling them around to rub against that rough spot tucked away in there. She made a keening kind of sound.

Then he leaned over her, kissing her so she could taste herself.

She came again, short and hard, with a deep groan that was like poetry to him.

“Promise me you’ll do what I want you to do,” he said. “Promise me now, Erika.”

Her head thrashed from side to side. “I don’t want to.”

“Do it anyway,” he growled.

And he reached down to free his cock, rolled on a condom, then slammed himself into her.

She made herself into a bow, arching up off the table like every wet dream he’d ever had. She was gorgeous, glorious, so he took her hard. She wrapped her legs around him, and met him, thrust for thrust.

And watching her fuck him back was so hot he was tempted to come himself.

But he wasn’t quite done.

“Promise me, Erika,” he said.

“I thought we were supposed to be done with talking,” she managed to gasp out.

And he couldn’t help himself. That made him laugh.

And as an extra incentive, he pulled the clamps off.

He knew that the pain would go through her like a shock, and he knew it did exactly what he wanted it to do when she screamed.

Dorian was deep inside her, pounding into her at a relentless pace—long and hard and deep—and he watched her shake like she might fall apart, as if the pain was picking her up and carrying her further.

She came beautifully. She was perfect.

And when she came back down, he picked her up, holding her there against him with his hands gripping that ass of hers that still bore his marks.

“Come,” she begged him. “Please, Dorian. Come.”

“Please, who?” he gritted out.

“Please, sir,” she panted at him. “I want to feel you come inside me.”

“Then you know what to do.” He pulled out, then slammed himself back in, and her eyes went fuzzy. But she dug her fingers into his shoulders, and held on. “You know what I want.”

“I promise,” she said, as if it hurt her. “I promise. I’ll do it.”

For you, she didn’t say.

But he heard it.

And when he let himself go at last, deep inside the tight fist of her pussy, she came with him, sobbing out his name.

Already his, he thought with profound satisfaction.

Whether she knew it or not.

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.

She doubted very much the Dorian would count that at all.

“It sounds to me like you’ve taken a little emotional dip and have stayed there,” he said. “I told you that you might.”

“Not everything is a pageant of intensity,” she snapped, and she was aware as she said it that she clearly didn’t believe that herself. Because if she did, she wouldn’t be sitting in her carriage house bedroom on her mother’s lover’s estate, with all the curtains closed tight against the drizzle of another English afternoon. God, she was so sick of her own shit. “And here’s a fun fact. Not every emotion I have has something to do with you.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” Dorian said smoothly, but still, there was that undercurrent that kicked at her and made her sit a little straighter. “I just landed in London. Your brother’s party is this weekend. Now that you’re so marvelously recovered from all the intimacy we shared, I hope you remember the promise you made me.”

“Go to hell.”

Dorian made a tsking sound that blazed through like the warning it was, making her body light up. Wet, needy, naughty—and desperate for the discipline only he could administer.

She wanted to hate herself for that but she couldn’t quite get there. Not with his voice in her ear.

“That does not bode well for you, kitten,” he said, with that soft, amused menace that made her…glow.

She cleared her throat. “What I do or don’t do concerning my brother is no business of yours.”

“If you say so.”

And she could swear, if she closed her eyes, she could see the look he was wearing on his face when he sounded like that. All that dark, dangerous patience in his gaze. That unyielding power stamped into that unsmiling mouth that made her feel weak in all the best ways. What was it about this man that made her silly straight through?

“Are you touching yourself?” he asked, his voice stern.

Erika froze, because sure enough, she’d reached down between her legs with one hand, and was pressing the heel of her palm against her throbbing clit. How the hell had he known that? “No.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

Her hand fell away from her pussy as if he’d ordered her to stop touching herself. As if he’d reached over and physically removed her hand, more like.

“I’m not lying,” she said. And his silence felt as sharp a rebuke as a slap on the ass. She sighed. “Now.”

“Good,” he said, and she could hear laughter and satisfaction then. And all that glorious heat. “Don’t. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my pussy and you can’t touch it without my permission. I’ll know, kitten. And there will be consequences.”

“You can’t just say things like that to people, Dorian. Are you insane? I can do anything I want with my body.”

“What’s that?” he asked, sounding mild and stern at once. The combination made goose bumps rise all over her skin. “Was that your safe word? Or was it another round of predictable complaints because you like to deal with your uncertainty by shooting off your mouth?”

She wanted to hang up on him. She didn’t. And she hated herself for that, too.

“I’ll see you this weekend,” he promised her. Though it sounded a lot more like a threat. “And I’ll expect you to remember every detail of the promise you made me, Erika. Because you can be certain I do.”

And he cut off the call before she could protest. Deliberately, she was sure.

But something about his voice galvanized her. She got out of the bed where she’d been conducting her experiments in insomnia and petulance. She threw open the curtains and glared out at the gray day. She went down into the kitchen of the carriage house and stared around, uninspired, at the dry cereal boxes that had provided her with the bulk of her nutrition since she’d arrived. Because her mother certainly didn’t want her grown daughter taking meals at the big house with her lover. Erika’s very existence was a testament to Chriszette’s age.

Erika had learned that lesson the hard way. And years ago. Now she accepted the fact that her mother liked to control her in between affairs, but never during them. A situation that had suited them both since Erika had left university.

Does it suit you? a dark voice that sounded suspiciously like Dorian’s asked inside her. Or do you put up with it because she treats you the way you think you deserve to be treated?

“Shut up, Dorian,” she muttered into the empty kitchen.

Her body was still flushed, and wound up, and she thought that maybe she should go ahead and handle her own needs. Because fuck him. Who cared what he ordered her to do? He wasn’t the boss of her.

But even when she sat down, then slipped her hand back between her legs, she couldn’t do it.

Because you want to be his, something that was all her whispered, telling her more truths she didn’t want to face.

Erika went on a long, punishing walk. When she’d exhausted herself, she trudged back to the carriage house and took a long bath. She soaked in the hot water until she was so heartily sick of herself and her own endlessly cycling thoughts that she thought she might scream.

She wrapped herself in a bath towel, then padded back to the bedroom. She picked up her phone, scowled at it for a while, and admitted that what she really wanted was for Dorian to call her again. Especially now that they were in the same country again.

I’ll see you this weekend, he’d said, and she shivered now, because she would see him again.

But that meant she would be seeing other people, too. Maybe it was time to stop recovering from Berlin and start handling her actual life. The one that went on no matter how many hard truths Dorian had marked into her skin that weekend.

Erika pulled up Jenny’s number.

So, she texted, what do you think I should wear to your ENGAGEMENT PARTY to MY BROTHER?

Her phone rang almost immediately.

“Oh my God, Erika,” Jenny cried when Erika picked up. “I thought you were blanking me.”

“I wasn’t not blanking you.”

“Where are you? Are you still in Germany?”

“No,” Erika said, her body flushed from her bath. She looked down at herself, caught by that same awareness that had haunted her since she’d left Berlin. That this wasn’t her body any longer. That he’d made it his. And why was that the only thing that seemed to soothe her? “I’m in Devon with Chriszette and her latest fling. Lord Something or Other. I only stayed in Berlin for that one weekend.”

The way she often had, over these last six months. Jenny would think nothing of it. Another weekend clubbing, that was all. And Erika would let her think it, because she couldn’t articulate what had happened between her and Dorian to herself. There was no way she could explain it to anyone else.

And maybe that was why, when the silence stretched out between them, she let it. Because she understood it.

“It would be better to see you in person—and before the party,” Jenny said after a moment. “Can you come up to London?”

Erika looked around at the carriage house that had become a prison of all the emotions she’d told Dorian she wasn’t experiencing. She thought about the fact she’d be seeing Dorian himself this weekend, and all the anticipation and anxiety, need and longing that kicked up. She thought about the promise she’d made him and what that would mean—could she really apologize to her brother?

Her brother, whom Jenny was marrying, for reasons unclear.

“As a matter of fact,” Erika said, “I would love to come to London. I could use a break.”

She did not add from me.

Because that would require explanations she didn’t want to give, not even to her oldest friend.

But if she could, she thought the next morning as she caught the train from Cranbrook to London Waterloo Station, she would have left herself behind.

CHAPTER TEN

THEY MET IN the breathtakingly posh bar of an extraordinarily luxurious and exclusive hotel where they’d liked to sneak away to during their Oxford years and imagine what their lives would be like when they graduated.

Erika could almost squint and see all those dreams dancing there in the dimly lit, aristocratically plush surroundings. It made it impossible not to engage in a game or two of what-if.

What if she’d lived these last years differently? Where would she be now? What would have happened if she’d stayed at Oxford and done as Jenny had—because Lady Genevieve Charlotte Elizabeth Markham, Jenny to her friends, was nothing if not dutiful.

In the flattering light of the cozy, quiet bar, Jenny looked as if she could still be the teenager she’d been when they’d met as first years. She sat across from Erika looking as disarmingly approachable as ever, which had always been her secret weapon. She radiated warmth even when she wasn’t feeling the slightest hint of it herself. Erika had been drawn to it. Who wouldn’t be?

Maybe Conrad could use a little warmth, too, came that dark voice inside.

She told her inner Dorian to go fuck himself.

And then she marinated in memories and more what-ifs while Jenny set about ordering them wine.

Dutiful, well-behaved Jenny had taken the requisite job in an appropriate charity after she’d graduated with her first in classics. Like many girls of her station, saddled with a father consumed with notions of bloodlines and the consolidation of hereditary lands, her charity work had only ever been meant to be a stopgap. A pretty little notation on her résumé. One that she could toss aside the moment she assumed her true duties as a wife of a worthy, wealthy gentleman. Preferably one of her father’s choosing.

“You haven’t posted a single thing on any social media site in weeks,” Jenny said when they were both properly fortified with glasses of wine and a tray of spiced nuts. “I was starting to think the announcement might have killed you.”

She smiled as she said it, though her gaze was wary.

“The announcement was a surprise,” Erika agreed. And she’d received it not only from Dorian, but from Jenny, Chriszette—and even Conrad’s assistant. Lest she complain that she hadn’t been invited or informed, she supposed. Things she couldn’t imagine doing now but she certainly might have done a few weeks back. She could admit that. “But I survived it intact.”

Jenny sighed as she played idly with her wineglass. And Erika couldn’t keep herself from studying the enormous, sparkling ring that didn’t quite fit on her slender left hand. It slid as she moved, tipping the great stone this way, then that.

Silence had never been their thing. And Erika was suddenly struck by the unpleasant realization that it was because she’d always filled it. She’d always been perfectly happy to twitter on about herself, hadn’t she? Especially in recent years, when she’d viewed every in-person meeting with anybody as an opportunity to deliver highly curated press releases on how wonderful her life was.

Confront yourself and you conquer your fears, Dorian had told her, the dick.

“Jenny,” Erika said softly now, with more self-possession than she’d ever thought she had. “Tell me how this happened.”

She’d wanted to say this tragedy, which she certainly would have before. But something stopped her tonight—possibly the fact that Jenny certainly didn’t look tragic. And more to the point, hadn’t asked Erika’s opinion.

It was another little prick of shame that the pre-Berlin version of Erika would have steamrolled right in and bludgeoned half of London with her opinion without caring if anyone had solicited it. How charming.

“As I’ve mentioned before, I’m sure, my father has never appreciated my passion for charity work,” Jenny said, smiling wryly over her glass of wine.

“I would be astonished if your father appreciated passion in any form.”

Jenny’s smile deepened. “He’s quite fond of his dogs.”

Erika drank from her own glass. “I’m not sure I can figure out how we get from passionate charity work that benefits children in war zones to…Conrad.”

Jenny’s smile faded. She frowned down at her wine, but didn’t take a sip.

“We were at an event in Stockholm. My father likes me to play his hostess even when it’s not his party, so I was with him when he met Conrad. They started talking business, my father liked him, and a few days later he announced that he’d taken it upon himself to set us up on a date.” She lifted her gaze. “Which isn’t unusual. I’ve complained about this before. Any day now I expect him to simply announce that he’s sold me off.”

Erika smiled. Then returned to the subject at hand. “And you went on the date, clearly.”

“I didn’t dare say no,” Jenny said. “I assumed Conrad had either been pushed into it, or thought he could go on a single pity date and then carry on with whatever business dealings he had with my father. But instead, he asked me out on a second date.”

“And again, you went?”

“I couldn’t say no.”

“It’s simple, Jen. No. See? I did it.”

“Erika.” And her friend leveled a frank, sad sort of look at her. “Please stop pretending you don’t know what my father’s like. I’ve been playing this game for years. He sets me up on a date, and yes, I go on the dates, because that’s the price I have to pay for my independence.”

“You shouldn’t have to pay a price for your independence.”

Jenny’s smile was sad. “Should doesn’t have much to do with it, I’m afraid. It never has done.”

Erika remembered this from their university days. Jenny’s sense of unwavering duty to her stuffy, unsupportive father—or maybe, more realistically, to the nostalgia she’d been raised on. The grand stories about what had made the Markham family great. And wealthy.

Not so long ago, she would have railed at her friend about this. Tonight, she kept her mouth shut instead.

“I know that I could rebel,” Jenny said quietly when Erika didn’t speak. “Sometimes I dream of it. But that’s not who I am. So yes, I went on that second date, because my father expected me to. And I went on the third, and when Conrad brought me back home to my father’s house, he stayed for a drink. And proposed marriage, there and then, with this honking great ring and all that… Well. You know what your brother is like. So sure of everything.”

“I do indeed.”

Jenny sent her a reproving look. “And it’s all snowballed since. My father was the happiest I’ve seen him in years. Certainly since my mother died. Later that night, after Conrad left, he fairly waxed rhapsodic about putting me in safe hands at last.”

“But, Jen.” Erika’s voice was soft. Not quite imploring, but close. “You don’t love him.”

Jenny took a breath, but her gaze was steady when it met Erika’s.

“He’s kind to me,” she said simply. “We want the same things, more or less. He’s perfectly happy if I continue working, which isn’t something I could say for all the cavemen my father’s sent me on dates with. I’m going to have to marry one of them. Conrad is by far the best option.”

“Jenny…”

“And besides,” she said hurriedly, “sex is not a motivating factor for me the way it is for you.”

“That’s because you’ve never been fucked properly.” Erika laughed at Jenny’s expression. “You know it’s true. Or maybe you don’t, which is sad, but I know it’s true. Wait a minute.” She narrowed her eyes at her friend. “Are you saying that Conrad’s bad in bed? Or are you saying you haven’t sampled the wares yet?”

“I can’t imagine that you would want me to answer that question either way. About your brother.”

Erika made a face. “I really don’t. But as your friend, it’s my duty to ask.”

“I haven’t slept with him, no,” Jenny said, her cheeks red in the dark of the bar. It made Erika wonder how her friend would react if she found herself standing in the Walfreiheit Club one fine night. Or what she’d do if faced with a man like Dorian.

But she couldn’t let herself think about Dorian. Not now.

“There’s hardly been time,” Jenny was saying. “It’s all been a whirlwind and my father insisted on throwing this party—”

“You can’t marry a man if you don’t know what he’s like in bed,” Erika said. “Really, you can’t.”

“People have been doing exactly that for centuries.”

“And they’ve been wildly unhappy.”

“Not always.” Jenny shook her head, and her grip on her wineglass tightened. Visibly. “I don’t expect you to understand this decision, Erika. It’s a bit like being on a runaway train, if I’m honest. But what’s the harm in it? He’s not pretending to love me. I’m not pretending to love him. And, you know, there’s lots of research to prove that arranged marriages are happier, on balance, than marriages based on romantic love.”

“I’ll be sure to make that toast at the wedding. Here’s to a sexless union of people who don’t love each other, but whose financial portfolios match well enough to plod along. Three cheers.”

“Just as long as you come to the wedding.” Jenny reached over and grabbed Erika’s wrist in a fully out-of-character move that made Erika both love her more and worry for her at the same time. “We might not be love’s young dream, but we’re going to be all right. And I would very much like your blessing.”

And a few weeks ago, Erika would have lost her shit. She knew it. She would have said terrible things to Jenny that she’d never be able to take back. She would have called up her brother and shouted a whole lot more things, likely uglier by far. And she certainly wouldn’t have been able to sit here and listen to this breakdown of what had to be one of the stupidest reasons to marry another person she’d ever heard in her life. Especially coming from Jenny, who had always been a romantic.

But then, romantic or not, Jenny thought she didn’t like sex. Erika had always thought that wasn’t quite the truth, and that, really, Jenny had a thing about the man she called her best friend and had therefore never touched that way. Dylan Kilburn had been a first year with them at Oxford, had been brooding in Jenny’s direction since day one, and yet Jenny had resolutely refused to see him as anything but a friend. For years now. Erika was chock-full of theories as to why.

A couple of weeks ago, she would have hammered her friend with each and every one of those theories, but she was different now. And Erika wasn’t sure she liked that strange awareness deep inside her. She wasn’t sure she approved of it. But that didn’t matter, because either way, she wasn’t the same.

She had always wished that she could choose not to make a mess rather than always and forever trying to figure out how to clean it up. And tonight she found she could put it into practice. She put her hand on top of Jenny’s and kept her gaze steady. And she set aside her own feelings on the topic, because it didn’t matter what she felt or thought. Jenny hadn’t asked her for her theories, she’d asked for Erika’s blessing.

“You couldn’t keep me away from your wedding,” Erika said very distinctly. And found as she spoke that she meant it. “It doesn’t matter who you’re marrying or why. I will be there, with bells on. You can count on it.”

Later, as she was lying in the hotel room she’d taken for the night—curled up on her side with that ravenous hunger between her legs that still she didn’t take care of because Dorian had told her not to—she remembered Jenny’s face. And how stunned she’d looked that Erika had given her blessing.

And hadn’t made the whole damn thing about herself, more likely.

Erika wrapped herself up in her coverlet and pretended it was Dorian’s arms around her.

What if this was the strength you brought to every part of your life? he had asked her after another one of his wicked, ingenious scenes. He’d turned her inside out, left her gasping and half-mad, and yet convinced on a deep level that she could take anything he dished out. What if you controlled yourself out there, and only let outside forces control you when those forces were me?

And she felt too full there, in another anonymous hotel bed. Alone. Close to bursting and too thick with it for it to be anger. Or anything as straightforward as a sob.

Dorian had held up a mirror to her life and she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t looked into it. And seen. Somehow, in surrendering herself to him, he had given her the control now. Out here, in the world. Because she knew what true surrender was like, so there was no reason to submit herself to every passing whim.

Erika had chosen to give herself completely to Dorian because he was powerful enough to keep her safe while she did it, and having done that, why would she bother with these lesser surrenders that never made her feel anything but alone?

She could have a host of emotions about her friend and her brother, but she didn’t have to succumb to them.

She could choose.

She felt as if she’d been struck by lightning, so bright and hot was the jolt of awareness that hit her then.

Dorian had taught her how to choose.

Erika ran with that over the course of the next few days. She stayed in London, searching for the appropriate outfit. And this time, she didn’t want attention in a general sense. She wanted his attention. Only his.

Not just his attention, if she was honest. His approval.

And when she tried on the perfect dress, cut to enhance rather than expose, it felt like his hands on her body. As if he lounged there in the corner of her dressing room, his eyes ablaze and his mouth that unsmiling line that made her heart flip over.

The night of the engagement party, she was dressed, her hair pulled back into a neat chignon at her nape, and ready to go long before it was time to leave Devon and make the drive to the Markham family’s stately home in Wiltshire.

Possibly, she thought wryly, you are a little overexcited.

She waited in the ancient gallery in her mother’s lover’s sprawling house. She stared at the dark portraits that lined the walls, each featuring some ancestor or another of his with the same red jowls he sported himself, and found herself very thankful indeed that her mother’s taste in men had been much better when she was younger.

“My goodness, Erika,” came her mother’s stilted, affected voice from the stairs—as if she’d sensed Erika was entertaining uncharitable thoughts about her and had rushed to remind her why each and every one was true. “Are you ill?”

Erika turned to watch her mother come toward her. As ever, Chriszette was resplendent. An ice sculpture best enjoyed from a safe distance. Her blond hair was swept back from her smooth face and secured with combs. She wore a sweeping, elegant gown that made the most of her trim figure. She was a striking woman with a regal bearing and flashing blue eyes that made everyone around her feel as if really, they ought to curtsy.

And she certainly liked it when they did.

“Do I look ill?” Erika asked lightly. Because there was no telling how her mother would strike. Chriszette was like a snake. She was quite happy coiled up in the sun, until she wasn’t. And sometimes she moved so fast you never even saw the strike coming until you bled.

“I have never seen you look so…appropriate,” Chriszette said, her accent making her sound sharper than she perhaps meant. Then again, perhaps not.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Erika said with perhaps more determination than enthusiasm. “Thank you, Mother.”

Chriszette did not like to be called Mother. Her blue eyes cooled considerably, which was always hard to imagine as she started out so devoutly frigid. She glanced toward the stairs, and Erika knew that she was looking to see if her lover had heard Erika admit to their relationship. A fate worse than death.

“Darling,” Chriszette said with a smile that heralded the coming venom, “only very beautiful and very clever girls can afford to hide their assets. I assumed you knew that.” She swept her eyes up and down, taking in every inch of Erika’s body. “If you don’t put on a little show and make sure they’re looking at all that bare skin, they might remember that you’re a university dropout who shuffles aimlessly from one place to another, effectively homeless. What is cute in one’s twenties is a character flaw in later years. You’d do well to remember that.”

The old Erika would have screamed back at her, which was what Chriszette wanted. The more of a mess her daughter was, the more she could make herself the maternal victim. The old Erika had known this as well as the current Erika did, but this was the first time that Erika did nothing but smile back at Chriszette. And fail to otherwise react.

A faint frown creased her mother’s brow. “No one likes a born loser, Erika,” she said. “But as you know, they are often dazzled by a whore.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Erika said, and she was shaking a little, but she didn’t let it own her. The choice was hers, and she chose to let far more powerful things make her cry. Because he always sweetened that pot with a few orgasms. She nodded her mother. “I bow to your example, as always.”

And her mother’s lover appeared then, cutting off whatever vicious reply Chriszette might have planned to make.

The car swept them off for the long drive to Jenny’s father’s estate, where the party was being held in as much ancient, feudal splendor as possible. Right down to the selling of the bride, if Erika wanted to get technical.

And it wasn’t until she’d followed her mother up the grand stairs that led into the soaring hall, then waited her turn while Chriszette left her coat and fluttered all over her lover, that Erika found herself attacked by her own nerves.

She told herself not to be silly.

Which…didn’t really work.

After handing off her own coat, she drifted toward the grand ballroom. Chriszette liked to make an entrance, so the party was already in full swing as she swept inside.

Erika, for perhaps the first time in her life, didn’t particularly want to make a scene. So instead, she headed farther into the house, toward one of the less trafficked entrances to the ballroom. Then she stood there for a moment. Jenny was moving through the crowd, looking beautiful and bright and elegant, as always. Jenny’s father trailed along with her, looking puffed up and proud—an upgrade from his usual puffed up and pompous.

And then Erika saw her brother, looking as grim and determined as always.

It had been one thing to find a lovely dress. To take on faith that her mother was wrong and Dorian was right. That she had more to offer than too much skin on display at an otherwise excruciatingly proper party like this one, teeming as it was with the sorts of people who appeared regularly in Tatler, yet found their presence in its pages appalling.

She found it was one thing to do the things she’d done with Dorian, and admit the truths he’d wrung out of her.

But it would be something else again to look her brother in the eye. Then apologize for not only disappointing him, but for going out of her way to disappoint herself, too. And then taking it out on him. For years.

Her stomach twisted, then plummeted to the marble floor at her feet.

She must have been kidding herself. Or so hopped-up on endorphins that she’d forgotten that Conrad was hardly anybody’s idea of the sweet, genial older brother. He wasn’t the sort to kick a football about or help his younger sister with her maths. On the contrary, Conrad was a dark cloud of a man. He was so severe. So exacting. And he had a way of looking at a person that reminded Erika of their mother when she was poised to strike. Only worse, because Chriszette prized meanness.

Conrad valued accuracy.

And either way, Erika would end up with a hole punched straight through her.

There was absolutely no way that she could march up to him, make herself vulnerable and expose herself before that piercing blue stare of his.

The very idea made her want to curl up and die. Here and now.

She whirled around, thinking she would just grab her coat, call a car and leave all of this behind her—

But she slammed into a wall.

Except it wasn’t a wall, she realized as two hands caught her shoulders, and she tipped her head back to look up acres of broad chest packed into black tie.

It was Dorian.

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