“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 isyes, yellow light isI’m not sureand red light isstop.”
“Are you satisfied with that system as your safe word?” He studied her and he was sothorough. 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 readFifty Shadeslike 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...forgottenshe was kneeling, necessarily. It was impossible toforget. 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 thesefeelingswent 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?”