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 actuallygettinga 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 toaskfor 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—hisname—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 andnotbegging 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 thanhinted. She’d wondered how long he’d staysternif 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.