While down below, her pussy was soft and wild and making its own demands.
Louder and hotter by the second.
Rory had watched so many videos. She’d looked at so many pictures. The images were shocking—disturbing,she would even have said, had anyone been there to ask. Except it was the ones she’d found most personally disturbing that she’d looked at the longest. It was those same images that played over and over in her head as she thought about doing them with him.
And she thought about doing all of those things with him, no matter what words she flung at those fantasies in the light of day. When the sun was out, she was faintly embarrassed to discover, she was more of a pearl clutcher than the fearless warrior for alternative sexual experiences she’d always imagined she was.
But despite all her fantasies, each more feverish than the last, nothing had prepared her for this.
For sitting here in a converted church in a soft leather chair that she could feel like a caress on the bare skin of her thighs. For Conrad himself, sitting there so casually and yet clearly and indisputably in control.
Of himself.
And, unless she was very much mistaken, of her.
Worse—or better—when she stopped telling herself how offensive that ought to have been, she could tell that her body thrilled to the notion.
She thought of all thosethingsof his, implements and devices and tools, carefully locked away beneath the stained glass. She thought of collars and hard hands against her ass, all those things she’d imagined when she was alone, and none of that imagining had been even half as intense as sitting here.
Just sitting here.
Fighting with herself.
First something like self-pity washed through her. Why didn’t he simply take control the way he had before? Why didn’t he handle things—particularly her—so that she didn’t have to do all this...choosing?
Her heart beat a little faster at that, but she had a terrible inkling that she already knew what the truth was.
And it was a galling thing indeed to realize that despite all the time she spent shouting about what consent was and what it should look like, and all the many ways in which she personally liked to indicate her enthusiasm to her dates, it was clear that all of that was easy. Because it required so little of her.
This, however, required a whole lot more than a speech on her part.
And this is what she knew already. Whatever she did, or didn’t do, she was never going to get Conrad Vanderburg out of her head. She’d tried already and failed. Miserably.
More than that, she was fairly sure he had changed her body, and her, forever.
She didn’t think she could go back to thinking that a good night with a lover meant her lying there, sphinxlike, acting lofty and mysterious when once again he came and she didn’t. Talking aboutcloseness, andchoosing to have controlof her own orgasm, and then not having one.
How could she go back to any of that when he’d taken a wrecking ball to everything she thought was true—about her body, about what she was capable of, about the things that she could want and feel and need?
Rory understood that this would all remain true even if she got up from her seat right now and let herself back out of this gloriously Gothic church of his.
And the rawness inside her grew bigger and bigger, more unwieldy, more insistent.
She tried to imagine what it would be like if she left. She couldn’t help thinking that no matter what it might demand of her to stay, leaving would be the kind of regret she might never get over.
And she had no illusions. If she left, there was no way that Conrad would let her come back.
It’s just sex,she told herself stoutly.Kinky sex, that’s all. Why are you being so dramatic about it?
And that helped. That put her back on familiar ground. She was a goddamned sex positive, progressive, proudly kink-friendly woman. Even if, until now, the kinkiest thing she’d ever done had involved playing with candle wax with a boyfriend in college. The same boyfriend who had introduced her to girl-on-girl porn, which had played a huge part in her deciding that she must be pansexual.
She realized she was waiting for Conrad to say something else, but a glance his way—at all that brooding, weaponized patience—made it clear that he wasn’t going to do that.
So Rory would have to do what was necessary.
It really was necessary, she told herself. Because even if she hated every single thing that happened with this man—which would certainly be a change from what had already happened with him—it would be experience.
She was supposed to be the kind of person who collected experiences. That was part of her brand.