As he spoke, he wrapped that glossy black rope of her hair round and around his finger.
“For example, some people like a little hint of pain with their pleasure.” He tugged on the hair he held, and she gasped at the little pinch at her scalp. While at the same time, she felt her nipples pinch, and her clit throb. “You, for example, respond beautifully to pain.”
“I don’t...” But she didn’t finish that sentence.
Conrad eased back on that tugging pressure. “Some people like quite a lot of pain, and only through it do they find their pleasure,” he said. “It’s all in the details, Rory. Like anything else in life, it’s an infinitely customizable menu.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
And when his mouth curved, she remembered the pointed comment he’d made about how she hadn’t asked him that first.
“If I were to get philosophical about it, I would tell you that what turns me on the most is radical trust,” he said, and the quieter his voice got, the more intensely his dark blue eyes gleamed. “You put yourself in my hands, literally, and take whatever I choose to give you, trusting that what I will do with it will not only make us both come, but, truly, make us better people.”
There wasn’t anything particularly sexy about what he said. And still everything inside her reacted as if it was. She wanted to pick her hands from where they rested on top of her thighs, just as he told her, anddo somethingwith all that greedy energy. All that throbbing, greedy heat.
“And if you weren’t being philosophical?”
“There are many dominants,” Conrad said, a different gleam in his gaze. “But I tend to skew more toward high protocol. With a healthy amount of discipline.”
Rory felt as winded as if she’d run up six flights of stairs. “What does that mean?”
“It means I expect, and demand, that you speak to me in a certain way. Using certain words. And that you assume the appropriate positions that match those things.”
“That...doesn’t really tell me anything.”
“If we were in a club, I would expect any submissive who approached me to do so on their knees,” he told her coolly, his gaze never shifting from her face. “I would expect them to sit before me as you are now, in either of the two kneeling positions I described to you, but keep their eyes lowered unless I asked them to look at me.”
She thought maybe her mouth dropped open at that.
Conrad’s eyes crinkled in the corners. “I insist on being addressed respectfully. And I take a dim view of being spoken to unless I’ve issued an invitation to do so. That’s a basic overview of high protocol.” His gaze moved over her, and she knew he could see how fast she was breathing. There was no hiding it. “As for discipline? It can take any number of forms, but I’m a big believer in maintenance spankings.”
Every conversation with him made her feel as if she was being buffeted by high winds while standing on some unprotected mountaintop. This was no different. Every word he said seemed to spark a new fire inside her, even as her mind reeled about and tried to keep up.
“Okay. Wait. What about all that...bowing and scraping and whatever else is hot to you?”
“All of it.” And again, his laughter was in his gaze, if not out loud.
“Doesn’t that make you...”
But there were some things even she didn’t dare say.
Conrad knew. How did he always know? “Rory. Are you asking me if there are some who are drawn to this particular lifestyle because it accords them an architecture they can build around their innate bullying behavior? Of course there are.” He shrugged. “But that’s true of anything—of any people in any kind of relationship. Whatever our gender, whatever our sexual identity, there are no spaces—anywhere—that are one hundred percent safe from people who might manipulate those spaces to their own ends. But I will tell you that the people in the spaces I inhabit, while certainly not perfect, tend to be significantly more self-aware than the average puppy dog of a boy you might find in a bar.”
“They’re self-aware about the way they like women to kneel in front of them and call them...what? My liege?”
“Sir, generally. Or Master, depending.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, his dark eyes glittering. “But what on earth makes you think that it’s only women who kneel?”
Rory blinked at that, a bit shocked with herself. Because, of course, the internet had been filled with images of all sorts of people in all sorts of submissive poses. Why was it she couldn’t seem to remember that all of this could apply to all kinds of people who weren’t her?
Maybe she was as selfish as he’d suggested she was.
She didn’t know what to do with that possibility. “You’re right. I knew that. I...”
“Do you really want a seminar on BDSM throughout the ages?” Conrad asked, with a hint of that amusement again. “I prefer more practical applications of philosophy, but you can waste all the time you want, Rory. I already know how this works.”
But that other thing he’d said was still rattling around inside of her. “Well, but... I also want to know what you mean bymaintenance spanking.”
The way he almost smiled then struck her as deeply unholy. It was like a completely different note rang through her then, wicked and wild.