But this was about her, not him.
And he tried to look...benevolent. Or whatever she needed to see so that she knew she was safe. That she could experiment as she wished—as she should—and he would...wait, he supposed.
He would have to.
“I want to be very sure that I’m understanding you,” Rory said, sounding a bit stiff. Her gaze was still unreadable. “You tracked me down. I know you have my phone number so you probably know where I live. But how could you possibly have found me here?”
“That was a rhetorical question,” she said when he made as if to answer. And Conrad saw the flash of what he very much believed was temper in her eyes. “You had to want to find me. You had to go out of your way to do it. And now I’m finding it hard to get my head around the possibility that the reason you did that was so that you could...counsel me on how to fuck other men?”
Something shifted in him. Blood, maybe, heating up in a way that was not precisely wise. Or safe, for either of them.
“Perhaps you don’t need my counsel,” he managed to say without succumbing to the fire in him. “I’m sure you have puppies aplenty.”
“I’m done with puppies.” And her eyes flashed, telling him that it absolutely was temper. And quite a lot of it, if he wasn’t mistaken. “That’s why I like to come hang out with cats these days. And just to be perfectly clear, I haven’t been trolling around in sex clubs, either. Because it turns out, Conrad, I don’t really want to just...be tied up.”
The only surprising part about this woman, he reminded himself, was that she never ceased to be surprising herself. He never had any idea what she would say. And he had never imagined that she would say something like that. He thought of how she’d melted. How she’d delivered herself into his hands, and come so beautifully—and so often—that memories of it still woke him in the night.
“I was under the impression that you loved being tied up,” he said, trying to sound neutral.
She scowled at him, and even leaned forward. Were she his, she would have to account for that kind of aggression. Likely while getting spanked.
But he needed his cock to calm down, or he never would.
“I like it when you do it, you dumbass,” she threw at him.
And he was so astonished he actually laughed, but that only made her madder. She started brandishing her finger at him, and he was...astounded, certainly. But captivated all the same.
“I don’t need to experiment with submission,” she said furiously, “or whatever the hell you just said.”
“But you should.” He tried to sound patient. “You should view this as the beginning of your journey—”
“I’m not on a journey, Conrad,” she said, throwing her words at him, though that gaze of hers never wavered. “I’m not interested in submitting. I’ve never had the slightest urge to do any of those things, ever. I’ve always liked to be the one in control. The only difference now is you.”
His heart was kicking at him. That sounded a little too close to the things he wanted, but did not dare allow himself.
“I understand that BDSM can bring up very intense emotions,” he began.
And she snorted. Inelegant, graceless, and still he wanted nothing more than to get his hands on her.
“Are you going to pretend that that’s not the point?” she asked him. “Because you told me it was. You can’t claim that it’s all about intimacy and vulnerability and then pretend you’re surprised when that’s what happens.”
“Are you lecturing me on BDSM?”
“I’ll leave the lecturing to you, Professor,” she said, somehow both dry and hot at the same time. “But you can stop trying to foist me off on random other dudes in leather who happen to be prancing around Paris, doling out spankings and paddling on every street corner.”
“So you have dated,” he said coolly.
“I only want you,” she said, matter-of-factly, throwing that down in the middle the café table. A squirrelly looking tortoiseshell cat jumped on the table between them, looked back and forth between them, and hissed. But Conrad hardly noticed.
“That’s not a decision you can make after only one night.” He kept his eyes fixed on her, though his ears rang. “You need to separate actions and the person you’re acting them out with, because the truth is, they may not be the same.”
“Why?” she demanded. “As someone once said to me, I know how to drive a car without knowing how the engine feels. Or does that only apply to you?”
“I’m the one with the experience. You may think that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do.”
“Then why did you come here?”
There was a note of something else in her voice, then. Exasperation, maybe. And something else that clawed at him. Some kind of futility that he hated to hear in her voice.