He forced the words out, his voice such a curious growl, I couldn’t tell if he liked the idea or hated it.
“I’ve played at it before, pushed knotted butt plugs inside you, worked them in and out like I was an alpha.”
“You were never an alpha,” he said with a snort, his smile glittering in the dark. There was a challenge there, one that seemed impossible to meet, but this was the first stage, I realised.
“Your omega is being a brat,” Len informed me, coming to take a stand beside me. “He’s pushing you, trying to see if you’re strong enough to put him in the place he so desperately wants to be.”
“What the fuck would you know?” Tris shot back, but I looked at Len and he stared back, and we both smiled.
“I can count on the two of you for advice?” I asked him and James, who’d hung back slightly, giving Tris some space.
“Direction on how to deal with an unruly omega?” James purred, moving closer. “Darling, you’d have to beat me off with a stick to keep me out of this one.”
“Get inside the place you wanted to come to, to explore more thoroughly,” I said to Tristan in an offhand voice, my heels clicking across the ground as I stalked past him and towards the front door. “We have carte blanche to play the whole night, and I don’t intend to waste it.”
Chapter 25
“Get up on the stage,” I ordered in a dispassionate voice.
“We need to talk about this,” Tristan protested, looking at all three of us with an increasingly harried expression. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I said—”
“Get up on the stage, Tristan, or I’ll find someone who will.” I turned to look Len and James over, then saw a familiar face in the crowd. I cocked my head to one side and caught the moment Jackson saw me, a look of surprise, then wonder, on his face. He darted in and kissed the cheek of the man he was with, then wove his way through the masses, reaching us.
“Jacks…” Len said with a small frown.
“I forgot what this place was like, getting bogged down with the club,” he said, explaining himself almost guiltily. “I decided I needed to go out and have fun more. And you’re here with your omegas? Tris, Kit.” He nodded to each one of us, and I did the same in return, regal as a queen. “And…?”
He meant James, of course, who’d stepped closer, looming over my shoulder, looking Jackson up and down, and why not? That tumble of honey brown hair with all the deeply tanned skin that peeked out of his white shirt and eyes that went omega wide as James continued to stare.
“James Chadwick,” he said, holding out a hand that Jackson ambled up to take, but James just used it to pull the other man closer. He read Jackson like a book, detecting the rapid increase in his breath, the convulsive swallow of his throat as the alpha held the beta pinned to the spot just with his grip. James’ eyes slid to me, but he didn’t let Jackson go for a second. “You might be able to practise topping this one, Kit.”
“What?” Tristan said, pushing forward. “No!”
“Then get on the stage. Or a room.” I looked around me, saw the screened off cubicles that lined the edges of the massive room. “Fuck, I’ll pack us up and head to Apothecary if that will help things. What do you need?”
“That’s a nice idea, asking him,” Jackson said, looking over at Tris, whose expression grew more mutinous by the second, “but engaging his mind will keep him out of sub space for longer.” He got up on the podium, running his fingers over the vinyl bench then a set of stirrups similar to the ones Tai had used. “That’s what you want to do, don’t you? You want to be the alpha.”
There was a lightness about Jackson, but it wasn’t that he was amused. Just that he was…idly curious about everything. He leaned back, taking up position in the strange contraption, the fabric of his jeans pulled taut as he rocked back and forth, the device obviously having some kind of swivel mechanism.
“If you’re not lazy and using pheromones to do the job,” he said as I moved forward, the view of him sprawled out and open to me a tantalising one. For once, I was the one looming over one of them. “You have to rely on psychological domination. You’re looking down at me. I’d be strapped in, helpless. I might be naked.”
His voice got lower, throatier, his eyes maintaining contact with mine, even as he swung back and forth.
“Open to you and the crowd, completely vulnerable. My little brain would be ticking over faster and faster. What will she do? Will she hurt me or please me? What do I want her to do? I might test the bonds, see how strong they are, see how well you tied me down.”
I watched the way his body tensed, muscles popping under the plaid shirt he was wearing.
“And then it comes, that exquisite moment of focus.” He smiled up at me lazily, but somehow, I got the feeling it wasn’t me he was seeing, although maybe it was. His eyes glittered, though, with a knowledge I didn’t have.
Yet.
“When all you see is me—my reactions, my pain, my pleasure, my pleas, my cries, my sighs…” His words died away for a moment. “And all I see is you. Nothing going on, nothing in this fucking sexual zoo matters, but the one with their hands on me.”
There was something here, something more, something that made me narrow my eyes, searching for answers, but I didn’t get them, not yet. Tristan stomped up onto the podium, yanking his shirt up and over his head, revealing that taut swimmer’s build, and then it was exactly as Jackson said. My focus was entirely on him, as he came closer, as he looked down at Jackson, as he jerked his thumb abruptly, as he said, “Get out.”
“All good, chief,” Jackson said, rolling free and coming to stand beside me. “I was only here
if you weren’t ready to play.” There was a sadness to that which deserved more attention that I couldn’t give right now, not as my love moved closer, eyeing the apparatus suspiciously.