Page 218

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I joke.

But Kane surprises me when he frowns and shakes his head. “No. That won’t work. It’s either a full-throated Yes or it’s nothing at all. There is no room for half-measures in a game like this. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Sorry. Yes, I’m ready.”

“Good. Then take off your clothes and get on the bed.”

I undress hurriedly. It’s not actually that sexy, and yet somehow it’s maybe the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced? I don’t know how to explain it.

Rules as an abstract concept don’t exactly rev my engine. Neither does disrobing like I’m at the gynecologist.

But a shirtless Kane in a candlelit room with a bedspread covered in devices designed to do some pretty aggressively sexy things to me?

Yes. That’s hot.

So I strip everything off, pile it all up off to the side, then get onto the bed and lie down on my back with my head on the pillows.

He kneels beside me. He takes my right wrist and buckles the cuff, then works two fingers under it and pulls to check it.

Then the left. Then he reaches up and clips the chain to the wrought-iron spindle in the middle of the headboard.

I test it. My hands go up and a little out to each side, but they do not come down to my body.

It’s fear and relief at the same time, wound together so tight I couldn’t separate them with a paring knife.

“Alright?” Kane says.

“Yeah.”

“Words.”

“I’m alright. I’m— Yes. It’s good.”

He picks up the blindfold and holds it above my face. “Last chance to change your mind.”

“Put it on.”

The last thing I see is his solemn scowl before everything goes dark and soft. I can still see a faint orange glow around the bottom edge, the candles making themselves known, and I can hear him breathing. The mattress moves as he shifts his weight, and I have no idea where he’s about to touch me.

Then his mouth is on my knee.

“Oh,” I say.

“You flinched.”

“You surprised me!”

“I know.” His hand moves up the outside of my thigh, then the inside, and my leg starts to close out of pure animal habit, thirty-one years of muscle memory.

Until his palm meets it and pushes it open again.

“There it is,” he says.

“Shut up.”

“No.” He pushes my knee out further and holds it. “This is the point. You cannot run and you cannot hide, Lilah. You’re mine to devour as I please.”

He works his way up. He takes his time about it. There is a long stretch in there where I lose the plot entirely, where I can’t tell which part of me he’s kissing because I can’t see, and everything my body does happens without me getting a vote on it.