Page 53 of Safe Word

It did things to me – the understanding that she wasn’t afraid to play with fire, even if she didn’t even have an inkling how close she was to burning herself in the process.

Back in the armchair, I set the manuscript aside. Her handwriting curled in the margins – notes and edits I’d printed alongside the thing. I stared at the highlight beside the sex scene.

‘Too much.’ I scribbled, smiling. Darkly. Crookedly.

She had no fucking idea, did she?

I wedged an earbud into one of my ears and hit call.

I waited.

One Mississippi.

Two… Three…

Then her voice spilt through the line – husky and sleepy maybe? Honey-slow.

‘D’Angelo,’ she murmured.

Not breathless or flirty. Just her.

Fuck. Me. Where other women would falter, she didn’t even flinch. And that made my senses perk up.

I made my shoulders square up and coated my words into something obscure. My body refused to cooperate, heat curling low where it had no business staying.

‘Did I wake you?’ The question slipped out softer than intended, almost like I was asking her what she was wearing instead – a spectacularly bad way to open a call with an assistant who’d been working for me all of two days.

At forty-four, I was well-acquainted with my own rot. Pleasure – sex, pain – anything that grazed that nerve was just another pressure valve. I knew how the mind worked. I knew my own – and I knew my body. If I couldn’t exorcise the darkness with control, I’d bleed it out through the only ritual that ever worked – flesh and surrender.

Her answer came back in a low, husky drawl.

‘No. Just… reading.’ A faint rustle, like sheets moving. ‘What’s got you hot and bothered?’

The exhale that left me was long, heavy. I told myself it was irritation at her edits, not at the image her voice conjured – Paula curled up somewhere, reading my words, maybe biting her lip.

‘Chapter Seven,’ I managed finally, keeping my tone level. ‘Your changes. You’ve shifted the power dynamic between Damien and Chloe too soon.’

‘Oh?’ Her voice darkened a fraction. ‘You mean the part where she refused to wait for permission?’

The phone creaked in my hand, and I realised I’d squeezed it too tight. ‘Exactly. Damien was supposed to be in control. It’s not a power struggle; it’s about deliberate dominance. Structure.’

‘Hmm…’ she hummed, low and smoky. ‘So you’re saying she should be more submissive? Or just… differently submissive?’

I let a beat of silence stretch, mimicking her tone unintentionally when I finally spoke, ‘You can write a submissive who still challenges a Dom without toppling the scene. A good sub knows the rules enough to bend them without breaking them.’

‘That’s the difference you want in them?’ she asked, softer, the vowels a little slower.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He isn’t breaking her. He’s guiding her. She surrenders because she chooses to. Not because he takes.’

A pause. Then, a quiet laugh – dark honey dripping through the speaker. ‘Sounds like you’ve thought this through.’

I smiled like a fucking teenager – but only because she couldn’t see it. ‘Occupational hazard.’

‘Hazard,’ she echoed. I knew she wanted to ask the question that followed that word – were Dom-sub dynamics part of an author’s occupational hazard?

No.

But they were a part of Cain D’Angelo’s.