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“Wait here,” he told me before disappearing through the door. I tried to peer inside, but it was too dark, and I couldn’t quite see. When he returned, he was holding a variety of objects. One of them, was a whip.

“I’m not sure if I’ll be too keen on the whip, Alex,” I said with a nervous laugh.

“It’s not a whip. It's a flogger. And don’t be so quick to judge,” he said, seeing my facial expression. “Feel it. This could only inflict pain on you if I allow it.”

I took hold of the flogger he held out to me. He was right. The braided strands felt like silk against my fingers as I dragged them across my hand. A quiver of excitement ran through me at the thought of Alexander running this softly over my body.

Okay, maybe this isn’t so bad.

“What’s that?” I asked him, feeling a little bolder as I handed back the flogger and pointed to the long metal bar he held in his other hand.

“This is a spreader bar.”

I looked at the cuffs on each end of the bar.

Large enough to wrap around my ankles.

A tightness formed in my belly as I envisioned myself lying on Alexander’s covert bondage bed, with cuffs around my ankles, and spread wide for him.

“Krystina, please stop your hands from fidgeting, or else I’ll end up reneging on my promise not to touch you.”

I slapped my hands to my sides, although a part of me wanted to keep fidgeting so he would touch me.

But he didn’t lay so much as a finger on me. Instead, he stood there, continuing his ever so attentive study, as if he knew of my internal struggle. A part of me wanted to run screaming from the room, yet another part of me was anxiously waiting to be tied up.

“I wanted you to see this for yourself, if for nothing else than to ease my conscience that you know what you’re getting into,” Alexander said. He turned away and went back to the room that held his secret toy stash. When he came out, I was thankful to find him empty-handed. I wasn’t sure if I could handle another lesson on bondage paraphernalia today. After locking the door again, he came back over to where I was standing.

“Why do you keep that door locked?” I asked curiously.

“I wouldn’t want Vivian to come across my closet and get upset,” he explained, flashing me a lopsided grin.

A surge of jealousy surged through me. We had agreed to no strings attached, but I couldn’t deny I needed some sort of explanation for this Vivian person. I wasn’t the sharing type.

What if he’s already in an arrangement with someone and just wants to add me to the ménage à trois?

The thought reminded me there was still so much for us to talk about. He had written down threesomes, but I had disregarded it as a typical male fantasy. But with Alexander, I was quickly learning how wrong it was to assume much of anything.

“Who’s Vivian?” I asked suspiciously, with just a bit too much of an edge in my voice.

That I had caught him off-guard was all too apparent. He raised his eyebrows in a mock expression of surprise.

“Don’t worry, Krystina. She’s only my fifty-five-year-old housekeeper,” he clarified as if he had read my mind. “I prefer to limit who I share this with.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, relieved.

Good. I can handle old housekeepers.

He gave me a strange look but didn’t comment on the housekeeper any further.

“Let’s go back to the living room. We can talk more, and it might be less intimidating in there rather than in here,” he suggested, motioning to the room around us.

“No…I’m fine here. I’m just…”

How can I explain how I feel? This is all so twisted and bizarre, yet so unbelievably erotic.

“You’re just what?”

“This room, that secret room of toys and whatever else you have hiding in there…it’s strange. I don’t know what to think,” I said, my tongue heavy in my mouth as I tried to overcome my awkwardness. “It’s crazy because I feel like this is wrong in so many ways, yet I’m intrigued at the same time!”