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Diving into a busy day, waiting tables and making sandwiches, Vienna was far from Shelby’s thoughts, so was Col, Jessup, Clive Darcy and Padraig Finnian. She stayed far longer than the four hours Maureen conceded to, and ended the day with a cup of her own coffee and a long talk with her business partner; not about anything to do with her nightmare of incarceration. She smiled as she left the coffeehouse and let Maureen lock the door as she headed to her car.
An amazing feeling of relief was beginning to make her feel almost sane. But when she pulled up in front of the apartment, she found Padraig pacing on the steps, obviously annoyed that he had to wait.
“Where have you been?” he spit off angrily as she came up the walk.
“I had to get out.” Just the expression on his face, and all her restlessness came back to her, the gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach, the agitation over so many lies and half truths and pieces of Shelby Ryan that Padraig could never know. The reality of home seemed far more difficult to deal with now than her weeks in captivity.
“You had to get out why? Where’d you go?”
“What is this, Padraig, the third degree? I was at
the coffee house, working.” She shuffled inside her purse, looking for her keys.
“What’d you mean working so soon? We agreed you’d stay home, you needed to rest. You didn’t even answer your cell phone when I called and now you tell me you’ve been gone all day?”
“I’m sorry about the cell phone. I guess I didn’t bring it with me.” She opened the front door and moved inside with Padraig at her back. “I was getting restless, Padraig,” she said with a sigh. And now she was tired after a long day.
“Restless for what? I don’t understand. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Dammit! Why wouldn’t he stop!
But he wouldn’t stop. He spun her around, and though she was afraid to look him in the face, she had no choice now. He stared her down with his green eyes almost ruthless the way they appraised her. She’d never seen him quite like this in their three years together. Everything about him made her shudder in strange ways.
She wanted him, but there was so much that he didn’t know about her, so much she’d deliberately kept hidden. Why would he need to know about the kinky sex with Clive and his demented friends if she had no intention to go back there? It seemed like good excuse at the time. And it worked perfectly until the hard S&M in captivity brought back her masochistic desires. Submission to sadists was as real to her now as it was when she became Clive Darcy’s slavegirl. There’d be no hiding from the truth again. But Padraig Finnian would never understand how or why she could endure the beatings and the hard sex. How could she even admit to her Irish boyfriend that her body still craved that rough abuse? At night when Padraig wasn’t with her, this was what she thought about. There wasn’t a gentle thought in her head, just the images of surrender and punishment and the exhilarating ride on waves of pain.
“Padraig, I don’t know if I can be with you now,” she said to him, sighing heavily. She moved into the living room and flung her purse on a chair.
“What? What do you mean?” he came after her. “Turn around and look at me.”
She turned to see his eyes still flashing, though they were full of worry now.
“I-I’m sorry. I just don’t think this is going to work.”
“What the hell are you telling me?”
“The truth. The truth about me. You have to know that I’ve kept things from you. Not just now, but before. And that’s not right.”
“And what is it that that you’ve kept from me?”
“Padraig, please. This is so difficult…”
“What’s so difficult about the truth?” he pressed, moving closer still.
“They did terrible things to me when I was incarcerated. Terrible things. Things that would give most women nightmares for a long time. Most women, anyway.”
He stared at her skeptically. “But not you, eh?”
“Not in the same way,” she admitted. And now there was no way out, none. “Sit down, Padraig, please.”
They sat on opposite couches; Shelby curled up in the corner of one, Padraig in the center of the other leaning forward, his eyes not wavering from his distraught girlfriend.
“I never told you this because I was hoping that I could just forget it…but now I have to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“I have a past with a man who used to do those sorts of things to me. The things Col. Jessup and the others did while I was captive. He would bind me, beat me, and make me crawl at his feet. The reason he could do that was because I loved it. I craved it. I can’t explain why, but it’s who I am, like I was born to be a kinky slut. I thought I was over it after I left him. I mean, it seemed as if those desires for submission were gone, at least for the three years you and I have been together. But the last few weeks have proved my assumptions wrong. The desires have hovered on the sidelines of my life, but have never really gone away. And then…like fate catching up with me, or bad karma, or an angry god’s revenge, I get searched at the airport and all of a sudden my past hits me squarely in the eye.”
Padraig peered at her carefully, like he was counting every hair on her head. “So maybe, you’re sayin that what happened to you wasn’t all that hard to take?”
