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“Do you know why I didn’t collar you?” he asked. “Or make sure we were bonded so no one else in the club could touch you?”
Mal shook her head, throat too tight to speak even if she wanted to.
“It’s because I didn’t want to be only your Master.”
Mal whipped her head up, sure she was hearing things, or reading too much into the situation.
“You say you fell in love with me after a while? I think I fell for you on night three.”
“Benson, don’t. Don’t say this if you don’t mean it.”
“Don’t tell you I love you? That I hate you because you broke my heart?”
Mal was trembling, on the verge of tears—damn it, she never cried this much—and she wasn’t sure if she was happy or sad, elated or devastated.
“I found this great girl. Perfect for me. Smart, sexy, total pervert in all the good ways.”
She laughed, but it sounded perilously close to a sob.
“But there was a problem.” He rubbed his lips with two fingers in a way that was painfully familiar. “Because she was also my sub. I spent months trying to figure out how to ask her out on a date without either fucking up our D/s relationship, or having the power exchange influence her answer.” He looked at her. “I was worried she’d say yes out of habit.”
Mal shook her head. “You know that outside the club, I’m not at all submissive.” Benson was one of the few people in the club who knew what she did. Not because being a business consultant was a big secret, but because she wanted Las Palmas to be separate. With Benson, it felt natural to occasionally talk about their jobs. “I have no problem saying no. And I fully compartmentalize between my life out there and in here.”
“I learned that as we went on, but like I said, I fell for you on night three.”
“Benson, why didn’t you tell me how you felt…”
He raised a brow in that supercilious, dominant way he had.
“Fair point,” she whispered. “I didn’t say anything either.”
“Because what we had was too good to risk.”
Mal nodded. That summed up the issue nicely.
They were quiet for a moment, and Mal began to worry about what happened next, when he spoke.
“I did everything I could to be the Dom you needed.”
“Oh, Benson, if I forced you to—”
Again, the brow went up. “I wasn’t forced into anything. You know me better than that.”
She nodded.
“But some things we did weren’t things I found interesting, and frankly some of them I didn’t think helped our power exchange. Everything we did, even the stuff I was ambivalent about, was on my willing to try list.”
He looked down at his hands, seemed to struggle to find his next words.
“And if I hadn’t done them with you, you would have gone to someone else.”
“You were worried I’d switch Doms?”
“Once I got my hands on you, I had no fucking idea why you weren’t collared. Why someone else hadn’t already snatched you up. But I also knew it wasn’t fair of me to limit you. We talked about your submission journey all the time. I didn’t want to fuck that up for you.”
“And I didn’t know how to reconcile the fact that I wanted to experience things like knife play.” She held up one hand. “Didn’t want you to be the one with the knife.” She gestured to him, then held up her other hand. “But I also didn’t want anyone else to touch me.”
“And it killed me every time I had to let someone else put their hands on you.”
