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She had spent two more days with Dorian.
Two more days filled with...more. With him.
Playing the kind of games she learned were calledplayingandgameswhen they weren’t really playing at all. Not when they could change a person so completely. So profoundly.
Dorian had tied her up. He’d experimented with cuffs and collars and other binding things. He arranged her on that massive bed of his, attaching her wrists and ankles to the handy chains welded to those steel posters, and he taught her things about herself that she hadn’t known were there.
Over and over again.
And afterward, when she was lost in that buzzy, intense space that only he could put her in—where her mind and her emotions and her body were all one, all his—she told him stark truths she’d spent her whole life hiding from.
That she’d thought her father had left her, specifically, when he’d died. She had been the last one to see him and she had learned, during his illness, that good girls were quiet. Silent. Diffident and biddable at all times. And somehow, once he was gone, she’d decided that there was no point in being agood girlwhen people went ahead and died.
So she went in the opposite direction.
Hard.
She told him things she’d never really put into words before. That yes, as he’d suggested, a major part of why she’d dropped out of university was because she’d actually been good at studying and it made her feel like her old self again. Like that good girl she’d lost along the way, or notlost. That made it sound like something that had just happened. When she’d deliberately set about exterminating any traces of that girl who longed to please, bit by bit and year by year, until no one remembered she’d ever existed except Erika herself.
And though she never would have put it into words the way Dorian had, she’d shoved Conrad away, too. Because the people who loved her—who genuinely cared for her—died. Her mother was a safe space in that regard because as far as Erika could tell, she truly cared only about herself. Everything else was window dressing. Erika didn’t expect anything from her and the beauty of it was, Chriszette never disappointed.
She couldn’t believe the things Dorian got her to talk about.
He’d introduced her to a real flogger, not the hen-night jokey versions she’d thought were real before. He taught her the exquisite fear, twined as it was with an almost overwhelming sense of delirious need, for that arch of his brow that promised exactly the pain, punishment and pleasure she wanted.
She discovered she liked anything—sooner or later, and sometimes only because of where they ended up—if Dorian delivered it.
Erika found he could read her body with a fluency that should have terrified her. That did terrify her, sometimes. He knew how far to push her, and it was always further than she thought she could go.
He always asked her if she needed her safe word.
And then, when she gave him the green light, he used it push her limits. Over and over again during those two days that seemed like so much longer to her. Several lifetimes, at least.
Erika found herself caught between her own worst impulses, as if he’d tied her there. Deliberately. She wanted to run. She wanted to kneel. She wanted to lose herself in him on the one hand, and on the other, she wanted to prove her independence. Leap to her feet, storm out and make him regret that he had ever pretended to know her.
In his hands she was made of passion and dark greed, and rewarded for both. He made her cry and he made her come, and then he held her against him as she sobbed and slept and told him the stories she kept deep inside her and had never told another living soul.
She felt like a different person with him, and that was the real betrayal. In that brief span of time, a single weekend, she felt like the woman she’d secretly always wanted to be. Beautiful. Capable.
Lovable, something kept whispering inside her.
Dorian didn’t tell her he loved her and she wouldn’t have believed it if he did, but still. There was a look in his dark gaze. A certain gleam when he looked at her that made her wonder what it would be like. To always be here, with him, and a part of this powerful thing they shared. Part of this beautiful dance of mirroring, reflection and awareness.
Mixed in with blistering-hot sex and too many orgasms to count.
It would be a very lucky woman indeed who found herself kept forever by this man, she found herself thinking on that final morning. He’d bent her over the couch, where he’d spanked her that first night, burying his hands in her hair to hold her head where he wanted it. And he’d taken her with a brutal elegance that had left her wrecked in his wake.
Dorian had gazed at her before he’d left, tucking himself away into a three-piece suit that made him almost look like a stranger after the days of T-shirts, jeans and his dominance—were it not for that intensity and power of his that no suit could hide. He filled rooms with every breath, confidence and assurance stamped deep into his bones.
He looked at her as she panted and shook through the aftershocks. He lookedthroughher, his mouth unsmiling and too much knowledge in his gaze.
He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said he would see her soon, indicating that he expected her to be there when he got back from his business meetings in Zürich.
“When I ring you,” he said in that tone that made every hair on her body feel as if it was standing on end, “I expect you to answer.”
It was almost as if he knew what she was going to do.
First, Erika had sobbed, there on that leather couch, where he’d first introduced her to herself.
