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“Of course they do,” she said, and then she rolled her eyes.
Conrad almost laughed again.
“That’s not a line,” he said mildly. “I’m not trying to impress you. It’s a statement of fact. If you weren’t here when I arrived home, there is a long list of people I could have called who have already begged me for the privilege of being on that list in the first place.”
Her chin jutted higher. “Do you expect me to applaud?”
Conrad did laugh again, then, not sure why he was finding this entertaining. When he was, deliberately, strict and humorless when it came to these things. He liked discipline. Obedience. He expected his submissives to do as he asked, when he asked, or he found a different submissive. He had limited time and even less interest in “training” when that meant, as it so often did these days, hanging about at the service of a selfish woman who thought only of her own pleasure no matter how much time she spent on her knees.
Conrad, famously, had no interest whatsoever in thebratty subphenomenon.
Yet here he was, hard and intrigued despite himself.
And it had been so long since he’d been drawn to anything that he went with it.
“You wouldn’t like the way I prefer to receive my applause,” he told her, not stepping back. Not giving her space. “It involves your mouth. You on your knees with your hands behind your back. And generally speaking, a healthy amount of tears on your part. That tends to be par for the course in the kind of sex I prefer. Perhaps the equipment you saw in the other room already clued you in.”
“You make people cry when they give you blow jobs?”
“They cry because my cock is large and I like to fuck their faces,” Conrad said, the way he might discuss mild weather with the Queen of England. “And because crying at their own helplessness while I take my pleasure as I please makes them even hotter.”
She was breathing fast. “That sounds revolting.”
But her eyes were glassy with heat. He could see it roll over her, making her whole body quiver. And that pulse in her neck beat out the truth.
“Liar,” he said, and made a faintly disapproving noise. “What am I going to do with you? If you can’t even tell the truth to yourself, how will you possibly achieve the honesty that I require?” He let his gaze sharpen. “Because let’s be very clear. Honesty isn’t a suggestion. It’s a commandment you break at your peril.”
“Wait a minute. I haven’t agreed to anything.”
“Rory. Little one. You haven’t left.”
It seemed to occur to her that they were standing too close, then. That she was breathing too hard, her skin was too hot, and her nipples were poking hard against her oversize T-shirt—and worse, that he could see all of those things. She scrambled back a few feet and caught herself against the exposed brick wall behind her.
He made no move to follow her, and he could see that confused her.
“I’m not opposed to a sexual interaction,” she said after a moment, though every bit of her body language suggested that she wasn’t nearly as blasé as she sounded. “Necessarily.”
“I’m delighted to hear that.” Conrad watched the way the hand she’d shot out against the brick wall trembled. “But I generally require consent to be far more unambiguous. And enthusiastic. And occasionally documented.”
She shook her head at that, but sharpened her gaze on him as if that could keep her confusion at bay. He rather liked that she came to it naturally.
“But there are some things that you should know about me,” she told him, in the same lofty voice she’d used to lecture him on artisanal housecleaning, of all ridiculous things.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” he said. In what he liked to call his soothing voice. Not to be confused with his commanding voice. Though both usually had the same effect. “If I get my hands on you, I’ll know everything about you. Sooner or later.”
Her lips parted at that and it seemed to take her a long moment to shake it off. “First of all, I’m going to need you to respect my identity.”
“Which identity is this? An artist whose medium is bleach in a bathtub? An American who distinguishes herself by wandering around Paris dressed appallingly?”
She frowned, swaying on her feet like she couldn’t decide where to swing first.
“I’m pansexual,” she announced, and nodded, as if cosigning her own declaration.
“Again, you have my felicitations.”
“I’m pansexual for sure andprobablydemisexual, and—”
“Explain to me what these words mean to you,” Conrad said, interrupting her.
