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“If it makes you feel any better, Markus has done his share of hiding secrets too. For two people who love each other so much, you both seem to be very good at lying to each other.” His tone was hard.
“I don’t feel like I lied to Markus,” she snapped, before softening. “At least, not in the beginning. Only later, after I’d healed did I start having to hide my feelings from him.”
“Healed? What the hell does that mean? Were you sick?”
Bri feared discussing her private sexual experiences with Lukus, but she pushed it down. He was, after all, the Master of a private sex club. If he couldn’t understand what she’d been through, she had no chance of helping Markus understand. Brianna closed her eyes and started her story as the jets of water continued to relax her body.
“Not sick in the way you think.” She took a deep breath and began. “I knew by the time I was starting college that there was something wrong with me. Most of my friends were pairing up with nice boys who were complete pushovers. And they were happy with these guys. After all, it’s the twenty-first century. Why should men call all the shots? But all I saw when I looked at these guys were total wimps. Of course, my friends all kept trying to set me up with guys like they had and so I’d date perfectly nice, normal guys to make them happy. But the more I datednormalguys, the more frustrated I got.
“Do you know how exasperating it is to verbalize your submissive needs to a guy too clueless to figure it out and too weak to fulfill those needs even if he knew? It kind of defeats the purpose to have to spell it out… not that it mattered. Just the mention of the word ‘spanking’ had the ones I did tell bolting faster than a racecar driver at Daytona.”
“Bri, look at me.” His sternly issued interruption startled her into instant obedience. “Sweetheart, there’s nothing wrong with you or these feelings you have. You know that, right?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “I don’t ever want to hear you say there’s something wrong with you again.” He nodded. “Go on.”
Bri settled back against the tub and continued. “I guess an important part of the story is that in high school I loved romance novels, but over time I realized the normal-boy-meets-normal-girl-happily-ever-after stories just weren’t cutting it for me. I gravitated to the edgy romances where the woman was always the submissive to a dominant, strong man. You know—the naughty princess is captured by the rogue pirate and ravaged at sea until he admits he loves her, and they live happily ever after. Or the naughty young socialite who marries the older Duke who spanks her into becoming a well-behaved young wife while loving and cherishing her till death do they part. Over time, I found a lot of spanking and domestic discipline sites on the Internet and that led to more aggressive BDSM sites and before long… I knew I wasn’t gonna be happy unless I was with a dominant man who would not only love me, but protect me, discipline me, and basically want to master me—at least in the bedroom.
“For years I kept those desires pushed down. Then in college I met my best friend Tiffany. She not only understood but shared many of my same… well… hang-ups.” Bri opened her eyes to look into Lukus’s for the rest of the story. “I know we were stupid, but after college, Tiff and I started hanging out at some of the BDSM clubs downtown. We were smart enough to always stick together and at first; we just went to watch. I was still too timid to actually cross over from a voyeur to a player and honestly, I was happy enough keeping it that way for a long time. But then I met Jake. He was my first and I guess my only BDSM relationship.”
“How old were you when you met him?”
“Twenty-two. A baby really.”
“So, what happened?”
“The first few months or so things were okay. I can’t say I was truly happy. Not in the way I am with Markus, but I was certainly having fun exploring all of the darker sexual experiences I’d been reading and fantasizing about. And Jake was happy helping me explore them. Eventually, though, things started to change. I’d pretty much plateaued and was happy with the spanking and having sex a little on the rough side. Jake, on the other hand, had decided he wanted to keep pushing the envelope.”
“It truly is one of the hardest parts in a D/s relationship,” Lukus said. “The figuring out each other’s limits and understanding if the Dom and sub are compatible.”
“Well, that assumes that both people actuallywantto discover each other’s limits.”
Lukus’s face hardened. “He was a new Dom. I gather he didn’t take it slow enough for you. I try so hard to take new Doms under my wing to help them out. So many assholes think that being a Dom means you just get to be a domineering jerk twenty-four-seven. They don’t realize the great responsibility that comes with taking care of a submissive. Subs are to be protected… nurtured… cherished.”
“Well, Jake must have missed getting that memo,” Brianna said with a mirthless laugh. “He had no interest in understanding my limits. On the contrary, he wasn’t happy unless he was pushing me well past them.” Bri took a break, hating to say the next words, but knowing she couldn’t stop. “I should have left the first time he raped me, but the lines between submission and abuse were so fuzzy for me at first. He said all of the right words to keep me confused. ‘You told me you like to submit, so you’ll submit.’ Or my all-time favorite—‘subs have no right to say no… ever.’”
“The fucker. I thought I was pissed at him yesterday. Today, I think I’m gonna kill him. Did Markus know about him?”
“Yeah, he knew. By the time I finally left Jake, he’d pretty much beaten me within an inch of my life more than once—all in the name of punishment, mind you. I think the worst thing I ever did to deserve a punishment was forget to pick up his dry cleaning before one of his business trips. I left him for a couple months after that session. But then he came around with a big bouquet of roses, begging for another chance just before Valentine’s Day. He was always so apologetic, swearing he’d learned his lesson and that he’d never let his anger get the most of him ever again. That time he booked us a weekend away at a bed and breakfast to prove he could be as romantic as the next guy. Like a fool, I went away with him.”
Bri stopped the story there. Her eyes were closed again as she started to tremble.
Lukus cleared his throat. “Is the water getting too cold? You’re shivering.”
Her eyes remained closed, trying to shut out her memories as she shook her head. “The water is fine. I was just deciding how much I was going to tell you. I made the mistake of telling Markus everything and I think it’s a big part of what went wrong between us.”
“Sweetheart, you need to tell me what you told Markus. I need to know where his head is at right now.”
Brianna turned to gaze into the eyes of her husband’s best friend. “Why do you call me sweetheart?”
Her question seemed to catch Lukus off-guard. “I don’t know. I guess at first I was using it to get your attention. Now… it sort of just fits. Does it bother you?”
“It should… but oddly it doesn’t.” She gave him a pained smile. “It’s just that Markus calls me sweetheart, too.”
Their eyes were locked. The energy in the room was shifting but Lukus broke the connection first, looking away. “I think you’re stalling.” Reaching into the water, Lukus lifted her left leg and began to lather her with the soapy bath sponge. “Back to your story.”
Brianna looked away from him, her mind wandering back to the weekend that would forever change her life. “I should have known when we arrived at the remote cabin in the woods that something was wrong. Jake made out that he just wanted us to have a romantic getaway all alone. But what he really wanted was to get me miles away from civilization so no one could hear me screaming. We weren’t in the cabin ten minutes before he had me stripped naked and tied down. There was nothing romantic about it. The sole purpose of the weekend was for him to beat me until I promised never to leave him again. I’ve blocked out a lot of the details. I only remember that he used every punishment implement he owned on me. He only took breaks from beating me to get something to eat or rape me. Before we left on the trip, he’d promised me he would finally let me have a safeword, but of course the first time I tried to use it, he laughed and said no one knew my limits better than he did and that he’d only stop when he thought I’d had enough.”
Brianna turned her face back to Lukus. Tears she’d been holding back were now spilling down her face.
“Funny thing is that he never thought I’d had enough. By the time he dropped me off at home on Sunday night, my entire body was one huge bruise. I had over two dozen open cuts or wounds. I had rope burns, bruised ribs, and it took over a month for my…” Bri dropped her eyes and took a ragged breath before continuing. “I was so torn from the rough sex that it took months to recover. Tiffany begged me to call the police or at least go to the hospital. Looking back, of course I should have, but I was in shock. It was the only time I ever got fired from a job, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave our apartment for weeks.”
