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He closed his hand over hers. “Thomas suspected it for a long time, though he didn’t know if you’d ever embrace it the way you’ve done with me these past few days. Just because someone has a Dominant or submissive orientation doesn’t mean they’ll decide to take it down that path. It can run in families, you know.”
“How do you know he suspected that?”
Brick tugged her hair, brushing a knuckle over her cheek. “At the wedding, because Rory and Thomas know what I am, it was part of the dialogue. Nothing in detail. That’s all private between you and me, and that’s where it stays unless you prefer otherwise. But they were making sure if you wanted to explore that side with me, I’d take extra care.”
“Oh my God.”
He chuckled. “It’s okay, doc. Look at it this way. You and Thomas outnumber Rory on this side of the whip. Unless you count your mom. If any of us were going to vote on it, we’d all vote for serious Domme there.”
“Please don’t make me stick a hot poker in my ear to burn that image out of my brain.”
But her mind was already moving away from that down another path, the one from her brothers to Julie. Julie was a close friend of Marcus and Thomas’s from New York. Julie’s passion was community theater, and she’d run one successfully up there. Over the years, she’d become part of the Wilder family, partly because her own was so emotionally distant. Her parents and brother spent more time touring Europe and managing global business concerns than spending time together as a family.
Julie loved them, but routinely claimed she’d been switched at the hospital. Her attachment to Les’s family had only increased after she moved to North Carolina to run a community theater outside Charlotte, for a friend who had the capital to get it started, but not the know-how.
The friend, Madison, ran an erotic store called Naughty Bits in Matthews. The theater she’d envisioned was one that celebrated all kinds of erotic performance art.
On the far-too-rare occasions when Julie and Les had managed to be at the farm together, they usually pulled Daralyn into a girls’ sleepover. Julie would regale them with scintillating stories of the theater productions. While she exaggerated the details to make them laugh and blush, Julie had also conveyed the theater’s more serious intent, to celebrate sexual expression in all its forms. Including Dominant and submissive dynamics.
Initially, Les had suppressed her flood of questions, not wanting to reveal the depth of her fascination. But when she’d recognized Daralyn’s curiosity, Les had jumped in and thrown some of those questions out to Julie, under the guise of increasing Daralyn’s comfort with asking her own.
Why hadn’t she put that together with Daralyn being a submissive? Since Daralyn and her brother had paired up, Daralyn’s confidence and ability to express herself had notably improved. It might seem counterintuitive, that embracing a submissive side could result in that. But whereas a folder of pictures had become a moderately successful anxiety management tool for Les with day-to-day challenges, submitting to Brick during one of the most awful experiences of her life had given her an anchor point. From it, she was better able to look at what had happened and ask herself the hard questions about what she was doing with her life.
Belonging to someone, trusting their love and care, helped a person stand on their own two feet.
She went back to Julie. Julie was married to Desmond Hayes, who’d performed at her first community event for Madison’s theater. He’d done rope stuff, like the suspension displays she’d seen at Mick’s private party.
“So Des is a rope top… Is he also a Dom?”
“Yes. And yes, Julie is a submissive. She’d be totally okay with you knowing that, and talking to her about it if you wanted to.” Brick smiled at her expression. “It’s not that there are so many active D/s people; we just tend to cluster, the same way most people with common interests find one another.”
“Wow.” She took a deep breath.
In the resulting companionable silence, those revelations should have given her a sufficient level of distraction, helping reinforce the wall she usually used to function during high stress events. Unfortunately, the invading army was already past the gate, and each one of them looked like a clock, ticking down to tomorrow.
As the thoughts swarmed up again, like ocean water into a footprint left in the sand, she shifted in her seat. She tried to manage it, breathe in and out. Keep herself from wanting to jump out of her skin, get away before the worry constricted her into a fetal position.
“Hey.” He looked her way, eyes sharp. “You all right?”
“Yeah. It’s a weird mix in my head right now.” Her half-laugh sounded hollow, echoing in her chest. “Even being chased by a crazed killer can’t seem to derail it. Every hour I’m getting closer to tomorrow’s conference, the harder it is to think of anything else.”
Brick slowed down for a light and turned his full attention to her. “Then I’ll take you home and fix that.”
She cleared her throat. “That’s a lot to ask of a man who was shot.”
“Grazed. But I’m not doing the work, doc. You are. I’m going to push you hard, until you can’t think of anything but pleasing me.”
Traffic was backed up at the light, so he was able to move the hand on her shoulder to her hair, that tight hold that tipped her head toward his grip and brought her halfway across the seat to him. “What’s your response to that?”
Though hearing a “Dom tone” from Rory had given her that startling tingle, it was nowhere close to how she reacted to it from Brick. It set off an EMP among those inner worries, knocking them completely offline in favor of better things. Like in The Matrix, the machines floating lifeless.
She was never looking at that movie the same way again. Or her brothers, for that matter.
She met the challenge, offering her own back, with a curve of her lips. “I’d do that for you right here, if you ordered me to.”
Humor flitted through his intent gaze. “Rory always said you were a brat. You’ll wait until we get to my place. But the second we get through that door, I want you on your knees.”
She lowered her eyes, fastening her gaze on where she suspected he’d want her mouth first. Where she wanted it, too. “Yes, Sir.”
