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“I’m not a kid,” he said. “I’ve been in relationships that lasted long enough to consider marriage, or moving in together. They ran their course and didn’t work out. When I look at you, there’s something different there. We connected in a way I’ve never experienced. You know the day Nicole died? Right before it happened, I was thinking about the session you and I had at Progeny. Do you remember it? Really remember it?”
She did. When he saw how quickly she recalled it, he gave her a satisfied, tense nod.
“What I’m saying is it wasn’t my hearing loss, Skye. We had already stepped onto that road together. It just got delayed. Or maybe what I went through, that helped move it along even faster, what was opening up. Abby could have been the Mistress to come see me afterward, but she wasn’t. It was you. But I don’t really give a fuck if that meant anything significant or not. Things happen in the world, and whatever gets thrown in your path as a result, you grab it if it’s worth holding onto.”
When she kept looking at him, all those thoughts whirling in her brain, he pressed on. Tiger wasn’t the type of man who did lengthy conversations, but she could feel his determination to break through, to answer her fear and give her something to replace it. Something real. Terrifyingly real.
“Before, if I pleased a Mistress and was what she needed, that meant a lot. But as you and I got deeper into it, I was doing more than that with you. Pleasingyouwas what mattered, digging into myself to give you everything you needed, learning more about you so I could do that. And every time you gave me more of who you are, I felt like I’d found treasure."
He gave her a painful half smile. "Somewhere along the way, it hit me in the head. 'Dumbass, you fell in love with her. Youarein love with her.’ And that sense that we’re all alone in the world, that no one will ever get deep enough inside us to make that feeling go away? I don’t feel that way with you. I think it’s because you let me inside, too. It has to go two ways for that feeling to disappear.”
He took a breath. “I’ll make you a deal. If we don’t work out, it won’t be because I can hear, or you don’t talk the way most people do. It’ll be because I pissed you off to the point you need to end it or murder me. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer you to give me the choice, because I might just decide killing me would be easier than giving you up. It sure feels that way now.”
Tears were sliding down her cheeks. He stood, bent and kissed them, finding his way to her lips. Then he lifted his head and gazed down at her, his eyes so full of determined resolve, the sexy alpha male she knew, that her legs actually felt a little weak.
“Do you know, when I lost my hearing, I had this fucking awful coffin feeling, of being shut in with the silence. Then being with you, your help, made it into a cocoon instead. When I was with just you, it was a world all our own. I should have seen that it became that for you, too.”
His hands tightened on her. "You're so good at handling your world. I forget we all can be vulnerable. And yeah, Mistress and sub, it's my job to recognize it, but I got pissed because you were pulling away. I didn't look at why. You weren’t pulling away. You were shoring yourself up, reinforcing the fortress. Getting ready to handle it alone again.” Those eyes became fierce. “I can be your fortress, Mistress. Let me. Just let me.”
Skye held his gaze. Lifted her hands. Formed theOandK. Then she slid her arms under his and held on. For the first time in her life, she let herself be held the way her father had held her.
With a strength and surety that told her she’d never have to doubt the depth of the love being offered in those arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A month or so later
She’d been in Spokane, Washington for a week, helping with a marketing system implementation that was not going smoothly. The IT manager was determined to prove they hadn’t needed any help getting it set up. Which they did; else she wouldn’t have been called in.
The only thing saving the idiot from bodily harm was the regular texts Tiger sent her, making her smile. Each night, she video chatted with him in her hotel room because she wanted to hear his voice and see him.
Before she left, he'd driven her to the airport. She’d thought about telling him he didn’t need to do that, but since he was either sleeping at her place or her at his most of the time, it seemed natural to let his desire to care for her evolve that way.
His hearing had returned almost a hundred percent. No more hearing aids. She wouldn’t have held him to any goals he’d set himself before that, but his determination to learn signing had only increased.
Though she’d threatened to tie his hands so he’d stop asking her to show him more words and phrases, the message his commitment sent was impossible for her to ignore. Her quiet joy over it set up a small place in her heart, growing in strength eachday. Her ability to talk to him only with her hands, her body, her expression, was growing. One day, it would be all organic, no tech involved.
When they video chatted, she did a mix, signing and typing, but mostly she liked watching and listening to him. He usually called from his office garage, which told her that he was sleeping on that cigarette smoke saturated couch.
Part of it was him working needed hours to make up for time and income lost. But when she looked for confirmation on that, he told her, “My bed feels too empty.”
He had a knack for connecting heartstring-pulling thoughts like those to easier, arousing ones. Like he had during a chat earlier in the week.
“You once asked me my ultimate Mistress fantasy. What’s your sub one? No judgment, no constraints. You know who I am. I won’t feel like you’re asking it of me. Just gives me the chance to follow where your mind goes when you dream of possibilities.”
She hadn’t answered him right away, wanting to think about it through the next day. Then the first part of her morning had driven everything out of her head but frustration, when she discovered the IT manager had mucked up the programming she’d done yesterday, not knowing what the fuck he was doing.
She straightened it out, but came back to her hotel room that evening with a pounding head, an aching back and neck, and a desire to do nothing but face plant on the bed.
Eventually, though, she rolled over on her back, stared at the ceiling and recalled Tiger’s question. She lifted her phone and started to type.
She did have a fantasy. It wasn’t something she needed from Tiger, but she liked the idea of sharing it with him, seeing what he did with it. How he reacted.
“I come home to a sub…my sub, at the door. Kneeling for me. He wears a cock harness with a cuff under the head that vibrates, keeping him hard. He’s wearing nipple clamps, a chain between.”
She could see the way the steel would look against his flesh. His birthday had been a couple weeks ago, and she’d gotten him a leather cut with the tiger logo on the back, Roseland Garage Crew circling it. The cut had metal studs on the front, over the pockets. She liked the way it looked on him. Particularly when he didn’t wear a shirt under it. Just low-riding jeans and his boots.
“He holds a collar in his hands. If I put it on him, I’ve accepted his submission to me. Every day it’s his choice, to offer that to me.
