I didn’t like the idea of being with someone this rich. Someone who I had nothing in common with. I forgot for a second what I was even doing there.
James stepped up behind me, not touching, but unbearably close, and I remembered then. Oh yeah, that.
“Where’s your bedroom?” I asked bluntly. Perhaps it would be less intimidating than what I had seen so far. I highly doubted it.
A strong hand fell on my nape, squeezing, then massaging. I leaned into the contact. Even his simplest touch was pleasurable.
He grabbed my hair there, pulling the strands together into a ponytail. He used it like a handle. Or a leash. He pulled me, not ungently, up the stairs by it. My chin lifted up with his handling. It was firm and controlling, but with no pain. Yet.
We passed by eight doors in the long hallway to his bedroom. His room was on the very end, the door already opened.
He took me just inside of it, stopping to let me take it all in.
The room was softly lit and colossal. Double doors opened into a well lit bathroom on the opposite side of the room. The walls were a medium taupe, the colors themed to the desert, similar to the rest of what I’d seen of the house.
His bed was massive. I’d never seen a bed like that. It had to have been custom made. It had a massive four poster frame, made up of heavy dark wood that was intricately carved and nearly reached the high ceiling.
It was topped by a heavy, latticed top of the same wood. It was patterned and carved into a piece of art. It was beautiful and frightening. It was a bed made for beauty and pleasure. And bondage and pain.
I picked out the more alarming little details slowly, as I took in the entire massive bedroom. Restraints were hanging, attached to the latticed top. And more were fastened to the posters themselves, laid out neatly against the crisp white sheets.
“Are those ropes?” I asked in a breathless voice. There was some kind of cushioned ramp in the middle of the bed, in a sandy beige that matched the carpet. I wasn’t sure what it was for.
“Yes,” he answered, and didn’t elaborate.
My eyes caught on the object they had perhaps been avoiding. A black riding crop lay on the ramp. “Is that a riding crop?” I asked, my voice catching, but I knew the answer.
“Yes,” he answered, moving for the first time since we’d entered the room, nudging me forward by his grip on my hair until I was several steps closer to the bed. “I have more toys that I want to use on you, but I didn’t want to intimidate you by laying them all out.”
I laughed, and it was a desperate kind of noise. So this was how he tried not to intimidate me?
“You need to pick a safe word,” he told me. It was an order.
I took a deep breath. “I assume you know I’ve never done any of this before?” It was a question.
“Yes,” he breathed, his voice thick and intense.
My mind went blank. “Sotnos,” I said finally. It was as though my mind had worked independently of my brain.
“Sotnos?” he asked archly. He imitated the accenting of the word perfectly on the first try.
“Yes.” I wouldn’t tell him why. I was shocked at myself for choosing it, though it made a sick kind of sense. But I certainly wouldn’t explain it to him.
He tugged on my hair, hard, tilting my head back and to the side until I looked at him. His gaze was hard. “There are rules in here. I become your master in here, and I will punish you when you defy me. I will read your reactions, and try not to go too far, but if I do, or if there’s something you just can’t handle, that’s the word you use.”
“What about outside of here? Didn’t you say you would punish me for lying to you? But we weren’t in here when I lied to you.”
He smiled at me, and it was wicked. “There are exceptions. I will never lie to you, and I expect you to learn to do the same. Tell me what your safe word means.”
I shook my head stubbornly. “No.”
“Would you rather take more lashes than just tell me what that means?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I tried to sound sure, but I wasn’t. I had no concept of how hard he would hit me, or how much it would hurt, but I had spent my formative years being conditioned for pain, and I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t have a higher tolerance for this than most.
He ran a tongue over his teeth. It was incredibly hot, watching that skilled tongue run across his straight white teeth. I hadn’t seen it before, but the teeth on the outside of his canines were a little sharp, almost faint fangs, the four teeth between them straight and perfect. Even his teeth were impossibly sexy.
Figures, I thought, almost resentfully.
“How about an exchange? Is there something I could give you in exchange for that information? Something you want to know about me? Something you want in general?” His voice had turned to velvet as he spoke.
I wasn’t even tempted. I was not talking about it. I shook my head. He gripped my hair, hard.
“You’re driving me crazy,” he said softly, then nudged me towards the bed. “We need to talk. We need to figure out this arrangement. But I can’t wait any more for this. Nothing has ever made me feel this wild before. I need to mark you. I need to own you. I need to punish you. I need to open you up and strip every detail out of you. And I will get you to tell me what that word means to you.”
The last two sentences made my heart beat the fastest. That was never going to happen, but I couldn’t find the voice to tell him that just now. I couldn’t find the breath. It was panting out of me in a harsh rhythm of mindless fear and anticipation.