“Fine. Hand it over.”
He shook his head. “We will watch it together.”
Her stomach turned. “Why?”
“So we know you’ve suffered through it like we had to. So you’ll understand our concern.”
“Give it to me. I’ll watch it.”
“There’s more than just one DVD,” her mother added. “There are two and pictures.”
“Pictures?” she repeated. “Of what?”
“One thing at a time. Where’s your DVD player?”
They were serious. They were going to force her to watch whatever was on that DVD with them in the room.
“I’m sure she has one in her apartment.”
No way was she taking her sour-faced judgmental parents to her loft, the place that’d always been her sanctuary. Amery grabbed her laptop off the prop table. “I can watch it right here.”
“I want to warn you that it won’t matter if you try to destroy it. We’ve made copies of everything.” Her mother placed the plastic case in Amery’s hand.
“Of course you have.” She pointed to the folding chairs. “If you want to sit.” She pushed the rolling chair up to the table and popped open the DVD slot. When she felt her parents behind her, she wheeled around. “Do not stand over my shoulder, or I will take this in another room.”
Her mother harrumphed. “You do not get to decide—”
“Yes, I do. And besides, aren’t you supposed to be studying my face and body language to see how I react to what I see?”
“Now, sweetheart, we understand why you’d be defensive—”
“Don’t you ever call me sweetheart, Dad. Ever. You couldn’t show love and compassion when I was growing up, so you have no right to it now. I’d rather have your f**king contempt, which apparently I’ve got, so stick with that. Now, sit down.”
Her parents were shocked into complete silence for once.
Amery loaded the DVD. It was more than an hour long. “Do you expect me to watch the entire thing? Right now?”
“Yes. Why do you think we drove all the way from North Dakota?”
To shame me in person.
Before Amery hit PLAY, she wondered if someone had gotten a copy of the shibari demo they’d done at the club. At first she’d been annoyed Ronin had taped her without her knowledge. But after she’d seen it, she understood that Ronin needed her to see the demo from a different perspective. She’d actually cried during the part where he’d so lovingly removed the rope. Amery knew there was an amazing sexual chemistry between them; she felt it every time the man touched her. But to see it on-screen? To see the passion and tenderness in Ronin’s hands and on his face as he’d bound her and then untied her? That had unwound her completely. She had no defenses left where Ronin was concerned.
Somehow she didn’t think she’d see that on this DVD, and her pulse spiked when she clicked the start button.
The images were grainy, like a home movie with crappy video. But she knew the man she was seeing was Ronin. A younger Ronin.
There wasn’t any sound in the first segment as he bound an unknown naked woman. The focus was on the binding itself, not the sensuality of the act. The next two scenes were clearer, but the atmosphere had changed along with his rope partners to a harsher scene. The women were more intimately displayed. One even asked him to stop, at which Ronin crouched down and talked to her. Then he resumed his binding.
She might not have recognized Naomi after the first fifteen minutes of viewing if she hadn’t seen that annoying smirk up close and personal and heard that cooing baby talk voice.
The queasy sensation rolled over her as she watched Ronin binding Naomi. Not in the clinical manner as in the previous scenes, but with the loving touch she knew firsthand.
It shouldn’t have shocked her when Ronin stripped and started having sex with Naomi after finishing the binding. The shock, coupled with Naomi’s betrayal in taking something so intensely personal and almost . . . sacred to Ronin and using it to hurt him, sent her thoughts spiraling toward desolation.
To think her parents had watched this didn’t embarrass her; it infuriated her. This side of Ronin wasn’t Naomi’s to share. It never had been. Add in that she’d secretly taped them, and it spoke of her absolute evilness, vileness, and vindictiveness on a different plane.
By the third scene with Naomi, tears coursed down Amery’s face. She ached from the very bottom of her soul. Ached to see that the tenderness and care in Ronin’s beautiful eyes had been so wholly undeserved for this woman. Knowing when he saw this, he’d be mortified. Would he close himself off to her all over again?
To the untrained eye, or maybe to anyone who didn’t know Ronin on the level she did, the scenes that followed were harsher. The love and gratitude for the experience that shone in his eyes was gone. He tied Naomi in intricate configurations that took an incredible amount of time. The sex afterward was perfunctory at best, one-sided at worst. Ronin got off and didn’t seem to care if Naomi did. Their conversations were in Japanese, so Amery couldn’t decipher them, but she understood begging. Not the sexy kind of begging, but the desperate kind. Ronin’s reluctance was apparent when Naomi grabbed his hand and tried to make him spank her.
And he did—not with his hand. He used a paddle.
And then a belt.
In the next scene, Ronin splayed Naomi’s pu**y wide open and flogged it. Her screams were audible even behind the ball gag. But they weren’t screams of pain. She recognized the difference; she doubted her parents did.