REVEAL - Scorpio & Harlan (Fettered Book 2)

C
opyright
© 2016 by Lilia Moon

Borrowing my words to make money is a hard limit. Using them to fuel your own fantasies is totally encouraged!

xoxo Lilia

I
look
down at the pretty green plate heaped high with chocolate-chip cookies and topped with a cute yellow ribbon and try not to curse. It’s a good thing Gabby is the nicest person I know, or I’d probably spend half my life doing stupid stuff for her. I say no to most people just fine, but she’s had my number since her second day in the office.

Anyone who thinks she’s just our receptionist is an idiot.

Unfortunately for me, the guys at Fettered totally know Gabby’s worth, and they make sure to do good and useful things for her on a regular basis. Which means I get to play punk-rock delivery girl to her cookie-baking affliction, because apparently all good deeds in Gabby’s world have to be repaid with baked goods.

I needed a walk anyhow.

I take the couple of turns down the well-disguised alley that will get me to the back door of the hottest BDSM club in town. No way anyone’s on the front entrance at this time of day, and if I’m really lucky I can leave the cookies on the kitchen counter and run before anyone spots me. If Gabby wants her cookies dropped off with pretty words, she chose the wrong delivery chick.

I’m a behind-the-scenes kind of woman and everyone at Your Perfect Moment
knows that. We’re all in agreement that it’s better that way. Stuff gets done, we keep our rep as the best wedding planners in the city, and I don’t scare any of the clients with my leftover punk-rock singer attitude or fondness for black and chains. A lot of really naive, sweet, easily frightened people get married.

I get to the club’s back door and discover it’s already open. Or rather, it’s filled with Quint’s bulk as he has a conversation with Ari, who’s apparently taken up tree climbing. I nod at Quint and squint up into the trees. “Is she bored, or are apple trees part of some kink I don’t know about yet?”

Ari looks down at me and laughs. “This is so not an apple tree.”

Details. “There are easier ways to get Quint to look up your skirt.”

The big, sexy man in the door reaches for my plate of cookies and snorts.

Ari, still up in the tree, is a lot more opinionated. “You need to get laid, Scorpio. Or spanked.”

I waggle my eyebrows in her direction. “You volunteering?”

She shimmies down from the tree, grinning. “Sure.”

Quint rolls his eyes. “Quit recruiting—I have eleven new member requests to process this week already.”

Ari laughs as she busts into the cookies. “That’s totally Emily’s fault. She’s got all the slightly uptight ladies in town thinking they can maybe score themselves a Damon Black if they don’t mind a small trip to the wild side.”

I grin. My boss shook up a lot of people’s world views when she hooked up with Fettered’s owner. Elegant wedding planner meets spanking bench and lives happily ever after, or headed that way, anyhow.

Quint growls. “Shut up. It’s my job to screen those ones and send them back to their safe little cubicles.”

I pull up a very wobbly excuse for a chair and snag a cookie. “Why not just let them in? Either they’ll run scared the first time they see a paddle or they’ll find their inner kink and have a good time.”

Ari has somehow managed to end up guardian of the cookie plate. “Emily was ready. Most people aren’t. Generally we wait for people to realize what they want and seek us out.”

“Exactly.” Quint nibbles on his cookie like some kind of really big, blond surfer mouse. “You’re nicer at telling them to go away, so you can help me work through the new member requests.”

“Not a chance.” Ari pats his cheek and then breaks off a big chunk of his cookie and pops it in her mouth.

“Hey.” Quint swipes and misses. “Mine. You have a whole plate of cookies.”

She grins at him and chews. “You big, scary Dom, you.”

From everything I’ve heard, that’s exactly what he is, but you’d never know it from his pretty-boy looks and casual demeanor. Then again, most people don’t take me for the baddest wedding logistics coordinator in the business, either. Something about the spiky hair and chains seems to bias their assumptions.

Ari takes two more cookies, hands one of them to Quint, and passes the plate to me. “Damon and Harlan are in the dungeon, and Milo’s hanging around somewhere.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Since when did I turn into your personal delivery service?”

She snorts. “You’re not mine. You’re Gabby’s, and I’m pretty sure Harlan’s the guy who fixed your leaky faucet, so get moving, girlfriend.”

Harlan is Gabby’s favorite, which means he brings his bad-boy self to my turf all the damn time to fix things that don’t need fixing. He’s like a house elf with tribal tats. “Last week he oiled my freaking door hinges so now I can’t tell when people are sneaking up on me.”

Quint laughs. “That was me—sorry.”

I glare at him. A retired punk rocker can stand her ground even with the tough guys of Fettered. Somebody needs to, because everyone else in my office just rolls over and does whatever they want.

Well, except for Emily. Damon might be in charge of things in bed, but that sure as heck isn’t the dynamic between them the rest of the time. He’s still pretty much in awe of how she walked into his world, all sweet and bold and smart, and charmed the pants off of anyone in the BDSM community still wearing them.

It’s fun to watch, even if I mostly stand on the outside looking in.

Ari tosses a thumb over her shoulder. “The cookies are getting cold. Go.”

I don’t want to. I want to leave them at the back door with the sassy chick who’s become my good friend and the sexy Dom who doesn’t make me squirm.

Because one of the guys inside? He totally does. And from the look in her eyes, Ari knows it.

D
amon’s phone
rings and he tosses me his wrench and gets up to leave, grinning at his screen the whole time. “Finish this up, will you, Harlan?”

I manage not to roll my eyes. Big, bad BDSM club owners aren’t supposed to go all gooey when their subs call them. Which I’m smart enough not to say to my boss or any of the hundred other people I hang with who think it’s totally adorable.

Emily is adorable. Damon Black all soft and gooey is… something else. He’s my boss, but he’s also my closest friend. For him to suddenly have a life outside the club is just plain weird.

And leaves me holding the bag on equipment repairs.

I hold up the two wrenches we haven’t tried yet and sigh. Neither of them is going to fix the problem with this particular spanking bench and we both know it. Milo’s the guy we need, but he’s upstairs installing one of his secret projects and none of us are brave enough to interrupt him, even if it might take him days to come up for air. I lie down and stick my head back under the misbehaving bench, hoping things somehow look different this time.

“Box wrenches got you stumped?” Two feet clad in army boots stop at my shoulder. “The wrenches are the girl part. You need to find a boy part under there for them to have fun with.”

I’ll never look at hex bolts the same way again. “Just what I need—tool advice from a woman who spends her days tying bows around flowerpots.”

One booted foot kicks my shoulder, and not very gently. “It was an emergency. Trust me, nobody lets me play with bows unless the world is close to ending.”

That’s not what I hear. Scorpio’s pretty much the wedding planner equivalent of me—the guy who makes all the details work. I wiggle out from under the bench so I can stop looking stupid, and so that I can find out why she’s skulking in my dungeon. I figure the last one out fast. She’s holding a plate of cookies and they smell like pure sin, Gabby style. I grab two before Scorpio reconsiders. “She loves me best.”

She sits down on the spanking bench and makes a face. “She’s going through early menopause. It sometimes affects her sanity.”

Gabby’s a totally sexy forty-three-year-old grandmother, and there’s nothing wrong with her brain or anything else. “I’m working on getting her to adopt me.”

Scorpio snorts. “Get in line.”

That I can believe. “Are you here to deliver cookies, or because you have a secret desire to paddle someone?”

She steals one of my cookies and makes herself totally comfortable on a piece of equipment that makes most people outside my lifestyle blush like hell. “You need a spanking, lover boy?”

Not usually. But she might—and as far as I know, she’s never played. “There’s no shame in wanting one.”

“Duh.”

I don’t get her. There are always some dabblers at the club—people hanging around on the edges of BDSM and trying to decide if they really want to jump—but she doesn’t smell like one of them. She’s got friends who play, she’s come to events here, and she’s clearly comfortable bullshitting over cookies with a Dom, but she never steps all the way in.

Which suddenly has me more than idly curious. “You hang around here, but you don’t play.”

She shrugs, but something inside her has gone still. Watchful. “I deliver cookies. I come hang out with my friends sometimes. People here are pretty cool.”

I can usually read a newbie like a cereal box, but she’s twisting my wires. “Have you ever done more than talk?”

She raises a wry eyebrow. “Have another cookie and stay out of my bedroom.”

That’s usually an answer I’d respect, but she’s got me chasing something now. People say I have the best nose in the business, and it’s caught the smell of something. “You’re sitting in my bedroom, so answer my question.”

A long silence while she chews on a cookie and stares me down. Which is not something a Dom deals with very often, particularly one with leathers as old as mine. Finally she shakes her head. “Nah, not really. Some light kink, but no rules, no scenes.”

That’s the kind that sometimes goes bad in a hurry, but nobody sits on a spanking bench as calmly as she is if there are those kinds of skeletons in their closet. I decide to take her at her word. For now. “If you did, would you be a top or a bottom?” The staring has me honestly curious.

Her eyebrow does its quirking thing again. “Do you ask all the girls that question?”

Pretty much. I don’t play with women who don’t know the answer. I push them all into the sub role anyhow, because I know exactly what I am, and that doesn’t end up a good thing for anyone who doesn’t belong there. These days I’m smart enough to ask—but usually I’m pretty damn sure what they’re going to say.

Not this time.

“Sub.” She shrugs, but she’s not quite pulling off casual. “A pretty mouthy one, though.”

My imagination instantly offers up several things I could make Scorpio’s mouth do if she’s talking too much, and that has my brain freezing and my cock jumping to attention. I breathe, trying to get a grip. My inner Dom is suddenly
very
interested in the woman in army boots who is calmly eating her cookie and staring me down.

Damn. “I can work with mouthy.”

Her eyes widen. “What?”

I’ve never been one of those guys who gets in the water an inch at a time. I hold up a wrench and grin. “I like girl parts.”

She nearly chokes on cookie crumbs. “I bet that line gets you all the ladies.”

Right now I’m hoping it gets me this one, even though my brain’s clearly having trouble keeping up with some of my less complicated body parts. “You hang around, you’ve never played. If you want to, I’m offering. That’s all.”

Her eyes narrow. “Because you think I need to get in the water?”

There are some claws behind that question, and that’s got my curious circuits firing again. “No. Because you’re interesting. And because you’re friends with the cookie lady.”

She pelts me with one, straight into my forehead.

Yup, she’d eat a baby Dom for breakfast. “Pro tip—pelting your Dom with food is a really good way to get yourself tied up and punished.”

She’s a pretty cool cucumber, but I see the reaction. Subtle, and very quickly covered, but there. She’s not wrong about being a sub, somewhere under all that self-confident sass. One who might like getting tied up a whole lot.

My cock thinks that’s sexy as hell.

“Noted.” She stands up, plucks something off my forehead where the cookie hit, and pops it in her mouth. “Chocolate chips taste good on you, lover boy.”

I grab her wrist. Two can play at this game. Her pulse beats fast and hard under my fingers. “That’s not an answer.”

She’s smart, and honest enough not to play dumb. “I’ll think about it. I have to go—I’ve got six hot Italians to pick up at the airport.”

I close in enough to invade her personal space. “If you ever sign my contract, you’re in big trouble for that kind of sass. I’m keeping track.”

She grins and twists out of my hold. “I hope you can count really high.”