Rude Awakening (5 page)

“I can see you looking, you know,” she said, lifting the triangle of quiche and holding it in front of her mouth. “And yes, someone did that to me.”

He whipped his head around at her confession, and she blushed, taking a large bite and looking at the back door.

“I think,” she added quickly after swallowing. “I mean, I saw these scars when I was in the bath and just assumed someone had hurt me. It’s not like I know for definite or anything.”

She was playing him for a damn fool, he was sure of it, and who could blame her if she was running from someone who had made those hideous marks? But he wouldn’t allow this charade to continue. If she wanted to stay, she would have to admit she hadn’t lost her memory, and if it meant him threatening to oust her from his home, then he would do it, guilt be damned.

“You may as well just admit it,” he said, raising his cup to his lips and avoiding eye contact…for now. He took a sip then cradled the cup in his lap. “It’s in your best interests, after all. It means you get to stay longer.”

“Fuck!” she said, dropping the quiche to her plate.

He winced at her language, his suspicion that she wasn’t a woman from his circles confirmed. Oh, he wasn’t averse to bad language. Far from it—he enjoyed using it and hearing it in the bedroom—but he wasn’t used to women he dated using it in everyday speech.

But this isn’t a date, so what does it matter how she speaks?

“Come on,” he said gently. “It’s obvious you have a Master. You may as well tell me about it—him, your situation. Perhaps I can help.”

She snorted and picked up her fork, toying with the cuts of meat. “What the hell would you know about Masters?”

He smiled, took a sip of his drink and eyed her over the cup rim. “More than you might think.”

She widened her eyes, realisation dawning, and let her fork go. It landed on the plate with a clatter, and she stared at him open-mouthed. “Oh, fuck me. Don’t tell me you’re a bloody Master?”

He almost choked on his chocolate. “I am, and I sense yours isn’t a good one.”

She lifted her hand to her collar and stared at the back door again.

“I also suspect that collar should come off. Keeping one placed about your neck by a deviant isn’t advisable. Have you been mistreated?”

He knew she had, but his question was to get her to open up, not to just nod absently like she was doing now.

“Do you even know the proper rules?” He watched her eyes cloud over, as though memories had taken all her attention.

She tensed, fidgeting with that collar so harshly her nails scraped the skin of her neck.

“Please, stop doing that. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Felt worse pain than this,” she whispered, lowering her hand and embracing herself around her middle.

“I have no doubt you have. Do you wish to talk about it?”

The floodgates opened then, and she related horrors no person should have to endure, all the while keeping her gaze fixed on that back door. He imagined her running, finally breaking free, the bite of the cold on her feet, the wind whipping her hair and freezing her body. He resisted the urge to get up and embrace her, resisted even making the simple gesture of reaching across the table to touch her arm, worrying any action may spook her.

“I knew all along he was a wrong’un,” she said, tears wetting her cheeks. “Knew I shouldn’t be there, pretending to be a damn lady when I wasn’t and never will be. But he told me…he said that was the way a Dominant and submissive behaved, that I had to do whatever he told me whether I liked it or not. I’d read a bit about it in books, you know, when I worked in the library, but he said that was all a load of bollocks, that the books were wrong…”

She swiped her eyes with the back of one hand, and he was struck by the fact her tears were silent, no sobs accompanying them, no hitches of breath or the thickening of her voice. Had she been conditioned so much she was even afraid to cry?

Who the hell is this man?

“It’s possible I may know him,” he said, startled that he’d voiced his thoughts.

“Which is why I won’t tell you his name. It’s bad enough I’ve run from him—and he’ll come looking for me, you can bet on that—but to have you confronting him, if that’s what you had in mind… No, it’d make things worse for me.” She shivered and unlocked her arms, reaching for her drink only to hold it to her chest.

“You might want to drink that before it gets cold,” he said, leaving the subject of her Master’s name behind them for now. “You’ve had quite an ordeal, and being out in the snow won’t have helped.” He ploughed on, “Do you wish to stay here for a while until you feel safe enough to find a place of your own? I assume you’re not planning to return to him.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going back—ever—and I don’t rightly know what I’m going to do. I can’t work at the library again—he’ll look for me there—so maybe I ought to bugger off to another town or something, get completely away.”

“Maybe.”

He stood slowly and walked into the laundry room. The quick wash he’d set her clothes on had finished, and he transferred them to the dryer. “Your clothes will be ready soon,” he said as he returned to the kitchen. “Shall we go into the living room so you can warm up a little more? I’m worried you might suffer from a chill and want you as warm as possible.”

She cocked her head, giving him a quizzical look, as though his concern was utterly foreign to her, and he guessed that it undoubtedly was.

“I don’t know why you’d give much of a shit, but yes, that would be nice.”

He let her walk ahead of him and smiled at her word choice. Despite her way of speaking having initially made him cringe, he found her openness, her honest answers, refreshing. Especially since she’d now given him a brief description of her life prior to finding herself here. That she felt comfortable enough with him to revert back to her old ways was a step in the right direction. Her Master hadn’t completely cowed her, hadn’t stripped her of everything she’d been before she’d met the hateful man, and that was something to be grateful for.

In the living room, she sat at one end of the sofa while he sat at the other, close enough to see her facial expressions but far enough away to give her space. She stared at the fire, cup still nestled at her chest, and he studied her through lowered lashes, surprised he found her quite attractive. She wasn’t his usual choice. He had a penchant for blondes with a few layers of fat on their bones, but her face appealed to him, her waif-like body bringing out his urge to nurture.

“I can explain a little about the proper rules, if you like?” he asked. With their sexual leanings in common, at least they had something to discuss. “About how play should be directed. It really isn’t what your Master led you to believe. In other circumstances I’d offer to show you, to take you on as my sub until you’d learned all the rules, but with the state you’re in, I really don’t think it’s advisable. You’re vulnerable and, well…”

“I don’t think I could handle a spanking tonight,” she said, turning a weak smile his way. “Besides, you’d think me a right tart if I agreed, and I don’t fancy being labelled as something else I’m not. I mean, Master… He said I was all sorts of nasty things.” She gave the fire her attention again.

“I wouldn’t think you a tart. There’s nothing wrong in two people indulging if they’re both consenting. My concern is more about playing while you’re vulnerable and unsure of the rules. It isn’t my style to prey on women susceptible to upset due to their emotions being a little topsy-turvy.”

She laughed, not unkindly, and looked his way again. “Topsy-turvy?”

He sensed she was gently mocking his way of speech, but that was okay. If it meant she laughed and smiled like that, he’d let her do it all the time. She was like a constantly kicked puppy—all the instinctual bite thrashed out of her—although he thought, given the chance, the right environment, and the right Master, her bite and her bark might be encouraged to return. How sad that she’d been reduced to someone so unsure, where one moment she was lost in her thoughts and the next a smidgen of her former, true self tried to penetrate through the person she had been forced to become.

He wondered whether he should take her on, encourage her to be who she really was. Would she even want that on the back end of such a traumatic D/s relationship? He shook his head. What was he doing? He should never have even thought about it. Ridiculous to expect her to jump into something new when old wounds still lay exposed and festering, still raw and open to infection. But, God…he had a hankering to mend this broken bird, to watch her fly with new wings and soar through a sky void of mean, dark clouds and storms.

“Tell me a bit,” she said, cheeks flushing. “Tell me what I should have had, so next time—if there is a next time—I’ll know what to expect.”

She dug her elbow into the settee arm and rested her chin in her hand, her gaze fixed firmly on the rug in front of the fire. Harry frowned, thinking a little conversation wouldn’t hurt. But maybe it would.

“If I tell you how it’s supposed to be, won’t you feel upset that you didn’t have that?” he asked.

“Not really. Everyone has at least one shitty relationship—don’t they?—and that was mine. We’ve all got to move on, learn to trust new people. I’m not stupid, I know damn well there will be things that set me off, remind me of him, but fucking hell, I can’t live the rest of my life all scared and whatever, can I?”

He sensed she was covering up the pain with her bright tone, but if him talking went some way to helping, talk he would.

* * * *

“Wow,” she said quietly when he’d finished. “So if I was your pupil, you’d
want
me to speak up, to tell you what I wanted?”

“Of course. How else is your Master to know what your threshold is? It isn’t a Master’s right to override your desires, more that he must accommodate them, incorporate them into play and enjoy making you happy, meeting your needs. This…this person you’ve been involved with used you for his own ends. I’m sorry if that hurts, but I can’t allow you to go along thinking he was correct in what he did. It also sounds to me that he’s naturally controlling, because to strip away your identity, to manipulate things so you’re only reliant on him… That’s a dangerous man to be involved with.”

He looked at her to gauge her reaction, to see how much he could say without tipping her over the edge. Who knew what she had in her mind, what images played over and over, what emotions roiled inside her, set to send her crazy the moment she let down her guard and allowed herself to remember? She appeared awed, not devastated, though—the latter being how he’d thought she would react. It seemed she was more resilient than he’d given her credit for, although he wasn’t fool enough to think she wouldn’t suffer from the horrors she’d been through. It would take time to fully cherish this tiny woman, to have her totally believing what he said and understanding that she hadn’t been the one in the wrong.

He found himself admitting he rather relished the idea of being the one to bring her out of herself, to watch her blossom under his tutelage.

Don’t, Harry. It’s a big undertaking. And who’s to say she’d even want that?

As though she’d read his mind, she said, “Tomorrow, I want you to show me. I want us to do some mock play where you instruct me on the way it goes, what happens.”

He opened his mouth to protest, disliking the squirm of nerves in his belly that he would be taking advantage of her.

“No,” she said. “I might be hurting, I might have things in my head I shouldn’t bloody well have, but I want to learn. Just pretend I’m someone from that club you told me about, someone you’re taking on—you the teacher, me the pupil. It’ll be all right, honest. I just want to see how it’s really meant to be, because then it’ll help me get over this shit. Then I’ll understand and no bastard can hurt me ever again.”

“But you hardly know me,” he protested, thinking her mad to want to succumb to another Master so quickly.

“Doesn’t matter. I can tell you’re not a prick.”

He bit back a laugh but couldn’t prevent a smile twitching one corner of his mouth. “All right, but first I want to remove that collar. Would that be all right?”

She nodded, and he was pleased to see she didn’t touch it. He stood and walked to his sideboard, opening a drawer and extracting a large, sharp pair of scissors. He had no idea how else to remove it.

He returned to the settee and sat beside her. “I don’t think I have anything else I can use to take it off. I can only hope me sliding these between the collar and your neck won’t cause too much distress.”

She eyed him, then tilted her head. “Do it. Take the fucking thing off.”

She closed her eyes—so much trust there—and he gently eased one blade of the scissors beneath the collar. It indented her neck, but thankfully, with the leather being thin, he was able to snip it quickly. He let it fall into her lap, and she opened her eyes to stare down at it.

“Get it off me?” she asked, hands held up as if it might taint her if she touched it again.

Harry pulled it off her lap. “Would you like me to dispose of it?”

She nodded, closing her eyes again, and he stood, walked over to the wicker waste bin and dropped the collar inside.

To take the sting from the monumental thing she had allowed him to do, he said brightly, “How about tomorrow I take you out, get you some new clothes?”