Unrestrained (12 page)

He’d told her to be quiet, but she needed to say it. “I disobeyed your instructions. Twice.”

“How?”

When she didn’t immediately respond, he lifted his head from his reading. Though she was staring straight ahead, which gave her a view of his hip and length of thigh where he sat on the stool, she could feel that inexorable gaze pinned on her.

“I started to reread the notes. I only read . . . I read three pages and then stopped. And . . . I used my hand for seven minutes, not five.”

“When?”

“Today. A few hours ago. I didn’t wash it . . . like you said.”

He lowered his hand, snapped his fingers and then opened his palm, a clear directive. She laid the offending hand in it, which quivered as his thumb swept over her palm, her wrist pulse, his other fingers closing around her arm. He tugged her back up to her knees and she bit her lip as he brought the hand up to his face. He pressed his nose briefly into her palm, then rubbed his jaw over it, turning his head so her fingers passed over his lips. He kissed her fingertips, squeezed her hand, then used the same hold on her wrist to compel her back into a kneeling position.

“Hmm.” He returned to reading the notes. Since he said nothing further, she remained silent as ordered. He pushed them away, finishing up the sandwich. He didn’t speak again until he was done with his plate and had wiped his mouth. “Did you make this or Lynn?”

“I did.”

“Good girl.” Rising, he moved to the sink, washed his hands, dried them. Then he reached over and plucked the pancake spatula out of the pottery vase where it resided with all of Lynn’s other kitchen implements. He twirled it, smacked it against his hand. Now as before, it made Athena jump, though her backside tingled in uneasy anticipation this time.

“I punish for a couple of reasons, Athena. One is for mutual pleasure. One is for discipline. You’ve earned the discipline side, which means this waits for another day.” Putting the spatula back in its spot, he came back to the island, sliding a hip onto the stool.

“From reading your notes, I can tell you’re not quite sure what you want, but you have the fever to the point you don’t want to rule anything out. That’s pretty normal. So we’re going to let this evolve organically. Your safe word is
griffin
. Use it only if you want me to stop. I’m not going to give you an interim safe word yet, something to slow things down, because when you’re all over the map like that, you need a tighter circle to decide if something is a hard or soft limit. Knowing what I already do about your personality, your determination and courage, I know that having a stop-go safe word will accomplish that.”

She was looking at her hands, clasped and twisting around each other. He touched her shoulder, a firm tap reminding her to bring her chin up again. “Back straight, hands at your sides. Keep your thighs open. What do you think
The Choice
means? The bronze in your garden.”

Athena was glad he added the clarification, though she had to struggle to catch up with the change in direction. Fortunately, she’d mulled on the piece’s meaning enough in the past to have a formed opinion. “I think it represents every person’s struggle to choose between fantasy and reality, what they wish for life to be and what it is. The man in the suit, holding the sword, is deciding whether he’ll slay the fantasy, his dreams and wishes . . . or choose otherwise.”

“What other choice does he have? Getting lost in the dreams?” Dale had shifted so his legs were stretched out on either side of her. He seemed to like doing that, hemming her in. She liked it, too. She wanted to put her hands on his knees, look up into his face. He’d been close enough to kiss her earlier, but he hadn’t. Maybe he’d felt her uncertainty about that or, like the spatula, he was just really good at putting an image in her head, then taking it away, keeping her guessing—and anticipating.

“I like to think we live in a world where both can exist. When you hold on to your fantasies and dreams, your perception of the real world is transformed by them. Whether you achieve them or not, holding on to that magic gives you a different way of viewing everything. A better way, I think.”

Dale twined a lock of her hair around his hand, knuckles brushing her face. He was good at that, mixing tender gestures with sensual threats. One moment talking about punishment and ordering her to silence, the next helping her visualize a lazy boat ride to calm her down. What had he thought of her admission about breaking his rules? What kind of discipline was he considering? The fantasy versus reality of
that
was elevating her heart rate. Or maybe that was simply his touch. He cradled her jaw, stroking his thumb over her bottom lip.

“We tend to limit our vision of ourselves, don’t we?” he mused. “We decide what we are, all the things we can be. We think we have to be one thing or another, never realizing how many things we simply
are
. Like you. I’ve seen all the articles about your business, your fund-raisers. Even the personal stuff in the society columns. I saw the one about you and Roy taking his father out to the theater. He lived here, and the two of you cared for him until he died.”

“Yes.” Athena tried to wrap her mind around another subject change, though she had an inkling they were all related in some way. She was just too scattered to figure out how. “He was a good man. Roy’s mother was a good person as well, though she was a little more difficult at times.”

She and Elaine had had a cordial relationship, though Elaine saw Athena as competition for her only son’s affections. On the other hand, Robert was so much like Roy, the obvious evidence of it when they’d both lived under this roof had amused her.

“During the tour of this place, two places spoke to me,” Dale said. “One was your reading room. That’s your breathing space, the place where you go just to be. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Whenever I’m doing something that unsettles you, Athena, I want you to go to that place in your head and think it through, before you put up a shield. Understand?”

The words tweaked her subconscious, telling her that at some subliminal level she did. So she nodded. He stroked her hair behind her ear, teasing the tender area beneath. Sliding along the side of her throat, he caressed her nape.

“Let’s practice it. When you watched me at the club, how does it connect to what you want here? Go to that space in your head, think it through, then answer me.”

Closing her eyes, she remembered the last book she’d been reading in her easy chair. It was a book she’d read as a child. She’d found it when she was helping set up a thrift store for the women’s shelter. A story about a horse . . .
Blaze
. That was it. When she was a child, she’d read it on a rainy afternoon, falling asleep curled in her father’s recliner. Her mother’s hand, stroking her hair, had woken her for dinner. A different kind of stroking from Dale’s, but with that same protective, reassuring element.

“When I was watching you,” she said slowly, “I had a feeling, a need. I don’t know, I’ve never been on that end of things, you understand? I just felt a desire for what you were doing to Willow, how you made her step out of her head. You were whipping her, and you drove everything out.”

“Do you think you want that level of pain?”

“I don’t know. I just knew what you were doing felt like what I wanted, but I can’t explain how.” She stopped, feeling foolish. “I’m so used to being decisive, Dale. I think the reason I’m trying to keep you at arm’s length, make this a more businesslike arrangement, is the fear that if you become too personal to me . . .”

“I’ll become one of the expectations. Something you have to be a certain way around. I’ll want more from you and you’ll have to take on another role. Good girl.
Really
good girl. See, it’s there, just waiting under all the storm clouds.”

She felt absurdly pleased by the praise. She couldn’t have this conversation with someone who’d known her as a Domme. But he had no history with her, no perspective from which to judge her. No expectations. So she kept talking. “Anyone else would assume I’m still a Domme, that it’s a temporary switch, a change of pace. It’s not unheard of.”

“But that’s not how you see it, do you?”

She shook her head. But as ill fitting as the Domme coat was, she’d made it fit. Taking on a role had a certainty to it, a safety. With the duality that seemed to be attending every step of this, she was torn between the security it provided and wanting to shed it forever.

He touched her chin, bringing her eyes up to him. “All right. I have a couple boundaries of my own, different from these.” He glanced toward her list, then shifted his attention back to her face. “First, within the boundaries I set, you have the freedom to be whatever you need to be. You’re not going to be ashamed of anything you say and feel around me. I’m in control, so you don’t have to be. All right?”

She nodded. He tugged her hair lightly. “I expect a
yes
or
no
to a question.”

“Yes.”

His gaze intensified. “I do want something from you, Athena. And what I want will likely expand and grow. But I have only one expectation. For you to be exactly who you are. If who you are, who you become, doesn’t have a need for me in your life, then you tell me and our arrangement ends. For my part of things, I’m here because you fascinate me, I like you and I’m attracted to you. The thing you can expect from me, at all times, is honesty.”

He wanted things from her. For a single, insane moment, it made her want to give him everything.

“When in session, you address me as sir or Master,” he added. “Those are your two choices.”

She pressed her lips together under his touch. “What if I want to call you that outside of session?”

“Let’s start with in session,” he said. “Remember what I said about a sub getting overwhelmed by her feelings at first? Containing them to a certain extent helps settle you down, helps you decide if you really want to expand the D/s behavior beyond play and into lifestyle. That balance between fantasy and reality.”

He tapped her cheek, drawing her attention to the color flooding there. “You’re already breaking my first rule, Athena. Nothing you say to me should cause you embarrassment. I’m in control, you’re not. It’s clear you’re going to need some discipline to recognize that.”

When she’d snapped at him and he’d cut his eyes at her, he’d given her every reason to believe there’d be consequences for bad behavior. It had thrilled as much as terrified her.

“I’m not used to that.”

“What? Giving up control?”

“No,” she said. “Having someone to whom I can give it.” Had she ever?
When do you relinquish control, Athena?
Perhaps the better question was, was she capable of relinquishing control?

She kept her eyes down, unable to meet his gaze after such a personal admission. His fingers grazed her hair.

“All right, then.” He stood up. “You read three pages you weren’t supposed to read and went two minutes over the limit I set for you to masturbate to climax. Did you climax?”

She nodded.

“You’re just adding to the punishment, Athena.”

Her spine snapped up straight. “Yes sir.”

“The climax makes the infraction more severe. While I was reading, you also spoke when I told you to be quiet. You could have told me about your disobedience when I gave you permission to speak. Then there’s breaking my first boundary rule and the rule about addressing me. So, eight for the individual infractions, and four for the climax.”

Had she really been that bad? Summed up like that, it made it seem so. She was never bad. He put his hand under her elbow, brought her to her feet. With a perfunctory motion, he pulled the robe all the way off her body and tossed it on the stool, leaving her completely naked. Just like that, all her physical imperfections exposed. She was in good shape, but there was a difference between showing that off in the right kind of clothes and having nothing to sculpt or mold things into more appealing lines.

Shouldering his bag, he took her elbow again. “Come with me.”

He was all business now, which actually helped her self-consciousness. He remembered the layout of her home, moving with purpose down the wide hallway to the indoor rec room, where there was an array of comfortable furniture, a large flatscreen, music system and pool table. Roy had often played pool while he listened to the news and grumbled about how many idiots there were in the world.

Dropping his bag on the floor, Dale took her to the padded footrest in front of a large cushioned chair. “Put your stomach on the footrest, breasts just over the end, palms flat on the floor. Your knees aren’t going to reach the floor on the back end, so rest your thighs against the cushion and press your toes into the floor. Are you familiar with yoga?”

“Yes sir.”

“Like a down dog, only your stomach will be on the cushion, so your knees will be bent.”

It was still a precarious position, vulnerable, made more so when his tone sharpened. “Legs spread. Anytime I punish you, unless I say otherwise, you spread your legs. Shoulder width. I’ll tell you if I want them wider.”

Now that she was facing the reality, emotions were starting to roil in her stomach. “Dale . . .”

“Shh.” He helped steady her stance, then stroked a hand over her hair. “Have you ever been disciplined, Athena? Punished for being bad?”

“No.” Her voice was nearly a whisper, entirely unlike herself.

He let his knuckles glide down her back. “Then you’re giving me a gift. Sweet as a virgin offering up her innocence. All this gorgeous, baby-soft skin. Count it off for me, and breathe.”

She put her palms onto the Berber carpet, her toes digging into it on the other side of the footrest. In this position, her ass was lifted and, with her legs spread, she was as exposed to him as she could be. No clothes, no robe, nothing. He ran a hand down her back again. Cool air followed his touch on her buttocks, the flesh between her legs.

“Slick and swollen. This excites you, Athena. Your pretty cunt looks ready for whatever your Master wants.”

She’d seen this done, but having it done to her was very different. Her breath started to rasp in her throat when, in her peripheral vision, she saw him put his hand to his belt, unbuckle it and slide it free. He doubled it over. “Count them,” he reminded her.