Undone Rebel (Undone Lovers, Book One) (4 page)

“What the two of you do is hardly the lifestyle.”

Lane was half out of his chair when Emory put a hand on his arm and murmured, “Leave it. She’ll be here soon. Listen.”

Settling back in his chair, Lane’s heartbeat slowly returned to normal. Now that he wasn’t focused on beating the crap out of Alton, Lane could hear footsteps on the metal stairs that led to the office, which was perched midway up one side of the large soundstage.

He smoothed his expression into a smile as the door opened.

SJ was speaking quietly to Addie as she held the door open for the other woman. Their distraction gave the men a moment to look Addie over before she turned her attention to them.

Decked out in a skirt that hugged her body from high on her waist to her knee and a buttoned white shirt with a little collar, she was a far cry from the loosely dressed submissives Lane was used to. Her hair was a fall of even, glossy black waves, her bangs a perfect curve across her forehead, her lips fire-engine red.

“Perfection,” Emory whispered, rubbing his fingers across his lips.

She was. Nothing about her appearance was overtly sexual but she was undeniably sexy. She seemed supremely confident, but Lane saw the tremble in her fingers as she put her hand on her hip, watched her tongue dart over her lips as she licked them nervously.

When SJ motioned toward them and Addie’s attention switched from the photographer to him, Lane rose. Emory did the same, and Alton stepped out of the corner.

“Addie, it’s nice to see you again,” he said.

“Again?” Emory whispered under his breath.

“Thank you.” Her chin notched up, challenge radiating off every line of her body. “I know you,” she pointed at Lane with a red-nailed finger, “but not you two.”

“I’m Emory Setter, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Her hand slid into Emory’s, their skin nearly the same color. Lane bit back an unexpected flare of possessiveness and jealousy.

“Master Alton.” Alton nodded, but didn’t offer his hand.

“
Master
Alton?”

“That’s the proper way for a slave to address a Master.”

“Slave?” Addie’s hand slipped from her hip. She looked to Lane. He could see the worry, and maybe a hint of fear, in her eyes. “I’m not sure about this.”

“Maybe we’d better talk about what each of us…specializes in.”

“Oh, so now you have sex superpowers?” Addie swept her gaze over them, crossing her arms in front of her breasts. She pulled up her shields, the hint of fear gone.

“More areas of specialty,” Emory corrected smoothly, though one side of his mouth kicked up.

“BDSM should be a lifestyle, though some choose to,” Alton looked at Lane, his lip curled up, “dabble.”

“Gentlemen.” SJ’s quiet voice cut through the rising tension, capturing everyone’s attention. “Let us sit. Then talk. Please.”

Lane jumped forward to hold out a chair for Addie, who sank gracefully into it, crossing her ankles and tucking them under the chair.

“Adelita, the men represent different subcultures of an already hidden world.” SJ spoke softly, her words painting an elegant, dark picture. “Each of them sees BDSM in a different way, can make it beautiful in a different way.”

“Call me Addie. So I’ll take turns with them?” She bit her lower lip and looked away. “This sounds so…”

“Hot?” Lane asked.

Addie looked up, their gazes met. She didn’t answer.

“Yes, you will have time with each of them. There are specific things considered emblematic of the culture, which must be a part of the play. Beyond that, the gentlemen will be responding to you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Emory cut in before Lane could answer, “above all what a good Dom—that’s short for Dominant—wants is to bring both himself and the submissive he’s with to the absolute height of pleasure. Through BDSM you’ll find physical and emotional pleasures so intense they border on pain.”

Addie licked her lower lip, breathing deep. “So when I’m with you, I’ll be—”

“Orgasming. Yes.”

“Oh.” She looked at her hands for a moment. “You mentioned specialties?”

“You’ll be mine first,” Lane said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m the least…formal. I introduce you to the terms, the toys and light bondage. For me, BDSM is something that stays in the bedroom, maybe in a club playroom, but it’s about control in order to obtain the most pleasure for both of us.” Lane kept and held her gaze as he spoke, lines of intensity whipping between them like electricity.

“You’ll come to me next.” Emory tapped his fingers on his knee. “I enjoy the formality of a well-planned scene.”

“A scene?” Addie finally looked away from him to Emory. “I don’t understand.”

“The slave girl at auction is a classic, and one I always enjoy. The naughty schoolgirl is another.”

“Oh.” She blinked. “Ohhh.”

“When you’re done playing,” Alton sneered the word, rising from his chair to circle around Addie, looming over her, “I’ll teach you what D/s really means.”

She took a deep breath, then asked, “How?”

Lane had to admire her courage. He wasn’t sure if, in her position, he’d have said anything.

“When you’re with me, you’ll learn the freedom that comes from being entirely under my control. Your pleasure, and your pain, will be mine.”

“That certainly sounds… interesting.” She scooted her chair back half a foot, forcing Alton to stop circling, and crossed her legs. “I’m sure that will be an experience.”

Well played, gorgeous.

There was a muffled chuckle to Lane’s right. He looked over to see Emory pressing his fist over his mouth.

“And will each of you be there the whole time?” Addie asked.

“Do you mean will we be watching each other’s sessions? Maybe, that depends on what you’d prefer,” Lane answered.

She paused for a moment, examining each of them. “I’d like to keep the voyeurs to a minimum.”

“Okay, then.” Lane didn’t think she realized that she hadn’t actually flat out told them they couldn’t watch. One of the first things she was going to have to learn was that specificity was key in this world.

“When do we start?” she asked, looking around the room.

Lane stood. “Now.”

Addie stood on the edge of a beautiful bedroom. A massive four-poster bed sat on a platform on one side. There was a seating area in front of a gas fireplace and even a small dining table set with a sturdy rectangular table. It looked like a million-dollar-a-night suite in a swanky hotel—except it had only three walls and no roof.

“Welcome to my play place. What do you think?” Lane put his hand on her back.

When he applied pressure, Addie took a step up from the concrete floor of the warehouse-like sound stage to the hardwood floor of the fake room.

“It’s nice, big.”

“We’ll need the space, to move around in.”

“It’s…PG.”

“Were you expecting whips and chain on the walls?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to wait for Alton’s space for that.”

“Oh.”

“You’ve said that a lot today. Do you need to take a step back?”

“No, I can handle this.”

“You’re going to enjoy this. You shouldn’t seem so grim.”

“I’m not grim.” Addie took a step away, Lane’s hand falling from her back. She watched the photographer silently assemble and check several large cameras. “You’re not videoing anything, right?”

“Still photography only,” SJ said. She held up a camera, snapped a photo of Addie’s legs. She flipped the camera around, showed Addie the resulting image. The hem of her skirt was barely visible at the top of the image, the swell of her calves the focus of the image. The seam at the back of her stockings was just visible on her right leg.

“Gorgeous,” Lane said, his hand once more on the small of her back. “Are you ready to start?”

“Do we need to take test shots or anything?” Addie asked. Her stomach was full of butterflies, her fingers tingling. Though the dark sound stage and warm lighting in the mock bedroom made it seem as if it was the middle of the night, she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that it was noon. Noon on a Tuesday seemed like a strange time to start something as dark and kinky as a BDSM photo shoot.

“Nervous? Ready to back out?” Lane raised a brow.

“I’m not backing out.”

“It’s okay to be nervous.” Lane slid his hand along her neck, under her hair, his thumb pressing behind her ear.

“I can handle anything.”

“This isn’t a battle.”

“Sex is always a battle.”

Lane leaned in, blew across her neck. A shiver racked her upper body. Her discomfort with the fact that it was noon, that there was a woman with a camera only two feet away, disappeared.

Lane had morphed from an easygoing guy into a wolf.

Addie put her hands on his chest, pushing him away, wanting space to breathe, to think, to gain some composure and control. He caught both wrists in his free hand and forced them down. Her hands were between their crotches and she could feel his erection through his jeans.

“Why don’t we start with the basics?” Lane leaned away just enough to look into her eyes. “The first of which is, once you walk into the bedroom, you’re mine. I touch you when I want, how I want. You don’t push me away.”

“What about a…safe word?”

“You know more about BDSM than you admitted.”

“I did some research.”

“Smart and gorgeous. My favorite flavor. There’s not just a safe word, but a series of safe words. Just like a traffic light the words are green, yellow and red.”

“Green means go?”

“Or ‘oh yes, please, Lane, I want more’.”

Addie giggled, she couldn’t help it. The laugh dispelled some of her tension, and Lane let go of her hands. Had he been holding on to her because she was edgy? Would he always let go if she relaxed?

“I thought you said this wasn’t porn?” she teased.

“It’s not, but you’ll be saying something like that.”

“Confident, aren’t we? So you’re sure that every time you ask I’ll say ‘green’?”

“I’ll only do safe word checks if I sense something is wrong. It’s up to you to use your safe words if you’re uncomfortable or scared. Yellow means pause and reassess. Red means full stop.”

“You’re trying to tell me that you’ll be able to sense when something’s wrong with me?”

“Yes.” Lane cupped her elbow and led her to the seating area. He guided her to a padded armchair.

“Men can’t do that.”

“A good lover should be able to tell when something’s not right in sex, and a Dom must be able to. Failure to understand a submissive’s reactions to what’s happening, sometimes better than she understands it herself, is unacceptable.”

“So a Dom is really the ultimate lover.”

“I like to think so.”

“And what about you? What do you get out of it? I mean, don’t you want to have casual sex some of the time?”

“Of course. I date normally, and I have normal, vanilla sex with those women.”

“And you…hire professional submissives when you want to do this?” Addie motioned around the faux bedroom.

“If you mean hookers, then no. I meet women who are also into BDSM through clubs, chat rooms, forums. The relationships I have with them are sexual. I maybe take them out to dinner to get to know them, but I’m not dating them.”

“There’s never any crossover?”

Lane went to a bar cart, cracked open a bottle of fizzy water and poured two glasses “You mentioned a boyfriend tying you up. Did you think he was a Dom, part of the BDSM world?”

“No, it was just a bedroom game.” She accepted the glass he handed her.

“That’s what I do with the women I date, if they seem willing. I’ll take them into the shallow end of the pool, but I never seek out women to date with the intention of making them submissives.”

“So you have women you date, and women you fuck. What are you going to do when you fall in love and can’t have both anymore?”

“Love? That seems a little hearts and flowers for you, doesn’t it?”

Strangely, that comment centered Addie. The oh so confident Lane didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. For Addie, love conquered all. Romance was the heart and soul of L.A.’s laid-back rockabilly scene—it was what had first drawn her to the subculture. Lane said he knew sex, but Addie knew love. “Maybe, but you didn’t answer.”

“I’m only thirty-four, I have time to find the right one.”

The right one for what?

Addie took a sip, letting the bubbles fill her mouth. Lane had taken a seat on the couch. He wore dark-wash jeans and a white button-down, open at the throat. The leather jacket he’d been wearing when she first walked in was missing now, but the scent of leather lingered around him.

“Stand up.”

Lost in her perusal of him, it took Addie a minute to process what he’d said, to understand the shift in tension.