Worth The Wait: A Nature Of Desire Series Novel (40 page)

“Deal.”

“Good.” He grunted. “As soon as I have you tied up again, I’m going to beat you. Just to make myself feel better.”

“Okay. Can we stop talking about it right now, though?”

“Okay.” He squeezed her. It still wasn’t his normal strength, but it was getting closer. He felt solid, and he wasn’t quivering any more. She curled her fingers around his hand, thinking about how he’d said he touched her hands so often when she was tied up to make sure they weren’t cold, among other reasons. His had been too cold, but now they were feeling more like his normal temperature.

“Are you all right?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t get mad.

“Yeah. You took care of me just the way I needed, love.” He sighed. “I guess you proved your point, about my girlfriend needing to know more about my health than the average person.”

“I had to go to extraordinary lengths to say I told you so. Hope you appreciate me arranging for that sexual predator to break into the theater.” Her voice broke a little as it hit her once again, what could have happened if Des hadn’t come. Rape. She would have been raped. Possibly worse.

“Sshh, hey. It’s done. You’re good.”

“So does the passing out thing happen that often?” At his curious look, she gave him a crooked smile. “Figure I’d take advantage of my vulnerable position to find out more about this stuff, when you can’t get mad about it.”

He closed both arms around her this time, holding her firmly against him. “You are a silly, amazing girl. And a pain in my ass. No, it doesn’t happen that often. A situation like that, or a day when things just don’t work right, sometimes it can bring on an attack too fast and I need someone to inject me. But it’s rare. I know my body pretty well.”

“Don’t be selfish. I’d like the chance to get to know it pretty well myself. I didn’t like your note,” she added on a more serious note. “‘
It was bound to happen sometime
.’”

He met her gaze. “We’re all going to die, love. I don’t know anyone who’s gotten out of this life alive.”

She’d never met someone so matter-of-fact about dying. On one hand, it gave her a sense of what living with that knowledge had been like for him. But she was going with her gut and, even if it twisted in knots at his words, at all the emotions they could be concealing, she let it guide her.

“But that’s not what you meant. I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re different, aren’t you? You’re more…”

She didn’t say “fragile,” because it didn’t quite fit. He was strong, and more than capable. But he had a disease she was fairly sure he knew was getting the best of him. The day he’d told her she had a choice of whether to go forward with him or not, knowing his health would be a factor, he hadn’t directly implied it, but she knew now it had been there.

Plenty of diabetics lived into old age. Des didn’t expect to be one of them.

He didn’t answer her question, but she hadn’t expected he would. “Want to go back to my place tonight?” he asked, pressing a kiss to her head again.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Do you want one?”

She’d intended her question as a jest, but it came out a little serious, so that his response had an edge. When she lifted her head, his jaw was tense.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said softly. “I mean…I was looking for my Dom. What he would say if I asked him that.”

His jaw relaxed slightly. “No, you don’t have a choice. I don’t want you out of my sight right now.”

“Good.” She wrapped her arms around his torso. “The feeling’s mutual.”

S
he drove his truck
, since he wasn’t up for driving yet. He told her he’d bring her back in the morning on his way to work, though she wondered if he’d be recovered enough to work by then. When they reached his place, he stripped his clothes and fell in the bed, but when she paused before joining him, not sure how to explain what she needed, he already knew. He gripped her wrist and drew her close enough to kiss her palm.

“Go take a shower, love. Scald it all away. But bring your ass back to this bed. I’d like to have your soft body curled against me sooner rather than later.”

A shower was exactly what she wanted, but she sat on the bed, stroking his hair and the side of his face, until he fell asleep. It only took moments.

She did want a shower and she took a thorough one, scrubbing her attacker’s touch away, but she wanted to be with him even more, so she didn’t linger. When she came back to the bed and laid down with her head on his chest, her arm around him, he was resting so deeply he didn’t stir.

She dropped off into a sleep, uneasy, but holding tightly to him, lulled into unconsciousness by his heartbeat.

When she woke, she was alone, but he had a small house. She found him quickly. The door to what she’d thought was a closet was ajar, and a dim light was coming from the opening. She left his bed, wrapping the throw blanket at the foot over the oversized gray and red Wilder Hardware T-shirt she’d donned for sleepwear over her black cotton panties.

The room was almost a third of the size of his other living quarters, perhaps initially intended to be a small carport for the guesthouse and later enclosed to form this room. She wondered if he’d done the work, and thought maybe he had, because the room was custom fitted for his needs. The walls were cedar paneling, and strong parallel beams crossed the ceiling. The faint fragrance of oil pointed her to several bottles. She expected he used the oil to keep the many loose coils of ropes hanging on the wall in good condition.

She passed along the wall, trailing her fingers through a waterfall of multiple colors and materials. Jute, hemp and cotton. He had a couple of nylon coils, though those were rare, because they slipped too much for the type of rope bondage he preferred. She’d paid attention the night they went to the club with Madison and Logan, when Des had told her a lot about the different types of rope that were being used, and who cared for their rope properly and who didn’t.

The various hooks hanging from the ceiling for suspension work amused her, because above several of the hooks he’d fastened clip-on animals: monkeys, bears, a pink kitten. She touched a panda and sent it swaying.

But those were quick impressions, because what she really wanted to see was him. He was oiling one of the ropes at a rectangular table. The utility light over the table was the source of the room’s illumination, but it was enough to give her an agreeable view of him.

He was wearing a loose pair of black jeans and nothing else. Her gaze slid over the sunburst in the middle of his back and the tattoos wrapped over his arms. He’d tied his hair back so she was able to enjoy the sharp planes of his cheek bones, the sensual lips, the flicker of his thick lashes and those compelling, brown eyes as he looked her way.

No post-traumatic nonsense interfered with the little spurt of need and yearning she felt at his expression. He’d been right. Seeing her attacker helpless and frightened, carried away in a police car, had gone a long way to making her feel in control, not a victim. John had said he already had a record, so it was likely this could put him in prison for years.

She thought of how Des had held her right afterward, his thorough aftercare, despite the physical reaction she was sure he’d felt stealing over him even then. Now that she’d had time to think about it, she was quietly amazed at the courage it had taken to do what he’d done.

He’d handed her control over the man’s life or death. Even though rationally she knew it was Des’s strength and direction that had guided things, that key moment had totally belonged to her. She was also sure if she truly had wanted the man dead, Des would have done it. Which made him a little scary, but maybe in the right ways. Marcus had that quality to him in even more upfront ways. However, whereas this had been a first experience for Des with this kind of violence, she’d always suspected Marcus’s background had made it a far more common occurrence for him.

She studied Des as he turned his attention back to the ropes, perhaps sensing her need to orbit him without a lot of conversation yet. Her throat was still sore, but that wasn’t the reason. The silence was comfortable. She drew closer, looking at the four different coils of rope he had in front of him and an open notebook which had sketches and scribblings, clippings. She saw orchids, flowers and trees, cutouts of models from glitzy magazines in different positions, juxtaposed with his sketches of rope poses and notes about the possibilities. At the party she’d heard people use the term rope artist. That was what he was.

“How did you get started in this?” she asked. “Why didn’t you end up being into fire play, or get a shoe fetish?”

He smiled faintly. “You make it sound like getting a cold. I like a woman’s foot in a high heel as much as the next guy. But what I imagine when I see your foot in an extremely high heel is tying your feet in the same position without the shoes. I’d bind them over your back so I could tickle the soles with a feather and watch you squeal and squirm. Maybe put you in a vat of Jell-O to see you get all slippery.”

“Your mind goes into some very odd places,” she said, elbowing him. He put his arm around her. “Will you answer the question?”

“I will, though I’m not really sure I have a good one. When I got into BDSM, it was a pretty mundane entry. A friend suggested I go with him to a couple play parties. He thought it would interest me, since vanilla relationships didn’t really grab me. The first part of my life was a little too off the wall. I guess he realized my sexual interests would be the same.”

She smirked at him and he crossed his eyes at her. “I did play with the fire stuff for a bit, and I’m not bad at it. Whip play, the precision of it was cool, and what guy doesn’t want to pretend to be Indiana Jones? But I kept going back to the rigging. It absorbed me at all levels, sex and intellect, and it also quieted the voices.”

He paused. “You hear that a lot in BDSM, but I think it applies to whatever thing you find in your life that grounds you. Like you and your stage. Or a singer when they’re singing, a writer when they’re writing. So that was how it happened. Maybe because I’d spent a lot of my early years tied up in knots over the physical crap, making sense of knots and tangled rope was soothing to me, kind of a symbolic taking control of the lines.”

“You’ve thought this through.” She considered him. “You think most things through, though.”

“Yeah. I do.” He held her gaze, and she knew he was talking about way more than rope. “I’m okay, love. All good now.”

She pressed her lips together. She wasn’t so sure about that, but she wasn’t going to let this moment be about that, either. Seeing it, he continued in a casual tone.

“Now the Dom part, that was easy as breathing.” He winked. “Whenever I was with a woman, I needed to take complete control. I had a couple bad experiences with women totally not into Dom/sub stuff before I figured what my issue was. Talk about awkward moments. Good women, but we were just like this…” He passed one hand directly over the other, parallel tracks going in opposite directions.

“Well, you’re really good at it. I’m glad you figured it out. And, though I’m not sure I’ll ever be completely comfortable with watching you do it as a performance or scene with another sub, I don’t want you to stop doing that. You should be able to grow as an artist. I get that.”

She pointed to the cover of one of his books, where the subject was in a full Chinese split, her legs tied to a long pole that ran from one ankle to another, her upper torso flat on the ground and chin propped up on a chin rest. “I can’t do that, and will never be able to. I don’t want to hamper your art. I just…I know there’s always a sexual and intimacy component to it. There has to be, for the right energy to surround it. I just don’t know if I can handle you actually having sex with her, of any kind, and go forward together.”

There, she’d finally said it. After what she’d faced earlier in the night, it wasn’t as hard to get out, but she still hesitated to look at him right away. But Marcus was right. She wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t ever again going to settle for less than what she wanted. The timing might seem odd to Des to bring this up, but maybe she was still riding the self-empowerment Des had given her at the theater. She wasn’t in the mood to wait. She was ready to put it to rest once and for all.

Des touched her chin, guiding her attention up to him. As he did, that grip shifted and he was holding her face firmly. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ve found who I want to be with, Julie.”

She let a hint of a smile play on her lips, though his look gave her that lower vitals quiver. “Uh, just for verification, me, right?”

He blinked once, the sternness of his lips easing a fraction. “Unless Marilyn Monroe comes back to life, yes. Though I think your similarity to my fantasy Marilyn pulled me toward you from the first. Who’s to say you’re not a reincarnation?”

“She was a blonde,” Julie said, amazed at being compared to the bombshell.

“She was a brunette who dyed her hair blond,” he corrected her. “And I love your brown hair, so I’d rather it stay that color.” He drew her attention down to the ropes, where one of her restless hands was fingering the coils. “Would you like to try doing a form on me?”

Her gaze snapped back up to him, and she saw he was serious. Julie tangled her fingers in the coil of jute. Her kneejerk reaction would have been no, but as her attention coursed over his bare upper torso, she had a different answer. “Can I? Is that weird? I don’t have any desire to top.”

“It’s not weird at all. Come with me and bring that rope you’re touching. It should be long enough for what we’ll have you try.”

She did, unaccountably shy but very intrigued. She followed him to the center of the room where they stood on a cushioned mat in their bare feet. He turned and faced her.

“Okay, a rigger always coils his rope so it can shake out with minimum tangles and so he knows where the bight is, the folding-in-half point.” He took it from her to show her, shaking the rope loose. His deep voice took on a different cadence when teaching, but because he was teaching her, there was an intimacy tagging the syllables that increased the density around them.

“That’s because most shibari forms utilize doubled-over rope,” he continued, “and that’s what we’ll be doing here. I’m going to guide you through a diamond pattern harness on my upper torso, all right?”

“It won’t restrict your hands, will it?” She pinkened a little under his look.

“Not at all. I’ll be able to touch you as much as I want. I’d never deprive myself of that.” His fingers closed over hers on the rope as she followed his direction. “Here’s your bight. Slide that around my neck, as if you were helping me tie a tie. Like I was one of those guys who goes into his office in a suit every day.”

“I could never imagine you that way. You belong on your rooftops.”

He touched her face, running his hands down her arms as she guided the rope around his neck and let both ends fall down his front and drag the floor.

“There’s so much of it.”

“About eight meters, which is a good length for this tie. Don’t look worried. This is straightforward. You can’t hurt me. Okay, I’m going to guide you through what we call a stopper knot, five of them, down the front of my body.”

It took her a couple tries to figure it out, but he was patient and it was a fairly simple knot, according to him. Now that she thought more closely about the ones she’d seen him do, she realized the knots could look entirely different, even if they seemed to serve the same function.

“Like different words to say the same thing, in a bunch of different ways,” he explained. “There’s a poetry to rope, just like there is for spoken language.”

At another time, she might have summoned a Yoda or Grasshopper joke, but the timbre of his voice, stroking her with every word, didn’t encourage levity. She was content, marinating in a simmering arousal.

“Lots of rituals emphasize binding, tying and knots,” he pointed out. “What you said to me a few minutes ago told me that you want to claim me as your own, exclusively. Right?”

She met his gaze. “Yes.”

His brown eyes glinted with satisfaction. “I may be a Dom, but directing you to do this, seeing how much pleasure you’re finding in it, and picking up on those undercurrents? You think it seems weird, you wanting to do this, but nothing is farther from the truth.”

He cupped his hand under her hair, stroking. “When the final knot is done,” he said huskily, “I plan to take over, Julie. You’ll understand then what you doing this does to me.”

He tightened his arm around her waist, holding her close to him. She’d dropped the blanket so she was just in the T-shirt. He brushed a kiss over her mouth, then eased her back. He was being so gentle with her. After the earlier events of the night, she suspected he wasn’t wanting to put any kind of pressure on her, but her body was starting to stir and crave pressure. His pressure.

“Okay, once you get to the fifth knot, you’re going to split the rope ends around my cock and balls, thread the rope between my legs and take it to the bight around my neck in back. You’ll thread the two ends under that.”

As she worked, her fingertips brushed his skin. She was standing so close to him, his head bent over hers as he watched her. “Can you be naked?” she asked when she reached the fifth knot. “I’d like to see how that looks. If that’s okay.”

He folded his arms over her back, sliding down to thread his fingers into her panties to grip her ass.

“If you take off that shirt so you’re wearing just these. I do love your tits.”

“I don’t get to have the upper hand, me all dressed and you not?”