The Dare Collection February 2020

He watched her shudder.

“Maybe I have things to say to you,” she said, though her voice was thicker now. As was the scent of her need. “And I’m not sure I want all of my sentences to end in sir.”

“Noted.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t give her permission or argue the point, he just walked away. He went back out to the great room, where he’d left his bag, pulled out the item he’d found earlier and then took his time coming back.

And he wasn’t surprised to find her right where he wanted her. But he was pleased.

Everything in him went still, then hot. His predatory focus kicked in, hard. He wanted to eat her alive.

He intended to do just that.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he told her as he moved closer. “I won’t be happy if you pass out.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Baby, we’re deep in it now. Your usual safe word applies. If you continue to speak to me disrespectfully, I’ll respond. And I don’t think you’ll like it.”

He roamed toward her, feeling the sweet kick as the beauty of her splayed-open position flooded through him. She sat exactly as he’d imagined she would, stark naked on his table like his very own feast, her body flushed and soft against the hard black granite of the tabletop. Her hands were behind her back, just as he’d asked, making her breasts jut forward and up. Her eyes were shut tight, as if she had to frown to make herself obey. And in between her wide-open legs, he could see her pussy glistening with need.

She was perfect.

All he had to do was prove it to her.

“The only time you seem to behave is when I tell you to,” he said as he came closer. “Do I have to parade around an engagement party with you on a leash to make you behave appropriately? Because I think you know I will.”

When she only breathed, hard and fast, he reached out to run his palm over her shoulder. Then he took one of her pebble-hard nipples between his fingers. And pinched it.

She hissed, then squirmed, telling him she’d felt it in her pussy, too.

“Answer me, please.”

“No…no.” She panted. “I don’t need a leash.”

But he doubted he was the only one imagining it, then.

“I’m not punishing you, Erika,” he said as he continued to pinch her nipple, raising his other hand to treat her other one the same. She was instantly responsive, arching her back to press her breasts more completely into his palms no matter what expression she wore on her face. “I’m encouraging you. It would please me greatly if you did not take the occasion of your brother’s engagement party to make a spectacle of yourself.” He frowned when her eyes shot open, mutinous and mad. “Eyes closed. Now.”

She shut her eyes again, even as she flushed a bright red that he took for temper. And her reaction to her obedience, if he had to guess.

“I want you to wear something conservative that will cause absolutely no comment at all, unless it is a quiet compliment. The only attention you should be interested in is mine.”

She shuddered, hard.

Dorian continued, “I want you to congratulate Conrad, and his fiancée, and if while you’re doing it you can work in an apology for past behavior, I will be delighted. Do you understand what I’m asking of you?”

“I understand it,” Erika said after a moment while he plucked at her nipples. “But I don’t know what makes you think that after you spent all this time insulting me I would do a single thing for you.”

“I’ll tell you why,” he said.

Dorian moved between her legs, enjoying the contrast between her total nakedness and the fact he was dressed. He ran his palms over her thighs, then gripped them to yank her closer to the edge of the table. Only when her ass was on the edge did he again cup her lovely breasts in his hands. He moved his thumbs over her nipples, rougher than before, and enjoyed the way it made her squirm. Then he leaned forward, and put his mouth to her ear.

“You will do it because I want you to,” he told her. “Because it will please me. Because I want you to be the person I know you can be.”

Goose bumps marched down her neck, toward her collarbone. And below.

“Or I could gently suggest that you go fuck yourself,” she said, defiant to the last.

“Let me convince you,” he said, his voice a dark ribbon of sound.

Dorian bent down and took one of her nipples in his mouth, sucking hard. She arched into him. Her head fell back, and she made a helpless sort of noise when he moved his demanding mouth to her other nipple, and treated it with the same erotic roughness.

He indulged himself with her taste. She was velvet and rose and he was addicted. He pulled away, then used his hands again until both nipples were dry again. She was so responsive, he entertained himself imagining all the ways he could make her come with nipple stimulation alone.

But that was for another day.

Today, he had other goals. He pulled out the tiny evil clamps he’d retrieved from his bag. He clamped one nipple, and laughed at the noise she made. Then he clamped the other one, not at all surprised that she lost her head completely, jerking as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to get away from him or move closer to him, or something in between. Her hands were no longer behind her back, but in those adorable fists at her side.

“Hands behind your back,” he ordered her. When she obeyed, he rewarded her. “Open your eyes.”

And when she did, all that pretty blue was glazed over.

“That hurts,” she said, as if he’d betrayed her.

“You can take it.” And to prove it, he tugged gently on the chain that connected the two clamps, making her gasp again. “You will take it.”

And before she could say another word, he wrapped his other hand around the back of her head, and then took her mouth with his.

Finally.

He kissed her hungrily, thoroughly. He invaded her mouth, wet and dark and encompassing, the next best thing to fucking her.

And she kissed him back the same way.

Making him wonder why the hell he’d wasted all these years and all this time not doing exactly this.

Dorian kissed her until she went limp, and he kept going. He tried one filthy angle after the next until she was trembling beneath his hands, making needy and helpless noises in the back of her throat, and seemed to have forgotten about the clamps entirely.

So he tugged on the chain again, to remind her, and lapped up every greedy little noise she made.

He pulled away then, and stared down at her. She fought to catch her breath. Her eyes looked appealingly dazed, while her mouth was damp from his. Her color was high and good. She looked thoroughly debauched, and the clamps on her breasts made him so hard he almost hurt.

“What was it you wanted to say to me?” he asked her.

Politely.

“I don’t…”

“If memory serves, you suggested I was a coward.”

He watched her fight to access her brain again. He reached down and pushed her thighs farther apart, to the point where she had to strain the slightest bit to keep them open. Then he held her there, and waited.

“Why so quiet?” he asked her, a gentle taunt. “You came downstairs filled to the brim with insults. I’m beginning to think that all the trouble you cause with your mouth could be averted if you used it to do something other than talk.”

An image that made his cock pulse with his own dark need. But she hadn’t earned the privilege of sucking him off yet.

“Your rules are convenient,” she said, focusing enough to frown at him. “You change them to suit yourself.”

“Of course I do. Suiting myself is the whole point. If you concerned yourself less with following or not following the rules and more with pleasing me, it wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“But you don’t want me to please you,” she said, holding herself very still, no doubt because every breath made those clamps tug on her nipples. “You want me to break your rules so you can punish me.”

“Baby, I’m going to punish you one way or another no matter what you do.” He grinned. “That’s kind of the point.”

“Not for me,” said the woman who was dripping wet and trembling on the edge of an orgasm, all because he’d clamped her nipples. “I’m here for the sex.”

“You like your sex with some pain to accentuate the pleasure,” he said. He reached behind her and moved her arms, setting her hands down flat on the tabletop. “Ask me how I know.”

“Maybe as an experiment,” she lied, her eyes wide and full of shit. “Once in a while, as an adventure, and not because I need—”

“I think that’s enough talking, kitten,” Dorian said. Then he bent down, hauling her legs up over his shoulders and bringing his mouth down hard on her pussy in a single, swift movement.

He could feel her reaction go through her as she caught herself on the hands he’d moved for precisely that purpose, but that wasn’t quite enough. So he reached up, and tugged on that chain, knowing that it would send that exquisite pain narrowing through her body, lighting her up.

That was how he wanted her.

Lit up, bright red, sweet and soft against his tongue. He tugged on the clamps again, and she got wetter, like dessert.

So he ate his fill.

Dorian ate her hard, as demanding as everything else, because she made the most delicious sounds. Her clit was stiff and proud beneath his tongue, and when he took it between his teeth, she screamed.

He took her to the edge again and again, throwing her over every time, until he had to slide his hands around to hold her steady because she couldn’t seem to keep herself upright. He sank two fingers deep into the molten heat of her pussy, curling them around to rub against that rough spot tucked away in there. She made a keening kind of sound.

Then he leaned over her, kissing her so she could taste herself.

She came again, short and hard, with a deep groan that was like poetry to him.

“Promise me you’ll do what I want you to do,” he said. “Promise me now, Erika.”

Her head thrashed from side to side. “I don’t want to.”

“Do it anyway,” he growled.

And he reached down to free his cock, rolled on a condom, then slammed himself into her.

She made herself into a bow, arching up off the table like every wet dream he’d ever had. She was gorgeous, glorious, so he took her hard. She wrapped her legs around him, and met him, thrust for thrust.

And watching her fuck him back was so hot he was tempted to come himself.

But he wasn’t quite done.

“Promise me, Erika,” he said.

“I thought we were supposed to be done with talking,” she managed to gasp out.

And he couldn’t help himself. That made him laugh.

And as an extra incentive, he pulled the clamps off.

He knew that the pain would go through her like a shock, and he knew it did exactly what he wanted it to do when she screamed.

Dorian was deep inside her, pounding into her at a relentless pace—long and hard and deep—and he watched her shake like she might fall apart, as if the pain was picking her up and carrying her further.

She came beautifully. She was perfect.

And when she came back down, he picked her up, holding her there against him with his hands gripping that ass of hers that still bore his marks.

“Come,” she begged him. “Please, Dorian. Come.”

“Please, who?” he gritted out.

“Please, sir,” she panted at him. “I want to feel you come inside me.”

“Then you know what to do.” He pulled out, then slammed himself back in, and her eyes went fuzzy. But she dug her fingers into his shoulders, and held on. “You know what I want.”

“I promise,” she said, as if it hurt her. “I promise. I’ll do it.”

For you, she didn’t say.

But he heard it.

And when he let himself go at last, deep inside the tight fist of her pussy, she came with him, sobbing out his name.

Already his, he thought with profound satisfaction.

Whether she knew it or not.

CHAPTER NINE

THE FIRST WEEK after Berlin, Erika was…angry.

If that was the right word to describe the intensity of the emotions that jostled around inside her, fighting for supremacy, shifting and changing and sandbagging her every time she thought she had a handle on what was happening inside her.

Because she refused to accept that it had been a full-scale sea change.

She had spent two more days with Dorian.

Two more days filled with…more. With him.

Playing the kind of games she learned were called playing and games when they weren’t really playing at all. Not when they could change a person so completely. So profoundly.

Dorian had tied her up. He’d experimented with cuffs and collars and other binding things. He arranged her on that massive bed of his, attaching her wrists and ankles to the handy chains welded to those steel posters, and he taught her things about herself that she hadn’t known were there.

Over and over again.

And afterward, when she was lost in that buzzy, intense space that only he could put her in—where her mind and her emotions and her body were all one, all his—she told him stark truths she’d spent her whole life hiding from.

That she’d thought her father had left her, specifically, when he’d died. She had been the last one to see him and she had learned, during his illness, that good girls were quiet. Silent. Diffident and biddable at all times. And somehow, once he was gone, she’d decided that there was no point in being a good girl when people went ahead and died.

So she went in the opposite direction.

Hard.

She told him things she’d never really put into words before. That yes, as he’d suggested, a major part of why she’d dropped out of university was because she’d actually been good at studying and it made her feel like her old self again. Like that good girl she’d lost along the way, or not lost. That made it sound like something that had just happened. When she’d deliberately set about exterminating any traces of that girl who longed to please, bit by bit and year by year, until no one remembered she’d ever existed except Erika herself.

And though she never would have put it into words the way Dorian had, she’d shoved Conrad away, too. Because the people who loved her—who genuinely cared for her—died. Her mother was a safe space in that regard because as far as Erika could tell, she truly cared only about herself. Everything else was window dressing. Erika didn’t expect anything from her and the beauty of it was, Chriszette never disappointed.

She couldn’t believe the things Dorian got her to talk about.

He’d introduced her to a real flogger, not the hen-night jokey versions she’d thought were real before. He taught her the exquisite fear, twined as it was with an almost overwhelming sense of delirious need, for that arch of his brow that promised exactly the pain, punishment and pleasure she wanted.

She discovered she liked anything—sooner or later, and sometimes only because of where they ended up—if Dorian delivered it.

Erika found he could read her body with a fluency that should have terrified her. That did terrify her, sometimes. He knew how far to push her, and it was always further than she thought she could go.

He always asked her if she needed her safe word.

And then, when she gave him the green light, he used it push her limits. Over and over again during those two days that seemed like so much longer to her. Several lifetimes, at least.

Erika found herself caught between her own worst impulses, as if he’d tied her there. Deliberately. She wanted to run. She wanted to kneel. She wanted to lose herself in him on the one hand, and on the other, she wanted to prove her independence. Leap to her feet, storm out and make him regret that he had ever pretended to know her.

In his hands she was made of passion and dark greed, and rewarded for both. He made her cry and he made her come, and then he held her against him as she sobbed and slept and told him the stories she kept deep inside her and had never told another living soul.

She felt like a different person with him, and that was the real betrayal. In that brief span of time, a single weekend, she felt like the woman she’d secretly always wanted to be. Beautiful. Capable.

Lovable, something kept whispering inside her.

Dorian didn’t tell her he loved her and she wouldn’t have believed it if he did, but still. There was a look in his dark gaze. A certain gleam when he looked at her that made her wonder what it would be like. To always be here, with him, and a part of this powerful thing they shared. Part of this beautiful dance of mirroring, reflection and awareness.

Mixed in with blistering-hot sex and too many orgasms to count.

It would be a very lucky woman indeed who found herself kept forever by this man, she found herself thinking on that final morning. He’d bent her over the couch, where he’d spanked her that first night, burying his hands in her hair to hold her head where he wanted it. And he’d taken her with a brutal elegance that had left her wrecked in his wake.

Dorian had gazed at her before he’d left, tucking himself away into a three-piece suit that made him almost look like a stranger after the days of T-shirts, jeans and his dominance—were it not for that intensity and power of his that no suit could hide. He filled rooms with every breath, confidence and assurance stamped deep into his bones.

He looked at her as she panted and shook through the aftershocks. He looked through her, his mouth unsmiling and too much knowledge in his gaze.

He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said he would see her soon, indicating that he expected her to be there when he got back from his business meetings in Zürich.

“When I ring you,” he said in that tone that made every hair on her body feel as if it was standing on end, “I expect you to answer.”

It was almost as if he knew what she was going to do.

First, Erika had sobbed, there on that leather couch, where he’d first introduced her to herself.

Then she’d left, wearing the clothes she’d come in that first night and not capable of giving a single shit that she was on the streets of Berlin at midday on a Monday with her thong visible, her ass cheeks hanging out and a tiny, strappy little top that might as well have shouted her interest in bondage to everybody she passed on the street.

But it was Berlin, so nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.

And that stung, too. Because it was impossible to discount everything Dorian had told her when there she was, prancing down the street as if she wanted some stranger to pay her some mind.

He had introduced her to herself, then confronted her with all that meant, and she didn’t like it.

She’d gone back to her hotel, packed up her things and gotten the hell out of Germany.

But another fun fact about her madcap existence, about which she bragged to all and sundry as if she loved every second of it, was that she didn’t have anywhere to go. Not really. She lived out of hotels, or in the guest suites at friends’ houses. She’d been doing it so long that she’d long since stopped thinking too closely to be…rootless.

Untethered. Unattached.

If asked, she called it freedom. Pure happiness, she’d said a few weeks back. She’d been on her way to Berlin with a small stopover in Copenhagen to see the sort of friends who asked deep questions over wine, not because they were deep themselves, but because they liked to compete with their answers. The better to pretend their shallow lives had depth.

Erika was fantastic at pretending to be the happiest.

Are you happy? Dorian had asked her. Mercilessly. Or have you wrapped up hapless in a curated social media feed and forgotten that the core of all that glossy performance is emptiness?

In retrospect, what Erika was happy about was that she’d been gagged when he’d asked that question, because she still didn’t know how to answer it.

Nor did the answer come to her as she landed in England, and made her way to Devon, where her mother was living it up in a country manor with her latest conquest, who claimed a Windsor connection and spent as much time tramping about his property with his dogs as he did tending to his gout flare-ups.

Not that Chriszette was ever in the mood to entertain a full-grown daughter for more than the odd meal.

Erika was dispatched to a renovated carriage house far enough away from than main hall that Chriszette could pretend she wasn’t about, where she assured herself that she was perfectly fucking happy. And then fumed, like it was her job to prove it.

She was angry with herself for putting herself into that situation in Berlin in the first place. What had she been thinking? She was angry with her brother in general for being an overbearing asshole, and specifically for having such terrible taste in friends. She was angry with her mother, who could have taken maybe five minutes from her own narcissism to do a little parenting, back in the day, when her daughter was clearly acting out her grief—but hadn’t bothered. And certainly felt no compulsion to make up for that now.

And she was deeply, volcanically angry at Dorian.

Because she couldn’t help feeling that the only revenge taken had been against her. By her, which was worse, because she’d been correct in her initial assessment, if nothing else. Dorian was an excellent weapon.

“You’ll forget him in about forty-eight hours,” she told herself, out loud and with great confidence, when she sat down on the side of her carriage house bed, high in the eaves. “Less, probably.”

Because forgetting about men was something Erika was very, very good at. But Dorian wasn’t like other men. He didn’t fade away, out of sight and out of mind.

For the first time in her life, Erika was plagued with insomnia, hollow-eyed and up at all hours, because her body wanted what it couldn’t have. It wanted Dorian’s body next to hers, holding her tight, when she’d spent her entire previous life asserting with great confidence that she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cuddle while she slept.

She never had, before.

But then, there were a lot of things she’d never done before that weekend in Berlin with Dorian.

And toward the end of that first week and into the second week after she’d left him, Erika mostly just cried.

She felt tossed out to sea and abandoned while wave after wave of old, ugly emotion found her and sank her. Over and over again.

She almost thought it would be easier to drown.

But Dorian didn’t let her.

He didn’t call every day. Perhaps every other day. Sometimes he sounded terse, busy, and she hated that she felt particularly special that he made time for her. Other times he sounded tired, and she wished she could have the opportunity to soothe him. But he always sounded like him. Dark and richly textured and him.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said when she picked up the phone, the way she often did. Because even if that was true, she still obeyed him. He’d told her he expected her to answer and here she was, answering. Every time. “But you asked me to answer when you rang. Behold my obedience.”

“I never doubted you, Erika.” His voice did magical, terrible things to her body. Her nipples pinched so hard she could feel that line of sensation spiral down into her clit. She was wet instantly. Soft and ready for whatever he might do to her. “Are you ready to talk about your feelings yet?”

“I talk about my feelings all day every day,” she lied, and pretended she didn’t feel a little kick of pleasure when he laughed. “It’s true. I stop people on the street and download my every last emotion. I’ve already made a lot of new friends that way.”

That was slightly less of a lie, if a person counted storming about in England’s greenest hills and shouting at passing sheep.