“I’ll start light.” He turns and walks a couple steps away, a bit of showmanship for the crowd, then swishes the leather straps against my shorts-clad ass. It tickles. I stifle a giggle. Behind me, Grace laughs low. “Maybe I’ll make Liev do this one day,” Grace says. “Never really saw the appeal, but it’s kind of…flirty, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” says Max. “It can be flirty and fun and low-key. You can pretend it’s his tail or something.”
Grace snorts.
Giving them a grin, Blade swipes the fringe in a languorous figure eight that covers my ass and part of my thighs, never hitting my back. “You good?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I smile, let my gaze glaze over a little, and ignore the people gathering by the booth.
I don’t know how long he goes on, warming me up rather than hurting me. Although I know absolutely nothing about flogging, it’s apparent that Blade does, because the transition from that easy, almost lazy, painless cadence to a light sting is so smooth, I almost don’t notice that it hurts.
But it does. And I like it.
No, not like. I…respond to it. Nothing overt and, again, I’m not particularly aroused. But there’s a little strain when the strips of leather nip at my ass. My back arches, my butt wants more.
“Nice,” Blade says, satisfaction in his voice. “Good,” he says, matter-of-factly, never once changing the cadence.
Somewhere along the way, I sink into the pain, the regularity, the very slight changes in pace and power, I lose my inhibitions a little and close my eyes, not quite as self-conscious about our audience.
And then, as if a switch has been flipped, everything changes.
I go stiff with tension and open my eyes, wide, feeling…
Watched.
Which is ridiculous, right?
Until I spot him, right there toward the back of the crowd. It’s Zion. No doubt about it. And he’s seen me.
I swear, it’s not his presence that pricked my awareness so much as his stare.
Because it’s fierce. Angry, intense. Mean, almost.
And now, oh, now, my body responds with pleasure. And it’s not the scratching of an itch of these past few minutes, it’s pure carnality, from deep, deep inside me. Rolling out in waves, turning me lush and wet and open and…wanting.
The play session that felt casual and easy and not the least bit sexual a moment ago is now fully charged, my body gone from relaxed to galvanized in a split second.
The halter top that seemed risqué, but kind of fun and flirty, is suddenly inflammatory, turning my nipples into hard, aching points that I push, push, push against the cross. Tension coils low and hot in my middle and every single thing he and I have done over the past two days comes flying in to pelt my skin like a million little floggers.
The way he’s watching me, his eyes burning a path straight to my wet, throbbing, achingly empty core? Nothing in this world could tear my eyes from the man steadily forging his way through the crowd like a lion through a herd of gazelle. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen, felt, lived through.
I want him. Ineedhim. However I can get him.
Except, no. Seriously. Fuck that.
Without taking my eyes from Zion’s approach—as if I could—I say to Blade, “Do it harder. Make it hurt.”
* * *
Zion
I push through the crowd to Twyla.
The faces are a blur, the people an unidentifiable mass, if anyone talks to me, I don’t even hear it. All I see is her, strung up on an x-cross like an offering to the gods.
To me.
Every precise hit from Blade’s flogger ramps up the tension in my muscles, tightens my jaw, reduces my vision to nothing but a tunnel. A link from me to her. I feel her responses from the base of my spine to the top of my head. I feel it. Want it. Because it’s mine.
