Page 55 of Dominion’s Collar

And the sound I just made wasn't scripted. Everyone on the floor heard it.

The flogger stops. He sets it on the frame hook.

A pause. His breathing has changed. I can hear it behind me, fractionally faster than it was when we started.

Both palms press against my lower back. The heat from the flogger makes them feel like lit matches, and I gasp at the contact. Fingers spread wide across my waist, sliding down over my hips. Thumbs trace bone. Every inch of skin the flogger touched is screaming under his hands.

"Don't take it back," he says against my ear. His voice has gone rough. The control is thinning. "Give me the rest."

A hand slides down the front of my hip. Follows the crease where thigh meets pelvis. Fingers hook the waistband of the thong and pull it aside.

Air on slick, exposed skin. I'm open from behind, and the room is right there. I can't close my legs. I can't cover myself. I stay exactly where he put me.

"Color."

"Green." The word comes out wrecked.

He runs two fingers through me from behind. Slow. The slickness is obscene, coating his fingers, and the sound of it in the quiet room sends heat flooding up my throat. He parts the folds with a deliberateness that makes my hips jerk forward into the Cross.

He finds my clit. Circles once. My moan carries across the main floor and I don't care. I can't care.

Fingers slide through me with the same patience he gives the scotch he never drinks. The patience is worse than speed. It leaves me nowhere to hide.

"This is what the flogger did to you." Fingers slide back, dragging wetness forward. "This is what's underneath the act."

He pushes two fingers inside me. Slow. Knuckles pressing into wet heat. I clench around him, tight, slick, and the sound I make doesn't belong to anyone I recognize. He curls forward. Finds the spot that makes my vision white out.

Thumb on my clit. Steady pressure. Circles.

My back is still feeling the memory of the flogger. Every nerve ending lit, and his fingers inside me are reaching through the heat. It's too much. What the flogger did to my muscles feeds what his hand is doing between my thighs. I can't tell where the impact ends and his touch begins.

"Sebastien." His name falls out of me in front of everyone.

"Again."

"Sebastien." I'm begging. I hear myself begging, and the part of me that should be mortified is gone. The script is gone.

There's only the Cross and his hand. The unbearable heat in my skin. The want for a man I'm lying to. It's older and deeper than the flogger can reach.

A grip locks my hip, holding me still. The fingers inside me find a tempo that mirrors the flogger's cadence. Every pass presses deeper. The thumb on my clit keeps the same measured patience, holding me right at the edge. The edge is a place where nothing exists except the need to fall.

Claire has disappeared from my head. The investigation with her. There's nothing left except his fingers. The raw skin across my back. The fact that I'm dripping down his wrist on the main floor while wearing his collar.

I want this. Not for the case. Not for access. I want his hands on me. I want his mouth against my ear telling me what to do. I want the weight of him behind me and the pressure of his fingers inside me. I want the raw, stripped-down honesty of a woman who has stopped pretending she doesn't need this. I want the relief of not deciding what happens next, of handing the weight of every decision I've made for five years to someone whose hands are steadier than mine.

I want to come for him, on this floor, wearing his collar, with nothing between us except the truth my cover story was built to hide. I want it so badly my entire body is shaking with it.

"Please." The word leaves me in front of witnesses.

He doesn't give it to me. Not yet. The pressure holds steady. The circles on my clit maintain the same maddening pace. Patience is the one thing Sebastien never runs out of, and right now it's the cruelest thing he's ever done to me.

"Come for me, Natalie."

The orgasm rips through me. My body bows against the cross, my arms pulling hard against the restraints as the flogger-heated skin of my back tightens with the movement. My walls clench around his fingers in pulses that tear the last sound out of me, raw and loud and filling the room.

He holds me. One hand stays between my thighs, fingers still inside me, letting me ride the aftershocks against his palm.

The other arm wraps around my waist, taking my weight, leathers cool against the heat the flogger left. I feel him hard against me. The evidence of what I just gave him.