Page 52 of Safe Word

But not enough to stop me from reading every filthy one.

The paragraph stared back at me.

‘He wasn’t here to break her. He was here to unmake her. One command at a time.’

It hadn’t been the version I’d handed her. That was all Paula. Her voice, her kink, her twisted understanding of power and submission.

And fuck me if it didn’t land like a gut-punch, scattering the shards of the past for a brief moment.

She’d stripped the page bare, exposing something the readers – and I, clearly – would eat up in a heartbeat. This kind of control didn’t come from dominance. It came from intimacy.

The phone buzzed against the armrest with a tremor that yanked me out of my head.

Paula: Just went with it, but happy to rework it if it’s too much for you – was her response.

This woman knew what she was doing – the same way Chloe knew, when she bared her throat but kept her eyes locked on Damien’s. Too much for you… a fucking challenge – whispered at nine in the evening with my blood boiling hot.

Temptation dressed up as compromise.

I didn’t reply.

Well… not straight away.

I flipped back to the first line of the paragraph and reread it.

‘Unmake her… One command at a time.’

It echoed louder, crawling under my skin and nestling somewhere between my spine—

And my dick.

Somehow… I needed to hear her voice when she said that.

A call would mean just that – hearing her voice.

And that voice might undo things in me I had reserved for Scarlett. But I needed it. Like a drunkard needed his drink.

Reaching for the brandy again, I paused. Stared at the fucking glass that mocked me with its moonlit sheen. Paula was home, writing. Which meant I’d lost the wager against myself.

Though somehow, it didn’t really feel like losing.

Ignoring the amber-filled crystal, I tapped out a reply:

Me: Give me ten minutes. I’ll give you a call – because I was a creature of my own vices.

I had to stand up, stretch out the weight in my spine, trying to exhale the tension Scarlett had wedged into me but Paula had managed to twist around with a single sentence and a casual offer.

I needed those ten minutes to wrestle myself back into shape – mentally. Although I was well aware that had been a lost cause.

I moved through the flat, grabbing my charger, closing the blinds as if I were expecting the night to look in.

Paula’s prose was already slithering into every inch of my mind.

Her scenes were vivid. Evocative. I could totally tell she ripped her readers apart slow and hard. But this wasn’t arousal. Arousal was easy. Predictable. And I was twenty years above that age when things like this would make me go crazy.

This went further than all that. As though she knew how to dig under the layers of character, ego, authorship – and find the reader.

Find me.