Page 106 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

I hated walking on eggshells, but I had to. The egg had already cracked.

"Lacey, Derek Harrington isn't the man you think he is." I had barely gotten started when she interrupted me. She never used to do that.

"I doubt you know what I think he is." She was looking at the melting edge of the ice cream and not at me. "He built that place. He and his wife." She turned the cone a slow quarter, watching it. "I keep thinking about it. He's not what I decided he was. Five years I had him mislabeled a cold fish and he's the opposite. He made the hottest thing I've ever walked into." She looked up. "You okay, Janice? You just went pale."

I didn't feel okay, and her smirk made it worse. She was a lamb walking merrily into the lion's den. I'd heard the little lift in her voice, the one people get when they've started to want someone.

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't go there. Harrington." I set my cone down in the little wire ring on the table. "Of everyone. Not him." Fuck. Fuck. Idiot. Too fast, too hard, she's going to fight back.

"Why?"

I froze. I'd walked myself into a trap at the worst possible time. What I knew about Derek was tied to me. Things I'd done that I couldn't tell her. I can't lose her. Not Lacey. Not to Derek. I could feel it going, the steadiness I hadn't lost in years.

"I don't like military men," I blurted. "The Special Forces, the whole, you know. He's spent his life being very good at killing people, and men like that scare me, and I won't apologize for it." Idiot. Get your head together, this is critical. "And that place is his, which means he isn't a tourist in it, Lacey. He's not a man who wandered in. He built it. He's a Dom, and not a soft one, and I know that part by reputation. He used to be there all the time."

"By reputation," she said.

"By reputation." I was sinking. Her face just showed interest, not the fear that should be there, not any grasp of how far out over the water she was.

"So a man scares you because he was a soldier who has protected our country," she said, "and because strangers say things about him." She still hadn't raised her voice. If anything, it had come down, gone even, quiet, and very precise, and I should have known then, because that was new, that flat cold care in it, and I'd never heard her aim it at me. "That's the case. That's what you've got?"

"Lacey. It's more," I tried hopelessly.

"It's not what he's like." Cutting me off. She set her own cone down beside mine, deliberate, the two of them dripping in their wire rings, and folded her hands on the table like a woman about to take a history. "I've been in a room with him. I've watched him be a father. You've watched a reputation. I've watched the man."

She was defending him, and every word of the defense was a description of exactly how far in she already was, and I sat there watching her walk toward the edge with complete confidence in her own feet. She was over it and didn't know, and I couldn't say the one sentence that would make her stop. Everything I knew was locked in the room I wouldn't open. I just shook my head, hunting for anything that would work. I was losing her.

"You don't know what he's like when it's not fish and stories," I said. "You've seen his façade. That's what a man like that shows you. I'm telling you what's inside that you haven't assessed yet, and you've decided you can, and that's exactly the moment people get hurt."

"People." She turned the word over. "You mean me. Say me."

"You. Yes. You." Of course her. Of course my sweet, soft Lacey.

She looked at me for a long moment, and I thought I'd finally broken through.

"You're jealous."

No.

"That's not fair," I said, my composure slipping. "That's not what this is, and you know it isn't, and it's beneath you to say it."

"Is it?" Still quiet. "You've wanted to regain control since we got off that ship. You couldn't stand that I came home from that cruise and started deciding things for myself. And now there's a man, an actual man, and you're sitting here telling me he's too dangerous, too extreme, when the whole reason I even know what I am is that you decided to show me. You made me into someone who'd want this. And the second I want it somewhere you didn't pick, it's dangerous."

"That's not—" My hands had come up off the table. "Lacey, Ricardo is not the same as—"

"Haven't you spent months handing me extreme?" she asked, right over me, cold. "Wasn't it you? The club. Ricardo. All of it. You, every door, you held it open and pushed me through and told me it was good for me. And now you want to stand here and pick which extreme I'm allowed to have."

"Ricardo isn't extreme." I said it too fast, too loud. "That's the whole reason it was Ricardo. He's gentle, he's kind, he has never once in his life scared a woman, I chose him because he was the softest possible—"

"We had sex in the peace garden," she said.

I stopped.

"At the hospital. The little walled one, off the loading dock. He got the gate open and we did it on the path, with my back to the bricks." She said it the way she'd read me a set of numbers. "In the open. Where anyone could have come through the gate. And I liked it, Janice. I liked that part. The where-we-shouldn't of it. So maybe your safest thing isn't as safe as you think, and maybe I'm not either. Maybe I like extreme. Maybe that's just a thing about me now, and you don't get to be surprised, because you're the one who unleashed it."