Page 433 of Reign

I try to remember everything I put on those pages while half-horrified that he would read it and half-hoping he would do exactly that.

“I was thinking we could cross something else off your list,” he says.

“Today?”

“Or whenever.”

His thumb trails down the center of my throat.

I swallow beneath it.

“What?”

“You’ll find out.”

“No. Tell me one.”

“One?”

“One thing you’ve been considering.”

His gaze moves over my face as if he’s deciding how much trouble he wants to cause before Bianca arrives.

Then he says, “Free use.”

The words sound familiar. I know I put them on the questionnaire, but that was months ago.

“What exactly does that mean?”

Luciano’s expression changes.

He likes when I ask him questions like this. Maybe because he likes teaching me. Maybe because every answer gives him another opportunity to tell me what he wants to do to me in that calm voice while I attempt to remain a functioning person.

“It means,” he says, voice low and almost gentle, “that once we agree, I stop asking.” His hand slides from my throat to my shoulder, thumb pressing once into the soft place where neck meets collarbone. “I don’t wait for you to finish whatever you’re doing. I don’t care if you’re on a call, if you’re drawing, if you’re sitting at that desk I built for you looking all focused and pretty. If I want your mouth, I put you on your knees right there. If I want to fuck you, I bend you over the nearest surface and take it. You stay busy. I use what’s mine.”

Heat moves across my skin so fast it feels like a flush.

“Any time?”

“Any time.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “You can be mid-sentence. Mid-sketch. Mid-bite of those berries I leave for you. Doesn’t matter. I decide when I want you, and I take you. Quietly. Roughly. However I feel like using my girl that day.”

My lips part.

He continues as though he said something perfectly ordinary. “You can stop it whenever you need to. Your safeword still applies. So do every limit you wrote down. But until you use that word, I take what you’ve already given me permission to take. No more asking. No more waiting. Just my hands, my cock, and the knowledge that you already said yes.”

I look down at his hand on my shoulder.

Then toward the bedroom door.

There is a guard stationed at the end of the hall. Another near the stairs. At least two more on the first floor.

“That would require the house not having every guard within earshot.”

“They can be stationed around the perimeter.”

I look at him.

He’s completely serious.