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  It didn’t take long for sweetness to turn to spice. He slipped his fingers into the crotch of her panties, stroking the needy pearl of her clit, and she sucked on his tongue. They leaned against the grand bed and necked like two desperate survivors of the same storm. She spiraled higher and higher, spun tighter and tighter, hips pushing against him as she begged for completion.

  So he denied it to her. He stepped back to steady himself and lick her arousal from his fingertips. She stared back at him with big, wounded eyes and spread thighs as her breasts rose and fell with each of her ragged breaths. And then she smiled. “Are we finally going to play, Sir?”

  Damn right they were going to play.

  Lachlan shed his blazer, tossing it onto a rattan chair. He undid his cuffs and pushed up his sleeves, taking note of the way Naya drank in the small motions. She liked his wrists, then. And his forearms. And she’d already voiced her appreciation of his posterior. He wasn’t a vain man, but her thirst for him made him feel like a god. “Get on the bed,” he told her. “All fours. Clothes and shoes off.”

  He expected lip, almost looked forward to it, and so was surprised when she toed off her sandals and did as he asked. She pulled her shirtdress over her head and shed her delicate undergarments. Then she climbed onto the mattress and settled parallel to the intricate brass headboard and footboard. Her toes lined up at the edge of the bed, her hips and thighs presented for his approval. Every centimeter of her was beautiful. Curves and slopes and hollows just waiting to be explored and marked. “Any limits?” he asked, as he rid himself of his own shoes and socks.

  “Edgeplay,” she said, with a confidence that reassured him. This was no Fifty Shades of Naivety. She knew what she was in for, had done all her homework. “I don’t do cutting or breathplay or fire. I’m all safe, sane, consensual. Practically boring.”

  “Wax?” He tried to keep the hopeful note out of his voice, but the image of her quivering under a tilted candle was almost too much to bear. No matter what she said, she could never be boring.

  “Wax is fine, and—” She paused, turned her head, looked at him. “And Lock? I trust you.”

  That was the most important negotiation of all.

  Lachlan pulled open the doors of the armoire next to the bed, taking stock of his small but treasured collection of floggers and crops. Leather cuffs, the spreader bar, and a few other delights could wait. Today he didn’t want her restrained. Today he wanted her wild, pushing to meet his slaps, moving into his blows with her whole body and her whole soul. He selected a flogger with soft leather tails, testing them against his palm and his wrist. Yes. It had been some time since he’d dominated someone, but his arm knew the repetitive motion just as well as it did whisking a ganache. The swish of the tails through the air made Naya whimper with anticipation, and his cock twitched in response.

  He positioned himself a foot from the bed, his stance wide and secure, ensuring a steady arc of the flogger tails. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Always.” Her voice was already husky, as if she’d screamed and screamed. “And if I’m not, I’ll let you know.”

  “Risotto?” he suggested, unable to help himself.

  “Soufflé,” she quipped, before lifting her ass in the air.

  It was easy to fall into a rhythm. Easier still to watch the rise and fall of her breaths as the flogger criss-crossed the dip of her back. Thwap. Thwap. Thwap. The sound of leather hitting skin was like music. Her low cries accepted the pain and gave it sound. Lachlan had never felt so powerful...and so weak. It was like being joined on an entirely different level than sex. The slender flogger was a conduit for her belief in him and his worship of her. Thwap. “Darling.” Thwap. “Minx.” Thwap. “Brat.” He called her a thousand names and a thousand endearments as her body flushed red and she begged for more.

  Naya’s head hung low, her hair in her face. She glistened with sweat and her thighs rubbed together with slick need. She could come just from this. But she wouldn’t. Not until he gave her leave to do so. Strangled noises spilled from her lips. His name. Curse words in every language she knew. But she never once said “please” or “let me come.” She just met the arc-ing tails of the flogger again and again, until he was as sweat-soaked as she. Until he was so hard that he had to fumble with his fly and set loose his erection.

  He’d been walking around in a constant state of arousal for a decade because of this lovely creature. His gorgeous darling. And now he could give it all to her. He could paint her back with streaks of his come, rub it into her, and she’d want him all the more for it. But not yet, he told himself. There will be plenty of time for that.

  He tossed the flogger aside with the flick of a wrist, closing the space between them. Her buttocks was still unmarked, asking for the flat of his palm. So he answered. Once. Twice. On the third spank, as she moaned incoherent syllables, he told her what she needed to her. What they both needed to hear. “Come.”

  And then she did. In a long shuddering release that rocked her from head to toe. He steadied her with one hand on her hip, counted each exquisite spasm and drenched his fingers in the wet heat of her sex. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. “You’re everything. My sub, my girl, my darling.”

  “Yours,” she echoed, laying her cheek against the duvet, eyes passion-glazed and unfocused. “Finally yours.”

  Finally his. What should’ve been a joyous promise was a lie...and Lachlan let her believe it for just a little while longer.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’d dropped acid in Amsterdam once, making up for my sheltered teen years and lost time. I’d tripped for hours with two girlfriends, spinning in circles and seeing butterflies on the ceiling. That colorful, blissed-out high was nothing compared to subspace. I was beyond reality. Beyond time. Beyond pain. Out of my body and yet more in my skin than I’d ever been. And Lachlan had put me there. Into this dark, beautiful cradle that I didn’t want to leave. I distantly felt him moving me, positioning me on the mattress. Minutes later I felt something cool. A wet cloth. He ran it in circles over my body, and the delicious soreness leapt to life anew. I couldn’t move away, I couldn’t move toward. I was limp. Boneless. Every orgasm he gave me surpassed the previous one, but this...? This was special. This was what we’d recognized in each other so long ago and finally brought to fruition.

  I didn’t know how long I lay there in that perfect place. Soon I felt the dip of the mattress as he came to join me. He’d brought some sort of salve, and he smoothed it across my back, all the while pressing gentle kisses to my shoulders and the base of my skull. He was still mostly dressed. Still erect. I could feel every inch of him like a steel rod against my ass.

  “I’m not as naive as you think, Lock. Not anymore.”

  “We are not talking about this. Ever.”

  “But...but don’t you have to do something about it?”

  “No. I do not. It happens. I’m a man. Everything’s a potential trigger. Pornography. A good steak. A tree. Doesn’t mean I have to wank off at every opportunity.”

  “I thought you said we weren’t talking about this.”

  “Shut up, Naya.”

  “A tree.” The words and a giggle escaped before I could stop myself. “Did you...? Did you really get off to a tree?” My throat felt raw, and Lachlan seemed to know it. He scowled at me, reaching again for something out of my sightline. Ice chips. He’d brought ice chips to bed. I greedily sucked on one, relishing the cold liquid trickling down my throat.

  “I have never wanked to a tree,” he said, crisply. “I was just trying to keep an inquisitive teenager from discovering her connection to the state of my penis.”

  He’d failed. Even if I hadn’t known what to do with a Cosmo sex tip, I known what I did to him. What he did to me. What he still did to me. And the state of his penis was still impossible to ignore.

  I shifted slowly, turning to my other side, so we were face to face. Sure enough, his cock was practically touching his stomach, so hard it was angry with c
olor. I wanted it in me. It belonged in me. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t have sex with me right now, when I was still tumbling down from the flogging session. He would deny himself longer than he’d denied me. He could crumble to my wants, but not his own.

  Was there a better man than Lachlan Christie? If so, I hadn’t found him yet.

  I reached out and took him in hand, stroking up the stiff length of his erection. He exhaled softly, and I felt that breath on my cheek. We were so close I could count his eyelashes and drown in the deep blue of his irises...and once I was drawn into his eyes, I couldn’t look elsewhere. I stayed there, caught willingly, as I squeezed his shaft, cupped his balls and then started the process anew. I wasn’t sure when we went from looking at each other to kissing one another, but our lips met and held, and the dip of his tongue into my mouth mirrored the thrust of his cock against my palm.

  He had to need this orgasm badly, but he was gentle, tentative, taking his time, turning a simple hand job into something tender and beautiful and intimate. Half of me wanted to speak, to tell him how lucky and cherished I felt. The other half of me wanted to just revel in the sweet sounds of friction and his shuddering gasps. When he finally let himself come, it was with a harsh groan. The hot spurts of his seed coated my fingers, my wrist and even both of our stomachs and chests.

  My Lachlan. My gorgeous god. I’d waited so long to feel him. To taste him. I licked the salty essence of him from my hand. “Stop,” he murmured, reaching back for the cloth he’d used earlier. He cleaned us both with efficient movements even as I protested, “No! I like drinking you up!”

  “Fuck.” He choked out a laugh, pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Naya, what am I going to do with you?”

  “Anything you want.” I snuggled close, inhaling the stretch of skin between his scruffy jawline and his collarbone. “We have all the time in the world.”

  He went still. Maybe someone else wouldn’t have noticed such an imperceptible absence of motion, but I felt it deep in my bones. Something wasn’t right. Even after all this pleasure we’d shared, he was holding back. I knew what it was, too. That piece of paper. The funeral. The lawyers. The secret he wouldn’t tell me. It was still looming between us, as present as the lust and the laughter, and it was something so terrifying that he wouldn’t let me share in the fear. Not yet, anyway.

  “Trust goes both ways,” I reminded him, quietly. “You can do anything to me, but you can say anything, too.”

  “Will you tell me all your secrets, Lock?”

  “I don’t have any secrets, love. I’m as clear as day.”

  “Clear as the East River, more like it.”

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “Oh my God. You sound so stuffy.”

  “‘Oh my God.’ You sound so young.”

  His lips moved along my hairline, a silent apology maybe, or maybe an aimless caress. He drew me between his legs, till we were heartbeat to heartbeat. “I know. I want to tell you everything,” he said before leaning in to kiss me again. “Just give me time, darling. It will all be sorted soon.”

  How soon? How much time? Hours? Days? Weeks? We’d had ten years stolen from us. I didn’t want to lose any more. But I didn’t want to argue with Lachlan either, not after the beautiful flogging he’d given me, or the equally beautiful gift of his come. Maybe he thought he was protecting me, keeping the truth from me for my own good. I’d grown up, but there was probably still a part of him that saw me as sixteen, wide-eyed and naive. I couldn’t force him to open up, but I could show him how wrong he was.

  I slipped my arms around his neck, kissing him back as hard and as deep as I could. It was the kind of kiss that saw “Hello” and “Goodnight” getting naked together and making love for hours. I’m here, I said with my lips. I’m a grown woman, I said with my tongue. I am not going anywhere, so buckle up, I said with my whole body.

  Lachlan Christie could spank me red, make me see stars and turn my world upside down...but he had no idea who I’d become or what I was capable of—not just of loving him with my whole heart, but of fighting for him, for us, with my whole spirit.

  “You’re mine, and I’m yours,” I whispered as we drifted off to sleep in the curves of each other’s embrace. “You’ll never escape me now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Four days of cross-globe travel and their first play session together left Naya exhausted. Lachlan was content to let her rest...to watch her while she did so, even though he had a thousand things to do and one enormous case of blackmail to address. It was indulgent, selfish. But when had he ever been anything else? He’d decided Naya was his from the moment they met. Perhaps not his lover, but his person. How Grey’s Anatomy of him, she would likely say if she were awake. But now, curled up in his bed, in sheets a housekeeper he paid to come in and put down regardless of whether he was in residence, she had no sharp one-liners and no protective armor. Every inch, every millimeter, of her was open and vulnerable. He propped himself up on one elbow and just watched her, bathed in the mid-morning sun coming through the windows.

  He’d kept track of her, of course. Even if Ran had put a moratorium on personal contact, Lock still had Jyoti and the Internet on his side. Pictures from her high-school graduation in Switzerland. Her first shabby apartment in Dusseldorf and then her next, upgraded, flat in Cologne. An Instagram account littered with delightful photos of her clubbing and laughing and blooming. “She is beautiful, Lachlan, and she is strong,” her mother had assured him more than once. “She will survive this and so will you.” And they had, hadn’t they?

  He had to touch her. He made it as gentle as the flogger had been harsh, tracing her eyebrows with the tip of one finger, smoothing the furrows that creased her brow. She murmured something and shifted, angling toward him, and he threaded his hand through the loose strands of her hair. There was no way she’d sleep through this entire perusal, but he cherished the few minutes before her awareness came back to her.

  There were few things he valued as much as this woman. Yes, he loved his restaurant. Yes, he’d worked tirelessly for his career and his name and fucking thrived under the hot lights and the cameras. He loved guesting on Iron Chef and Chopped. Reruns of his own show aired in more than fifty-five countries around the world. It was on Netflix and Amazon Prime, too. He could’ve signed on for three more seasons of Into the Fire, but he’d wanted to come back to his own kitchen, his own domain. He also wanted to come home to Naya. He wanted it so badly it that terrified him.

  She made a soft sound, body arching as she fought her way out of slumber. “Mmm...why are you groping me?” She cracked open one eye, her lips turning up in a mock-scowl.

  “Because I can,” he replied as pompously as possible.

  Naya giggled. “Pervert.”

  “Damn right.”

  He tugged her into his arms, bending to kiss the spot behind her ear that made her wild. He’d discovered it at some point between their second and third bout of sex play, when they’d stumbled into the shower to clean the come from their skin, and he adored how responsive she was to even the lightest caress there. Her breath caught and she trembled, hands coming up to curl against his chest.

  “Lock,” she moaned in that way that went straight to his cock. And then she said one more word, its meaning so precise he didn’t have to ask for clarification. “Please.”

  She’d said it a dozen times last night. Each time he teased her with his fingers and his tongue. Each time he took her to the brink. Please fuck me. Please don’t make me beg. He liked hearing her beg—because it was so counter to her nature, always brash and always bold—but that wasn’t why he’d held off. It wasn’t why he would deny her and himself as long as possible.

  There was too much at stake.

  * * *

  If Lachlan wasn’t going to make love to me, he could at least take me out to dinner—or breakfast or lunch or whatever meal our jet-lagged bodies were on at the moment. That was the argument I made after we finally
unpacked and settled into his ridiculously posh flat.

  “I’m a world-class chef,” he reminded again, as if I’d somehow forgotten there were entire Tumblrs and Instagrams devoted to how his shoulders looked in those pristine white smocks.

  “You don’t have groceries,” I countered, peering into the cavernous—and empty—recesses of the fridge that was practically bigger than my entire apartment in Cologne. “Unless you plan to whip me up culinary delights out of thin air, we have to interact with the outside world.”

  He peered over my shoulder, taking in the pathetic landscape. There was a six-pack of Indian beer that had been there for God knew how long, and basically nothing else. “I’ll have some things delivered straightaway,” he offered.

  “Ugh. Killjoy!” I scowled at him, slipping out from under his arm to lean on the butcher-block kitchen island. It was about the size of a twin bed, with a sunken stainless steel sink at one end. I had no doubt that he had a similar set-up in New York.

  Lachlan laughed. “First a pervert, now a killjoy. Make up your mind, minx!”

  “Who says you can’t be both?” In fact, I was pretty confident in saying he was both. Along with maddening and gorgeous and everything I’d ever wanted him to be.

  Had it really only been days since we’d reunited? It felt like no time had passed. He was still, in so many ways, the assertive college boy I’d hero-worshipped. Except now he allowed himself to touch me, to be with me, to rejoice in this powerful thing between us—to a point.

  “I bet Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay go out to restaurants.”

  He scowled at me—just the reaction I’d been hoping for. “Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay can go fuck themselves.”

  I cracked up. Lachlan’s feuds with his fellow celebrity chefs were pretty well publicized. He’d once declared that Fieri’s food was “not even worth calling ‘pedestrian,’ because that’s an insult to people crossing the street.” And I still remembered an Entertainment Tonight clip of him slamming Bobby Flay cheating on Stephanie March. “If he’s screwing around on his wife, just imagine what he’s screwing up in the kitchen. Has anyone checked on his root vegetables?” Wouldn’t somebody think of the parsnips?!