Page 4 of Sherwood
He didn’t bother to wait for my response.
I was off the barstool and following him before I even registered that I’d made my choice. My heels clicked on the wide, wooden floorboards as I walked across the yawning central space of the club, and curious eyes burned along my skin as I walked through the clumps of people talking, kissing, playing.
Meat The Knot…of course they would stare.
I was still Marian Fitzwalter, after all.
* * *
The private roomwas deceptively spacious and outfitted with a dizzying array of whips, canes, floggers, and several other things I didn’t know the names for. There was a bed made up with sheets of dark green silk, a leather spanking bench, and a suspended fireplace in the corner, its flames casting dangerous shadows everywhere. Like the rest of the club, there were exposed wooden beams and large windows looking out over the ocean—the same sort of Pacific-lodge-meets-modernism aesthetic that dominated most of the architecture here in Sherwood.
Rafe de Lacy had ignored everything else in the room and had sat in a black damask chair near the fireplace, his feet planted on the polished concrete floor and his elbows braced on his suit-clad thighs as he leaned forward to look at me. His posture was alert and focused, but there was a restlessness to it too, as if it took everything he had to stay still. Those light blue eyes glittered at me as I shut the door and turned to face him.
“I—” I stopped, my voice sounding ridiculous in the near-silence of the space. I dug my teeth into my lower lip and searched for the right words to say, the right things to do.
But the truth was that I’d never done this before, and not onlythis, with a stranger in a strange place, but real kink at all. What had happened between me and Lox all those years ago had been the furthest thing from planned or rehearsed, and there’d been no protocols or etiquette. Only wordless, shapeless instinct.
It hadn’t even been until my sophomore year in college that I’d learned there was a name for it at all.
Rafe de Lacy didn’t move or speak in response to my aborted greeting, but neither did he lift his eyes from me. I was pinned in place by that stare, stuck like gravity itself had reoriented at his will, and it reminded me so forcefully—so viscerally—of Lox, that my voice came back, as if summoned by an order.
“I’m not sure what to do next,” I admitted. “If I should stand or sit or kneel.”
Between his thighs, there was the tiniest flex of his fingers. “Have you ever knelt for someone before?” His voice was deep, rasping. Faintly British.
“Yes,” I answered honestly. “Once.”
“Only once?”
“It was a long time ago. It—” I glanced down at the floor, not sure how much was good submissive manners—or just plain old hookup manners—to say. “It didn’t end well.”
His heavy-lidded stare didn’t change, but the sharp line of his mouth softened somewhat. “Come sit,” he said, indicating the chair next to him.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and something like a smile tilted his lips. He was pleased by that.
After crossing the room to the chair, I sat and smoothed the black velvet of my dress over my legs. I crossed my ankles and folded my hands in my lap, my back straight. His eyes flicked over me, lingering on where the slender ties of the dress’s halter were tied in a neat bow at the nape of my neck, and then settled on my face.
“I’m Rafe,” he said and held out a hand, which I took. It was large and warm and a little rough—rougher than I would have thought given the suit and watch. Maybe he was hands-on about whatever surveys he did for the EPA?
“I know,” I said. I shivered a little as his thumb brushed against the back of my hand. “The bartender told me your name.”
“Then you find me at a loss, because I don’t know yours,” he said, keeping my hand in his. It was a light grasp—I could pull free very easily if I wanted to—but I still felt the latent power in that hand, in those fingers. “But it’s okay if you’d prefer not to give it, or would rather go by a pseudonym while you’re here.”
“Marian,” I said, catching myself before I could say the rest. He didn’t need to know I was a Fitzwalter. That could complicate things, given how my company made its money and his position at the EPA. “My name is Marian.”
“Marian,” he said, his eyes roaming all over my face. “A lovely name.”
“Thank you.”
“And do you know what I am, Marian? Here in this club, I mean?”
An easy question.
“A dominant.”
“And do you consider yourself a submissive?”
I laughed a little. Because I absolutely did consider myself a submissive and had since the moment I’d learned the word—but also: “Would I be back here with you if I didn’t?”
