“If my fear of losing her is greater than my fear of hurting her.”
“Exactly.” He seemed to be waiting for Axel to continue.
“Igetit,” he finally said. “My brain gets it. I get that she wants it and it’s not abuse. But it doesn’t stop my body from wanting to throw up when I think about putting a bruise on her, even if she wants it. Tilly told me that people who are determined to make it work usually quickly grow out of it, and I know she’s smart, but…” He struggled for words. “I wish it’d fucking kick in any time now.”
“My Redbird is quite the wise woman. Which is why I’m proud and humbled to be her husband, but even more proud and humbled that she chooses to submit to me. Willingly. Well, mostly.”
The smile returned. “Sometimes I aggravate her and it’s more a case of me taming her than it is her submitting to me. Not that I mind. That’s part of her charm and her strength. And it’s also why it damn well takes two or three of us to handle her, at times.”
“She scares me, honestly.”
Landry grinned. “Try being married to her or sharing a bed with her. And there are times she makes me look like a cuddly kitten in comparison.”
Chapter Eighteen
Skye knelt where she’d been told to on the yoga mat on the pool house floor. Heels neatly tucked under her butt, hands resting palms up on the tops of her thighs, shoulders back.
Naked.
Collared and cuffed.
Feeling no fear or anxiety over being naked in front of the clothed men, no worries about them or their motives. She had trust in them.
Completely.
Cris, dressed similarly to Bob in jeans, a button-up shirt, and barefoot, sat in a chair off to the side, thumbing through his phone and going through e-mail. He wore his leather formal collar. Bob stood at ease, hands clasped behind him, five feet in front of her and facing her, able to see her every movement and facial expression in case she needed anything.
On the coffee table sat a top-of-the-line baby monitor, turned on and receiving.
The base unit sat on Landry’s desk in the office, where it was currently broadcasting his end of the call to his California office to handle some sort of crisis out there.
Bob had left the room when the gate buzzer had sounded on the pool house’s intercom, presumably to let Axel in, even though she had not heard the doorbell ring before Bob returned and retook his position a few minutes later. She knew they’d set the baby monitor in the office because the house intercom system was two-way, and they wouldn’t be able to talk or make any noises in the pool room if the connection to the office was open.
After Skye had arrived a couple of hours ago, picked up by Bob, Landry had dropped her hard and fast into subspace. In the foyer, Landry had been waiting for her. She’d been ordered to strip right there, and he’d cuffed and collared her—which they provided tonight, not her old ones—and he’d grabbed her by the hair, put her on the floor in a formal bow, and spent the better part of twenty minutes talking to her, telling her what a good girl she was…
Bam. Subspace.
Under threat of death she couldn’t convey what else he’d said to her during that time, except that between the grip on her hair and his low, steady voice in her ear, she’d done a quick, head-first swan dive off that fucking cliff.
Freely.
Voluntarily.
From that point on, she’d been made to do poses, Landry’s particular choice of them that he used as part of his household, changing every ten minutes or so. Cris was in charge of that. Every second or third pose change, he would lean in, tightly fist her hair in his hand, and talk to her the way Landry had. He might not have been able to drop her as hard or deep into subspace as Landry initially did, but once she was already there, Cris could damn sure keep her there. There had been a break about an hour ago for dinner, where she’d been made to sit on the floor next to Bob’s chair while he hand-fed her and gave her sips of water from a glass while the three men had a pleasant dinner chat that she’d mostly ignored.
More blissful subspace, able to keep her brain shut down and focusing only on what she was told to focus on.
After dinner, they’d moved to the pool house, except for Landry.
The closer they grew to the time of them actually scening, the more her pulse raced. She longed to feel his cane across her ass, the sting of the paddle and the sharpcrackechoing through the room as it made contact, nails raked down her back, fists pummeling tight muscles.
She wanted to feel a singletail striping her back, the heavy thud of a flogger pounding into her.
The tip of a knife tracing across her flesh.
She wanted to be one large, lumpy mass of bruises tomorrow morning.
She did not, however, want to contemplate that tonight was make-or-break.
