Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 129027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 645(@200wpm)___ 516(@250wpm)___ 430(@300wpm)
“I’m waiting,” Kira sing-songs. And then she starts to look around the room. “Because if you’re not feeling in the mood, I bet I could find someone else who—”
“Don’t you dare,” I say, hand shooting out to lock around her ankle like a shackle. “Until you walk down that fucking aisle, you’re mine. You hear me?”
She sucks in a quick breath of air at the vehemence of my words, and I think I suck in an inhale too, as shocked myself as she seems to be.
“I hear you,” she whispers back, and it satisfies some rumbling thing in my chest that she’s agreed. “So claim what’s yours already.”
She doesn’t know how dangerous it is to say that to a man like me. Especially now that, after talking to Marcus, I have an idea of exactly how I might do just that.
“Come with me,” I growl, sweeping her off the table where she’s standing and into my arms. “I hope you’ve got your strength up, darlin’. ’Cause you’re gonna need it for what I have in store.”
THIRTY
KIRA
As Isaak bends me over a leather bench and secures leather cuffs to my ankles and wrists, I have a brief freakout moment.
What the hell have I just gotten myself into? I’m not into pain… I don’t think. Isaak knows that, right?
I don’t even know why I climbed up on the poker table like that. I just knew I had the impulse—get up on the table and show your cunt off to the whole room. And I needed to know if it was an intrusive thought or a real one. As I was doing it, I felt wild. And on the edge of crazy, too. As in, maybe actually nuts. I was always worried about what would happen if I gave in to the intrusive thoughts.
Like, would I someday end up with a fork shoved in my hand? Or would I yank the wheel of my car and drive off a cliff while I’m driving in the Texas Hill Country with all those dramatic drop-offs and nothing but a tiny railing between me and the great beyond?
My thoughts have terrified me since I was a teenager when they really started getting scary. So I didn’t let myself do… well, anything. I followed the rules religiously. Religion gave such strict rules, too, and I was always so good at following rules.
But somehow that was still never good enough for my mother. Because she had so many extra rules. Rules for everything, and they were never written down anywhere. Invisible rules for food, rules for how I was supposed to do my hair, and rules for which clothes I was supposed to wear with which shoes. Rules for how I was supposed to respond when Carol was sad, angry, or happy, and rules for the expression I was supposed to have on my face at all times.
No matter how good I was at the rules everywhere else, I always failed with Carol. Once I reached for a second piece of fudge, and Carol cast her eyes disparagingly my way and said, “I’d rather be anorexic than fat.”
So I put the fudge back and had a mild ED for the rest of high school. Losing pounds as I disappeared. Barely there. So invisible no one ever saw me except Drew when he needed comfort.
“What are your hard and soft limits?” Isaak asks while securing my left—and last—wrist.
“Uh…” I cast my brain around quickly.
“Do you know what that means?”
“Of course I know what it means,” I snap. “I’m not an idiot. I’ve studied all about safewords and hard and soft limits.”
I guess he doesn’t know me well enough yet to realize that when I learned that BDSM was all about rules, I got excited and learned them all forward and backward. I love rules as much as my mind rebels against them and sends chaotic thoughts like bolts of lightning attacking me.
Jumping Isaak in the elevator was the first time I’ve given in to the chaos. I don’t know if I’m walking a path of destruction by stepping off the narrow path of the rules like my religion growing up always promised would happen. But no one else in this room is following those rules. My entire college degree has been about trying to deconstruct all that shit.
Because aren’t all those rules just the boundaries of the conditioning I learned? To change, I have to start breaking rules. In spite of all I’ve learned, I’ve just kept coloring inside the lines. As if all I learned was only for other people. Not for me.
“Great,” Isaak says with only the tiniest eye roll. “So what are yours?”
“Um.” I bite my bottom lip and Isaak frowns at me. Oh right, that’s my poker tell. I don’t want to confuse him. Well, only occasionally, on my terms. I refuse to be intimate with someone I can’t hide my feelings from.