“You’re my new client?” she asked, pleasantly surprised. She’d had enough bad surprises lately. She was due for a good surprise.

“Is that a problem?” he asked as he stepped inside.

“Not a problem. Just unexpected. I haven’t seen you in two years.”

“Been busy,” he said. “Busy bee with busy beavers. These are for you, Mistress.”

“Thank you, they’re beautiful.”

“Watch out. I ordered roses with extra thorns.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Smiling she set the roses on her nightstand. “Thorny, what are you doing here?”

He looked good, healthy despite the aneurysm. He had on tight black jeans and an artfully torn T-shirt, no sleeves to show off his elegant full sleeve tattoos.

“The usual reason—I need to be flogged, often and by someone who knows how.”

“I haven’t seen you in two years and you all of sudden need a flogging from me?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against her bedpost.

“Bad week,” he admitted.

“What happened?”

“Consult with a hotshot surgeon who was convinced he could take care of this,” he said, tapping his forehead. “Long story short, he can’t. My fault for getting my hopes up.”

“Oh, Thorny, I’m so sorry,” she said.

He shrugged and didn’t meet her eyes. He looked defeated, scared, almost feverish. Bad week. She knew how he felt.

“I needed a pick-me-up. You’re the best domme in town, so the story goes. I wanted the best.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t feel comfortable taking money from you.”

“Please, I don’t want pity. Anything but that from you.”

“It’s not pity, I promise. I have a client with terminal cancer and another with chronic pain, and I take their money without batting an eyelash. But you... I knew you before you were a client. And I liked you. Plus you warned me about Milady, which you didn’t have to do.”

“You stepped in front of a whip to protect me from a beating. You didn’t have to do that, either.”

“I wish you hadn’t booked me. I would flog you for free, for the fun of it. I like you and I’m not allowed to be intimate friends with a client.”

“Or more than friends?” he asked, giving her a look—that look. That more-than-friends look.

“Or more than friends,” she said, remembering how much she wanted him the night she saw him at the Body House. Her heart broke for him. She couldn’t imagine what he lived with day in and day out. It would be like being locked in a coffin every single day and not knowing if anyone would come along and open the lid. “We already have a prior existing relationship. If Juliette had known that she never would have booked you with me. She would have scheduled you with Mistress Irina or somebody else.”

“I don’t want somebody else. I want you.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem. Dominatrixes and clients are supposed to have distance. Boundaries. I sort of crossed a line with a client a few weeks ago and Kingsley nearly fired me over it.”

“Damn.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to flog you.”

Thorny sat on her bed. He looked good there.

“Well...maybe we could arrange a trade then,” he said. “I can call and cancel my appointment, right? Tell Juliette that I chickened out. She’ll give me my money back, right?”

“Of course. I just have to tell her we didn’t have the session.”

“Then I’m not a client anymore. And you can give me a flogging. And I can give you...well, anything you want, Mistress.”

“Anything I want?”

He batted his eyelashes at her.

“You want me to beat you and top you in exchange for you fucking me?”

“Not just fucking,” Thorny said. “Women don’t pay me two grand a night for a vanilla fuck. I give the whole shebang.”

“What is the whole shebang?”

“It’s when I bang she hole.”

Nora narrowed her eyes at him. Thorny laughed and took her hand into his and kissed the back of it.

“Mistress, I have a gift. And so do you. You give me your gift and I’ll give you my gift. I’m clean. I’ve been tested. I’m a condom maniac. There is no escort on the planet who gives a better Boyfriend Experience than I do.”

Nora sat back against the bedpost. Boyfriend? Wasn’t she just wishing the other day for a boyfriend? A real boyfriend. Not an owner like Søren. Not a slave, either. An actual boyfriend. Someone to share her life with, not just her bed.

“When we’re done will you help me strip the sheets and fold them after they’re dry?” she asked.

“Absolutely. I can never get my sheets folded right without someone helping me. I like to help around the house. It’s fun playing normal sometimes. You wanna play with me?”

“It’s very hard to say no to a sexy silver fox with a brain tumor.”

“It’s not a—”

She slapped her hand over his mouth. “No quoting dumb movies in my dungeon. I get enough of that from Griffin.”

“Mess, Mus-muss.”

She lowered her hand.

“What was that?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Do you really want to have sex with me or are you just trying to distract yourself from this?” Now she tapped his forehead.

“Yeah, I want to have sex with you because I have an aneurysm. That’s the only reason. Or maybe I want to have sex with you because you’re the most famous dominatrix in town, I love being flogged, oh, and you’re so hot ‘Wicked Game’ plays spontaneously when you walk into a room.”

Nora gave him credit. He knew how to hit on a woman.

“How about this...” she said. “We’ll go to my house. I’ll give you the flogging of your dreams. If we end up having sex, great. If not, no harm, no foul. We still had a nice evening together. Good enough?”

“More than good enough. I want to seduce you, however. So, you know, watch your back.”

“Ass man, are you?”

“I’m every kind of man.”

Nora smiled. Every kind of man was her kind of guy.

“Let’s go to my place.”

“So it’s a yes?”

Nora leaned in and kissed him. He kissed her back and as they kissed she saw a volcano in the rearview mirror of her mind, receding into the distance. She felt safer already.

“Yes,” she said against his lips. “Why not?”

“Yes, excellent,” he said. He seemed more than happy. More like...relieved. Did he need a flogging from her that bad?

“Don’t die in my house,” Nora said as she found her keys to lock up the dungeon. “My neighbors think I’m weird enough as it is without a bunch of ambulances showing up to cart your beautiful corpse out of my house.”

“I’d rather come in your bed than go in your bed. You know I’m hypersexual, right? I can get off about eight times a day.”

“Eight?”

“My cock isn’t huge but it’s tenacious.”

“I’ve never met a tenacious cock before. I look forward to making its acquaintance.”

“You’re going to beat me up first, right?”

“Oh, Thorny,” she said as she locked the dungeon behind them and they walked down the hall arm in arm. “I’m going to do such things to you...”

“Good things? Bad things?”

Nora smiled at him.

“Good bad things.”

Thorny kissed her again right in the hallway.

“My favorite things.”

He abruptly stopped kissing her and took a step back.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re not going to get in trouble with Kingsley for this, are you?”

“No, of course not. As long as he doesn’t find out.”

“Good. Just checking.”

“I’ll tell you what Kingsley told me once when he and I did something we weren’t supposed to do—what he doesn’t know won’t hurt us.”

“What if he finds out?”

“He’ll hurt us.”

“Can I ask one more question, Mistress?” Thorny said as they headed to the exit.

“Sure thing. What’s the question?”

“Why do you have a coffin in your dungeon?”

28

A Mirror Image

NORA PICKED UP her Lexus at Kingsley’s and drove her and Thorny to her house in Connecticut. The dog days of August were earning their bad reputation today. The clouds hung in the sky heavy, dark and low and the air simmered with heat. The electricity in the atmosphere made the hair stand up on her arms. Her clothes clung to her skin and it seemed everyone, herself included, wanted nothing more than to be naked inside an air-conditioned room. A few drops of rain fell presaging the coming summer storm, the sky heady and swollen but waiting to burst open. Even the sidewalks steamed.