When they arrived at Nora’s house, Thorny whistled his appreciation while Nora turned off her cell phone. Last thing she wanted was Kingsley calling and interrupting her night off.

“Looks like the kink trade pays better than the flesh trade,” Thorny said.

“You know what they say—if you want to afford a house in New York City, you move out of New York City.”

She let him in and took him up to her bedroom. Luckily her cleaning lady came on Fridays and the house looked and smelled clean and pleasant. Thorny looked around appreciatively. She liked this, bringing guys home to her place. It would be a crime to have such a nice house and no one to share it with.

“This is my bedroom,” Nora said. Sunlight streamed in through the sides of Roman blinds against the window.

“Sexy,” Thorny said. “Nice bed.”

Nora patted the iron footboard. The bed was a bit medieval-looking, and anyone who’d been in Søren’s dungeon would see it looked a bit like his. She had such good memories of that bed...

“You’re not the first client who offered me something in trade for my kink. One of my boys owns the largest furniture store on the Eastern Seaboard. He told me if I could beat him until he passed out, he’d let me have the pick of his showroom. Voilà.”

“Passed out? Jesus,” Thorny said, tugging off his jacket. “That’s too rough for my blood.”

“Don’t worry. I only hit as hard as my boys want to be hit. You like floggings, right, but hate whips? They feel too much like switches?”

“You remember that?” He grinned, obviously pleased.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” She walked to him where he stood at the foot of her bed, leaning against the post. She put her hands on his chest and kissed him again. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Søren. She guessed his height at about five-ten. In her three-inch heels she could easily reach his lips. His kisses were sweet and gentle, affectionate, but with a hint of the passion she knew he hid within him. She could taste it on her tongue. Copper. The same taste as the electricity in the humid August air.

“So you’re going to give me the Boyfriend Experience?” Nora asked.

“I am.”

“Then I will give you the Submissive Experience. How does that sound?”

“Does it involve you putting me into subspace and getting me off so hard I can taste music and smell stars?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds perfect. But...we’re doing this in here?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Well...it’s a bedroom. Just a bedroom.” He glanced around the room and she saw what he saw—a spacious bedroom with a recessed sitting area, an iron bed, a few novels on the nightstand and a lamp, and not much else but an ornately carved cheval mirror standing in the corner. Apart from two potted plants hanging from the ceiling by the mirror, there was not much else...

Or was there?

“Looks, my boy, can be deceiving.” She winked at him and pulled away. On her way to her closet she glanced back over her shoulder. “You should be taking your clothes off right now. In case you didn’t know.”

“Yes, Mistress.” He yanked his shirt off and she saw both of his nipples were pierced with silver hoops. Lovely. She did her best to ignore his body while she set up the room. From her closet she took out a black step stool and two lengths of rope. She threw a two-foot chrome spreader bar on the bed and found her favorite fawn-colored wrist and ankle cuffs. They were padded with soft faux fur on the inside. She wanted Thorny to feel coddled and comfortable, even in bondage.

“I’m only going to flog you, but you’ll be cuffed so you won’t be able to move much until I let you out. I’ll monitor your pain. If it’s good you say green. If you need me to back off a notch or slow down, say yellow. If it’s bad say red. Red won’t stop the scene. It’ll just stop the flogging until you’re ready again. Your safe word will end everything. What’s your safe word?”

“Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second.”

Nora looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Thorny aimed at her one of the sexier grins that had ever been aimed at a woman in the history of sexy grinning.

“I don’t safe out often,” he said.

“Queen Liz it is then.”

From the top of her closet, Nora pulled out a black bag. She tossed it onto the bed and unzipped it. Thorny wasn’t naked yet. He still wore black boxer briefs but she didn’t scold him. His interest in stripping had no doubt been diverted by what Nora took out of her bag.

“Suede,” Nora said, pulling out the first flogger. It had fourteen-inch scarlet-red tails. “Very soft and sensual. The bright blue is next. It’s deer-hide. The leather is buttery. Feel?”

She held it out and Thorny ran his fingers over the tails.

“Nice. Very smooth,” he said.

“This black one is bull-hide. Much sharper edges. The yellow-and-black one is rubber. It’s stingy like a bee so we’ll leave that one alone. It would feel a little like a whipping. But this one...” She held up a hunter-green-and-black flogger. “This one’s elk. Heavy and thuddy.”

“I like thuddy.”

“I thought you would.” She pulled out one last flogger but didn’t remove it from its red leather case. “This one’s special. I’ll save it for last.”

She lined them up on the bed in order of lightest and softest to heaviest and hardest. Thorny gazed at them with heat in his eyes.

“Why do you like floggings?” Nora came to him and ran her hands over his chest, shoulders and arms.

“Floggers are beautiful. They can feel soft one second and hard as steel the next. Takes an expert to wield one the right way. And you can get hit with them all over your body. Arms, legs, feet, anywhere, without doing real damage. I don’t know. They’re just sexy and scary and sensual all at the same time. Just like you.”

Nora kissed him again, slipping her tongue between his lips slowly as she eased her hands into his underwear and pushed them down. Her lips left his reluctantly, but she continued her downward trajectory as she dragged the boxers to the floor and bade Thorny step out of them. She stood up and took a step back.

“Very nice,” she said of his body. He was hard already. All of him and not just his cock. He had a hard flat stomach, a hard V of muscle on each side of his torso, hard hipbones that jutted out, and two vertical hard lines of muscles in his thighs. “You run.”

“How did you know?”

“Even blindfolded I could recognize runner quads. You have a lovely body, Thorny. I can’t wait to use it and abuse it for my amusement and pleasure.”

“That’s what it’s here for, Mistress.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. And now to show you the secret of my bedroom. Go stand facing the mirror.”

He did as ordered. Nora picked up her ropes and her step stool and carried them over to Thorny. Now there were two Thornys—the real one and the mirror one.

She put the step stool by his left foot and climbed it.

“Excuse me whilst I put my ferns away.”

“I don’t think you get enough light in here for ferns, Mistress.”

“It’s okay. They’re fake,” she said. “I had to tell the contractor something to get him to install two hooks in the ceiling of my bedroom, didn’t I?”

Thorny glanced up at the J-shaped hooks screwed into the plaster above them.

“I told the contractor I needed two hooks for my plants and that he should make sure they could hold two hundred pounds each.”

“Those would be some big fucking plants, Mistress.”

“That’s what the contractor said.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I like my plants the way I like my men—hanging from hooks on my bedroom ceiling. He didn’t ask any more questions after that.”

Nora looped her rope over the hooks and came down from the stool. First, she buckled the padded cuffs on Thorny’s wrists, then she hoisted them above his head and secured them with the rope. Next she cuffed his ankles and bound them to the two-foot spreader bar. When she finished, Thorny stood immobile, naked and hard three feet from her mirror with his arms tied to the hooks on the ceiling and his feet rooted firmly to the floor.