Disciplined by the Dom (15 page)

The apartment was well kept, clean, bright, stylish, even—whoever lived here made the most with what they had. There were lamps made out of old Bombay Gin bottles, a spectacular fish tank, many colored lights. It made Jake smile.

“I’ve got to call Danny,” Catie said. “Shit, he’s going to… I don’t know what he’s going to do. He’s out on tour for three months.”

Jake made a mental note. He’d take care of it. But that wasn’t what concerned him now.

“Catie, what are you going to do?”

She avoided his gaze. “No idea.”

Before he could say anything, she disappeared into a room and emerged with a duffel bag, already half-full. She moved about the small apartment with admirable efficiency, gathering belongings and clothing from improvised storage places. Mostly clothing, some books that she stuffed quickly into the bag. A notebook that she tried to hide from him.

Jake could feel their five minutes ticking away.

“Catie, I can arrange—”

“God, you’re making this difficult!” she said.

She had turned away from him. Jake walked around her and gently touched her elbow. It seemed strange that she wouldn’t look at him.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “I just…I can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

She waved her hand, as though she hadn’t heard him. As if she were just thinking out loud. “But it doesn’t matter, right? You don’t want to train me anymore, anyway.”

He turned her towards him. “No. That’s not true.”

When she finally looked up at him, he couldn’t tell if she believed him. Somewhere on the other side of the room, a phone began to ring. Catie didn’t move.

“Catie,
that is not true
. I made a mistake. Many mistakes. But our arrangement is unchanged. It must be.”

“Unless I leave Volare.”

He wanted to shake her, shout at her. No. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. He felt nauseous, but eventually his mind caught up with his gut: it wasn’t just what he wanted, it was because of her notes, her thesis. There were reasons beyond the personal. Beyond what he’d promised.

The phone continued to ring.

“No,” he choked.

“Listen, you’ve been really kind to me today, but—”

“Come stay with me.”

The words were out of his mouth before he knew what they were. His mind, his rational, controlled mind, turned them over, double-checked their meaning. No, he’d said it. He’d meant it. He wanted her with him. And he could find many ways to rationalize it—that it would be easier to train (a lie), that it would be easier to keep an eye on her (and he’d be more vulnerable), that it wouldn’t compromise his judgment (a vicious lie)—but the truth was, he simply wanted her with him.

Catie looked at him with disbelief. There was almost a glimmer of happiness in her face, almost relief, and then it was gone, replaced by that look of loss again. She looked at him sadly, eyes wide, head shaking, as the phone continued to ring.

Then the answering machine clicked on.

“I have an urgent message regarding the care of one Elizabeth Reardon at Ridge Hill Living Facility. There has been a change in her status, and she’s been moved to the Constant Care facility, but I see on the records that her bill has only been paid for Assisted Living through the end of the Q2. Her account is only covered for Constant Care through the end of February. I was given this number by our usual contact, a Mr. Everett. Please call us back as soon as possible.”

Catie turned her head toward the sound. Jake watched her face go slack as the message played, watched her eyes cloud over.

“Shit,” she said softly.

“Sounds like an important message,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

“It is.”

They stood, silently. He fought off the interruption; she wasn’t Elizabeth Reardon, this wasn’t her apartment.

“Catie,” he said, not wanting to let the issue die. He could feel her pulling further away from him, and he couldn’t let that happen. He could fix this—he knew he could. “Catie. Come stay with me. Please.”

“Oh,
shit
,” she said, turning away from him. Her hand went to her face, like she was wiping her eyes.

It wasn’t exactly the response he expected.

“Catie, if you want, you don’t have to see me. It’s a big house. You don’t have to train with me—”

He stopped suddenly, stumbling over his own unexpected reaction. He felt sick. In truth, the idea of her training with anyone else was physically repugnant to him.

Jake was speechless.

“Hey, Mr. Jayson?” Captain Seenan opened the door, looked at Jake and Catie’s obviously emotional tableau, and cleared his throat. “Mr. Jayson, I’m sorry, but we really only have five minutes.”

Jake didn’t know whether he wanted to hug or hit the captain. “Thank you, Captain. We’ll be right out.”

Seenan opened his mouth, thought better of it, and ducked back out.

They had a minute, maybe less. Jake stared helplessly at Catie’s back, totally unsure of what to do. This was the exact space in which he was without skills, without experience: relationships. Connecting. Emoting. He knew what to do as a Dom. He would know what to do if she agreed to continue training. As a man, he was at a loss.

Time to try something.

He reached out, grabbed Catie by the arm, and pulled her back to him, spinning her around until she was pinned against his chest. He brushed aside her hair and kissed her, hard, and kept kissing her, his hands roaming over her body as he felt her begin to respond. When he pulled away, it felt like they had stepped into a scene.

“Come with me,” he ordered.

“Yes,” she said.

He should be elated. He was. He could feel the heat between them, knew that was still intact.

Then why did she seem so sad?

chapter
15

Catie’s expression was calm while her mind rioted.

There was no other way to describe it, really. She was in a kind of shock now, so much so that she let Jake carry her duffel back down the rickety, filthy stairs, back through the rain, back to the black town car. She watched him throw it in the trunk, let him open the door for her.

Jake. Jake who’d just kissed her until her mind went blank and her body went live. Jake, who she’d thought she’d finally decided she couldn’t betray; Jake, who had almost made it easy to make that choice by running after her, by putting his body between hers and danger. She’d thought she’d have at least six months to figure out something else. She’d thought she’d be able to do it; somehow, she’d make it all work out. Nana and Jake both could rely on her, even if neither of them knew it.

Then that message.

She really didn’t have a choice. She had to get that story, she had to get it written, and she had to get it to Brazzer by the end of February, or her grandmother…

Her mind clamped down. No. Nope. Wasn’t going to happen. Catie did her best to steel herself for what she would have to do, but every time she looked at Jake—every time she thought about that last kiss, about the kiss before that, about every time he’d touched her—it felt like her whole body went into rebellion. How did other people live with this kind of conflict? With these lies? How did people find the strength to do the things that had to be done?

She so wished that he could be a bastard. Truly a bastard. She had thought, briefly, when he’d blown her off, that he was, and she’d been sad, at the time. Hurt. Now, she
longed
for that. She’d had no idea how lucky she’d been.

Instead, he’d become the white knight she would have to stab in the back. Maybe some part of her had known, some part of her had hedged, as she was packing her bag: she’d remembered her notebook, after all. The one with all her notes and observations in it. The one with all of Volare’s secrets.

Part of her wished he would find her notebook. Part of her wished she would be exposed, and thus absolved of all responsibility for making a choice. Then she could tell herself she wouldn’t have done it, in the end, that something else would have come along, that she would have figured out another way to raise the money. But she didn’t really believe in fairytales like that. She knew no one would be there to save her and her grandmother in the end. It was just up to her.

So she’d have to toughen up.

“Are you all right?” Jake asked her.

She forced herself to look at him, which did
not
help. He looked incredible, his silver streak tussled where she’d had her hand in his hair, his white shirt still wet and plastered to his chest. Catie swallowed, tried to quell the feeling in her stomach. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m just…I guess just…not really sure what to think of all this.”

She looked ahead, wondered if the driver was listening in. Somehow that made it worse. Jake seemed to understand her concern. He nodded, and they rode the rest of the way in silence.

Catie was surprised when they pulled up to a stone-faced mansion, complete with wrought iron works and juliet balconies. She’d been admiring all the stately buildings, never imagining that one of them was Jake’s actual home. Of course it made total sense, when she actually thought about it. His great-great-grandfather had probably commissioned the damn thing, back before there were even sidewalks this far north. She’d never get her head around that: his family had helped build the city. The
country
. Railroads, mining, banks…

And he was carrying her duffel bag.

He stood by the open door, bag slung over his shoulder, and held out his hand. She sighed.

Be less perfect right now. Please.

But she took it. She could feel his touch everywhere, all over again. She held her breath, and followed him up the steps, willing herself to just get through this.

What the hell had she been thinking?

He punched a code into a number pad, then placed his thumb on a sensor, and the door clicked open. The security shouldn’t have surprised her either, but it did. It also reminded her what she was there for.
She
was what he needed to secure himself against.

“Catie!”

She had faltered, stepping over the threshold. A Freudian slip, a gesture of panic, maybe. She felt exposed, and weak, and frightened that she’d never be strong enough to pull this off.

But it was worse when he caught her. His arm pressed into her where he held her around the waist, and the steel-like steadiness of the man himself as he kept her from falling made her feel even weaker. Just the nearness of him was enough to overpower her senses. Her breath hitched, and her muscles tensed, and it felt as thought her whole body seized with her desire for him. For one long, painful second, it was all she could feel.

Without a word, he threw her bag in through the door onto a staid marble floor and dipped to lift her in his arms.

“Oh Jesus,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He carried her—
carried
her—in through the imposing front entrance, and slammed the door shut behind them.

It echoed.

Catie finally looked up. It was dark, but windows that seemed twenty feet high let in some streams of grey light. It was a massive entrance hall, the kind of thing you expected to read about in Edith Wharton novels, the sort of space meant to impress guests at formal events.

“You live here alone?” she asked.

“It does get a little drafty,” he said, smiling in the gloom.

He walked over to where he’d chucked her bag, and set her down gingerly on the floor. She was both relieved and saddened; not feeling the warmth of him left her colder than she’d been before. Without thinking about it she let her hand drift down his arm, and only remembered herself when his eyes followed the trail of her touch.

They hadn’t yet said what they were, if anything at all. Whether he was her trainer, or… It would be so much worse if this were truly personal now. Worse, but she longed for it. She wanted him to say, “I can’t train you because I want you, because I care about you, because I am attached to you,” and yet she dreaded it above all else.
Talk about fairytales
. As though she would be the one to change him, to make him whole. And then to betray him.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t… I don’t…”

“Follow me,” he said. His voice was gentle, yet commanding. It was exactly what she needed to hear. Every time she tried to think, she was met with the terrible facts of her situation, with the awful choice she’d made. Her overheated mind was quickly becoming a battle zone.

He led her up the stairs to the second floor, where there were soft lights, and warm looking rugs laid out over the cold stone floors. The floors above them were dark; she wondered if he ever went up there. One floor of this building looked big enough for two, maybe three normal sized apartments. Did he really live here all alone?

“I have a cook who comes regularly,” he said, like he was reading her mind. That, or she wasn’t the first person to wander through this lonely house thinking like this. “And regular employees, but no live-in servants. We’re alone.”

Alone
.

Two kinky-minded people could get up to all sorts of things by themselves in a house like this. She found herself wondering if he had a special room for BDSM play, then found herself jealously wondering about who else might have played with him. It was exactly the wrong sort of thing to think, the kind of thing that would only trick her into unrealistic expectations, into caring more about him than she could afford to. As if her mind were actively trying to betray her while she was planning to betray him.

Fantastic.

He led her to the back of the house and opened a heavy wooden door to reveal an enormous bedroom. Everything about it was huge: the multi-paned windows, the bed, the drapes. It wasn’t stuffy, either.

“I have the cleaning service keep it ready,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like something a man who’s planning on being unattached would do,” she said offhand.

The immediate silence felt thick, impenetrable. Catie couldn’t believe she’d said that out loud. What the hell was wrong with her? It was like she couldn’t handle all of the intensity, and her circuits were blowing left and right.