Holding The Cards (15 page)

She was sure the continuous touch, the even, slow circles, would keep his subject stirred. The lull of it would bring Josh's thoughts back to those more intimate touches and the unsettling effect they had on his body.

For she had no doubt Josh had been aroused. Lauren suspected men sometimes longed for a
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non-feminine strength in a sexual touch, a matching of body power fraught with delightful possibilities.

"I'm not gay," Josh muttered suddenly, shifting under her hand. He looked back at Marcus, challenge in his gray eyes.

"Of course you're not, silly boy," Marcus chuckled. He caressed Josh's jaw with light fingers, his face reflecting his pleasure when Josh did not pull away. "No more than two college girls exploring one another under their nightshirts, trying their first taste of what lies between their thighs. The body has no sexual preference. Our hearts choose who we love; only our minds try to give it a classification. But when we strap our minds down and give control to another," his fingertips slid down Josh's ribs, lingering at the top of a bare hip, "our bodies have free and delightful rein to experience, enjoy, endure. The sensations take over… anticipation, nervousness. What will this feel like? Taste like?"

His voice was soothing, melodious. Lauren was as enthralled as Josh, watching the movement of Marcus's hands, but they stilled at that moment, so that Josh's pensive glance flicked back up to Marcus's face. "I've been your friend a long time, Josh," Marcus said quietly, his eyes serious. "I know what you are, and what you're not. Trust me…trust Lauren, and be still." He shifted his gaze to Lauren. "I believe you indicated you were going to give our boy here a reward for good behavior."

She started out of the reverie his words and movements had woven over both of them. Marcus grinned, though he dropped his attention to Josh and got his hands working on his charge again.

There were grades of Masters, she realized. The most common were probably those like herself, who sought physical and emotional fulfillment. Then there were those like Marcus, who had taken it to an art form, as a man who appreciated art certainly would, honed the game to a level of craftsmanship spellbinding to watch.

She took a moment to enjoy the way he looked, his expression absorbed in the beauty of Josh's body, his hands glistening with the sandalwood oil. Idly she wondered how Marcus would look, slicked down in it, polished like a gem, the same way he had rubbed Josh, and the image was a pleasant one.

There were a million facets of this diamond to explore and cause to sparkle. However, at the moment it was the banked fire in Josh's dark eyes she wanted to bring back to full flame.

"So I did," she smiled. "I'm letting Josh choose. What would you like as a reward?" she asked, tilting her head toward him.

Josh reached out a long, brown arm and laid his palm over her bare foot.

"I want to know about the man who hurt you."

Oh, he was clever. And if it was just cleverness, she could have been angry. But those gray eyes, soft now like a dove's breast, filled with gentle curiosity, were not hiding his feelings. He was interested in her, wanted to know what was going on in her heart. It was something she found she could not deny him.

Hell. She suspected she might be unable to say no to anything he asked of her. The ironic double-edged sword of vulnerability in the Dom and sub relationship, where a Mistress might do all manner of cruel things to bring her submissive, and herself, to greater heights of pleasure, but in matters of the heart she was as open as he was, perhaps more.

She wanted to close up. She wanted to say no. She wanted to tell herself it wasn't a problem, that she was on an island in the middle of Paradise, and she would walk away in two days and never see him
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again.

"His name was Jonathan." It was funny, how little she had said his name aloud since he had left her. It got clogged a bit in her throat, so she had to clear it, and it came out sounding garbled, but she didn't repeat it. Her fingers had tightened on the arms of the chair, but she didn't realize it until Josh's fingertip whispered over her big toe, and she loosened her grip on the grooved plastic.

"I like control, but I'm healthy with it. Control is just a dance; you can lead the dance, but your partner has to know how to match your steps, know when to go left when you go right. A lot of it is imagination, wishful thinking. You only hold power as long as those you hold it over want you to have it."

It helped to work from the general to the specific, like the absurd practice of dipping one callused toe in the water before plunging all the far more sensitive extremities into it. There was a reason that the crotch was the hardest part to submerge without shrieking.

She kept her eyes on the horizon and thought, as she often had, that subs were braver than Doms, ultimately. They obeyed when the Mistress demanded they meet her eyes while they answered a difficult question. She could not have looked at Josh now without the aid of a stereotaxic device.

"Sometimes, someone can be sneaky, exercise power over you in a way you don't notice until you're too deep in a pit to get out. The worst ones can put you there and you think you don't want out, even though you're abandoning everything you value about yourself." She shook her head. "Maybe I should stop."

Josh trickled warm sand from his cupped hand into the spaces between her toes. It made her toes wiggle, dislodge the sand. He repeated the action. It had a comfortable rhythm to it. "I want to hear your story," he said.

Lauren felt his attention centered on her every word, every movement, the working of her throat. Most men didn't look at a woman that closely. Most didn't want to hear anything about a woman's past lovers.

To a man, it infringed on his sense of possession, whereas for a woman, it was a way of revealing what she wanted and needed in a lover. She wanted to tell herself that Josh and she really hadn't had time to develop a sense of possessiveness, but she saw the tattoo on his back again, and felt the rise of white anger again at the woman who had inflicted it upon him. She watched the sand roll over the arch of her foot, his fingers hovering just above it. She was lying to herself, protecting herself.

He was a different type of man. For him, intimate knowledge of her past might be a type of possession.

It was something Jonathan had never wanted from her, but she had desperately wanted to give him. Josh wanted it, was asking for it.

"I met Jonathan in my favorite club, of course. I played with him. Nothing serious, just safe play. The D/s form of first date. But he was different. He had these brown eyes, these lips… ah, dammit," she closed her eyes, fought the moisture back. "My soul opened up to him like a flower to sun the moment,
the
second
, I saw him, breathed him, touched him."

Neither man said anything, and Lauren sat in darkness a few moments, just feeling Josh's touch on her foot, hearing Marcus shift to her other side. She inhaled the comfortable normalcy of tanning oill and the sea and tried to get it to banish the dark shadows that had risen out of her heart the moment she gave voice to the name of her demon.

At length, she made herself open her eyes, watch the horizon again. "I should have known he was an obsession more than anything else, because I felt so damn drawn to him from the beginning. Why would I
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feel that way about him if he was the wrong person?"

She pushed down the sudden ice of fear in her throat. It was impossible to ignore the similarities in the picture she was painting with what was happening between her and Josh.

She swallowed the shards of glass. "I ignored all the danger signs. He didn't want to meet outside the club, not even for a cup of coffee. I thought he was just being cautious.

"Over time, even when I finally coaxed him into living with me, it should have told me he was only interested in the physical. Especially since that only lasted about a month, and he moved back out. He didn't want anything between us but the game. But he had such a way of making me feel like the center of the universe when I was playing Mistress to him. It's hard to explain, even to myself," she admitted. "I wanted him to fall in love with me as I had fallen in love with him. I assumed it was just something I would have to work harder at to make happen. At my home, he would play, but he gave me nothing more than that. After sex, he was always retreating to the study to work, or having to go out without me. We spent weekends in the dungeons. I devised so many ways to break him down, make him open to me. I'm a good Mistress," a smile touched her eyes as she curled her toe around one of Josh's fingers. "I believe a person plays a submissive because there's something inside they want you to break open." She noted the finger tensed a bit under her grasp. "I did break him open. I thought I opened up every room inside him, made him vulnerable in a hundred different ways. I stroked all those vulnerabilities, collected them to me and cherished them as gifts, the way a Mistress should, and gave him the best of myself."

She raised her arms, caught hold of the back of the chair, bent her elbows and stretched the muscles, tightening her fingers until the knuckles whitened.

"I wanted him more than air," she said, low, her throat choked with it. "Doesn't that sound like a pathetic cliché? All I wanted was to look in his eyes and see that connection I was sure was going to eventually be there. I can't explain now how I got so desperate. I had a full and happy life, career, family. All I lacked was a Mr. Forever, but that wasn't something I was obsessed with having. But I had weak points.

A Mistress ultimately has to be as vulnerable to the sub as they are to her, and the sub who knows how can push the right buttons, make the Mistress the slave of her own vulnerabilities. And Jonathan did.

Everything I wanted deep in my heart he dangled in front of me, just enough to make me keep grabbing at it. I neglected my work, my life. Every day came to be about getting to the club that night.

"I was going to make him love me," she said softly. "And the D/s game became the chess board, the strategy to make it happen. The more I craved his love, a sincere gesture of intimacy, the more he withheld it. I had never been aware of being lonely, and suddenly I was. I felt inadequate. My self-esteem plummeted and I didn't even notice. It's funny, how someone you love can break you down, take away your identity and recreate you, before you even realize that's what they're doing."

A sun-browned hand covered her left knee and she made herself look at Josh. It took such effort that her eyes felt glassy. He squeezed her, his thumb stroking the protrusion of bone, and his eyes were tranquil gray pools, strong and understanding. She had a sudden urge to crawl into his lap.

"I should say you don't have to go on, but I really want to know."

She tried for a smile, failed, managed a grimace. "You have this image of yourself," she murmured, shifting her gaze to her knees, "as someone competent and smart, someone somebody would like, not because of what you would do for them, but because of who you are. Then you let someone inside, they get your number. They can tear it all down."

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Josh understood all too well what she was saying. She could see it in the shadows in his eyes, the flicker of comprehension.

"What happened to end it?" Marcus asked. Lauren tilted her head to look at him. He had drawn close to her chair, so Josh and he were coiled around her like two wolves protecting a member of the pack, their affection and anger for her palpable. She should have felt surprise, but sex, or sexual situations, did tend to create the impression of intimacy quickly, though it was often built on no more than the lust of the moment.

No. She wouldn't let Jonathan make her timid. This was more than that. The bond that had developed between the three of them in less than thirty-six hours defied description, even with the facilitation of their island paradise setting.

"A mirror." She moistened her lips. "One night, as I was getting ready to go meet Jonathan, I realized I couldn't meet my own gaze in the mirror. I had become ashamed of myself, so much that I couldn't face who I was. So I did the hardest thing in my life, because I knew how it would end. I went to the club that night, and told him I loved him, and I wanted more."

In her mind, she was back there, and the pain gripped her, such that she could not speak for several moments. She was vaguely aware of the two men exchanging a concerned glance, some slight movements of their hands upon her, comfort or encouragement, it did not matter.

"He put on this amazed expression," she said, her tone flat as stagnant water. "But there was this little smile around his lips. And I knew." Her voice shook and she clenched her jaw, forcing it to stop. "I knew. He had been playing me from the beginning. True subs don't do that. The whole point is trust.

Even if there isn't the intimacy of lovers, there should be the respect of friends. He had used me, twisted me up, and then when I broke, he dumped me. That's what got his rocks off. He had loved having me as a Mistress, but he didn't want Lauren, the woman. He never had. He was a sick, sociopathic son of a bitch and I had been totally gone over him."

Josh rose up on one elbow. With a gentle thumb, he pressed the tear from the corner of her eye, the rest of his hand cradling her face. She shut her eyes, leaned into his touch a moment, let his palm shut out the light so she could focus on the tranquil darkness.

"I stayed away from the club for months after that, but Maria said he never came back after that night.

She heard he had gotten some Mistress over at another competing club tied up over him."