Not Your Damn Dom (Denial #2) (15 page)

Alex looked as though she wanted to go give the boy a piece of her mind. I suppressed a smile as she said,
“Good for you. I used to do kickboxing when I was growing up, because my brother did it. He was kinda mean too, but he got bored of kickboxing pretty quick. I had to beg my mom to keep letting me go to classes even though I was a girl.”

I hadn
’t known that. The thought of Alex determined to kick her brother’s ass made me grin.

“
Your mom didn’t think girls should fight either?” Rina sighed. “Moms suck sometimes.”

“
Sometimes,” Alex agreed. “And sometimes they can be pretty cool. Anyway, I got my green belt and my brother could never win a fight against me. So it’s totally worth doing this stuff.”

Beside me, Oliver leaned over and asked,
“You gonna actually start these kids off, or are you just gonna drool over your girlfriend all night?”

I glared at him and raised my voice.
“Everyone paired up? Choose who’s striking first and who’s blocking, and practice your roundhouses. Oliver and I will be walking around like usual, so if you need help, come and grab us.”

The kids got to work, and I tried to focus on my small
protégés, gently correcting stances and giving tips for improving the forms of a few of them on my way around the room. A couple of the boys really reminded me of myself back when I’d started MMA. I’d been so angry at the world, and this had been my only outlet. I’d probably hurt one or two of my sparring partners pretty badly before my instructor had taken me aside and reprimanded me for it.

These days, I was glad I
’d gotten out all that aggression when I had. If I’d come to the D/s lifestyle without martial arts and the gym to vent my anger at, God knows what I’d have become.

You became it anyway
, a small voice at the back of my head reminded me, but it was fainter than usual, as though one scene with Alex had been enough to silence some of the self-loathing that still hid within me.

I diverted my attention back to my group before I got too caught up in thoughts of scenes and Alex in general.

Alex

I helped Rina gently through the exercises Spencer had assigned. Since I was
way too tall to be roundhouse kicking her properly, I let her strike the whole time rather than switching roles halfway through.

Poor kid
—from the looks of her resigned expression when everyone had paired off, this wasn’t the first time she’d been excluded. This had happened to me as a kid too. Making it in a predominantly male group could be difficult sometimes, even when the group members were pre-pubescent. Rina looked as though she was only about eight.

As I worked with her, I kept an eye on the kids around me. Some of them were
focused more on what Rina and I were doing than on their own exercises—those would be the kids whose parents hadn’t cared enough to shield them from the graphic blood-and-guts crime scenes in
One Last Look
, I guessed. It was always nice to be recognised, but geez.

Spencer had stopped next to a boy who was really giving his sparring partner a beatdown. The other boy had tears in his eyes but was valiantly trying not to show he was hurting. Spencer caught my eye and gestured from Rina to the bruised kid, and I nodded, getting his drift. Spencer sent the boy over and I stepped out of my pairing with Rina to let her do some blocking while the boy struck.

I just hoped the boy wouldn’t get teased by his male classmates for getting almost beaten up and then ‘having to work with a girl’ for the rest of the session. Kids could be assholes sometimes.

Meanwhile, Spencer took the aggressive boy into his office, I assumed for a reprimand.
Little bully. God.

After the session, Rina came over and thanked me for my help before running over to the bored-looking woman who
’d come to pick her up; I assumed it was her mother. I just hoped she ended up more understanding of Rina’s choice of hobby than my mother had of mine. If not for my father’s intervention, I’d never have been able to carry on kickboxing for as long as I had, and I might never have felt confident enough to read for the action role that led to my introduction to Spencer.

As
Spencer’s assistant, Oliver, saw the kids out of the hall, I went into the office, where Spencer was just saying goodbye to the boy who’d gone nuts against his partner. I kept my face neutral until we were alone, but then sighed. “Ugh. Little brat. Some kids are just horrible.”

Spencer shrugged.
“Tell that to nine-year-old me. I was just like him.”

I stared at him, unable to reconcile the calm control in Spencer with the pummelling the boy had unleashed earlier.
“Seriously?”

He looked faintly embarrassed.
“Bad childhood. Anger management issues.”

Oliver interrupted us, so I didn
’t get back onto the topic until we were upstairs in Spencer’s apartment, looking over the takeout menus.

“
I still can’t see you as the kind of child who’d take all his rage out on another kid like that. You’re always so in control, even when you’re…” I trailed off, knowing he’d get what I meant after our scene the night before.

“
Yeah, but if not for the martial arts, I probably wouldn’t be half as in control. If I’d bottled it all up inside, it might have come out in other ways.” He shook his head. “I’ve made mistakes, but taking out anger on a sub has never been one of them.”

I smiled. I
’d never doubted that for a second. “Then thank God for martial arts, huh?”

His answering smile was crooked, as though he was remembering bad times past.
“You can say that again. After my mom left us, it kept me sane through a lot of childhood shit. Hopefully I can help Dwayne keep it together as well. He’s having a tough time with his parents splitting up.”

A wave of love crashed into my chest, almost stealing my breath. The way
Spencer related to the kids in his charge just made me appreciate him more. No matter what his opinion of himself sometimes, or his sadistic impulses, he was a good man. He was physically capable of hurting someone badly, but I knew that mentally, he didn’t have the urge to do more than cause pleasurable pain to a submissive.

“
These kids are lucky to have a mentor like you. And I’m lucky to have you as a Dom.”

He glanced up sharply at my last words, and I rolled my eyes.
“I know, I know. You’re not my damn Dom…but until this weekend is over, that’s how I’m thinking of you.”

“
Until this weekend is over. No longer than that,” he said.

I pushed down my sadness and nodded.
“Yes, Sir.”

The heat in his expression made me want to pull the takeout menu out of his hands and kneel at his feet, but I knew he
’d be hungry.

“
I got a call from Owen earlier, telling me I got the part in the BDSM movie. He wasn’t happy that I turned it down,” I said, to distract myself.

“
Owen?” Spencer’s expression was suddenly guarded. “Owen who?”

“
Owen Hayward, the director.”

He gave a short, sharp laugh.
“I’m not surprised. He’ll have been looking for new submissives as well as actresses who can play the part. Was he all over you?”

Remembering my strange audition, I twisted my fingers together in my lap.
“Not ‘all over’, but he definitely gave me a vibe of…Domness.”

“
Was there another guy with him? Tall, blond?”

Remembering
Jay, I nodded. Spencer shook his head as though he found their behaviour shameless. “They share women all the time. I never thought they’d stoop as low as having an audition to find a new sub, though.” He fixed me with a possessive look. “If Owen tries anything else, you tell him you’re mine, you hear?”

A delicious shiver went down my spine. There was something about being told that I was without a doubt his that made me a little tingly.
“Am I yours?”

He cupped a hand to the back of my neck, squeezing firmly as he stared into my eyes.
“Damn right, you are. You’ve been mine from the moment you walked into my gym, you understand that?”

I just about melted under the intense attention.
“Yes, Sir.”

He kissed me hard, and everything else ceased to matter but his lips on mine. Before we could get too distracted, though, my stomach rumbled, shattering the moment as we both laughed.

“Food first, pretty girl.”

After the meal, I asked, “
Do you have lots of devious and sinful things you want to try on me?”

He growled against my neck,
“You have no fucking idea how many.”

“
Gonna tell me some of them?”

“
No, because I don’t have your checklist yet, and I need to know your limits before I know what I can do.”

Spoilsport
. “Yeah, but you haven’t
given
me the checklist yet. Tell me something you really, really want to do to me.”

He was silent for a few seconds. I
’d all but resigned myself to the conversation being over when he said, “I want to chain you down and use a vibrator on your clit, then leave you there just as you’re at the point of coming…”

Chains? I hadn
’t ever thought about chains before, but already my imagination was racing ahead, wondering if chains were much different from rope restraints, whether it would feel more intense or permanent or scary to be in chains. “I want you to,” I whispered.

“
But now I’ve spoiled the element of surprise,” he told me, drawing back to look at me. “Part of me wants to see how you react to things you were hardly even expecting, so that fantasy might not happen on Saturday now.”

I wondered if he was being purposely difficult. If we only had one night for a full scene, why would he tease me with things like this and then say he wouldn
’t do them? “Take me to bed?” I asked softly. “Do bad things to me?”

He pulled me to my feet as though I were a ragdoll, in need of support. I loved it when he showed his strength like this, and I had a suspicion
did it on purpose. “Got no chains in the bedroom, I’m afraid…”

“
But you do own some?”

“
You’ll see on Saturday.”

“
Tease.” I let him carry me down the hall, unable to stop myself from smiling. No matter how complicated things were about to get, I loved being around this man. I just plain loved him.

* * * *

Alex

I stared down at the checklist Spencer had given me, the options fuelling my imagination as the red highlighter in my hand shook. I was having trouble focusing on the task I was actually meant to be doing, daydreaming away about nipple clamps and vampire gloves when yesterday, I’d barely even known what those things were.

Spencer had
given me the printout the night before, and I’d had to do some Internet research around some of the options. Some of them definitely didn’t appeal, especially the ‘anal hook’ one. I knew the hook wasn’t actually sharp, but the mental image—and the photographs I’d seen—made me squirm, and not in a good way.

Other options were extremely attractive, though. Including one or two of the ones Spencer had ruled out as his own hard limits
—he’d said he wouldn’t roleplay. Being tied up and interrogated by an ‘enemy spy’ or having to placate my ‘angry boss’ after an office administration disaster sounded hot, but I set aside the ideas wistfully. I wouldn’t want to have the anal hook in me under any circumstances, so I made the decision to respect his aversion to roleplay in return.

Berating myself for my lack of focus, I scanned down the list again. I was pretty sure I
’d marked all my hard limits with the red pen, so I took the green highlighter and began to mark the things I was happy to have done to me.

Spencer had told me not to mark anything in green that I was on the fence about, so I had to leave a few things out, but after a while I ended up with a list that was mostly green
—the things that I knew I liked or was enthusiastic to try. About two thirds of the remaining options were yellow—things that I was kind of scared of but would trust Spencer to try with me in time if he really wanted to do them—and the rest were red.

I held the page at arm
’s length to look at the ratio and snorted to myself. “Does this make me a sexual deviant?”

Tobias
popped his head around the door. “Does what…? Oh.” He took the checklist from me, made a face and handed it back. “That’s more than enough information about your sexual preferences, thank you!”

I grinned and scanned the page one more time, making sure I was confident of my choices. Then I sent a text to Spencer, as he
’d ordered.
Finished my checklist, Sir.