What Happens After Dark (35 page)

“That I did. It’s my right to punish. But I don’t raise a hand to her.” His eyes flashed. Luke almost believed the guy bought into his own rhetoric, that he truly was fighting on Bree’s behalf for the right not to be beaten, that within all the bluster, the man didn’t like to see a woman brutalized.

It was that insight only that made Luke explain. “She fell,” he said with excessive quietness. “I don’t hit women or children.” Then he smiled with teeth bared. “Now fuck off.”

The man stared him down for a full thirty seconds. Luke met him eye to eye.

Finally, the guy took one step to the side. “I believe you.” Then he turned, spread his hand out like a courtier, and the crowd swept aside.

Luke got her the hell out of there.

“You know where to come back to if he starts mistreating you,” the dom called as his parting shot. Luke didn’t allow Bree to turn around or even acknowledge the man.

“My car,” she said a couple of minutes later as he herded her along the sidewalk outside. “It’s back there.”

He held her tighter. “I’m not letting you drive alone. I don’t trust you to go home.”

“But I need my car.”

“We’ll take BART up tomorrow and get it.” He would drive them to the station, then they’d ride the rapid transit together.

“But my car might get towed, and I have to go to work tomorrow.”

He stopped and gave her a look that should have reduced her to a quivering puddle. “Then get in your car, and I will follow you to your mother’s house. If you deviate from that route, I will run you off the road.”

She swallowed.

“Is that understood?”

“Maybe you should take me to my place instead,” she whispered, staring at the concrete.

A group of four couples headed up the club steps, laughing, the women giggling. He stared after them a moment. What did she want? What did she need? Could he ever actually give it to her? Or would she forever be running off somewhere, scaring the crap out of him, just to incite him to acts of debauchery?

“
Not
your place,” he said. “And not mine. You don’t deserve any one-on-one time after what you did.”

She raised her head. “Didn’t I do exactly what you wanted me to, Master?” Her eyes were still slightly dazed and puzzled. She really didn’t get it.

“What if I can’t rescue you?”

“I didn’t need rescuing, Master.”

He grabbed her chin, held her so she couldn’t look away. “Anything could have happened to you.” More than what had already been done to her, but she refused to see that. “Now don’t piss me off any more than I already am. Get in your car and go to your mother’s.”

“Or what?” she said so softly he had to read her lips when a raucous bout of laughter floated across the night.

He knew what she was trying to do. To provoke him into taking her home for punishment. If she’d said she needed him to make love to her, he’d have done it in a heartbeat. He didn’t ask why she’d come to the club tonight. He didn’t ask what she’d needed that he couldn’t provide. It couldn’t be explained. He didn’t think she even knew herself.

“You really don’t want to test me right now, slave,” he said so very quietly.

Slowly, she shook her head.

“Then get in your fucking car and drive to your mother’s.”

As she headed back down the street in her too sexy dress, his heart beat fast and hard against the walls of his chest. He’d been
that
close to issuing an ultimatum. But when you did, you could never back down.

He wanted her to offer her body and soul without all the hidden meanings, without forcing him to be the heavy. He had sympathy for what had been done to her in the past, but playing the bad man all the time was draining him dry.

 

 

HE’D MADE HER TREMBLE DELICIOUSLY. IT HAD BEEN SO GOOD, the way he talked to the dom, how he took her so forcefully. His headlights shone in her rearview mirror. He was
there
in so many ways.

He was right, he’d rescued her. He hadn’t asked why she was there. She didn’t want to talk about Marbury or tell Luke she was jealous of his daughter. She didn’t want to admit she’d been frightened of Margie and Ron and the dom. She didn’t used to be frightened. Or rather the fear was part of the turn-on. She’d thrived on it. But somehow, in the hallway, sandwiched between the three of them, she’d gone queasy. Then Luke was there. Right when she needed him.

She didn’t want to be sent off to her mother’s like a naughty child. She’d make him see that wasn’t what he wanted either.

By the time she got home to her mom’s, her eyes smarted from his headlights in the mirror. It was cold as she stepped out of the car, and she pulled the jacket she’d brought from the passenger seat and wrapped it around her, suddenly shivering in its warmth.

He made a slow circle at the end of the cul-de-sac, then stopped in the front of the house, but didn’t get out. She was forced to walk out into the street to talk to him.

The night was quiet with only the hum of faraway cars on the main road. He rolled down his window. “Go in, it’s cold.”

“Let me get in the car with you.”

“I already fucked you tonight.”

It wasn’t enough. She needed more. “Why’d you leave your daughter?”

“She went back this morning.”

God. She could have called him. All along, she could have gone to him. But would she have? She didn’t mean for the heavy sigh to leave her lips.

His brow furrowed. “Were you pissed about my daughter interrupting us last night?”

“No, not pissed.”

“Then what?”

I had such a bad day, and I needed you, and you weren’t there. I’m afraid someday you won’t be there at all.
Her fears were pitiful. “I thought you were busy.”

“So you went to a club?” He said it mildly, but she sensed the iron in his voice.

“I didn’t want to come here to my mother’s.”

“So you went to a club?” he repeated. This time, she thought she heard his teeth grinding.

“I just—”
Tell him the truth.
The whisper echoed in her head.
Tell him about Marbury.

She’d wanted to cry in her office when Marbury yelled at her. She’d felt like weeping when Erin had to rescue her. She was thirty-five years old, and she’d damn near burst into tears at work because a man, an
asshole
, yelled at her and called her names. Could anyone have a clue how humiliating that was?

Luke wouldn’t understand. She begged
him
to call her names. She invited his fury. How could she explain about Marbury? How could she explain that when her
Master
said those things, did those things, it was wonderful. But Marbury was different.

He opened the door and climbed out slowly. “You just what?”

With her high heels, they were of a height, and yet he seemed so much taller, so much bigger.

“I needed something,” she whispered, ashamed she couldn’t tell him the truth.

“You needed something, and you chose to go elsewhere. One night, and you couldn’t wait for me.”

“I’m sorry.” What she’d done sounded churlish. Yet even if she told him about Marbury, he wouldn’t understand. Men didn’t cry at work. They got angry. They didn’t melt into messy puddles of goo.

He’d never understand that she was terrified he’d leave her. So she’d left him.

With the streetlight shining down on his dark head, his eyes were in shadow as he stared at her for long, excruciating moments before he spoke. “As I drove up there, I was terrified something really bad was going to happen to you.”

She swallowed. She should have thought of that. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She felt his eyes on her for an interminably silent minute. “I can’t give you what you need,” he finally said.

Something inside her screamed.
No, please don’t go.

“I didn’t like some of the things I had to do tonight.” He paused. Her ears roared in the wait. “The things we do aren’t good for you, either. You have to see that.”

She wanted to wrap her body around him, hold him, never let him go. “You’re not leaving,” she said so softly that she knew he had to read her lips.

“We can’t do it your way anymore. It’s eating at us.”

“But I only went there because I had a bad day at work and there was this meeting with a man and it didn’t go well, and I couldn’t call you, and I just had to do something.”

He cupped her face, stilled her. “That’s the problem. You
could
have called me. You should have known it didn’t matter who I was with or what I was doing.”

He’d seen through her lies, but still she tried. “But your daughter—”

He squeezed her cheeks between his palms. “You don’t trust me. I’m like every other man to you. You would have let that guy in the club fuck you to get whatever it was you needed instead of coming to me no matter what.”

It was true. She hadn’t wanted it in the same way she needed Luke, but she wouldn’t have stopped the dom. She never stopped them. She never stood up and told them they couldn’t do it to her. She never told them she didn’t want it even when she truly didn’t. She never had.

“You can’t even deny it,” he said so quietly she heard the death knell in his voice.

“No,” she whispered.

“I’m not good for you anymore. I’m becoming like the rest of them.”

“You are good.” She’d had so many men, and he was the one good one. But even for him, she couldn’t stop needing things the way she needed them. She couldn’t be a different woman. She’d been this way too long. Yet she couldn’t go on making him do what demeaned him. “I’m sorry I can’t change.”

After all, this was only what she deserved, what she’d always deserved, since she was child.

Bree backed away. Luke’s hands fell from her face, and she was cold, so horribly cold. As if she’d been buried in the grave her father should have occupied.

 

 

BREE DIDN’T TURN AS SHE CLOSED THE DOOR OF HER PARENTS’ home. She didn’t fight for him. He knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t anyway. She was not a fighter.

The hole in his chest was the size of Calcutta, the ache ceaseless, the regret boundless. Yet he couldn’t continue contributing to her issues. Punishing her, calling her names, spanking her, it was all part of her ritual, her symptoms. If she had him to run to, she wouldn’t face her problems, she’d get help.

For a moment there, he’d thought she might have some sort of revelation. That she would tell him something that suddenly made it all clear, that provided the key to fixing what was wrong with her. About her father. Her life. Something he could fucking
fix
.

Yet all it had been was a bad day at work, a difficult meeting. And she’d gone to the club. He knew it was so much more than what she said. Yet she still could not tell him. He couldn’t live with the fact that she didn’t trust him. She would
never
trust him.

THE BEDSIDE CLOCK POUNDED THE BRIGHT RED NUMBERS OF eight forty-three a.m. into her head. She hadn’t told Erin she wouldn’t be in to work on Friday morning, but she could call now, and Erin wouldn’t care. Erin would gush with understanding.

She and Dominic were so fucking understanding.

Bree put her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up slowly. Her head ached as if she’d gone on a drinking binge. She was naked, the dress, stockings, and high heels in a crumpled pile on the carpet next to the bed.

Her mother knocked softly on the closed door. “Bree, I made you breakfast.”

She realized it was the scent of coffee that had woken her.

“I’m coming, Mom.” She pulled on her robe and shoved her feet into a pair of old slippers she’d borrowed from her mother, then shuffled like an old woman to the door. The hall was empty, but the rich aroma of coffee led her to the kitchen like the pied piper.

“You slept late, dear,” her mother said, all cheery. Even her apron, patterned with bright red roses, was cheery.

“Ugh,” was all Bree said.

“I made eggs and fried tomatoes.”

Bree loved fried tomatoes, the tangy taste. Her stomach growled. She’d forgotten to eat dinner, and she was lightheaded from hunger.

“Did Luke find you last night?”

Bree slid down into a chair at the table. “Yes.” God, she wanted to get out of here, go home, stay in her bed for days. But she was trapped.

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Depends on what you consider nice,” Bree answered softly. If she hadn’t gone to the club without him, would he still be in her life? Maybe. For a few weeks or months. But she wasn’t worth more than that. Better to take the pain and get over it.

“You know what I mean, dear. Luke adores you.”

“Right.” Bree sighed, suddenly unable to touch the tomatoes and eggs on her plate. God, when would her mother stop with the whole Luke-is-a-gift thing? “That’s why he left me last night.”

“Dear, he didn’t leave you.” Her mother
tutted
. “He came here. He thought
you
were going to be here. He didn’t realize you were going up to the city on your own.”

She looked at her mother, the gay apron, the bright smile. “So you told him where I’d gone?”

“Of course I did.” Her mother flapped her napkin and laid it across her lap. “He’s a good man. He’ll take care of you.”

Something started rising in her. She couldn’t call it rage. Yet it was black and seething, and in a way, it was better than the despair in which she’d awoken. “He isn’t going to take care of me, Mom. He left me. Not just for last night, but forever. He’s gone. He’s not coming back. He doesn’t want me anymore.” Instead of the pain she’d expected when she said the words aloud, she experienced a blaze of satisfaction at the look of horror dawning on her mother’s face.

Slack-jawed, her mom stared. “How could you let him go?”

“I didn’t have a choice in the matter.” She wasn’t so sure about that. He’d certainly wanted
something
from her when he climbed out of the car. She hadn’t been able to figure it out, though. But this was about her mother’s attitude, not what happened last night. “He didn’t ask for my opinion on the matter.”