Make Me, Sir

muscles started to tense.

“Gabrielle,” Marcus snapped.

She jerked and looked up.

“There we go. Stay with me, darlin’.” He stroked her shaggy hair, and she eased back with a tired sigh. “Holt, can you give it to her piece by piece?”

Holt’s mouth flattened, and he squeezed Gabrielle’s hand. “I don’t want to scare you again, sweetheart, but we need to find out what did this. Do you understand?”

She nodded, but her body stilled. She might not consciously remember the cause, but something inside her did.

“You little brat,” Holt said.

Gabrielle’s exhalation was almost a laugh.

Smiling, Marcus rubbed his chin across her head. Nothing kept this spitfire down long, did it? The knot in his stomach loosened.

“Guess it wasn’t that.” Holt smiled and fed her the next part: “You obviously want to be beaten hard…”

A tiny flinch from her, but no fear.

Holt nodded. “…or maybe you’re a dirty slut who-”

Gabrielle’s body turned rigid. Her eyes went blank.

“That’s it.” Marcus lifted her chin again. “Gabrielle, look at me. Now!” he snapped.

The bond he’d established with her reached deep, and she shuddered. Her eyes focused on his.

“Good girl,” he murmured. “You’re a very good girl. Stay with me, darlin’.” Because you’re scaring the hell out of me when you don’t.

She sighed and leaned into him again.

Marcus glanced at Holt. The dom’s face tightened with unhappiness and guilt. “I wanted to find out if she liked being called names.”

Quite a few subs got off on a dom calling them slut or whore or dirty. “You weren’t out of line, Holt. I’ve never seen such an extreme reaction to verbal humiliation. This is something from the past.”

“Yeah, well.” The dom ran a hand through his hair. “You going to work on this with her?”

“Definitely.”

“All right then.” His expression turned harsh. “If you discover who taught her that kind of fear…I’d enjoy giving him a lesson in manners.”

Marcus nodded. So would I. As the other dom walked away, Marcus stroked Gabrielle’s pale cheek and studied on the matter.

“Dirty slut.” Some women might be disgusted, some affronted, some turned on. But Gabrielle’s reaction seemed closer to a catatonic flashback. What could have happened in her past to set such a trigger? The most likely cause would be…

His arms felt so good, and he shed heat like the sun on a summer day. Gabi pressed her cheek against the smooth shirt covering his muscular chest. She should get back to playing decoy, but her body didn’t want to move. She stared at the stocks. They’d released her, carried her here, and she didn’t remember. How could she have blanked out? As fear spiraled up her spine, she took a death grip on Marcus’s suit. Don’t let go.

At her movement, he ran his knuckles over her cheek and used his thumb under her chin to turn her face up. His intense scrutiny felt as if he could see through her clothing, even her body, all the way into her inner self. She couldn’t look away.

“You ever played out a rape scenario, sugar?” he asked in a rough voice, as if the ugly word had abraded away the smoothness.

As her skin turned cold, nausea wrung her stomach like a dirty washcloth. She dug her fingers into his forearm and encountered only rocklike muscles. “No.” No no no. “No, please, Sir.”

“I see.” He released her face and curled his strong fingers around hers, anchoring her in the present. “When were you raped?”

Her air disappeared as if he’d hit her in the solar plexus, and her next inhalation struggled against the constriction in her chest. “How…how did you know?”

His eyes stayed steady on hers. “I didn’t, darlin’. But now I do. When?”

She swallowed. “Ten years ago. I got caught in a gang war.”

“Mmm.” The unemotional acknowledgement somehow let her breathe. She looked down, watching how his thumb traced small circles on the back of her hand. Slowly her muscles unknotted.

“Does a man taking control bother you?”

“No. It all happened in the past, and I deal with it okay. That’s why I didn’t put anything down on the questionnaire as a problem.”

He made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Don’t lie to me, darlin’. Look at me now.”

She tried not to flinch from the intensity of his blue gaze. I don’t want to talk about this; I just want you to hold me.

“When does being dominated cause problems?” And as if she couldn’t understand the question, he nodded toward the stocks.

Okay, so maybe sometimes she didn’t do so well. “I never thought about it.” And I never want to.

Even as he kept her gaze trapped, he stroked her cheek gently, and as always when he mixed all that power with gentleness, everything in her melted. His eyes softened, and he murmured, “Little sub.” He kissed her forehead. “Think about what you felt in the stocks…and tell me about the last time you froze.”

She said lightly, “Well, seems like once-”

“Don’t be acting up, Gabrielle.” His fingers took her chin in an all-too-effective control. “I want to hear about the last time something made you sick and scared.”

No sidestepping would evade his insistence on answers. “I dated a guy for a while. He’d pull my hair and fuck rough, and I liked it. A lot. But he called me names once…” Her hands turned clammy, and she tried to look away.

His hand tightened on her face. “Stay with me here, Gabrielle.” His sharp eyes cut through her fear like a knife. “Tell me the words he used.”

“Slut.” The word reverberated in her skull, and her pulse filled her ears like breaking waves in a storm. She swallowed, forcing nausea back. “Whore. Cunt. Stuff like that.”

“Ah, there we go. It’s all tied to the words.” He was silent a minute, thinking, then frowned at her. “You’re still shaking, darlin’. We’re going to sit a piece while you take a bit of rest.” His hand slid to her nape and pressed her head against his shoulder. As the noise in her brain diminished, she could hear the slow beat of his heart, and each thud somehow settled her world.

She heard him speaking off and on… Coaxing the rough-voiced dom to give a construction job to a teen with a bad rep. Someone with a light Hispanic accent talked him into joining a poker night the following week. The techno music changed to classical-Rachmaninoff.

He held her firmly, his arms never loosening. Sometimes he’d drop a kiss on top of her head as if to let her know he hadn’t forgotten her. And she felt more content right there, right then, than in just about forever.

Eventually he sat her up, laughter in his voice. “You falling asleep there, sugar?”

She shook her head and remembered to answer. “No, Sir.” A second’s pause and she risked looking up. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, but we’re not quite finished, darlin’.”

Oh dear.

“First, and I mean for you to remember this: verbal humiliation is a hard limit for you. You tell any dom that before you start a scene. Do you understand me?”

A hard limit meant a definitely won’t do that. “Yes, Sir.”

“Good enough. Now I want to use a few of those words and see how you react.” As he waited for her nod, he took her hand.

To brace herself, she gripped his wrist. “Okay.”