bed of nails.
Gordon bent to retrieve something that looked like a long black baton. Then Amelia saw what hung from the end of it, and her eyes widened. Her blood warmed, as her heart began to pound faster, long before the first blow. Terror tied inside anticipation. The sweat flowed instantly under her arms.
He held a cat-o’-nine-tails. Only…the end of each small whip glittered in the red light.
The glitter of metal.
Hooks.
“My wife was a complete bitch tonight,” Gordon said. “So I just want you to know that I need this just as much as you do.”
From somewhere not too far away came a moan of orgasm, followed quickly by a bloodcurdling scream.
Amelia saw something move on the far side of the room-the curtains shifted. She saw the pale jaw and black- pit eyes of a Watcher take position. They never missed an exhibition of pain.
“Let’s begin,” Gordon said. He smiled and raised his arm.
Chapter Four
It was 2:00 a.m. The street was so silent it was surreal. As if they had exited the noisy club to step into a lost ’50s
“That place was…amazing!” Rae said as she pulled the seatbelt across her waist.
Mark’s smile turned into a yawn, as he started the Sonata and pulled onto the street. “It was pretty wild,” he admitted. “You found a good guy, I take it?”
“A good girl,” Rae corrected.
“Oh
“Not what you think,” she said. “She knew how to handle a flogger better than any man I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t have wanted to watch.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “You’re really getting into this pain thing.” He flipped the turn signal on and focused on the road, pointedly avoiding looking at his wife. Her obsession with whips and pain had seriously begun to worry him. At first it had seemed harmless enough, but now she didn’t seem to have an interest in sex without first getting, essentially, beat up.
“Did you at least get laid afterwards?” he asked finally.
Rae smiled as she thought of what she had done to the man she’d pulled to the ground. She’d basically forced him to take her, dragging him onto her and then suddenly flipping to be on top of him, demanding that he enter her and meld his penetration with her body’s already burning landscape of raw, lashed skin.
“Yes,” she answered simply. “Did you?”
He laughed. “Apparently I’m one of those antisocial types. The bartender had to take me under her wing.”
“Her wing, huh?” she laughed. “I’m guessing that’s not all you were under.”
“No,” Mark admitted. “She was pretty good.”
Rae sighed. “I can’t wait until the next one.”
“Who says we’ll be invited?”
“We will,” she promised. “I talked to a couple people about it. We’re in.”
Something in Mark’s belly sank. All at once, for the first time since they’d started playing in the lifestyle, he found that he wanted, more than anything, to have a boring life. He wanted to cut the grass on the weekend and watch football and maybe have some boring missionary sex with his wife once or twice a week.
He didn’t want to bed horny women with tattoos on their asses and perversion on their brains. He didn’t want to see his wife tied up and banged by beefy bald guys who preferred wearing leather chaps to jeans.
In his heart, Mark just wanted to be like normal people.
But one sidelong glance to the woman in the passenger’s seat said that there was nothing that Rae wanted less than that. And so he didn’t say a word.
Rae stared at the welts on her skin in the bathroom mirror. She’d let Mark undress and go to bed ahead of her so that she could have a minute to herself alone. She winced as she peeled her bra and shirt off the dried sweat and beads of blood that crisscrossed her chest. She didn’t want him to see her like this, not now. Rae could tell something was bothering Mark about the club. He’d acted a little funny when she’d finally come out of the bondage area and found him lounging at the bar, nursing a beer. She couldn’t figure out what the matter could be-she’d seen the bartender that he said he’d banged…a hottie. So he’d gotten it good, and she herself had found what she needed… What was the problem all of a sudden? Mark hadn’t had any issues with her sleeping with others in years. She pulled a nightgown over her head and made sure in the mirror that none of the welts were visible. She didn’t need to give his nerves any ammunition…though she didn’t know how she was going to keep the damage hidden long enough for it to heal.
She reached out to turn out the light and grimaced as the silk caught on the edges of raw skin.
“Wow,” she whispered. This night was going to take a while to live down. But in her heart, she was already ready to go back.
Chapter Five
Mark barely had the phone to his ear when Rae’s voice announced: “It’s tonight!”
Mark knew what she meant without asking. For the past month that’s all Rae had talked about. Her interest in pain which had long been bubbling near the surface seemed to have exploded into an obsession after their first trip to NightWhere. She’d bought books on bondage and submission. She’d tried to get Mark to flog her and when his slaps disappointed, she’d tried to turn the tables on him. She cornered him in the bedroom one night with thigh-high black boots, a leather corset, black gloves and a long, wicked-looking leather whip. He escaped from that with a couple of well-placed spanks and a deep kiss. She’d given in quickly and with energy-sex had not been that good with her in a long time, he’d thought at the time.
But it had only been the foreplay for what she truly desired.
“It’s tonight,” she repeated. “Are you almost home?”
Mark opened the garage door a half hour later and stepped into the house to find his wife lounging back on the couch, clearly posing for him. He did a double take.
“Do you like?” she asked.
Rae leapt up and did a twirl. The chains connecting the two small leather cups of her bra rattled as she did. Small chains hung in twin silver waterfalls across her bare belly. A curtain of ill-concealing metal.
She also wore a short black leather skirt and black fishnet hose beneath it. Chains looped from the waist of her skirt, and she wore silver bracelets of chain as well. Around her neck, she had a collar of chain bound to leather. She had painted her lips black and wore dark shadow around her eyes. Rae was darkly, dangerously stunning.
“Have you been watching
