Page 48 of Dominion’s Collar

The collar prominent against her skin, her hands resting on her thighs. Her eyes move through the room with the systematic attention I've been reading since her first night.

The attention is sharper tonight. Exits first, then people, then the gaps between them. She checks the room before she settles into it. She didn't do that three weeks ago, and she hasn't relaxed since she sat down.

"Natalie."

She looks at me. Waits.

"If something were happening outside this building that I should know about, you'd tell me."

The statement falls between question and command. Her face doesn't change. The composure holds.

But her hands tighten on her thighs. A small adjustment. Involuntary.

"Nothing's happening that you need to worry about."

The answer is polished, delivered from behind the fortification she builds when she doesn't want me inside. I expected exactly this.

"That isn't what I asked."

She holds my gaze. The defiance is there in the angle of her chin; the angle I've been reading since the night she told me her limits were her limits.

"I'm fine, Sebastien."

I've heard those words before. I've delivered them myself. They mean: I'm not fine, and I've decided you don't get to know why.

I let the silence do what silence does. It presses against what she isn't saying, and the shape it takes around the unsaid tells me more than her answer did.

I don't push further. Pushing is the wrong tool for someone who pushes back harder.

We sit for an hour. She nurses a water. I hold the scotch. The room does what it does around us: conversations rise and fall, negotiations conclude, Renata works the bar.

Natalie watches all of it. I watch her watch it. Somewhere in the middle of the hour I stop calling this watching and start calling it what it is. Possession. The consuming awareness of a woman's breathing at my knee, the warmth of her shoulder against my leg, the line of her throat where my leather sits. I want to put my hand on the back of her neck and hold her there. Not for the room. For me.

Her shoulders have dropped a degree from the rigid posture she carried to the cushion, and the dropping is involuntary.

She's more relaxed at my feet than she's been since she arrived. That should please me. Instead it sharpens the contrast with everything else I'm reading.

"You're staring," she says. Not looking up at me. Looking at the room.

"I'm always staring."

"Usually it's more subtle." Now she tilts her head back. The angle puts the collar on full display, and I don't think the display is accidental. "What are you looking for?"

The honest answer would end the evening. I give her the other one.

"I'm looking at a woman who relaxes at my feet and tenses in a parking lot."

Her expression doesn't shift, but the stillness that replaces it is its own answer. She keeps her face steady because she decides to keep it steady. Not because I missed.

"Parking lots are poorly lit," she says. "This room has excellent lighting."

"And excellent security."

"That too." She looks up at me again, and this time the angle carries something sharper than deflection. "You know, for a man who insists on control, you spend a lot of time trying to get me to volunteer information. If you want to know something, Sebastien, give me an order. See if that works better."

The words land precisely where she aimed them.

The dare underneath is specific: you can command my body but you can't command my trust. And we both know which one I actually want.