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“No.”

“Then no, I don’t know.”

He sets the crop down on the bed next to the bar and takes a step toward me. I have to tip my head back to keep looking at him.

“Every time I touch you, you flinch. Did you know that? You cover yourself. You cringe away.”

My face goes hot. “So this is punishment for hiding from you?”

“No,” he scolds. “It’s the opposite.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because you can’t hide with your hands buckled to a headboard.” He picks up the blindfold again and lets it drape off two fingers. “And with this on, you can’t watch my face and wonder what I’m thinking. You do that, too. You look for the moment I change my mind about you.”

I open my mouth to argue, but he’s right, isn’t he? I do look. I’ve been looking since the first night.

Waiting for The Shift.

“And the bar?”

“So that all of you is visible and you have no choice but to embrace the bliss and agony of being truly seen.” He strokes my cheek with the back of his hand. “I want you laid out on that bed where you can’t cross an arm over your stomach, or turn a light off, or bury your face away. And I want to keep you there until you believe me when I tell you that you are beautiful.”

“And if I never believe you?”

“Then we’ll do it again and again until you do.”

I stare at the three things on the black comforter. The fabric. The cuffs. The bar with its little buckles hanging open.

My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my throat. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” I whisper.

He holds out a hand. “Would you like to try?”

I look at his hand. Then at the bed. Then back at his hand.

“Okay,” I say. “Yes.”

He doesn’t smile or make a joke about it. He just takes my hand and pulls me the rest of the way in. “Before we can start, we need a safe word. Pick something that you won’t say by accident. Whatever you choose, it’ll be the kill switch. You say it and everything stops at once. I’ll never ask you to explain or punish you for using it.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

His mouth twists cruelly. “If you truly knew how much I think about you, Lilah, you’d run away screaming.”

The skin-crawling feeling is intensifying with every passing second.

“A word,” he says. “Anything you want.”

I cast around, but it’s like I’ve forgotten what words are.

Then a memory occurs to me. Maybe it wasn’t the first time I ever thought about Kane in a sexual way, because I’m pretty sure my vagina was like I’ll take two of him, please from the second I first inhaled his cologne in my mother’s pantry.

But it’s the first time that I can remember him looking at me in that way. Putting his hands on me. Making me keenly aware of how many lines he’d be willing to cross if I let him.

It was when he reached out and wiped the streak of sugar from my face, then sucked his thumb. The night we met, Christmas Eve, all alone in the kitchen of my bakery.

“Sugar,” I say. “That’s my safe word.”

“Sugar,” he echoes. He nods. “You have the power tonight, Lilah. Never forget that. Are you ready?”