Page 80 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

I kept a hand on her through the meetings the next day. Her knee, her back, her wrist. I found her hand without looking and said her name like a gift I was handing people. She gets adrift in crowds, my Lacey. She needs an anchor. And I could not stop touching her now that I finally could.

She went quiet under my hand once or twice. She'd been nobody's for so long, and now she was somebody's, and a woman goes soft under that after long enough.

That night Renée and Sloane came by with wine, and Sloane watched her, her mouth, the fallen line of her throat, how she was half-asleep on my shoulder. Over anyone else I'd have felt something sharp. Instead I felt glorious. Look at her. Look what came out of that careful shell.

But she'd gone heavy against me, all the way under, and I lifted the wine out of Renée's hand mid-pour. "Out, both of you. She's done." I put her to bed careful as glass. I had always been a happy woman, but never like this.

The next evening a crowd of us ended up in the aft-deck tub, foam thick enough you couldn't see beneath it, and I settled into the corner and held out my hand.

"Come here. Sit."

She folded down between my knees, back to me. I put my mouth to her ear. "There she is." Coming alive at last, in my arms, where I'd always known she'd end up. My hands ran up her thighs under the foam. For years I'd wanted this, and here it was, and I didn't take it apart. It felt too good to take apart.

My hand went still, high on her thigh.

"I keep thinking about what we talked about," I said. "Me in charge." I found the edge of her bikini. "I think you'd love it."

My fingers were already moving. I wanted to be inside her, to feel that warm slick tightness. She'd told me herself, I don't say no to what I want anymore. She'd handed me the rule. So this was hers. I was only giving her what she'd asked for.

"Lacey," I said, soft. "Say yes."

She didn't say yes. She let her head fall back against my shoulder, and that was better than yes.

I pushed her bikini bottom aside and slid my finger over her pussy. Touching her clit, and then slowly inside her. Fuck, I could do this all my life. She went still, that whole, total stillness—and I told her she was perfect, doing so well, that I had her. And I had her. She'd gone under in my hand like she was made for it, because she was. I'd always known she was, and here it was, proof, and I was so full of being answered that my throat ached. Just that one finger, in public no less, and she belonged to me.

The women knew what her stillness meant. Renée grinned. Sloane didn't. Sloane watched her face with an expression I pushed out of my head, because nothing was going to be wrong tonight.

Renée tipped her head toward the stairs. "Are we taking this down to your room, Jan, or are you keeping her to yourself?"

I wanted to keep her. And I wanted them to see her, how far she'd come, how deep she went, what I'd drawn up out of her. My Lacey. Flowering. Oh God yes I wanted that, to see her obedient, to know how far down she could go.

My hand didn't stop. "You okay with that, baby? The girls coming down."

"Yes." Automatic.

I laughed and said it to the room: "She's decided she doesn't say no to what she wants anymore." I squeezed, easy, inside her. "Her idea, not mine. God, she's going to be fun tonight."

Her idea. She'd said it. That fast little yes with nothing behind it—I felt it, some flat, empty note in it—and my thumb moved and my mouth was already at her ear and it was gone, past, the water loud and warm and the night ahead of us. She was a natural giver, given to me. Happily.

I drew my hand up out of her, slow, and stood us both up, my arm around her, and she followed on legs that didn't quite work, soft and gone, and I led her back toward the cabin.

All mine.

34 - ROAD OF EXCESS

Lacey

The cabin door closed and the room seemed to shrink around me. Built for two, holding four, so that wherever you stood you were near someone. It all seemed distorted. Walls close, light low though it wasn't, and I couldn't have told you what was happening to me. Everything had been slipping away from me since the hot tub and I had stopped trying to make sense of things.

Janice didn't tell me to do anything. She came to me where I'd stopped just inside the door and put her hands on my face and kissed me, and her fingers found the tie at the back of my neck, and my top came loose. There was a thing in me that said yes. It had been saying yes all night, and it said yes again now. I didn't understand any of it.

"There she is."

Renée had the edge of the desk, towel slipping off one hip, not bothering with it. Sloane had the chair. She'd folded down into it and gone still. Renée was looking at all of me. Sloane was looking at my face.

The bottoms went the way the top had, her hand at my hip, and then I was the only one of the four undressed and the only one being looked at, and there was a quality about the wrongness of being the nude one in a room of clothed women that felt like twisted joy. Janice walked me to the bed like you guide someone who's already going where you want them. When the backs of my knees found the mattress, her hands settled on my shoulders. "Get on your knees, baby," she purred. "I want your mouth on me." With no real pressure and before I realized, I was sinking to my knees.

On my knees with my back to the room, I felt how little space there was, my calf pressed against Renée's shin because there was nowhere else for it to go. Behind me, I could feel Sloane and Renée.