“No one was in the hallway before I came in.”

Kingsley sighed with relief. “Good,” he said. “Please, don’t be offended—”

“I have many clients who would prefer not to have their proclivities announced to the world. You don’t have to explain. I am nothing if not discreet.”

“Your discretion is the stuff of legend, Maîtresse.”

She raised her eyebrow at him. “I was warned about your accent. They were right.”

Kingsley desperately wanted this woman, but he’d rather die than have the whole city know about the other side of his sexual proclivities—the submissive masochistic side.

Mistress Felicia walked to him, walked slowly, taking her sweet time, making every step toward him a lesson in patience.

“I compliment his accent and he stops speaking. Typical switch. Can’t stop playing mind games for a second, can you?”

“Tell me what to say, and I’ll say it,” Kingsley said.

“Tell me you want me to beat you and fuck you, Kingsley.”

Yes. God, yes. Yes, he wanted her to do everything to him. But...

“I would like that,” he said. “But, you see, I—”

She laid her palm on his chest.

“Your heart is racing,” she said. “Are you scared?”

“I have a problem,” he said.

“I can see you’re burdened by something. Tell me your burdens. Tell me how I can ease them,” she said, touching his face, his forehead, his lips. She smelled like roses, like an English garden.

“I was shot,” he said, focusing on the delicious scent of her instead of the memories. “Last year. I was with a dominant recently. I had a flashback.”

“What triggered it?” she asked, apparently not the least bothered by his revelation.

“Someone touched my throat with a whip.”

“Your throat,” she repeated, looking at him but also into him.

“I was choked once.”

“I see,” she said, her voice quiet and serene. “I won’t touch your throat. And I’m not afraid of your flashbacks. If you have one, you have one. If you don’t, then...well, more time to play then, isn’t it?”

Mistress Felicia ran a gloved hand through his hair. She grabbed a fistful of it at the nape of his neck, forcing his head back.

Kingsley didn’t speak.

“I will hurt you the way you like being hurt tonight,” Mistress Felicia said. “And in no other way. Tell me what you like.”

“I will, Maîtresse.”

“Do you like this?” she asked, tugging harder on his hair. “Do you like being treated like property?”

“Oui, Maîtresse,” he said.

“Do you like pain?”

“More than anything.”

“How much pain?”

“All the pain,” he said.

“You’re a masochist?”

“You could call me that.”

“What don’t you want?”

“I don’t want a collar,” he said. “I hate them.”

Mistress Felicia laughed and pulled harder on his hair. His eyes watered from the pain. She was good, very good.

“I won’t put a collar on you. Nothing on your throat. Nothing but my kisses.” She brought her lips to his neck and bit the skin over his jugular vein. The bite turned into a kiss and back into another bite. “Your neck is too delicious to cover it up with anything but my mouth. And besides, there are other ways to enslave men that don’t require collars.”

She tossed her riding crop onto the bed and took him by the wrist, bringing his hand between her legs. She wore nothing beneath her leather skirt. He cupped her there, the base of his hand against her clitoris.

“One finger,” she whispered. “One.”

He slipped one finger between her folds and inside her. So warm, so wet. He closed his eyes.

“You like it inside me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he breathed.

“If you survive the pain I’m going to inflict on you, I’ll let you inside me again. I might let you put your cock in me. If you take everything I give you.”

“I promise, Maîtresse, I can take it.”

“What’s your safe word?” she asked as Kingsley continued to stroke inside her body with one finger.

“I don’t have one.”

“Choose one.”

“I don’t need one.”

“You have flashbacks from recent trauma. You need one.”

“If I have a flashback, consider that my safe word.”

Mistress Felicia laughed, and Kingsley felt her muscles gripping his finger. Two weeks... He was dying to be inside her. The wait would almost kill him. But for all that, he wanted the pain she had to offer even more than the sex. It had been so long since he’d let himself have the type of pain Søren had given him when they were teenagers. He hadn’t planned on submitting to anyone tonight. But now that Mistress Felicia was here, he realized submission was what he most wanted.

Kingsley nearly groaned aloud in disappointment when she took his wrist again and moved his hand from her. But then she opened his pants.

“Don’t get hard,” she ordered.

“It would help if you left the room, Maîtresse.”

“You’re a big boy. You have self-control. Use it.”

Kingsley focused his mind on things unlikely to arouse him—politics, airplane crashes, a bad case of the shingles, vanilla sex.