Eleanor looked down at Kingsley. He kept his eyes lowered. She snapped her fingers in front of his face, one of Søren’s least endearing ways of getting her attention. It worked. Kingsley met her eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Completely 100 percent sure about this?”

“Elle, listen to me.” He met her eyes and looked deep and hard into them. “Yes.”

She nodded and took one more long breath. What to do...what to do... She’d been hurting herself since she was a teenager. She knew how to give pain, right? She’d been the first person to hurt her own body.

Then she had an idea.

She opened the drawer in his nightstand and pulled out a scalpel from a leather case. Then she picked up the lit candle.

“Blood-play or wax-play?” he asked. Both seemed amenable to him.

“Neither,” she said.

She crawled onto the bed and straddled Kingsley’s hips. She pushed herself against his erection but didn’t let him inside her. His cock pulsed against her wet seam. She wanted him in her, yes, but she wanted to make him wait even more.

“I did this to myself when I was a kid. Except I used a curling iron. My curling iron’s all the way in the other room, so we’ll have to improvise a little.”

She brought the blade of the scalpel into the flame of the candle and watched while the fire heated the metal.

When it turned a glowing red, she lowered the scalpel and pressed the flat of the blade against Kingsley’s stomach.

With a gasp of pure pain, he closed his eyes tight and arched underneath her, arched so hard his cock went inside her. She shuddered as their bodies joined. She settled in on top of him, moving her hips to take him as deep as she could.

“Vicious bitch,” he hissed through his clenched teeth. She’d given him a first-degree burn.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked, worried she’d crossed a line already.

“God, yes. Do it again,” he said between harsh breaths. “Please.”

Eleanor laughed. “Well, since you asked so nicely.”

Then she brought the blade into the flame again, heated it once more and brought it back to his stomach.

The red-hot metal left half-moon shaped burns on his stomach. Every time she touched him with the flat of the scalpel blade, he shuddered as if in agony, grunted in the back of his throat and pushed his hips into her.

After the fifth burn, and the sixth, sex and pain became the same thing to them. Their bodies were joined but only when she pressed the blade against his stomach, his hips, his chest, against the tender flesh of his inner bicep, did he thrust up and into her.

Her own wetness poured out of her and coated him, sealing them together.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, more curious than caring.

“It’s excruciating,” Kingsley said. “Thank you.”

“You want more?”

“As much as you can give.”

“Will you heal in time before Søren comes home?”

“He’s back when? Six weeks?” Kingsley looked down at the burns on his chest, hips and arms. “Maybe.”

“Well, in for a penny, in for a pounding,” she said, firing up the blade again.

She burned him a seventh time. Then an eighth. She went all the way to sixteen and then stopped.

“Sixteen’s a good number,” she said, putting the candle down.

“What does it mean to you?” he asked.

“I was sixteen when I saw you the first time. On the stairs at that orgy you were throwing. Remember what you said to me?”

Kingsley grinned. “I said, ‘No children allowed.’”

“And yet...here I am.” She pushed her hips forward and clenched her muscles around his cock.

“Ah, but you’re not a little girl anymore. Not a virgin anymore.”

“I haven’t been a virgin since I was twenty.”

He raised his hand and swept it through her hair. He touched her cheek, her chin, her lips and tapped her lightly under her chin.

“Not that kind of virgin,” he said softly. “Not after tonight.”

She turned her head and kissed his palm.

“Hold still,” she said.

Kingsley lowered his arms. After that he didn’t move even to breathe.

With the tip of the scalpel she carved a small “ES” into the delicate skin of his lower stomach, near enough to his cock to make him nervous. She went deep enough to draw blood but not so deep the cuts wouldn’t heal in a day or two. Kingsley could blame his burns on someone else if it came to that. Her initials on this most intimate part of Kingsley’s body would damn them both if Søren saw them.

“Beautiful.” Kingsley sighed. His pupils were so dilated his eyes appeared solid black.

“It’s not quite finished yet,” she said. She picked up the candle one more time and let a drop of wax fall onto the broken skin.

Kingsley’s fingers dug into the sheets, his shoulders lifted up and with a hot spurt, he came inside her. His orgasm caught them both off guard. He grunted and gasped as his hips rose and fell beneath her. The pleasure of it was so intense she almost came from the force of his climax. She’d never been aroused this way before, never felt this mix of pleasure and power. It scared her how much she loved having Kingsley underneath her, hurting him as she did, pushing him to the edge until he lost control and came without any warning.

He lay back on the bed, panting and breathing.

“I think you liked that,” she said. Eleanor bent over and kissed him hard and deep.