She didn't say "fragile," because it didn't quite fit. He was strong, and more than capable. But he had a disease she was fairly sure he knew was getting the best of him. The day he'd told her she had a choice of whether to go forward with him or not, knowing his health would be a factor, he hadn't directly implied it, but she knew now it had been there.

Plenty of diabetics lived into old age. Des didn't expect to be one of them.

He didn't answer her question, but she hadn't expected he would. "Want to go back to my place tonight?" he asked, pressing a kiss to her head again.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Do you want one?"

She'd intended her question as a jest, but it came out a little serious, so that his response had an edge. When she lifted her head, his jaw was tense.

"I didn't mean it like that," she said softly. "I mean...I was looking for my Dom. What he would say if I asked him that."

His jaw relaxed slightly. "No, you don't have a choice. I don't want you out of my sight right now."

"Good." She wrapped her arms around his torso. "The feeling's mutual."

Chapter Fifteen.

She drove his truck, since he wasn't up for driving yet. He told her he'd bring her back in the morning on his way to work, though she wondered if he'd be recovered enough to work by then. When they reached his place, he stripped his clothes and fell in the bed, but when she paused before joining him, not sure how to explain what she needed, he already knew. He gripped her wrist and drew her close enough to kiss her palm.

"Go take a shower, love. Scald it all away. But bring your a.s.s back to this bed. I'd like to have your soft body curled against me sooner rather than later."

A shower was exactly what she wanted, but she sat on the bed, stroking his hair and the side of his face, until he fell asleep. It only took moments.

She did want a shower and she took a thorough one, scrubbing her attacker's touch away, but she wanted to be with him even more, so she didn't linger. When she came back to the bed and laid down with her head on his chest, her arm around him, he was resting so deeply he didn't stir.

She dropped off into a sleep, uneasy, but holding tightly to him, lulled into unconsciousness by his heartbeat.

When she woke, she was alone, but he had a small house. She found him quickly. The door to what she'd thought was a closet was ajar, and a dim light was coming from the opening. She left his bed, wrapping the throw blanket at the foot over the oversized gray and red Wilder Hardware T-shirt she'd donned for sleepwear over her black cotton panties.

The room was almost a third of the size of his other living quarters, perhaps initially intended to be a small carport for the guesthouse and later enclosed to form this room. She wondered if he'd done the work, and thought maybe he had, because the room was custom fitted for his needs. The walls were cedar paneling, and strong parallel beams crossed the ceiling. The faint fragrance of oil pointed her to several bottles. She expected he used the oil to keep the many loose coils of ropes hanging on the wall in good condition.

She pa.s.sed along the wall, trailing her fingers through a waterfall of multiple colors and materials. Jute, hemp and cotton. He had a couple of nylon coils, though those were rare, because they slipped too much for the type of rope bondage he preferred. She'd paid attention the night they went to the club with Madison and Logan, when Des had told her a lot about the different types of rope that were being used, and who cared for their rope properly and who didn't.

The various hooks hanging from the ceiling for suspension work amused her, because above several of the hooks he'd fastened clip-on animals: monkeys, bears, a pink kitten. She touched a panda and sent it swaying.

But those were quick impressions, because what she really wanted to see was him. He was oiling one of the ropes at a rectangular table. The utility light over the table was the source of the room's illumination, but it was enough to give her an agreeable view of him.

He was wearing a loose pair of black jeans and nothing else. Her gaze slid over the sunburst in the middle of his back and the tattoos wrapped over his arms. He'd tied his hair back so she was able to enjoy the sharp planes of his cheek bones, the sensual lips, the flicker of his thick lashes and those compelling, brown eyes as he looked her way.

No post-traumatic nonsense interfered with the little spurt of need and yearning she felt at his expression. He'd been right. Seeing her attacker helpless and frightened, carried away in a police car, had gone a long way to making her feel in control, not a victim. John had said he already had a record, so it was likely this could put him in prison for years.

She thought of how Des had held her right afterward, his thorough aftercare, despite the physical reaction she was sure he'd felt stealing over him even then. Now that she'd had time to think about it, she was quietly amazed at the courage it had taken to do what he'd done.

He'd handed her control over the man's life or death. Even though rationally she knew it was Des's strength and direction that had guided things, that key moment had totally belonged to her. She was also sure if she truly had wanted the man dead, Des would have done it. Which made him a little scary, but maybe in the right ways. Marcus had that quality to him in even more upfront ways. However, whereas this had been a first experience for Des with this kind of violence, she'd always suspected Marcus's background had made it a far more common occurrence for him.

She studied Des as he turned his attention back to the ropes, perhaps sensing her need to orbit him without a lot of conversation yet. Her throat was still sore, but that wasn't the reason. The silence was comfortable. She drew closer, looking at the four different coils of rope he had in front of him and an open notebook which had sketches and scribblings, clippings. She saw orchids, flowers and trees, cutouts of models from glitzy magazines in different positions, juxtaposed with his sketches of rope poses and notes about the possibilities. At the party she'd heard people use the term rope artist. That was what he was.

"How did you get started in this?" she asked. "Why didn't you end up being into fire play, or get a shoe fetish?"

He smiled faintly. "You make it sound like getting a cold. I like a woman's foot in a high heel as much as the next guy. But what I imagine when I see your foot in an extremely high heel is tying your feet in the same position without the shoes. I'd bind them over your back so I could tickle the soles with a feather and watch you squeal and squirm. Maybe put you in a vat of Jell-O to see you get all slippery."

"Your mind goes into some very odd places," she said, elbowing him. He put his arm around her. "Will you answer the question?"

"I will, though I'm not really sure I have a good one. When I got into BDSM, it was a pretty mundane entry. A friend suggested I go with him to a couple play parties. He thought it would interest me, since vanilla relationships didn't really grab me. The first part of my life was a little too off the wall. I guess he realized my s.e.xual interests would be the same."

She smirked at him and he crossed his eyes at her. "I did play with the fire stuff for a bit, and I'm not bad at it. Whip play, the precision of it was cool, and what guy doesn't want to pretend to be Indiana Jones? But I kept going back to the rigging. It absorbed me at all levels, s.e.x and intellect, and it also quieted the voices."

He paused. "You hear that a lot in BDSM, but I think it applies to whatever thing you find in your life that grounds you. Like you and your stage. Or a singer when they're singing, a writer when they're writing. So that was how it happened. Maybe because I'd spent a lot of my early years tied up in knots over the physical c.r.a.p, making sense of knots and tangled rope was soothing to me, kind of a symbolic taking control of the lines."

"You've thought this through." She considered him. "You think most things through, though."

"Yeah. I do." He held her gaze, and she knew he was talking about way more than rope. "I'm okay, love. All good now."

She pressed her lips together. She wasn't so sure about that, but she wasn't going to let this moment be about that, either. Seeing it, he continued in a casual tone.

"Now the Dom part, that was easy as breathing." He winked. "Whenever I was with a woman, I needed to take complete control. I had a couple bad experiences with women totally not into Dom/sub stuff before I figured what my issue was. Talk about awkward moments. Good women, but we were just like this..." He pa.s.sed one hand directly over the other, parallel tracks going in opposite directions.

"Well, you're really good at it. I'm glad you figured it out. And, though I'm not sure I'll ever be completely comfortable with watching you do it as a performance or scene with another sub, I don't want you to stop doing that. You should be able to grow as an artist. I get that."

She pointed to the cover of one of his books, where the subject was in a full Chinese split, her legs tied to a long pole that ran from one ankle to another, her upper torso flat on the ground and chin propped up on a chin rest. "I can't do that, and will never be able to. I don't want to hamper your art. I just...I know there's always a s.e.xual and intimacy component to it. There has to be, for the right energy to surround it. I just don't know if I can handle you actually having s.e.x with her, of any kind, and go forward together."

There, she'd finally said it. After what she'd faced earlier in the night, it wasn't as hard to get out, but she still hesitated to look at him right away. But Marcus was right. She wasn't a coward. She wasn't ever again going to settle for less than what she wanted. The timing might seem odd to Des to bring this up, but maybe she was still riding the self-empowerment Des had given her at the theater. She wasn't in the mood to wait. She was ready to put it to rest once and for all.

Des touched her chin, guiding her attention up to him. As he did, that grip shifted and he was holding her face firmly. "You don't have to worry about that. I've found who I want to be with, Julie."

She let a hint of a smile play on her lips, though his look gave her that lower vitals quiver. "Uh, just for verification, me, right?"

He blinked once, the sternness of his lips easing a fraction. "Unless Marilyn Monroe comes back to life, yes. Though I think your similarity to my fantasy Marilyn pulled me toward you from the first. Who's to say you're not a reincarnation?"

"She was a blonde," Julie said, amazed at being compared to the bombsh.e.l.l.

"She was a brunette who dyed her hair blond," he corrected her. "And I love your brown hair, so I'd rather it stay that color." He drew her attention down to the ropes, where one of her restless hands was fingering the coils. "Would you like to try doing a form on me?"

Her gaze snapped back up to him, and she saw he was serious. Julie tangled her fingers in the coil of jute. Her kneejerk reaction would have been no, but as her attention coursed over his bare upper torso, she had a different answer. "Can I? Is that weird? I don't have any desire to top."

"It's not weird at all. Come with me and bring that rope you're touching. It should be long enough for what we'll have you try."

She did, unaccountably shy but very intrigued. She followed him to the center of the room where they stood on a cushioned mat in their bare feet. He turned and faced her.

"Okay, a rigger always coils his rope so it can shake out with minimum tangles and so he knows where the bight is, the folding-in-half point." He took it from her to show her, shaking the rope loose. His deep voice took on a different cadence when teaching, but because he was teaching her, there was an intimacy tagging the syllables that increased the density around them.

"That's because most shibari forms utilize doubled-over rope," he continued, "and that's what we'll be doing here. I'm going to guide you through a diamond pattern harness on my upper torso, all right?"

"It won't restrict your hands, will it?" She pinkened a little under his look.

"Not at all. I'll be able to touch you as much as I want. I'd never deprive myself of that." His fingers closed over hers on the rope as she followed his direction. "Here's your bight. Slide that around my neck, as if you were helping me tie a tie. Like I was one of those guys who goes into his office in a suit every day."

"I could never imagine you that way. You belong on your rooftops."

He touched her face, running his hands down her arms as she guided the rope around his neck and let both ends fall down his front and drag the floor.

"There's so much of it."

"About eight meters, which is a good length for this tie. Don't look worried. This is straightforward. You can't hurt me. Okay, I'm going to guide you through what we call a stopper knot, five of them, down the front of my body."

It took her a couple tries to figure it out, but he was patient and it was a fairly simple knot, according to him. Now that she thought more closely about the ones she'd seen him do, she realized the knots could look entirely different, even if they seemed to serve the same function.

"Like different words to say the same thing, in a bunch of different ways," he explained. "There's a poetry to rope, just like there is for spoken language."

At another time, she might have summoned a Yoda or Gra.s.shopper joke, but the timbre of his voice, stroking her with every word, didn't encourage levity. She was content, marinating in a simmering arousal.

"Lots of rituals emphasize binding, tying and knots," he pointed out. "What you said to me a few minutes ago told me that you want to claim me as your own, exclusively. Right?"

She met his gaze. "Yes."

His brown eyes glinted with satisfaction. "I may be a Dom, but directing you to do this, seeing how much pleasure you're finding in it, and picking up on those undercurrents? You think it seems weird, you wanting to do this, but nothing is farther from the truth."

He cupped his hand under her hair, stroking. "When the final knot is done," he said huskily, "I plan to take over, Julie. You'll understand then what you doing this does to me."

He tightened his arm around her waist, holding her close to him. She'd dropped the blanket so she was just in the T-shirt. He brushed a kiss over her mouth, then eased her back. He was being so gentle with her. After the earlier events of the night, she suspected he wasn't wanting to put any kind of pressure on her, but her body was starting to stir and crave pressure. His pressure.

"Okay, once you get to the fifth knot, you're going to split the rope ends around my c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s, thread the rope between my legs and take it to the bight around my neck in back. You'll thread the two ends under that."

As she worked, her fingertips brushed his skin. She was standing so close to him, his head bent over hers as he watched her. "Can you be naked?" she asked when she reached the fifth knot. "I'd like to see how that looks. If that's okay."

He folded his arms over her back, sliding down to thread his fingers into her panties to grip her a.s.s.

"If you take off that shirt so you're wearing just these. I do love your t.i.ts."

"I don't get to have the upper hand, me all dressed and you not?"

"Is that what you want to experience right now?" He posed the question seriously.

She shook her head. "I guess I was just curious if that would make you antsy."

"Who's in control has nothing to do with clothes. Not for this. Answer the question, Julie. Are you wanting to top right now?"

"No. Definitely no."

"Then don't ask me questions to test that. It means you're feeling nervous. Follow my directions, trust me, and let that go. I'll take us both where we want to be."

"Okay." As always during this, he spoke without irritation. He wasn't angry with her, just laying down clear rules of engagement. "Question, though. What would you do if I didn't follow directions on purpose, specifically to test you?"

"Bratting?" His eyes gleamed in a way that caused erotic flutters. "I'd put you on the ground and hogtie you, and I'd attach the rope to a hook so your knees were off the floor and you'd feel the strain. You'd get hot and wet over it, but you'd also have to apologize to me for trying to run things before I let that tension loose."

"Oh," she said faintly. "Good to know."

"Shirt?" he reminded her, eyes sweeping over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s straining against the fabric of the T-shirt. "Though seeing your nipples get bigger and stiffer under there is a pleasure, that's another man's shirt, and I want it off."

"Oh." She hadn't even thought of it that way. "It's one Thomas loaned me when I was visiting him and Marcus in North Carolina. It's his family's hardware store. He said I could keep it. It reminded me of my visits there when I was back in New York."

Initially, she'd liked it because it smelled like Thomas, a reinforcement of that rea.s.suring, platonic crush she had on both him and Marcus, her surrogate family and best friends. Something way too hard to explain right now, when the only scent and touch she wanted were from the man in front of her.

Pulling off the shirt, she set it aside. He brought her closer again with a look and caressed her breast, teasing the nipple with his thumb. Then he let her go to detach the pump and open his jeans. He left them that way-a provocative look since there was nothing under them- as he fished a piece of medical tape and the cap for the cannula out of his pocket. He'd started to carry those two things there regularly, so that when they wanted to be intimate he could quickly cap the line and tape it against his body where it wouldn't distract either of them any more than necessary. It was little different from the pause for a condom, but she was very glad they didn't have to worry about that anymore.

That taken care of, he pushed the jeans off his bare a.s.s.

He was temptingly erect, but he took control again, continuing to instruct her on how to tie him in the rope. She gave herself the indulgence of caressing his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and brushing his c.o.c.k frequently as he had her run the two ropes between his legs, leaving a fist width of slack beneath his b.a.l.l.s.

"It will draw up as we continue. Now let's do the diamonds."

She thought how it worked was cool, pa.s.sing the rope under the bight, as he called it, at the back of his neck, and bringing the ends under either of his arms to thread them between the double strands in front. As she pulled those two strands apart, it created a diamond pattern between the first two knots. Another wrap around back, and then back to the front, creating another diamond, all the way down his upper torso.

He had his head tilted, watching her. On a whim, she let go of the rope to pull the band loose holding his hair and threaded her hands through it, spreading it out on his bare shoulders. He nuzzled her cheek and she closed her eyes, rubbing her cheek in his hair, against his face, showing affection the way animals did, conveying feelings without words. The motion denoted trust, intimacy, connection. He rubbed his sandpaper jaw against her, and she giggled, pushing him away with her nose, but she let her lips caress his throat before returning to the tying.

When she reached his c.o.c.k and t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and created a wider diamond that framed them, the horizontal lines running over his hip bones, she caressed his erect shaft, and ensured the lines running between his legs weren't pinching. He was right. As she'd created the diamond pattern, the slack in the rope had disappeared. She guided the doubled strand between his b.u.t.tocks, letting her fingers play there, her other palm sliding along his lower back, up to the layers of muscle covering his ribs. Her fingertips traced the b.u.mps of his spine. The man didn't have a spare ounce on him. Maybe she needed to consider the roofer diet plan, since she liked food so much.

He directed her on how to tie the form off in the crisscross pattern she'd created on his back. She still had some rope left, but he agreed without words on a momentary break, so she could lean full against him, feeling that network of rope press against b.r.e.a.s.t.s and nipples, her abdomen against his b.u.t.tocks. She let her hand roam over him in front, exploring the harness she'd created. She closed her eyes, savoring that powerful connection, just as he'd described, and understanding why the act itself could be as powerful for a sub as for a Dom.

He put his hands over hers, increasing the sense of joining. She dragged her lips over his back. Overwhelmed was the word that so often came to mind when she was with him, but it was like being in a boat alone but not afraid, drifting in the midst of a big, powerful ocean. An ocean she didn't fear because she belonged to those waters. She could sink deep, deep down in them and never be lost or forgotten, merely held, rocked. Weightless, unbound by anything but the water itself, a hold she never wanted to escape. She slid around to his front, and found his eyes on her.

"Let's take care of the rest of the rope, all right?"

He directed her on how to draw the strands up his back and forward again, then create a network of rope that framed his shoulders, biceps, elbows and wrists. The excess she wrapped over his hands like an open glove. Every placement of the rope highlighted that part of his body, and she understood what he'd meant, about how rope tying emphasized curves and the molding of flesh. The isolating quality of the rope made her look at his many parts as unique treasures, as well as part of the whole.

She trailed her fingers over his arms and the wraps of rope over his knuckles, before she stepped back to look at her handiwork. Diamond patterns covered his chest and abdomen, while small twists and stopper knots followed the line between his chest wall and collar bone out to the round part of his shoulders. The additional rope framed his strong arms in the lattice design like he'd done on her legs at the party, ending with the triple wraps over his callused hands. Her gaze slid down to the diamond of rope framing his erect c.o.c.k. Yes, she'd say he'd fully recovered from their ordeal at the theater. He seemed to be having a thrillingly virile post-trauma response to her being threatened.

Her reaction was equally primal. She wanted to go to her knees, take him in her mouth, and he saw it. "You'll be doing that," he said with dark pleasure. "But first, it's your turn. Put your arms above your head and bend your elbows so your hands are at the base of your neck. I'm going to do a two-hand tie behind your head. Curl your fingers up in a half fist facing each other. Not interlaced. Just put the knuckles against each other."

She did that under his appreciative gaze as her b.r.e.a.s.t.s lifted and her rib cage tilted. He went to his table and brought back another coil of rope. As he shook it out, he moved behind her. Her gaze drank in the sight of him moving in that net of rope, the way it slid along his firm flesh and rippling muscles, the framing of his erect c.o.c.k.

His hands on her were caressing but swift, conveying a male demand and urgency. She felt that urgency, too. She'd never get tired of the tide of feeling-s.e.xual, soothing, exciting, emotional-when he tied her.

He put three wraps beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and used them to anchor the wrist tie that kept her elbows by her ears and pointed toward the ceiling. Her half clasped hands were resting at the base of her neck. Returning to her front, he hooked his fingers in the wrap beneath her upward tilted b.r.e.a.s.t.s, displayed for his hot male pleasure.

"On your knees," he ordered.

His hold steadied her descent and, once she was there, he didn't waste any time. He fed his c.o.c.k between her parted lips.