In the Company of Witches(19)

“This is beautiful.” Gina went down on her knees next to the half-empty box and pulled out a supple corset collar. “Who ordered this?”

“I did,” Marisa said. “It’ll look gorgeous with my taffeta.” She affected a Southern drawl. “Particularly when I do my Scarlett O’Hara.”

“I don’t remember Scarlett having a corset collar.”

“Scarlett didn’t lift her skirts for about twelve guys a night, either.” Marisa giggled. “Some modifications make the menfolk happy. Or the womenfolk, as the case may be.” She batted her eyes. “Women fantasize about lacing Scarlett into that corset, too.”

Laughter went around the room. “Wait—this would look beautiful with Raina’s black lace,” Gina said. “Oh my God, that would be gorgeous. Raina, try it on. You could use it the nights Marisa wasn’t playing Southern belle.”

Marisa nodded enthusiastically, brought it over to Raina, holding it up. “Try it on, see what it looks like. You have the most beautiful swan neck.”

“In a few minutes,” Raina said. “Let’s look at the other things first.”

“Oh, come on. The fashion show is part of the fun.”

“Not now,” Raina said, her tone changing. “All right?”

Though Mikhael couldn’t see Raina’s face, he noted the tension in her shoulders. The flicker on Marisa’s face was also telling, as well as the brief pause in the chatter, the exchanged glances. He sensed they’d run up against this in Raina’s nature before, but like the house’s moods, they didn’t always predict where that door would turn up. To her credit, Marisa nodded, pressed Raina’s hand, and left the corset collar in her mistress’s lap before she retreated.

In a few minutes, they were enraptured by a vibrator the size of a Louisville slugger. He was fairly certain no normal-sized person would sit still to have that shoved up any orifice.

RAINA HOPED THAT EXCHANGE WOULD GO UNNOTED, but a consummate hunter noticed everything. While her staff was playing with the enormous dildo, she heard the scrape of the stool as he moved closer. His long-fingered hand slid around her elbow, his chest briefly pressing into her back, his thighs now alongside the outsides of hers as he picked up the corset collar from her lap. His breath teased her ear. “Pull your hair to the side.”

“I can’t. Please…just don’t.”

“It’s all right,” he said quietly. “I’m here; we’re here; all of them are here. Nothing bad is going to happen. Some part of you wants this. Pull your hair to the side. Obey me.”

Before his arrival, if any male tried to command her, even in the most subtle of ways, her back would go up and the unfortunate would get the sharp edge of her temper. But when they came from his lips, those two words had the ability to make her do unthinkable things. That was the problem. Everything with him was different.

That crack he’d opened last night was still there, and getting wider. She couldn’t move. Her hands were too cold. But he put his hands under her hair, against her neck. His skin warmed hers. Pushing her hair to the side, he slid his fingers through it, found her nape.

“You do have a neck like a swan. It’s beautiful, everything a woman’s neck should be. Here we go.”

That sexy Russian accent flavored the warning as he fit the collar around her throat, smoothing it. She quivered, vibrated. She wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t.

“You remember earlier, when I kissed your neck? Putting this over that spot, lacing it to hold it there, to remind you of my marking…I like that idea.”

So did she. She wished he’d broken skin with his bite, so she could feel the tenderness under that provocative snugness. As he tightened the laces, testing it to make sure he wasn’t constricting her windpipe, it made her keep her chin up. Made her vulnerable and dependent on the Master who owned her, who put it on her.

She knew all the permutations of BDSM. For a woman particularly, its power was in the psychological manipulation. The collar, the restraints…Those were mere tools to encourage the mind to accept the submission. She could write helpful fact sheets, “Bondage and You.” As he’d pointed out, it was one of the many things offered by her house.

Her relationship to it was far more personal, as she’d just made clear in her ridiculous and irrational reaction to Marisa, prompting Mikhael to push harder. She knew about both sides of the coins, the ugly and not so ugly. But her direct experience, until Mikhael had arrived, was only with the ugly side. The not so ugly was just an incoherent yearning behind the darkness. But a Dark Guardian had no fear of darkness. He would stride through it, not let it stop him from giving her what that quivering part of her wanted. Because she knew that, some part of her trusted him to do this. That scared her most of all.

She remained still, but if the turbulence inside her had been translated to movement, she’d have run three laps at a full-out sprint by the time he finished the lacing. He caressed her spine below the collar, and she made a tiny noise as he brushed his lips over her ear. He’d pushed the robe to the points of her shoulders during his task, and she held it loosely clasped over her breasts, her knuckles too tense.

Sophia glanced up. “Gina, look. You’re right.”

Gina turned with Marisa and the others. Mikhael eased back, but his leg was still alongside her stool, his foot braced on the bottom rung, surrounding her with a sense of ownership. She saw it register in their eyes. In Li’s, it was a knowing, somewhat concerned look, making her wonder how much her senior staff member understood about his mistress.

She summoned a faint smile, despite the pressure building in her chest that needed them to look away. To go away. “Well, that cinches it, no pun intended. Marisa, you’ll have to order another. This one’s mine.”

Desperately seeking a distraction, her gaze shifted to Isaac. When the party had escalated into more movement and noise, he’d retreated to the doorway, hanging back and giving himself an escape. It reminded Raina of one of the cats, curious enough to stay where he could see, but ready to bolt all the same. His eyes were on Raina when Min lunged at him playfully from the floor, trying to drag him down to his knees to rejoin the group.

Not expecting it, he leaped back, hitting the doorframe hard enough to knock a few of the pictures off the wall. The glass of one broke as he stumbled, stepping on it. Raina winced. He’d just put his footprint in an original watercolor.

His fangs had unsheathed in raw, uncontrolled instinct, cutting his lip. Spinning to hide it, he rammed into Saul. The other male caught his shoulders, unconcerned, and propelled him back into the room.

“Calm down, dude. The girls aren’t that scary. Well, unless they get hold of that giant dildo. Then it’s every man for himself.”

Isaac twitched in Saul’s grip, but Saul was a strong male, large for an incubi, his grip gentle but unshakable. Min dabbed a damp handkerchief on Isaac’s lip. “It’s all right, silly kitten,” she chided in her musical voice. “There’s nothing to fear here. Well…” Casting a surreptitious glance toward Mikhael, she dropped to a whisper. “There’s usually nothing to fear here. But Raina won’t let him do anything to you.”

Her staff had the situation well in hand, which was good, because she couldn’t help them right now. The noise and Isaac’s panic had tripped her own to a higher level. Her pulse was pounding beneath that collar and she wanted to claw at it, get it off before it did things to her, made her lose control in five different directions. Images of the past and desires of the present were about to crash like a head-on collision of metal and fire.

She’d shrugged her robe back onto her shoulders, dropped her icy hands back to her lap, but Mikhael’s were gliding up and down her upper arms, knuckles grazing the outsides of her breasts as he put his mouth to her collarbone, sending fireworks through her bloodstream. He slid closer behind her, those powerful thighs pressing into her hips. When he laid his hands over hers, he was so very warm, curled around her flesh that way. He put his chin on her shoulder, watching what was going on before them, in that casually intimate way a lover would.

She saw the startled glances of the others. It wasn’t that men hadn’t acted familiar around her when she took the occasional client. It was that he was a Dark Guardian, and not a client.

He hadn’t disagreed with Min’s statement that Raina would stop him, but she knew why. There was nothing to argue. They both knew she might be able to slow him down, but she couldn’t stop a Dark Guardian. Not with power alone.

“What’s that thing folded in the bottom of the box?” she asked, forcing her tone to be casual. She wasn’t going to freak them out by going to pieces. She could handle this. It was simply a costume piece. It didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t owned by anyone. Not anymore.

“Cocoon suit. Double awesome!” Isaac looked perplexed, so Aiden explained, with enthusiasm. “The guest lays down in it, like a sleeping bag. When you inflate it, they’re completely immobilized. Let’s go test it on Saul, right now.”

Saul took off, and they pursued like a lynch mob. A happy, festive lynch mob, the girls topless, wearing nipple clamps that sparkled with glittering jewels, others in bits of costume finery that had also come in the box. Ana was impressively fleet, in the lead despite the fact she wore a new pair of black stilettos that had a silver skull and crossbones design across the toe. It was a mass exodus of pretty, half-naked bodies, all the appealing parts quivering and bobbing, hair flowing. Isaac was carried along in their midst.