Oh, high ceilings.
When Arthur and Maxence had been joking about "high ceilings," they had meant that Cash knew a lot about sex clubs. They must all be built with tall ceilings or something.
She snickered.
Cash turned. "What?"
"Nothin'," but she grinned at him.
He raised one eyebrow at her but kept walking.
Cash stopped at a door, opened it, and stood to the side, holding it for her.
She walked in and stepped aside, keeping close to the wall. Hot air wafted around her.
Odd, that the room was so warm. Her business suit seemed like too many layers of thick cloth for the small room. Anybody wearing normal clothes in here would sweat through their clothes in no time.
Oh.
She got it.
They had evidently come in the back door of the dungeon because the first thing that Rox saw when her eyes adjusted to the gloom was an enormous, carved door on the opposite side of the room like a doorway to Hell.
Cash closed the door behind them. When she turned around, the door was camouflaged, painted into the stone-bricked wall. Sconces on the walls glowed with orange bulbs as if they were pitch torches.
And there were apparatuses stationed around the room, odd skeletal structures like weird gym equipment that were empty of weights.
Her arms warmed, and she realized that Cash was standing right behind her, touching her.
She said, "I don't know how anything in here is supposed to work."
Cash ran his hands up her neck. "I do."
His voice was about half an octave lower than usual, and it had a calmness, an unswaying determination that he didn't usually have.
She cleared her throat. "Somehow, that isn't reassuring."
"It should be." He stroked the back of her neck with his fingers. "Dilettantes get hurt in places like this. You're safe with me."
"Am I?"
"You're always safe with me."
"I'm a little scared," she admitted.
He wrapped his arms around her from behind. "We can leave. We'll go have a drink with The Dom and wait for Arthur and Maxence."
"Give me a minute."
The black iron and silver contraptions jutted into the air, shining and yet dark at the same time. Ropes and whips and spiked metal torture things hung in glass cases.
Rox clasped her hands in front of her. "Do you want to hurt me?"
"No."
"Those things over there look like they're for hurting people."
"That's not the point," he said. "Unless you are both into that sort of thing, you shouldn't hurt the other person just to hurt them."
"And you're into that sort of thing, hurting people."
"No. I don't like sadism or masochism. Everything done here should heighten the other person's reaction so that when the pleasure comes-and it should-it is that much sweeter and more intense."
Cruel whips and ties and chains and metal bars crowded the room. "Just looking at all this is making me nuts."
Cash gently turned her around so that she faced the wall. "Then don't look."
"It doesn't mean that all that stuff just disappeared. Just because I'm not looking at it doesn't mean that it's not there. Just because you refuse to acknowledge something doesn't mean that it isn't going to happen."
He pressed her shoulders, moving her closer to the wall, and then blocked her view of the room with his broad shoulders. "But most of it doesn't concern you. On your first day at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg, I didn't hand you a stack of contracts and tell you to have them annotated and back to me by the next morning."
She shook her head. "We sat down together, across from each other at a table, with several contracts and talked about important paragraphs and how you wanted me to handle something like that."
"And how did you feel about that, afterward?"
"Confident," she said, closing her eyes at the memory. He had gazed at her with those glamorous green eyes of his all day and spoken softly, smiling when she picked up on something. "Like I knew what to do and how to do it."
"Safe," he whispered.
"Yes." Her voice was as breathy as if she was hypnotized.
"I always keep you safe."
Physically, yes.
Professionally, absolutely.
She nodded, holding all the exceptions inside.
His breath brushed the back of her neck, and the cinnamon and musk of his cologne swirled around her. "In the rest of your life, you take care of everyone, and you are responsible for everything."
"Yeah. I'm an adult. That's what adults do."
"For a few hours, give it to me."
"What?" That scared the hell out of her.
"Give it all to me. Don't worry. Don't think. Don't plan. Don't manage. Lay down all your responsibilities and your fears. For a few hours, just feel."
He lifted her arms and pressed her hands against the wall above her head, palms against the cool stone.
"That sounds so old-fashioned, so-" Dang it, she couldn't quite think of the right word, not with his heavy body warming her back and pressing her against the wall. "Let the man do whatever he wants to you. Lie still and think of England."
He chuckled low in his throat. "You won't be able to lie still, I assure you."
"It sounds like you'll be doing all the work. Planning all the things."
"I'll do that."
"Like you'll have all the control."
"Yes. That's exactly it." His warm lips pressed the place where her shoulder met her neck. "Breathe." He ran his hands up her arms and pressed her hands flat against the wall. "Trust me."
A trembling started deep in her chest. "Trust you?"
"Close your eyes. Just breathe."
"How do I know that you won't just tie me up and leave me here, helpless?"
"You'll have to trust me."
Rox sucked her lower lip into her mouth and bit down.
"Think of this: in three years, have I ever betrayed you? Have I ever not been there for you when you needed me?"
"You screwed a buttload of other women." Her tone was a little drier than she had meant it to be.
"You were married, or you said that you were. You do not get to be angry about that."
"Yeah, well, that." This was why she was not a litigator's paralegal. Her arguments were stupid when she was all het up.
He said, "I ran myself to the ground, trying to keep my hands off of you, to keep myself from seducing you into breaking your vows."
He sure thought a lot of himself that he just assumed that she would fall on her back and break her fictional wedding vows if he had crooked his little finger at her.
And yet, the moment he had put his arms around her on the deck, she had fallen for all his games.
She said, "Yeah, screwing all those women must have been rough on you, poor baby."
His deep voice vibrated near her skin. "But I've always been there whenever you needed me, no matter what happened. Together, we assaulted a man in Athens when he tried to hurt you."
A huge man had grabbed her, thrown her up against a wall, and groped her boobs. She had kneed him in the nutsack, but the guy hadn't gone down. If anything, it had made him angrier, and the liquor on his breath had made her dizzy. Cash had spun him around and cold-cocked him in the jaw, slamming the guy to the ground.
She said, "Um, yeah."
"And I carried you across that river in Brazil."
"I couldn't believe those other lawyers insisted on that hike. The current was too strong. I couldn't keep my feet. I didn't want to see Sting's rain forest quite that closely."
"I have always been there when you needed me. I've always protected you and kept you safe. I will tonight, too."
She couldn't seem to breathe all the way down into her lungs. "But what if you can't? What if something happens? What if it turns out that I'm allergic to nylon or whatever those ropes are made out of?"
Twisted skeins of ropes hung in a glass-front case, sorted by color and thickness. They reminded Rox of her great-aunt's knitting yarn stash and yet were so different and freaky.
He whispered, "You're arguing to argue. First, you tried to argue the law, saying that the underlying theory was retrogressive-"
Yeah, retrogressive. That was the word she had been looking for, dang it. Trust the European guy who had learned high-falutin' English to take the vocab-heavy Law School Admissions Test to know the twenty-dollar word.
"-but I refuted your logic. Then, you argued the facts of the case, saying that you couldn't trust me. When I rebutted that with concrete examples, you began to just argue, throwing out a squirrel case about the allergenic qualities of the ropes."