Chapter 15
Three weeks had passed since Costa Rica. Three weeks of silence that felt louder than anything they’d said. Deafening in all the things he hadn’t.
álvarez’s assistant had been in touch twice, providing polite but evasive updates about shifting timelines, finalizing arrangements, and reminders about discretion. The invitation to the island was coming. Everyone knew it. The waiting was just another kind of pressure.
In the meantime, Dev had the team working secondary leads, tracking smaller buyers, watching shell accounts, and nudging informants. Useful work. Necessary work. But not the work they were here for.
With the op already set, everything else felt like motion without momentum. Like killing time while the real danger waited just out of sight.
And then there was Gaby. The awkwardness between them had become impossible to ignore.
The others noticed. Dev’s silence made it worse.
More than once, Leland had given him a measured look that made it clear he’d already drawn his conclusions.
Mateo had offered unsolicited advice over drinks.
Rhys ignored it and was called a fool, out loud this time, as he walked away.
Alec, surprisingly, said nothing, which meant he was thinking.
Rhys was thinking, too. More than he should. It was why he’d come to the club tonight—not to monitor or manage, and not to play. He’d come to quiet the noise in his head. To relax, if that was still possible.
Dev and Cari liked to mix things up and never let the opportunity for a special event pass them by. He didn’t know what they had planned for July 4th, but it wasn’t anything like he’d imagined.
Red silk ribbons wound around wrists and throats. White lace traced spines and hips. Blue body paint swept across bare skin in stars and stripes, like living banners.
Liberty Night, as Cari had dubbed it, celebrated freedom through surrender and spectacle through control—a contradiction Rhys felt far too keenly tonight.
Ironically, the one place he’d come to escape tension was the one place it waited for him most faithfully. Because when he stepped into the playroom, his gaze found her immediately.
Gaby stood near an aftercare station, out of the way, like she was trying to disappear.
Impossible, with her dark hair in loose spirals around her shoulders, the blue ribbon knotted at her throat matching her blue-and-white star-spangled skirt.
The red was a satiny swath tied around her breasts.
She looked stunning, and his body responded despite willing it not to.
She wasn’t playing. Didn’t seem to be looking for a partner. She was simply there.
A dom approached her, his smile confident, charming. He walked away soon after when she shook her head and declined.
Another followed a few minutes later. Again: no, thank you.
Jealousy flared in his chest when a third approached. It was ridiculous. He had no claim on her here. Not tonight. Not ever.
And yet, seeing others interested in her, knowing she was free to accept or decline, stirred something inside him he didn’t want to name.
He pushed off from the wall before he could talk himself out of it. “You’re not participating tonight?” he asked, stopping a few feet away.
She looked up at him, surprised, then her eyes shuttered quickly. “Is that a problem?”
“It is if you came here wanting to,” he said, adopting the careful neutrality he used whenever he wanted he shouldn’t. “Were the doms not to your taste? Or rude? If so, I can speak to them. Perhaps give a manners lesson.”
“No. They were fine, and perfectly polite.”
“What’s holding you back?”
“This is still new to me. You’re the only one I’ve ever—” She stopped short. Hurt crossed her face, fast then gone, but not before he saw it.
Silence stretched between them.
Finally, he said the thing he’d sworn he wouldn’t.
“Since you’re comfortable with me, I’ll look after you tonight.
” Had he emphasized tonight? He hadn’t meant to.
As he thought it, he realized how much he hadn’t meant to.
Christ, he was a mess. But he’d started down this path and held out his hand.
“We can play. Nothing too heavy, just more exploration.”
The offer landed between them like a spark to dry tinder. She stared at his proffered hand, hesitated briefly, then laid her fingers across his palm. “All right.”
The answer was simple. Too simple.
“All right, who?”
“Master Lu— Uh, Rhys.” She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Let’s leave master for Lucien,” he suggested quietly. “Sir will do when we’re not undercover.” He hadn’t meant to say more, knew he shouldn’t, yet he didn’t hold back. “With me, it always will be.”
He moved her toward the raised platform near the center of the room. It was one of the club’s more dramatic stations: a sleek black frame with a suspension bar above and a spreader bar mounted below. It was public, which meant witnesses. Witnesses meant control. And distance.
He turned to face her.
“Do you remember the safeword?”
“Red, sir.”
“Very good. What are your limits?”
Her gaze held steady as she pondered his question. “I… uh… haven’t done all that much, so I don’t really know.”
“Nothing painful or humiliating, is my guess. But definitely pleasure, right?”
She nodded, a rush of color surging to her cheeks.
He led her up the steps and, with practiced hands, positioned her, lifting her wrists to the bar one at a time and securing them. Then he crouched, cuffing her ankles to the two-foot-wide floor-mounted steel bar.
The posture, elbows bent but her arms above her head, shortened her skirt, giving him a flash of a blue thong and curvy bare cheeks.
For what he had in mind, the panties could stay.
He wanted her to feel the thrill of being claimed while others watched.
Bared, but not stripped of dignity. Visible. Powerful.
Leaving on the red satin. Not a chance.
He tugged the bow in back, and the material fluttered to the floor.
The room and the onlookers faded. His focus narrowed to the subtle tension in her shoulders, the way the pulse at her throat thrummed, the rise and fall of her breasts, and the tautness of her nipples. Lovely that.
“You’re stunning, Gaby. The doms you turned away are only beginning to realize that.”
Voice low, he praised, kept his directives concise, his touch light and deliberate.
Helping her fall into a more submissive mindset with reassurance rather than fear.
He also introduced her to sensation play.
A feather, a rubber-tipped vampire glove, beginner’s clamps on her rosy nipples, and, finally, the furry softness of a bunny flogger stroking her breasts, belly, thighs, and, ultimately, snapping a little more firmly on her shapely behind.
Gaby swayed in her restraints more toward his touch than away from it.
She was beautiful, a light flush to her golden skin, half-lidded eyes as she followed his every move, the tip of her pink tongue slipping out to wet her full lips.
She was trembling, the suspension chains overhead rattling ever so slightly.
Maintaining control was harder than it should have been.
His hand traced down her spine—not for effect, not for discipline—because he needed to feel the warmth of her skin beneath his palm. He leaned close. “Easy,” he murmured, the encouragement as much for him as for her.
He kissed her shoulder, softly, barely a graze, and told himself it was part of the scene. But it wasn’t. And he knew it the instant he did it, but it didn’t stop him from wanting more.
He couldn’t resist lapping at the tip of a pink nipple, visible beyond the clamp.
The second received the same treatment. But it wasn’t nearly enough for him.
He released the rubber-tipped tweezers and sucked the taut bud into his mouth, watching as her head fell back.
Her soft moan told him she was enjoying this as much as him.
Still not enough, he palmed a firm, round cheek as he suckled.
His free hand slipped into her panties in front and found her wetness.
Rhys hadn’t meant to take it this far. He hadn’t meant to snap the thin strap of her panties, or curse under his breath when he fumbled with protection—actually fumbled. He hadn’t meant to release one ankle and hike her knee over his hip. This was no longer exploration.
Before he drove into her, reason returned. His eyes met hers, still half-lidded and liquid with passion.
“Please, sir. Don’t stop now,” she implored.
It struck him that, in the heat of the moment, she remembered to say sir.
Very fleetingly, because he needed to know with certainty that she was ready to go beyond the limits they’d set. “You’re sure,” he asked, voice rough from the thin hold on his control.
“Never more so.”
She cried out softly the next instant when he filled her—warm, snug, wetness surrounding him.
He could have come then and there, but that wasn’t the kind of dom he was, taking without giving.
He pumped into her with as much restraint as he could muster, but the chains above took up a rhythmic chink, chink, chink, audible despite the music and Gaby’s breathy cries.
It wasn’t long, thank Christ, before she shuddered with pleasure.
Rhys quickly followed, taking play and exploration to climax and utter gratification after having thought constantly about being embedded inside her once again.
When the buzz in his ears finally faded and the tension drained from his body into the deep, boneless relaxation that always followed release, reality rushed back in all at once.
The hum of the room swelled around them. Murmurs, the soft creak of leather, the rhythmic pulse of music, cut through the moment, jarring and unwelcome.
Rhys opened his eyes.
And there she was.