At Her Will (Mistresses of the Board Room #5)

Chapter 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

R ev stood at the pulpit, gazing at the polished wood top. Unlike Witford, he had no notes in front of him, no carefully reviewed pages. The congregation waited, and he drew in their energy. Uncertain, unbalanced by what had happened. Much like he’d felt, all the way up to this moment.

He hadn’t asked, but Veracity had said she might come. She hadn’t, and he understood. But it sure would have been nice to see her in the sea of expectant faces before him.

“Let’s pray first thing,” he said. “I think it will help.”

And it did. He did what he did in the garden behind the church, offering up everything, hiding nothing. Asking for guidance, showing gratitude for his blessings. Hoping he served God’s will in all he did.

When he lifted his head, he was calmer. He looked at the people before him, and he smiled. “It all right,” he said. “Things happen. We all get lost.”

A few murmurs of assent. “I see hope in your faces. Hope that I have some answers. I don’t think I do. But that’s okay, because God give us the answers we need.”

He thought of Tisha and Witford. He felt their absence keenly. “We get lost in fear, in hatred, in anger. We get lost when we put store in the wrong things, and forget the only things that really matter.”

He lifted his gaze. “And what are those things? Honoring and caring for others. Forgiving when forgiveness is needed. We hurting because we don’t understand what happened to Tisha and Witford, to Simon and Tyson. But we know if they look to God, if they ask God to help them find Him again, He will. God’s forgiveness is limitless. No matter how short we fall on it, we have to try to be like that.”

He drew a few random lines on the wood before him. “I always had family, but they come and go too often. My momma, Teena Joy. Now Witford and Tisha. They not passed on, but they apart from me right now, and I don’t know if they’ll find their way back. It hurts, almost as bad as from them dying.”

When his attention slid over the elderly members of their church, he saw understanding. They’d lived long enough to know what he was saying. They would help him with the younger members of the congregation, would take his words and use them to help heal others.

“I not sure if I done right, if I missed things I should have seen. If I should have done things I didn’t. We can all ask God’s help today. Faith isn’t always an easy path. But love carries us down the right road. Love for each other, our families, families we born into and those we choose.

“When we hate, we separate ourselves from one another. That’s when we get lost most of all, and when we invite evil in. We think it belongs to the person we’ve separated ourselves from, when really it’s infected us, too.”

His gaze lifted as the rear door opened. Veracity entered the nave, wearing a form-fitting golden orange suit with black trim. The colors reminded him of a monarch butterfly. Her pillbox hat was black with a little gold net over her eyes. Her black gloves had sparkling orange lace at the wrists.

As she took a seat, the vise around his chest dropped free with a resounding clank.

Vera had been drawn as tight as a gallows rope when she drove into the parking lot. She walked up to the doors and stopped, perilously close to bolting back to her car. No usher came out to change her mind. She should take that as a sign and do just that.

But it was Rev’s first sermon in front of a congregation. She’d come this far. Gotten dressed up and everything.

She put her hand on the door, opened it, and was standing in the narthex. She clasped her hands together, head down, and listened to his words, coming through the next set of doors. They reached for her, brought her closer to the entry. Maybe his words opened them, or maybe her grasp on the handle did it, but it didn’t matter. She was in the nave, and sliding into her preferred back row pew.

He kept talking, but his eyes touched her with a light that told her just how glad he was to see her.

She saw Ray, a couple pews away from her on the other side of the aisle. No phone on his knee, but no collection plate either. His expression was troubled, fixed on Rev. She expected Rev had told them today wasn’t going to be about collections, or keeping an eye on the parking lot. It was about being fully present for the service.

“Repentance is important, because to be forgiven by those we love…there’s a grace there more priceless than anything made by man. ‘I once was lost, but now I’m found.’”

As he sang the “Amazing Grace” line, straight from the pulpit, the effect was immediate, a spring rain on parched earth, the promise of the morning sunrise. Vera could feel the way it sank into all of them, the worst parts of the tension and worry easing, heads lifting, shoulders dropping, gazes exchanged, hands clasped.

He left the pulpit, still singing. He repeated that line in the way a blues song would do it. Strong like a declaration. Then soft and fragile, a man weeping before a cross. Quiet, the sound of a brook, all of them resting on its grassy banks, at peace. With rejoicing, with laughter, strong and lifting up to the heavens.

When he’d started, some of the parishioners had come to their feet. Less than normal, though. That changed as he kept uttering the line, bringing a few more individuals, then clusters of people here and there, and finally whole sections rising. At his gesture, the choir joined in, and the energy surged. Those on the aisles reached out to him as he passed, so he could clasp their hands, a confirmation of solidarity.

“Reach out to one another,” he sang. Then he sang it more fiercely, a call to action, a piercing light. Michael’s sword, cutting darkness away. “Reach out to your sisters and brothers. We all here for one another. Pray for each other. Pray for Witford, for Tisha, for Simon and Tyson. They strayed into the darkness, and they need us all to raise God’s lanterns, to guide them back to the light.”

Amens rang out. Calls for Jesus’s help, proclamations that Jesus was Lord. As Vera watched it happen, she recalled every joyous energy raising at her own Wiccan and pagan celebrations, offering hope and healing, all from the same source, the same well. Everything connected. Every soul. Every heart.

When Rev reached her in the last row, the congregation had turned, following his progress. Once there, with no self-consciousness, he dropped to one knee and extended his hand, palm up.

“I asked your forgiveness,” he said huskily, “but I want so much more than that, Veracity. I need your heart and love, just as much as I need God’s love, because they one and the same to me. I need to belong to you in Heaven and on Earth, same as I belong to Him. You my Goddess, He my God. The balance I need. Let me serve you both. Let me love and care for you.”

He wasn’t raising his voice, and for once, despite the fervor behind it, it didn’t resonate. This was just between them and him, only his body language telling them it was a moment of import, the question being asked.

Tears rolled down her face. When he’d come to her the other night, she’d realized that yes, she was hurt, and more than a little afraid of what was going on in her. But she’d also realized she couldn’t heal by herself. She needed him to help her. And she still did. She told him all that with her eyes, which was her answer.

Here I am.

His eyes lit up and he pressed a kiss to her fingers, held them to his forehead, that third eye, before he rose, drawing her up with him. He turned to the congregation. “This is the woman I love,” he said. “Veracity Morgan. She a caring and loving woman, who stands in God’s light.”

He began to back down the aisle, and resumed “Amazing Grace,” incorporating the words and sentiments thrown to him from his audience, as was his way. Since he didn’t let go of her hand, he took her with him. She allowed it, because she didn’t want to let go of him, either.

Then they surprised her, people reaching out to grip her free hand as she passed, offering her warm greetings with fervent sincerity. But all of them, herself included, were in the grip of the words God had given Rev, had given to all of them. There was no room for anything here right now but truth and love.

“Peace to you, sister…”

“Welcome…”

“God praise you…”

When she reached Mrs. Meriweather, the woman took her hand and spoke a matriarch’s blessing. The words she chose had a significance Vera couldn’t deny.

“Welcome to our family.”

Many things, large and small, happened for more significant reasons. She’d lost her birth family, but then she’d found Ros, Skye, Cyn and Abby, Bastion, and people like Sy and Trey, Mavis. Now that family was expanding even further.

She’d faced the real possibility of her death. It had opened her not just to this moment, but to healing the wounds of past losses.

She could mail that card. She could truly forgive her parents and siblings, and give them a home in her heart, where they’d always belonged. She could embrace the gifts she’d been given, and where those gifts had brought her.

To the man who held her hand, and her heart, in his gentle, strong hands.

After the service, Rev asked her to stand with him at the door. She saw some uncertain looks at her pentacle, but mostly they looked to Rev, drawing on the reassurance and strength he'd brought back to the pulpit after he’d escorted her to a seat right up front, giving her a wink as if he expected her to admonish him later for putting her in such a conspicuous place.

Yes, there would be repercussions. But for now, she settled in to listen, just like everyone else.

He'd held up several different books. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran. Hindu texts, Buddhist texts. “All these talk about what God is,” he said. “They men’s way of trying to understand, to make sense, to know how we should follow God. None of these paths are wrong. But here,” he touched his heart, “is where God make the most sense, if our heart be right. This is where we can always find and follow Him.

“I don’t think it matter to Him what we call Him, or the paths people take to Him, long as one thing the same. The most important thing. If everyone called him Love—not God, not Allah, not Jehovah or Yahweh, not Lord and Lady”—his gaze touched Vera’s before rising to his listeners again—“how you think we might treat one another, no matter what path we following?”

So yes, there were some uncertain looks at her choice of jewelry, but he’d made them think. Or, from his perspective, God had given him words to help them that way. Though in her opinion, God had chosen a darn good channel, one not only with great reception for the message, but who believed in it fully.

When the parking lot emptied, Rev turned to face her. “How are you today?”

It wasn’t a casual question, so she took her time answering. “I’m feeling not quite so lost at sea. You being with me…it helped. I’m finding my way back to myself.”

He gazed at their interlaced hands. “Is it all right if I say something to you, then? About that day. It’s okay if it’s not. It’ll keep.”

A faint quiver went through the connection and his mouth tightened. As he lifted a hand to her face, she shook her head, even as she leaned into him.

“No. I can hear it. I want to hear it.”

“We do this first. So it might be easier.” He drew her into his arms until her head was on his shoulder, face to his neck, and his voice was above her ear, like soothing thunder during an easy rain. “You tell me if it’s too much.”

Her other hand moved to his biceps, held, as he pressed his forehead to hers. That third eye contact, instinctive between two souls reaching for one another. Trying to reconnect, and realizing that, too, was a fragile thing, something that couldn’t be forced.

“Walk with me in the garden,” he said.

He understood. She nodded, and they walked hand in hand around the outside of the church, through the cemetery, to the garden archway.

“I stopped at a church that night,” he said. “After I left the hospital. Spoke to a Reverend Dana, and she helped take the sword from my heart. She was…like me. In your world. Our world. Submissive.”

The way he said it sent a welcome spark of sexual electricity through her. “Yes,” Vera said. “She is.”

“You know her?”

“The BDSM community isn’t large. Dana is married to Peter Winston, operations manager for Kensington & Associates. They’re a client, and Matt Kensington and Ros are good friends.”

“Is Dana a friend of yours?”

“As a matter of fact. There’s a ‘Faith is Universal’ event each year. Cyn calls it the FU conference.” Vera’s eye roll made him chuckle. “It started as a small get-together in Audubon Park, a collaboration between a Buddhist monk and a Catholic priest. Dana and I have shared a booth there. And a hot chocolate afterward.”

Rev nodded. “I talked to Christophe, one of our Sunday school teachers. He been taking seminary courses online and wants to be an assistant pastor. We gonna split it up, the services and pastor duties, and let other active church members share the responsibility. A church is way more than just one person.”

“Sounds like you won’t have much time for anything else.”

“Everything I plan builds in time for you, Mistress.”

The bright sun caught the golden brown in his eyes and lit them up with all the heat and life he carried within. She saw his desire to dive deep into her, and the wish that she herself had. Standing in the garden, with beauty around them and sunlight on their shoulders, she would let the right feelings course through and strengthen them, bring them forward on a path together that would never split apart.

“What you did with Witford and Tisha was the right thing, Rev. It was the thing a strong man, a just man, would do.” Because of how fragile the place inside her was that the words touched, she said it slowly, carefully. “But I’m also glad that Lawrence, Mick and Tiger followed you. You’re mine now. You’ll have a care with yourself, and think about that before you walk into situations with bulls and bad people. Understand?”

His lips twitched. “Yes, Mistress.”

“I want to say something to you, too. About that day.”

She had him sit on the bench near the stern but kind angel statue, but instead of sitting next to him, she sat down on his lap, sliding her arms around his shoulders. He put his around her hips, his eyes warm and curious.

“I remember you there, Rev. In my soul, my heart and head. I know I was leaving my body. You reached out and held on, telling me to come back. I felt it, the Divine power flowing through you, winding around me. I looked into your eyes and saw your soul. Do you remember that?”

“Not entirely.” His sheepish look had her raising a curious brow. “What I do remember…it might be the first time I wasn't sure if I let God speak through me, as much as I spoke my own mind, and asked God to please take my wishes into account. I maybe asked Him a little more forcefully than I should have.”

She kissed him. A sweet glide into pleasure, the two of them holding onto one another. When she drew back, she gave him her best reproving look.

“Since a Mistress has to hand out the right kind of punishment to help a sub feel better about taking the lead when he shouldn’t, maybe God will leave that to me. Given the circumstances and all. Plus, I plan to do terrible, evil things to you for putting me up in the front pew like that without any warning. In those circumstances, a woman likes to make sure the back of her hair looks as good as the front.”

“I promise to remember that in the future,” he told her solemnly, and patted the back of his short hair. “It important to me, too.”

“Wise ass.” She stroked her nails along his nape. “Do you want to come to the handfasting? Jasmine did invite you.”

“Yes. I’d like to see it done. I been looking through your ministering books, about that, and some other things.” His expression became more intent. “Once you ready to go home, I’d like to do something with you I been thinking about. Will you trust me on that, without me telling you much about it ahead of time?”

“Does it involve spiders or reality TV?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then yes.” Her eyes held his. “I trust you, Rev.”

Once they reached her house and entered her kitchen, he slipped her purse from her shoulder and asked if she would go out into the backyard and relax on her bench while he prepared. Showing that his request hadn’t been a spur of the moment thing, he’d had her stop at his place so he could retrieve a box of things to bring with him. He’d asked her to wait on him in the car, and when he came out, the box was closed.

As she sat on the bench, gazing at the falling water and dancing girl, she felt a mix of things. The emotions of the day, of the past weeks, were powerful. She worried she’d never be the same person again.

“You’re not,” Maureen had said during their latest session. “Events like this change us. There’s no escaping that. But you have to decide what you want to reclaim and what you want to leave by the roadside. What matters is you make that choice, not those who did this to you.”

She closed her eyes. Inevitably, when she did that, some of the worst moments came back to her, her inability to move, the wheel taking her under, the water stealing her ability to breathe. At first, she’d fought to get away from those images, but with Maureen’s help, she was making herself relive them in limited doses. As she did, she told herself it was over. She’d survived. She was on the other side of it.

It didn’t stop her from starting off the bench when he touched her, her hands fisted in defense. “Oh, Goddess. Rev, I’m sorry.”

His expression held deep pain, shared with her, but he held out a hand. “You owe me no apologies, Mistress. Please, will you come with me?”

She put her trembling hand in his. He held it, just looking at her, then tipped his head back. He’d shed his suit jacket, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, the shirt tucked into belted slacks. He’d removed the tie and opened the collar so she could see the smooth skin of his throat, and a hint of the scooped neck of the cotton T-shirt he wore under the shirt.

“Sure is a fine day. I might have done this outside, but it involves some things I’m not sure you’d want your teacher next door to see.” He gave her that stirring alpha look of his. “Or that I’d be okay with him seeing.”

She summoned a smile. “Maybe we come back afterward. Have a Sunday dinner out here. We’ll cook it together.”

“Sounds good.”

He guided her to the back door, her hand secure in his, and paused there to look at her, then out at the backyard. “You got a nice space here. Good place to sit, good sun. I expect some good and bad things have happened at this very spot, over the million years it been here. Do you think that change the good things about it?”

She looked up at him. “It can. But we shouldn’t let it.”

His firm lips brushed hers. “Exactly.”

Once in the house, he took her to her bedroom, though he paused in the doorway to explain what she was about to see.

“I been reading your books about the Tantra stuff,” he said. “I thought maybe this is something that you’d like.”

He put both hands on her shoulders, the calm strength that riveted members of his congregation in his touch, vast and immutable as the ocean itself. While it had a similar effect on her, she also knew what it cost him to find it, and offer it to her. She wasn’t the only one who’d been scarred by what had happened. Her hands overlapped his, holding onto him, as he was holding onto her.

“If it don’t,” he added, “you’ll tell me and I’ll stop. And that will be fine. Mind me?”

“I do.” She caressed him. “Have I mentioned I like how you use that phrase?”

Giving her a lopsided smile, he moved so she could see what he’d done.

He’d laid a mat on the floor and placed four bowls of water around it, marking the quarters. White and red flowers floated in them, the colors of Shiva and Shakti. A bouquet of mixed flowers was at the head of the mat.

“May I undress you?”

At her nod, he slid the orange coat from her shoulders. “This a butterfly’s colors. When you came into the church, that’s what I thought you looked like. A monarch butterfly.”

He hung it up in her closet, then returned to slip the buttons of her blouse and unzip her skirt, leaving her in garters and stockings. He knelt to remove those. As he did, his hands slid over her skin with the soothing pleasure of a hot shower after a long, hard winter day. Coupled with the erotic stimulation that his touch could bring to her.

His decision to pause a moment, to look at her in the garters and underwear, his gaze covering every inch of skin, added to both feelings. Though the erotic part took a decisive lead.

He showed his pleasure for handling her body, touching it, appreciating it, and he made sure each article of clothing was hung up or folded the way she liked. Over the short time he’d known her, he’d internalized so much about her preferences, including her care of her clothes.

Each movement, each act, built the power within the space he’d created.

He’d started the gas logs in the bedroom fireplace, so she wasn’t cold. When he came back to her, he took her hand and dropped to one knee, looking up at her. Fully clothed, while she was naked, and yet, just like the other night, the gesture, his expression, told her he saw her as in charge, in control. His Mistress.

“I was reading about nyasa ,” he said, pronouncing the word with care. “Honoring the divine and inviting it inside you, so you know what I say is true. I know you a human woman, Veracity. But I also know you a piece of God, what you call the Lord and Lady. I think…I think what happened damaged that connection a bit. Same as it did for me, with the face of God I know. I thought this might help heal that some, for both of us.”

He invited her to lie down, in a knee-weakening way. He rose to lift her in his arms, then squatted down, an impressive show of strength, and placed her on the mat in a supine position. He touched her face, then her throat, her chest, her abdomen, her mound.

She trembled. It was a unique feeling, to give her submissive the lead like this, and yet feel how strongly he was serving her. Taking care of her.

He drew the bouquet closer and knelt beside her. “I gonna place a flower at each of the chakra points, and each flower honors a Goddess.”

“You’ve been reading my Encyclopedia of Goddesses.”

“Yes ma’am. Got some interesting female deities in there.”

When he removed his pocketknife from his slacks to cut a lush red azalea bloom out of the bouquet, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden memory that wrenched her away, making her lose time. When she came back, he was leaning over her, his hand on her shoulder.

“Veracity.”

She shook her head, and a tear rolled down her face. “This is beautiful. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“You can’t ruin anything.” He folded the blade back into the knife, put it in her hand and closed her fingers over it. “This helped me free you.”

“Yes.” She felt the heat of his hand lingering in the metal and held onto that, closing her eyes. It was as he’d said on her porch. Good and bad. This had been a weapon of good. It had helped save her.

She offered it back to him, and he continued, easy and calm. He laid the bloom on her mound, the petals brushing her clitoris. “The Goddess Kali. Folks think she scary, bloodthirsty, and she can be, but you made me think of her a different way, and what I read said she also is passionate. She know creation comes from destruction, from pushing ourselves, facing our fears to free us from them.”

He met Vera’s gaze. “Things end so other things can begin.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He selected an amber colored rose next, laying it on her abdomen. “Freya,” he said. “A goddess of fertility, among other things. Her name translates to Mistress. I liked reading about her.”

When he put a yellow peony on her sternum, over her heart, her breath hitched in a near sob. “Kuan-Yin,” he said. He stroked the side of her breast, her upper arm. “Her name means ‘she who hears the weeping world.’ She a goddess of compassion and healing, who stayed human instead of becoming pure light. She wanted to stay near humanity and help them.” He nodded thoughtfully. “She reminded me of Jesus that way.”

He put a white azalea bloom on her throat, the petals a light caress against her pulse. “Hecate. Goddess of witches, a moon goddess, sometimes an earth goddess. Connected to earth and God power, and she understand the balance between the two. She bring that understanding back to you, to bring you peace and balance.”

He stroked her cheek, traced her ear, caressed her hair and took away another tear with his thumb. His face showed anguish, love, care. Resolve and determination.

“All of them are within you. They are you. You stand apart from whatever earthly harms are done to you, because whatever happens, you come out on the other side, just as Christ did, showing death, pain and torment had no lasting hold upon Him.”

She knew reading wasn’t easy for him. She imagined him holding the books in his hands, bent over them, his mind taking those words into him, absorbing them into who he was, to remember what he’d read and repeat it like this, in his own way.

He unscrewed the dropper top of a small brown bottle, tucked next to one of the flower bowls. “I anoint your crown chakra, to reinforce and bring my Mistress that balance.”

Rev leaned over her. While he left a drop of lavender on her forehead, she rested her hand on his abdomen and closed her eyes again. Inhaling its calming properties and the almond oil base, she kept his image inside her mind, every detail of him over her like this. His body, his words, what he'd created here, all of it was a forcefield, keeping out anything unwelcome.

When she opened her eyes, he was replacing the top of the bottle. He set it aside and sat back, his hands on his knees as he bowed his head.

“And now I await my Mistress’s desires.”

She felt the flowers resting upon her, and all they meant. She welcomed the familiar touch of that power into her and didn’t shrink from it. It closed around her, helping and healing. Giving her back the power she’d been too fragile to embrace this fully, up until this moment.

She’d come back from church wanting to immerse herself in pleasure with him. This took that need to a far more transcendent level.

She slid her hand over his knee and touched his fingers. “You remember that first fantasy I described, leaving your handprints on a chalkboard as I did what I wanted to you?”

“I remember it.” He kept his head down, his fingers tightening on his knees under her touch.

“All the things I’ve done to you and with you. They go through my mind a hundred times every day. They make me aroused, make me content. Make me miss you, need to be with you.” Joy surged through her as the words came to her the way she wanted them to come, unfettered by anything else. “Even as I’m also able to wait, to do what the day demands of me, knowing you’re there, at the end of it, but also throughout it, and at the beginning of it.”

He swallowed. “It sound a lot like my day, Mistress.”

“Take off everything but your cross, then sit back down, legs Indian style.”

A little smile crossed his face as he rose. “Teena Joy, when she taught me history, the part about Native Americans, she had me sit that way and we made feathered headdresses out of construction paper. She told me stories about the Choctaw, Natchez and Chitimacha, the tribes around New Orleans.”

“I’d like to hear those stories. But right now, I want to see your beautiful body, every inch that belongs to me.”

Heat flourished in his eyes, in the energy shimmering over his flesh and the muscle beneath as he complied, stripping off his shoes and clothes and setting them aside. The cross gleamed against his bare chest.

“Your eyes are the color of gingerbread,” she told him. “We’ll make gingerbread men later and frost them. I’d like to do some creative things with that frosting.”

His cock was already semi-erect, his thigh muscles flexing as he sat down in the position she’d ordered. “You making me hungrier, Mistress. But not so much for that.”

She smiled and plucked the flowers off of her body, sending a blessing to each Goddess face he’d named before sitting up and distributing them in the bowls of water. As she rose to her feet, she felt the strength of the Goddess rise with her. Reborn.

His eyes caressed her body, top to toe, making all of it tingle with the desire to mate, to be closer, touch, rub, stroke and caress every part of herself against every part of him.

But denial, building the anticipation, was the Bruce Willis anti-hero of sex. It made sure the world was saved, good prevailed and the ending was unforgettable. Bastion had told her that, during one of his rare visits to Progeny. He’d been taking a break from a scene, purposefully prolonging it so his submissives would think too much arousal could cause insanity. And that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

She moved behind Rev. “Back straight.” He wasn’t slouching, but the order brought his shoulders back further, his chest out and head up. She pressed her mound against the back of his neck as she caressed his shoulders, his skull and jaw.

All hers.

She came to his front and straddled him, closing her legs around his waist, bringing their sexes against one another, his rigid cock pressed to her damp cunt. “This is a Shakti-Shiva pose,” she whispered. “When we’re joined, the energy is a closed circle. Afterwards, when we spoon in my bed, I’ll have you press up against me, behind me, and our chakras will align. That energy will take us into sleep together.”

“Where you can dream of me.” He had remembered.

“Yes.”

He touched the soft skin at the corner of her eye. “No bad dreams. No more, Mistress. I won’t let them come.”

She pressed her face into his hand. She held that connection as she lifted herself, reached between them and guided him into her, ready and hard, her body slick and willing. They came together close, a firm lock, and that circle closed. Complete and passionate.

“What will you dream of, Rev?” Her voice held the strain of arousal. She would draw the climax out for both of them. Or maybe she wouldn’t plan anything. The Goddesses who’d been called to the circle would take them where They willed, into a cycle of arousal and bliss until they were limp with it and slept, spooned together the way she’d described.

“I’ll dream of being everything you need me to be, Mistress. And then I’ll wake up and make it happen.”

She began to move, their souls locked in sensation, in pleasure and need. In love.

“You already are, Rev. You already have.”