And it mixes it up, gives him some downtime in a way he can safely enjoy it.”
“Why not at home? Why don’t you take turns?”
Mac’s expression turned sad. “He’s been hurt in a lot of ways, and not just the shooting. It’s not my place to tell his secrets. I can say he’s had a damn good reason to not want to trust. I don’t blame him. I was there for him to help pick up the pieces, and I was lucky enough to prove to him he could trust me.” He looked at her. “He trusted me enough to believe me when I offered myself to him.”
She couldn’t process that. “You asked him to make you his slave?”
“Yeah.”
She still found that difficult to believe. “You’ve got nothing.”
“I have Sully. He’s my Master. That’s everything I need. He’s all I need. If I have him, he’ll take care of the rest. That’s all I need to know.” The look on her face must have showed her disbelief.
“Besides, you’ve seen for yourself not everything we do is Master/slave stuff. A lot of it is normal. Do you know what he bought me for our first Christmas together?”
She shook her head.
He smiled. “I got up that morning, and yes, we were full-on slave and Master at that point, and there’s a Corvette sitting in the driveway. Not new, but in great shape.”
“But whose name was it in?” She struggled to understand, to reconcile the new longing in her soul with the stubborn balking in her mind.
“His. He owns me. Everything that’s mine, so to speak, is his.
Here’s the thing, I never asked him for a new car. We’d been at a car show the weekend before and I saw one there. I was looking at it. I never said I wished I had one, never offered an opinion on it. I spent a few minutes looking at it, and while I knew in my heart I wished I had one, I never told him.”
Confusion set in. “So how did he know?”
Mac grinned. “That’s the point! He knows me better than I know myself sometimes. He knew from watching me that I wanted one. I didn’t even consciously do anything. He just knew.”
She thought about the VW in the driveway. “Is that how he knew about the Bug?”
“Naw, that was me. I’ll admit I gave him the idea. I knew he’d been planning on getting you a car, and I told him what you’d said about them.”
Part of her felt uplifted that the men cared enough about her to do that for her. Part of her felt…disappointed. Sully hadn’t read her mind after all.
She shoved that last twinge out of her thoughts. “What if he kicks you out with nothing?”
He shrugged. “He could, but he won’t. Legally we have an agreement that if we separate I’ll get certain things.”
“The Dilly?”
“That’s one of them.”
“It doesn’t scare you?”
“Why should it?”
Wrapping her head around the issue wasn’t happening as she hoped it would. She stood and paced the kitchen. “How do you know?
How do you know you won’t get screwed? In the bad way,” she added.
“I don’t.”
“So you’re perfectly okay with him having all this control over you? Faced with the very real possibility of having to start over?”
He shrugged. “I can always get a job, go back to school for my master’s degree, something.”
It struck her how little she knew about the men. “You went to college?”
“Yeah. Sully made me take advantage of my GI Bill bennies. I had no interest in going to college. He ordered me to. I enlisted in the Army the week after I graduated from high school, went to boot camp a few weeks later. I had no interest in college.”
“What’s your degree in?”
“Marine biology. Sully said I could pick any major I wanted, but I had to earn a degree in something.” He smirked. “So you see, I’m not some poor, dumb asshole without options. I was offered an internship at Mote Marine. I turned it down despite Sully wanting me to take it.”
“He made you go to school?”
He grinned. “Yeah, how horrible is that? Fuckin’ sadist.”
Clarisse tried to process that. “You’re a marine biologist?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “No. I’m a slave.”
She blinked, trying to make sense of that. “Why would you give up a career to do that?”
“I trust him. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life, to serve him.” He studied her. “Have you ever really trusted anyone?”
She started to answer, then stopped, thinking about it.
He picked up the conversation. “I trust him to blindfold me, strap me to a cross, and whip the shit out of me and not let anyone else touch me. I trust him to pay the electric bill and buy me food. I trust him not to sell the Dilly out from under me. I’m not saying that level of trust magically appeared overnight. We didn’t start out from day one the way we are now. We started out with pretty elaborate boundaries. Eventually, over the years, we dropped almost everything and replaced it with safewording. At some point you have to take the leap and trust you’re going to be caught. In exchange for that, I’m perfectly happy to serve him.”
The war waged within her. “He was a cop. How do I ever trust one of them!” An old argument and one she knew wasn’t valid anymore, but it remained her mistrustful brain’s fallback position.
One her mind could comfortably wrap around even while her heart disputed the truth of that belief.
“Not all cops are like Bryan,” Mac said. “Most of them aren’t.
Most of them are decent, caring guys dedicated to their jobs. I’m not saying they’re not human and don’t make mistakes, but the majority of them don’t hurt people.”
She crossed her arms in front of her. “He’s still a fucking cop.
They stick together. Sort of like the Mafia, isn’t it?” Any excuse, any lie she could tell herself to deny the new and conflicting feelings struggling to take over.
Anything to stall having to admit the truth to herself.
Mac sadly shook his head. “No, babe. Not even close. Not like that.” He closed his eyes. “If Sully could have killed Betsy’s husband with his bare hands, he would have. It ripped him up nearly as badly as me when she died. He didn’t even know me then. I was the victim’s brother. He came to the hospital every day and sat with me and my brother, talked with us. When we finally took her off life support, he stood there with us when it happened. He was there for us during the trial and the asshole’s conviction.”
He opened his eyes. She noticed they looked too bright, like maybe he was close to tears. “Maybe that’s the answer to your question. How can I trust him? Because he walked through hell with me when I was still just part of the job to him. How can he trust me?
Because when our positions were reversed, I walked through hell with him and refused to let him give up.”
He pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.
Sully departed early the next morning for a conference. Although Clarisse didn’t revisit the topic, her brain still struggled to make sense of it. Modern women were supposed to be strong and independent and not want to be under anyone’s thumb, right? She’d struggled for years under Bryan’s anger, chafing under his control and abuse.
So why did she want to throw herself at Mac?
And Sully, to a lesser extent.
By the next day, she couldn’t take it anymore. After lunch, she sought Mac out in the study off the living room, where he sat in front of his computer—naked, of course—working on paperwork for the Dilly.
Mac looked up as she walked in. She felt a cautious mask descend. Something she’d never felt from him before.
“Can I interrupt you?” she quietly asked.
He nodded.