Some years ago, perhaps seven or eight, Nick Sebring had worked for his brother, Knight. There had been a falling out, the reason for which I was not privy. After this Knight cut his brother loose.

It then appeared Nick had lost his way as there was a spell of time where he was either keeping company with a variety of unsavory characters or on the straight and narrow with an office job.

However, four years ago, Nick Sebring had set up his own shop.

This shop included providing a variety of elite services to an exclusive set of clientele who could pay handsomely. In a very short period of time, he’d made a name for himself in this business of acquisitions, deliveries, security, mediation, surveillance, deep background checks, safe-housing, and information collection, dissemination and safeguarding.

Also in a very short period of time, he’d made a fortune doing these things.

Back in the day, Nick Sebring had been known as the incompetent, unprincipled wastrel younger brother of a successful man. Nick also was known to have a fondness for cocaine and a mind filled with nothing but getting laid and living large off his brother’s back.

He was no longer any of that.

What he was was a dark horse. No one had expected anything of him except, perhaps, the frequently earned title of baby daddy and an early death due to his own folly.

But now, in our world, he was respected and even feared.

And, in the club in the seating area next to mine, he also looked nothing like he used to look.

The few times I’d been on the scene and had the opportunity to see him back then, I’d noted he had been very pretty. Unlike his brother, who was remarkably good-looking in an intensely masculine but entirely offhand way, Nick Sebring had been handsome in a look-at-me way. He’d worn clothes that were loudly expensive, his hair was over-styled and he had a body that was meticulously maintained—not to maintain it, but to get attention.

Now, his black hair was clipped very short, only bits at the top and the front longer and sticking up in appealing ways which invited a woman’s touch to arrange or smooth, no matter how hopeless this endeavor might be (or perhaps because of it).

He was tan, my guess, not due to laying by a pool, especially not now when we were heading out of February. The lines emanating out of the sides of his eyes and around his mouth and the nuance of ruggedness barely contained in the elegant confines of a viewing chamber in the club hinted the tan was because he spent time outside.

His stubble was thick and not groomed. He was not a man who forgot to shave that day or had been too busy to do so for a couple. It had been weeks. Though it was not a full grown beard.

I detested facial hair on a man.

But Nick Sebring’s looked good.

And his clothes were impeccable—not obnoxiously so, but in an understated way. That didn’t mean his sky blue dress shirt didn’t catch on his defined biceps or beautifully delineate his broad shoulders, they did—deliciously so.

Since Tommy, unless it was one of the rare occasions where I was in a certain mood and went out to find a man to assuage that mood, it was unusual for me to have a reaction to a male. Not any of them. It was too dangerous.

No-strings-attached and usually no-names-exchanged fucking was one thing.

But I’d learned my lesson.

Three glances and Nick Sebring drew me. In fact, even sitting still I was finding it physically exhausting fighting the urge to look his way. And I was finding it utterly impossible to get him out of my mind.

Thankfully, a noise pierced this thought and my unfocused gaze focused on the scene being played out in the window in front of me.

The whipping post had been set up.

Such was the attraction of Nick Sebring—the whipping post and I hadn’t noticed.

If done well, that was my favorite scene.

I reached to my drink and took a sip, forcing myself to take in the players.

The man had the whip. Cat o’ nine tails, a beautiful set in braided chocolate and burgundy leather with expanded curved tips, not knots, beads or frayed.

He was in jeans, nothing else, and had a large, muscular body that was most appealing.

A woman was tied to the post. She was also in jeans and nothing else. I saw the red marks on her back and knew she’d taken more than one lash during my inattention.

And when I watched what the man did next, I automatically crossed my legs, feeling my lips part and Nick Sebring flew from my mind.

He ran his lips along the marks on her back.

One. Another. The next. And the next. Slowly. Tenderly.

A devotion.

Once done, he ran the handle of the whip along her hip.

Again slowly, he stepped back, raised his arm and let loose.

The slap of leather against flesh filled the chamber as her head flew back, her quiet moan sweet and short, her back arched.

He moved in and tenderly ran the tails of the whip along her skin. As he did, she relaxed for him. He then worked her neck with his mouth and pressed his bulging crotch into her behind before he again stepped back and let loose with the whip.

And again.

Then he moved back to her.

I’d seen many such scenarios but not one as slow, as drawn out, as tender, loving, sensual as the one before me. A scene where he mixed pleasure and adulation with her pain like they had an entire week for him to bring her to climax and not the length of their scene at a sex club.

They were on display, who knew how many people watching, but they were completely alone. She was completely his. Her adoration of him not in question. And this adoration was not what he could do to her. Not what he gave to her. That was only a part of the love she had for her master.

She loved him.

His devotion was the same. Unhidden, completely exposed. Every move he made was entirely focused on her pleasure. On her.