“So tell me, Sylvia,” he said, as he moved back to the couch. “What do you want? Do you want to surrender? Or do you want me to leave?”

I didn’t answer in words. Instead, I slowly lifted my hands and once again unbuttoned my dress.

This time, however, I didn’t simply spread it open. Instead, I let it slip over my arms and off my body so that I stood before him in only my brand-new lingerie and shoes.

The shoes went next, even though I lost a good two inches of height and felt all the more vulnerable for it.

I needed to do the stockings next, and started to bend over to roll them down. But I lifted my head and the heat I saw in his eyes fueled my imagination. I took a step toward him, then another. Then I lifted my leg and put the ball of my foot on the edge of the couch, right between his thighs. And then, I very slowly started to roll down the stocking. When I reached my foot, I carefully eased off the silk. I rose slowly, letting the stocking dangle, and very casually let the wisp of silk play lightly over his crotch.

“Naughty,” he said, but the smile suggested that he liked naughty just fine.

At the moment, so did I.

I repeated the process with my other foot, only this time I extended my leg so that my foot wasn’t on the edge of the couch but on the cushion. Now, my toes brushed against his cock, straining against his jeans. And I knew that because of the way I stood with one leg up and the other leg down, the tiny thong was doing very little to hide how incredibly wet I was—and right then Jackson had a front-row seat with a view.

And then, because I wanted to make sure he didn’t miss a thing, I trailed my finger from my ankle to my sex. I moaned as I slipped a finger deep inside myself, and I kept my eyes on him, not wanting to miss even a single spark of passion that fired on his face.

“How do you taste?” he asked, and I slowly lifted my finger to my mouth, drew it in deep and let him watch as I sucked. “Sweet,” I finally said. “Do you like candy?”

“Oh, yes,” he said as he reached out and put his hands on my hips even as he slid off the couch to kneel in front of me. “Maybe just a little taste.” He leaned forward and closed his mouth over my sex, then licked and sucked with such intensity that I think I would have collapsed right there if he hadn’t been holding me up.

“Delicious,” he murmured when he pulled away and I whimpered with regret.

“Please,” I said.

“Trust me.” His hands roamed down, finding the band for the thong, then easing it down until I could step out of it.

He stood, then made a circular motion with his finger. “Turn around.”

I complied, then sucked in air when he unfastened my bra and peeled it off my body. He let it drop to the carpet, leaving me standing there completely naked and entirely aroused. “This,” he said. “I like this a lot.”

He reached around, then cupped his hands over my breasts. From behind, he trailed kisses over my body, tracing the outline of my tattoos, but never asking about them. Slowly, slowly down each vertebra, then a soft brush of lips over the dimples above my ass. Then he was on his knees and his tongue was dancing gently along the soft line of flesh that marked the juncture between the back of my thigh and the curve of my ass.

He had turned my entire body into an erogenous zone, and I trembled, so unsteady that I reached up and cupped my hands over his, as if holding on to my own breasts would somehow keep me steady.

When he told me to turn again, I did so without hesitation. His mouth was even with my sex, and I saw the way his mouth quirked in a teasing smile as he tilted his head back and looked up into my eyes. “You’re beautiful,” he said, then slowly traced a finger down, down, over my breasts, my tats, my belly button.

“A ribbon,” he said, when he reached the red ribbon tattoo that scrolled along the crease of skin between thigh and torso. “And a lock,” he added, touching the first tattoo on my pubic bone that Cass had inked so long ago. “Why? What’s written on the ribbon?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “I just liked them in the artist’s book.”

He held my eyes for a moment as if in challenge, but I stayed silent. How could I share the extent of the lie? How could I explain that contrary to what I told him, those tats were far from nothing. Instead, they were everything. Marks of both shame and power. A reminder of who I was, and who I would never be again.

“Someday you’ll tell me the truth,” he said, as he stroked his thumb lightly over my sex. “But right now, all I want is to taste you.”

And then, with no more warning, he closed his mouth over my sex, then drew his tongue so delicately over my clit that I saw the world turn gray and stars explode in front of me. “It won’t stay this way,” he said.