When he put his lips to work, Dona arched against the loveseat, her mouth opening in pleasure.

“Working you up has gotten me so hot,” she said, her voice catching, lips curving in a smile of self-absorbed pleasure. “We’re entitled to our coffee breaks down here, you know. When it serves a purpose.”

In the world he’d left, if a Mistress introduced such a measure into the game, he’d counter it with a strategy of his own. Sulking petulance or feigned jealousy, whatever suited the purpose of making her think she was able to manipulate his emotions.

As she arched the man became more enthusiastic, his head moving between her legs, his muscular back rippling. The other man spread open the corset and framed her full breasts in his hands before moving to suckle her nipples. Nathan felt the heat of her response like a wave encompassing him.

He didn’t want to watch other men pleasure his Mistress, but she was right.

Darkness held him, seeking her desire only as a way to control her. Desolately, he realized he hadn’t earned the right to do what these men were doing. With them she could lose herself in that haze that women found from just the simplest of touches upon their much more sensitized skin.

He wanted to do that for her, wanted to discover what minute changes of position would drive her higher, bring her to a climax so elevated it would shatter them both.

Something entered into his conflicting feelings at this moment like a new flavor of wine he’d never tried before, bitter and sweet both, the kind of taste one kept drinking even as he wondered if he liked it.

Despite the fact he was undeserving, he found himself straining against his bonds, needing her to know, wanting her to see.

Her lips parted, tongue coming out to stroke them in a way he wanted to emulate.

Her eyes were heavy-lidded when they focused on him. The flare in her eyes hit him like a punch in the gut. Her pleasure was being driven by him watching. The click of that connection eased the barbed wire around his heart, but not the aching lust, the fury to drive them away and serve her alone. Her desire was obviously rising as he raged against his chains, her eyes sliding over the slick bunched muscles in his shoulders and thighs as he tried to free himself. Curving up again into the blond’s face, she moaned as he apparently thrust his tongue more deeply inside her.

“Oh…Nathan…” When she murmured his name, he wanted to weep. “You please your Mistress so much.” Her voice drifted off and came back. “The look in your eyes, wanting me so much. You understand that’s up to me, don’t you? That’s what submission is about. Your Mistress knows how to please you. Your cock is so hard right now. I can see it from here.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he groaned, as if her attention had physically clamped around it like her fist. “God…please, let me…”

“Your Mistress wants to fuck you. Wants to be fucked by you. But you have something to face first.”

He shook his head. No. No. But even as he rejected it, he knew his capitulation was inevitable. He’d do anything for her if she asked it like this and she knew it. Women had tried to manipulate him before, but this wasn’t that. As his Mistress, Dona was demanding that he face what he didn’t want to face. He had no choice but to do it, because he had to obey her. His heart told him he did.

Dropping to one knee, he bowed his head in surrender.

“Yes,” he whispered. And shuddered.

Chapter Ten

There was some pleasure in the fact that Yin and Yang went away like a puff of smoke the moment he acquiesced. There was little pleasure in what came next. His Mistress, laced back in her armor, circling him the way the mirrors were doing, the images of Eliza stalking him.

As mouthwatering and sexy as the outfit was designed to be, something deeper in his soul than lust had wanted to see Dona unadorned by anything but her own lovely skin. Unshielded as he felt at this moment.

“She loved you so much. You wanted to love her. So desperately.” Nathan stared at the pretty young face, the tiny hoop earrings in her lobes, the careful application of makeup. A girl becoming a woman with cautious steps.

He wanted to touch her face and suddenly he could, or at least his hands were free to touch the surface of the glass. It gave way beneath his touch, almost like the softness of skin.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her. If I could…” He closed his hand into a fist, pulled it away. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t.”

“No, you can’t. It does matter, though. True regret and remorse can be powerful catalysts for change.”

He turned to find Dona, but she had an annoying way of being out of his view when she wanted him to focus on something else. All he saw were more mirrors.

“She loved you so much that you thought she was weak.” The images began chasing one another through all the mirrors, above, below, all around. Showing him things he didn’t want to see.

“She wasn’t weak.”

“No,” Dona agreed. “She was a young girl in love for the first time, confused by her hormones and feelings, a girl who got herself involved with a boy who already knew how to hustle and outmaneuver women three times his age. You didn’t believe in her devotion. It fascinated and sickened you. So you started rebelling against it in small ways, testing it. Seeing if it was real, this phenomenon you’d never experienced. You weren’t merciful enough to cut her loose. You wanted what she had to offer even though you didn’t understand it. Evil fears what it doesn’t understand. If it can’t prove it a lie, it destroys it and calls it weak.”

He wanted to look away, but invisible hands that felt like reptilian skin clamped down on his head and neck. Making him turn from one image to another, his body unable to move on its own, a marionette.

Dona walked before the panel of mirrors, her fingers traveling along the base of the glass, her head tilted up, watching, though he had the odd feeling she was able to see his face at the same moment she was watching the scenes play out around them, shaming him before her. The women he had been with did not know this side of him until he allowed them to know. She knew it all, was watching it with him. That made it worse.

“First, it was typical things,” Dona continued. “Telling her you’d call her and not doing so deliberately. Canceling a date at the last moment and then making sure she saw you somewhere having fun without her. Just when she was hurt and angry enough to break up with you, you’d come back with a smooth move that usually takes men years to learn. Showing up at her door unexpectedly with a planned picnic, or bringing her flowers during a class where all her friends would see. That little pendant you bought her with the unicorn etched on it. Taking her on a bus to the equestrian championship.”

“She loved horses,” he murmured.

“Yes. She treasured that day, probably because she sensed how much you genuinely enjoyed it, surprising yourself. You honed your best seduction skills on her, Jonathan. With your foster mothers, you learned to manipulate and deceive using their weaknesses of character. With Eliza, you learned how to turn a woman’s greatest strength into her greatest liability. Her capacity to love. She was your experiment, teaching you how far you could push a woman’s love to breaking point and then reel her back in. As if you were the ultimate deep-sea fisherman of love.” She drew out the syllables, mocking him now. Nathan clenched his teeth. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Most of it was, yes. There were parts that weren’t. Like here.” The image in the mirror froze and he was looking at himself at the championship with Eliza. She was watching the winning horse complete a jump, her eyes shiny with amazement, absorbed in the beauty of the animal and rider. She was lost in a young girl’s dream that it could be her on that horse, making those jumps, becoming something more than she’d expected to be. He leaned back in his seat while she leaned forward, his seventeen-year-old self just as captivated by her, for virtually the same reason.

“It freaked you out, big time, how you felt that day. After that, your games got worse. Your tests more intense. Hot one day, cold the next, you went from fisherman to orchestra maestro, learning to make her emotions perform the composition you wished.” Dona turned, cocked her head. “You successfully graduated into a sexual predator at seventeen. That’s very impressive.”

“Are you done yet?” He tried to sound angry, unaffected, but he thought he was going to go insane if he had to watch the images another moment. His muscles were trembling at the effort to loose the invisible bindings which were once again thwarting his overwhelming need to look away.

“Not even close, apparently.” She turned her attention back to the mirrors. “She entered her junior year an entirely different girl. Nervous, high-strung, completely dependent on you. When you told her to get on her knees and suck off one of your so-called friends at a party on a bet, she didn’t even hesitate, though she cried the whole time. They thought it was just her eyes watering from the size of his dick, but you knew.”

The image came up, stark and brutal, the football player’s meaty hand on her delicate head, fingers curled in her hair. Jonathan sat in the background watching, acknowledging the ribald jokes of his friends egging her on like it was a beer-chugging competition. Calls of “me next” were being mouthed.

“Stop…” He strangled it out, fought the restraint with real fervor. Dona appeared next to him in that quick blink of reality that seemed to staple time together and erase transitions, making everything more intense. Her fingers curled in his ear, pinched, her voice a hiss.

“We’re not stopping. Not until it’s enough. One of the most important parts of punishment is reliving your crimes with complete awareness. The soldiers that decapitated children in Rwanda, it drives them mad to understand the depths of their own barbarity. Down here, insanity isn’t a defense. It’s not even original. Look and tell me why you shouldn’t receive the most severe punishment possible for doing this to a girl whose only crime was loving you?”

She turned on her heel, went back to the mirrors. He watched the horrifying scene play out as Eliza was passed to two other boys to perform the same act. While he couldn’t stop the flow of images, it didn’t stop him from wishing it. Wishing he didn’t feel every word Dona had said in his gut like a knife wound, bleeding truth.