We tied Asher on his knees to one side of the bed, centered between the bedposts. He was near enough to the edge of the bed that if we wanted to we could have his legs off the side, but we started with him comfortable, kneeling. The bed was the same bed, but the frame had been changed since last we had Richard with us. The frame was metal and custom built so that there were distinct places for attaching things all over the frame. It had originally been done so that Asher could teach me to top Nathaniel, but that meant that all of us had experienced the bed on both sides. The rule was you never try something on your submissive that you hadn’t tried on your own body first. There had been a few things that Nathaniel wanted that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, try on myself because the pain level was too high and I didn’t heal like he did, but Asher had taken more than one for the team in that area, until even he had called no mas, and Nathaniel had still not gone to his limit on pain with us. Frankly, Nathaniel’s limits in this area still scared me, even as they intrigued me.
Jean-Claude had gotten out the toy trunk—not toy box, trunk. It was one of those huge old-fashioned steamer trunks big enough to hide a body in. We’d moved it permanently into the bedroom about a month ago rather than having to get a few toys and carry them in; it had been a tacit acknowledgment of what we were doing in the bed and with each other. I had never dreamed that Richard would be on his knees digging around in the toys. I’d known he liked this kind of sex; he was right: Raina hadn’t created the need, she’d just let it out of its box. That he’d gotten comfortable enough with himself to admit it out loud to us was nothing short of miraculous. If miracles were things you thought you’d never see, like the St. Louis Rams winning the Super Bowl, or ice skating in hell.
Jean-Claude had simply taken off his shirt, and he was in leather pants and boots, very BDSM. With Asher tied up nude, my little businessy skirt outfit looked so out of place, but Jean-Claude had a fix for that. It was a leather dress, short but with a full skirt, and it belted at the waist; it looked like June Cleaver does bondage. I went into the bathroom to change with a pair of stiletto heels in hand. The shoes I’d worn before, but the dress was new. But the true beauty of the dress didn’t hit me until I put it on and started playing with the heavy zipper that went all the way down the front of it. The upper part of the dress was tight enough through the chest that it held me in place without a bra even when the zipper was nearly halfway down. My breasts stayed mounded, and no matter how I moved they weren’t going to fall out by accident. No, I’d have to lower the zipper and let them out. Or I could zip the dress all the way up and show no cleavage at all. It was a nice dress. I played with the zipper until my breasts looked like they were spilling out, or would at any moment, but I knew they were solid in place—well, as solid as real breasts get. I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror as I moved for the door, and it stopped me. I wasn’t into breasts, but the sight of my own chest in that dress with the wide leather belt making my waist look even tinier in all that leather with the full skirt was eye-catching. Okay, it made even me think, Wow, look at all that creamy goodness. It wasn’t something I was used to thinking about my own breasts.
When I stepped out in the dress, Jean-Claude let me see on his face exactly how much he liked the view. “Mon Dieu, ma petite.” He grabbed Asher’s hair and turned him so he could see me. The angle was painful, but as he had with Richard, Asher didn’t respond like it hurt. Jean-Claude put their faces together and said, “Look at her, Asher. Look at her and know that you don’t get to touch her tonight.” He let go of that golden hair and walked toward me, leaving Asher hanging there as if he didn’t matter. I knew it was part of the game, and I trusted Jean-Claude to know what kind of submissive Asher was, but if I was the one tied up, humiliation or taunting would throw me out of bottom and right back in my fuck-you-and-you-don’t-get-to-fuck-me attitude.
Jean-Claude came to me and offered his hand. The stilettos were four inches. I looked fabulous in them, but as my sexy meter went up, my graceful meter went down, or that’s how it felt. He’d assured me if I’d only wear them enough to practice, I’d get better at it. Sure.
With his hand to steady me I felt pretty secure in them. The floggers and some whips were laid out by the bed in neat rows. I caught a glimpse of Richard at the end of the bed, hidden by the belted bed curtains.
“They aren’t going to fit,” Richard said.
Jean-Claude had fetched a pair of leather pants that had fit Richard. I realized that they must have been the same ones I’d seen him wear more than once. But that had been over a year ago, and apparently it wasn’t just his arms that had gotten bigger from the weight lifting.
Jean-Claude led me around the foot of the bed. Richard was leaning against it, his body bent almost double as he pulled the last of the leather over his ankle and foot. He’d tied his hair back in a ponytail so he was one long curve of smooth, summer-tanned skin from his neck to midthigh.
He shook his head and said, “There’s no way. I’ve put on too much muscle.” Then he looked up and saw me in the dress, and if Jean-Claude’s face had been everything I wanted to see, Richard’s was both better and worse. He slid off the bed to land heavily on the floor. He sat there with the leather pants in his lap and stared at me as if I’d hit him between the eyes with a hammer. Gob-smacked, Byron, one of our newer British vamps, would have called it. If I’d had any doubts about the outfit, Richard took care of them.
Then Richard rallied and grabbed on to the bed to stand. He was still holding the pants in one hand in front of his body, but he stood every inch of that six foot one inch, shoulders back, face set in that arrogant model look. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he knew just how handsome he was, but then he’d get that look on his face, and I knew he understood exactly how amazing he looked. With most of his legs showing I could see the extra muscle that had kept him out of the pants. Then he dropped the pants and let me see all of him. He let me see that it wasn’t just his face that had reacted to the sight of me in the dress.
My hand tightened on Jean-Claude’s, because I was suddenly not steady enough in the stiletto heels. I couldn’t see my face, but I suspected that it was my turn to look like the handsome hammer had got me between the eyes, my turn to be gob-smacked. He’d had that effect on me almost from the first moment I saw him, which had been nude in a bed, come to think of it. I had never asked what he had been doing in that bed with a female shapeshifter. I’d always assumed they’d just passed out changing from animal to human form—most shifters were nearly comatose for hours after shifting back—and someone had put them between the sheets to sleep it off. Staring at him standing there, I realized that assumption had probably been naïve.
“Your face,” Richard said, “for a moment it was exactly what I wanted to see, and then you started thinking about something else. You didn’t see me anymore. What . . . who were you thinking about while you looked at me?” His face was still almost impossibly handsome; without the hair, the cheekbones that had helped give him the darker skin tone sculpted his face to painful perfection, but the anger was there too now, and that wasn’t attractive. Of all the men in my life, only he’d ever used his rage against me.
“Ma petite,” Jean-Claude said, and his nickname for me was enough. He meant for me to try to fix this. I understood. This was the closest we’d ever gotten with our Richard to something workable. The moment I thought our Richard, I knew it wasn’t my thought. I’d ceased to think of him as mine, but that was okay; we needed this to work the way kids need their fighting parents to make up before the divorce splits the family and the possessions. The problem with the three of us was that the “possessions” included people. More than any child, the vampires and werewolves and other shapeshifters in this city were possessions. We needed to grow up and fix this.