Unconditional (Masters and Mercenaries #5.5)(5)

What the hell would he do if he had to watch her with some damn Dom? He wouldn’t be able to look away if she was naked. He would stand there and stare at her like a Peeping Tom.

“Because Ashley is an employee and if I choose to take you on, you’ll spend the first six weeks playing with her and her alone. Until I’m certain you’re trustworthy, you’re not allowed to play with the club members. Ashley is a newbie. The rest of the regulars have been in the lifestyle for a while. I want to see how you train a new sub.”

Training Ashley? God, it had been a terrible idea when he thought it would be a single encounter, much less weeks and weeks of having her at his command. Yeah, that was very likely a horrible idea. If he trained her, she would be under his direction, available to him. He would be responsible for her behavior, for her discipline, for her pleasure. He would have to touch all that sweet, soft skin. That ridiculously vulnerable skin. Young skin. Yes, she was too f*cking young for him. He would have to remind himself of that every single time he looked at her. He was on the slow slide to forty and she was twenty-freaking-five. There was a whole decade between them.

And she had a baby. She was a baby with a baby.

All very good reasons to not train her.

“It would be a completely up-front relationship,” Ian explained, his words continuing even as Keith’s brain exploded with all the reasons why he shouldn’t listen to Mephistopheles in leather. “You’ll sign a training contract with her. She understands that you wouldn’t have any kind of relationship with her outside of the club.”

He stopped his inner diatribe. “Ashley knows about this?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t be here asking you if Ashley hadn’t already agreed to it.” He slid a piece of paper across the desk. “She’s already signed the contract.”

Holy shit. Ashley Paxon had actually signed a goddamn BDSM contract, and there was his name sitting right alongside hers. There was no way she was expecting someone younger, fresher, less jaded. She was expecting him.

He stared down at her signature. Her handwriting was pretty and feminine, like the woman herself.

He scanned the verbiage, each word meaningful to his trained eye. Taggart knew how to write a contract, and Keith wondered if he’d gone to a professional for it. He would love to see some of his tight-assed colleagues dealing with a D/s contract.

In short, the contract gave him rights to train Ashley, but only on the grounds of the club. For the brief time that the contract was to run, he could see her off grounds if she needed him for anything, but there would be no sexual contact outside of the club. He got to the part of the contract that read This means no touchy touchy.

No. Taggart definitely wrote this himself. No one who had spent three years and a couple of hundred grand on law school would ever write that.

Of course, it also left sex open to them as long as they had it at Sanctum.

He could f*ck Ashley and it would be all right because she wanted to explore. He could f*ck her and then maybe his head would be on straight and he could stop thinking about her twenty-four seven. Maybe when they were done, he could f*ck someone else.

He knew he needed a sexual outlet. He’d kept several submissives over the years, letting each one go after the terms of their contract were over. He’d never written a contract for more than a few months and he never, ever extended one. He often found them new Doms, and several had married the men he’d found for them.

It should have been just another day in his life, but when he’d seen Ashley at Ryan’s house, he’d been hit with a bolt of lust like nothing he’d ever felt.

He hadn’t touched another woman since that moment, hadn’t even wanted to. He’d been celibate for six months, and it was slowly killing him.

Ian Taggart was handing him the keys to the kingdom. He could have her and see that she was just like all the other women in his life, and he could send her happily on her way.

“What about her baby?” He thought the child’s name was Emily, maybe Emma. He didn’t like to think about the baby. Ashley’s youth, her inexperience, her innocence he might have been able to handle, but he couldn’t handle the child.

I can’t believe you didn’t know. You should have known.

A vision flashed through his head. Soft, perfect skin, cold to the touch. How could anything so perfect be so cold?

He forced himself to look back at Ian. He wasn’t going there. He wasn’t ever going there again. Years were between him and the memory, but when he allowed it to, the remembrance came back as sharp and achingly bitter as if it were happening in the moment.

“You want to bring her baby into the D/s relationship? I have to say, uhm, I’m probably not going to allow that. Babies aren’t permitted in the club and when they try to sneak in, I have a long talk with their parents about their very bad behavior.”

Keith rolled his eyes. God, the woman who put up with this dude’s shit probably deserved a medal. “I was wondering how she was going to handle childcare. Club hours are late and her sister works here. She doesn’t have any other family.”

Somehow, he hadn’t thought Ashley would be irresponsible.

“So she should give up her sexuality because she bore a child? This seems to be a recurring theme of the day. It makes me want to have a vasectomy.”

It really wasn’t any of his business what went on with Ashley’s daughter. If she wanted to pawn the kid off so she could play at D/s, that was her problem. “Never mind.”