Knight Nostalgia: A Knights of the Board Room Anthology(89)

Yeah, like that would really help her focus. But she winced as he tightened the screws. It started to hurt, or maybe she was just imagining how much it could hurt, when her hand pulled free in involuntary defense and landed on his forearm.

Peter stopped, one set of fingers on the screw, the other holding her nipple in a capable grip. When his storm cloud gray gaze lifted to her face, held there, she froze, her heart thumping.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, but she couldn’t seem to make her hand lift and return to its laced position behind her head. Instead it curled into the firm, heated flesh of his forearm.

Peter glanced at that contact, then back to her face. She looked down, feeling a heated flush rising in her cheeks, because the room had fallen completely silent. Not even the clink of ice in a glass. “Are you afraid of it hurting more than you can handle?” Peter asked her.

She nodded, and he overlooked her not responding with words.

“Your Master takes very good care of you, Rachel. That’s his job, isn’t it?”

She blinked at the unexpected question, and hesitated before she spoke. “Jon does take very good care of me.”

“A careful answer. You don’t think that’s his job.”

“It’s not that. It’s that…” She stopped. It was even harder to think about complicated stuff when her body was on a high simmer of arousal.

“You don’t feel it’s your role to set the terms.” Peter nodded, as if her inability to answer had confirmed it. He glanced toward Jon and, whatever he saw there, gave him an answer of some sorts.

In her moment of distraction, Peter turned the screw once more.

She sucked in a breath, her nails digging into his arm. The pressure did send a little zing of pain through the nipple, but after her mind sorted through it, she realized it was bearable. Uncomfortable, but not horribly painful. And that discomfort, a Master imposing that upon her, seemed to feed into her resurging arousal, something she realized as anxiety died away.

Swallowing, she made herself return her hand to a laced position behind her head, her gaze flicking up to briefly meet Peter’s. “I’m sorry, sir.”

He caressed her breast. “Jon told us everything we need to know about you tonight, a lot of which we already knew, but some we didn’t. He’d rather go over information we know, than take the chance that he missed something we didn’t. Your pain threshold, your hard and soft limits.”

Peter tweaked the chain in an admonishing way. “He knows most of that. Not because you told him, but because he makes it his job to know it. So, you need to say it now, because he needs to hear that you know it. To every Master here, it’s the most important thing.”

His words told her who she needed to be looking at. Her heart was still doing that irregular pounding, but for different reasons now. Jon sat at the other end, his gaze fixed upon her. Her handsome-as-sin Master, with his penetrate-to-the-soul blue eyes.

“Taking care of me is my Master’s job,” she said, her voice trembling a little.

All these years she’d been learning to trust him, she hadn’t always thought about Jon’s side of that, but she was reminded of it in the slight easing of his expression now, which tilted her heart in a poignant way. There were things he needed from her, every bit as much as she did from him. Another hard lesson for her. Enough that she still had these kinds of stumbling points.

“Good,” Jon said. There was more behind the word, and she bit back an odd desire to say something, though she wasn’t sure what. However, after a moment of looking at her with an unfathomable expression, he swept his glance around the room. “Everyone else have what they need?”

At grunts of agreement, she let out a shaky breath. Her body might not survive another infraction. As if he’d read her mind, Peter gripped her waist, a reassurance, but when he didn’t immediately let go and his serious look became even more so, she knew he wasn’t finished.

“Another thing you need to know, Rachel. Every man here also considers it his job to take care of you. They feel the same way about Dana.” He laid his free hand on his wife’s hip, stroking. “And Savannah and Cassandra. Which means, even if your Master hadn’t told me your pain limits, I would have been watching your face, your body, every clue you gave me, to make sure I was hitting the right note for both of us. Understand?”

“I do,” she said quietly, and suddenly tears pricked her eyes, her throat thickening, because she knew he meant it. They all did. And that was more of the miracle that her being with Jon had brought to her.

“Nope, none of that kind of crying tonight,” Peter admonished her gently, reaching up to press his thumb to the corner of her eye. “It’s poker night. Only kind of crying that can happen here is when we shatter you with too many orgasms, or when Ben throws one of his girly tantrums from losing.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d react. If I ever lost, which I never do.”

Peter winked at her, rather than responding to Ben, and then gave her a nudge, telling her she could go back to Jon.

Jon had taught her it was okay to follow her heart. In a way, Peter had just reinforced the message. So, despite being adorned in sex toys, at a male poker game as a sex slave, she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Peter in a grateful hug, whispering “Thank you,” in his ear. “Thank all of you.”