Colters' Daughter (Colters' Legacy #3)(31)

Max never took his eyes off Callie as she digested his blunt declaration. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t shy away. Nor did she appear to have an extreme reaction.Her expression didn’t change but she cocked her head to the side and stared at him like she was sliding into his thoughts and giving them serious consideration.

“Define everything, Max. Are you being dramatic to make a point? I need you to be exacting here. This isn’t the sort of thing we can afford to misunderstand.”

He almost smiled. So typically Callie. Blunt. To the point. She wasn’t a shy woman. He’d been afraid that he’d ruined some of that spirit, but it was there. Maybe beaten down, but it stirred beneath the shadows and slowly flickered to life.

“What do I mean by everything? It’s simple and yet complicated. You asked before if you were to submit to me only in the bedroom, so in essence you were asking if it was narrowed to sex. My answer is no.”

He thumbed over her nipple, unable to keep from touching her. He’d never grow tired of feeling her against him. After so many months, it was like coming home to have her in his arms. He could sit here all night and simply touch her and smell her.

“I want you to be mine. You’ll be mine to protect. To cherish. To love. To take care of. To provide for. I want to dress you, spoil you, lavish you with fine food. Trips to Europe, the world. I want you to trust me enough to allow me to make the decisions in our relationship. To cede absolute control to me in the bedroom. To give your body to me and only me. But it’s not about you giving and me taking. It’s not about pleasing me to the exclusion of all else. Maybe it was like that in my other relationships. I want ours to be about me pleasing you every bit as much as you please me. I want to do things for you. Everything for you. I want to give you things. I want this kind of relationship for what it can do for you as well as me. For the things I can give to you.

“So, no, I don’t want it confined to the bedroom, but I want our relationship to be where you can push back when I go too far. But only then. Once we establish complete trust, it will be easier. You’ll know that I won’t want to do anything that isn’t in your best interests.”

Her brows bunched and she stared intently at him. Her expression was pensive, and he knew she’d absorbed every single one of his words and even now was turning them over and over in her mind. He could see the questions in her eyes.

He smiled. She wanted to argue. To protest. But she tempered the bubbling protest as she continued to study him.

“It takes a very strong woman to submit to a man,” he said as he fingered a strand of her hair. “What attracted me to you was your beauty and your laughter. I’ll never forget the first time I saw you in Italy. You took my breath away. But later, it was your fiercely independent spirit that kept me with you. Even as you submitted, your will remained. Your true self was unaltered. You retained all the qualities I most admired, and yet you offered your submission to me so sweetly it made me ache.”

“You seem so sure the two can coexist long-term,” she said. “Is that what happened with your other women? Did they lose themselves in the process?”

Her intuitive question caught him off guard. “Partly, yes. It happened in two of my relationships. They were so caught up in pleasing me that they became shells of the women I was first attracted to. They became…what they thought I wanted. What I thought I wanted for that matter. It sounds so contradictory, but what I want is a woman who can please me and be pleased by me, but not lose herself in the process. Someone strong. Someone like you.”

“I may have misjudged you, Max,” she offered quietly. “All this while I’ve been hurting and aching, and I assumed you weren’t thinking about me at all, that you left me without thought and never looked back. But that’s not true, is it? You’ve been thinking about me—us—quite a lot.”

“Not a day has passed that I haven’t thought about us.”

Her eyes softened and became damp pools of blue. She reached up and cupped his cheek and stroked gently. “You have my submission, Max. Without reservation. I want to try. I don’t know if you’re right and I’m the woman you need or that I’ll end up being the woman you want, but I want to be her. I’m willing to try. I’m willing to give us a chance. I’ll make mistakes. I’ve never allowed anyone the kind of control you’re asking for.”

He smiled and leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead. “I’ve no doubt no one has ever been able to control you. And that’s not what I want to do. I love your free spirit too much. I am the only person I ever want you to submit to and it’s my job to cherish your gift and not crush your spirit but nurture it instead.”

She smiled back. “I think I can handle that.”

“Good. Now that we’ve settled that matter, I want to establish a few ground rules.”

She started to frown but recovered quickly and instead looked inquisitively at him.

“When we are alone, whether in this apartment or elsewhere, you aren’t to wear clothing unless I’ve said otherwise.”

Her lips parted and he could see her battling over whether to question him.

“I want you accessible to me at all times. If I want to f**k you in the kitchen, I want to be able to just lean you over the table and slide inside your sweet body.”

Her breathing hiccupped and her eyes went a little hazy.