Love, Diamonds, and Spades (Cactus Creek #2)(29)

With her name on his lips, he surged into her one last time and plunged into darkness.



*



WHEN HE RESURFACED back to the land of the living, he found her awake, again tracing a finger over his tattoo, mind clearly chugging away.

“What are you thinking about, baby?”

She sat up and he immediately felt the loss bang against his chest. “Come back and cuddle with me, woman.”

A smile peeked through at that rough demand but she maintained her interrogation face.

He sighed, wondering what was going on in that busy little head of hers.

“Were you holding back earlier? During all the sex, I mean?” A faint blush pinked her cheeks and he almost lost track of the questioning. It never ceased to amaze him—and turn him on—how she could be his ferocious little hellcat one second, and his shy, sweet kitten the next.

“Was I holding back? Not at all. Why, were you?” He raised a brow. “Are you about to crush my fragile male ego?”

She laughed. “I think you have plenty ego left on reserve. But seriously, you weren’t holding back on anything? As in things you like?”

“I like you.”

“I’m being serious.”

“No, you’re being weird.” He sighed and tucked his arms behind his head. “Just say what you’re trying to say.”

After a pregnant pause, she looked him in the eye and said in one long exhale, “I know you’re a dom, and that you like to go to BDSM clubs.”

He blinked at her for a second and then cursed.

“So it’s true!”

Thankfully that wasn’t sheer horror on her face. More a cross between curiosity, amusement, and a tiny bit of hurt, along with a whole lot of questions.

“Who’d you hear that from?” he asked shaking his head tiredly. “Dani? Xoey?”

“Yes.”

He paused and then rolled his eyes. “Well that explains some very weird Christmas gifts I got last year.”

“From Dani or Xoey?”

He chuckled. “Dani. Xoey always gives me weird gifts.”

She tilted her head. “Why didn’t you tell me? That you were into all that whole dom and sub thing.”

“I’m not.”

“But…”

“Quinn, I’m not a dom. But…my ex, Lacey, was a sub. That is, she realized she was a sub while we were dating.”

Quinn wrapped her arms around her legs and tucked her chin on her knees. “Really? That must have been hard on you two.”

He loved this about her. That he could just talk to her about anything, even the bizarre and uncomfortable.

“It was hard. She started researching it heavily and throwing herself into the lifestyle. But I wasn’t in to it. She kept saying if I loved her, I should at least try it.”

A look of annoyance flitted across Quinn’s face and he almost reached out and kissed her for that. “It wasn’t all bad. But after about six months, I discovered she was becoming obsessed with the lifestyle—in an outsider-looking-in way. Everything about her changed…or no, that’s not right. I think her true inner self just came rushing out all at once.”

With a heavy sigh, he closed his eyes and tried not to let those long few months fill him with the black sticky webs of discontent and at times, pure misery, as it had back then.

“Because she didn’t have a dom to help her, she sort of just…lost it. I’ve been told that if she’d had a dom to guide her, or more folks in the lifestyle to help her, she wouldn’t have unraveled the way she did. But basically, she started needing me to tell her what to wear, who to be friends with, how to act, when to talk. When and if to use the bathroom, when and if she should eat. And she wanted to be punished for things, she wanted to punish herself, rather. Almost cruelly. Not for the sake of pain, but almost like she was going crazy in her own skin.”

Now, Quinn did look horrified.

Yeah. That’s how it’d been for him too.

“Then one day, she tried to commit suicide.”

Quinn gasped.

“I tried to get her to go to a therapist and she did for a while. Some helped a little but it was still like she was wearing someone else’s skin, going crazy scratching at it to try and tear it off.” He exhaled roughly. “Honestly, I knew I couldn’t go through another six months like the six prior so I made myself think outside the box.”

Quinn’s eyes widened. “That’s why you went to the BDSM clubs.”

He nodded. “But not in the way you’re thinking. I really have no interest in the lifestyle. But I found doms who folks recommended I talk to and I had them meet Lacey. By then, she was a shell of a human, nearly broken. I couldn’t send her out into a new world—even if it was clearly the world she’d always been meant to be in—without watching out for her.”

“So I spent a few weeks with her in the clubs, and I interviewed a bunch of doms for her. Eventually, she started to come to life. After a month, I met one dom I just knew was going to be a good fit for her. So I introduced them, threatened his life if he hurt her, of course. And then finally let her go.”

For a while, he just let the silence sink in. Almost like the thud of a book closing with the words, ‘The End.’

When he looked up at Quinn, he found she was just staring at him, shaking her head. “You’re just…you’re an amazing guy. You know that, right? I don’t know a single person who would go through everything you just explained.”