Free The Promise of Lace by Lilith Duvalier Page B

and rubbed his fingers in little circles on my scalp. We collapsed into
bed, spent and satisfied. I tucked myself against his chest and he pulled my
blankets around us.
    I felt warm and content and tired. And just a little
concerned about how easily and quickly we’d clicked. The last time I had been…
dommy with a guy like this had been with Isaiah, and there had been a long
involved conversation about limits beforehand.
    This had just happened. And for all the 50 Shades shit out
there, that’s not really how it was supposed to work.
    His hands were back in my hair, stroking and massaging my
scalp. Gentle and calm again. I was tracing nonsense shapes across his bare
chest, stopping every once in a while to trace the lines of his tattoo.
    I was very close to falling asleep when he finally said
“So…” softly.
    “So…” I mimicked.
    “The underwear thing. You… didn’t actually say that
you were okay with that. Not in so many words.”
    Dammit . Why did I have to have a
thing for the smart ones?
    “Why do you wear it?” I asked.
    “Umm…” His hands carded through my hair. He pressed a kiss
to my temple. I sighed and nuzzled my cheek against his firm chest. “A lot of reasons. And kind of a weird
story.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “Okay.”
    He didn’t say anything for a while. Just
kept playing with my hair. Adjusted the covers around
us. Settled his hand around my waist differently. “Well. For one I get a killer discount at work.”
    I snorted against his chest.
    “I… umm. I like the way they feel. I like the
fabric more than guy’s underwear. I like the fit. Finding a bikini cut in men’s
underwear is like searching for some kind of Holy Grail.” He breathed deeply.
My body rose and fell with his. “I like the way I look in them. I used to be…
sort of scrawny. The gym body is new. And…umm…” he breathed deeply again, and I
could hear his heart beat starting to drum against my ear. “It’s a little bit
because… I was… I was in this really, really ,
abusive relationship. For… way too long.”
    I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I stopped tracing my
fingers across his chest, flattened my hand and ran it down around his waist,
sort of hugging him closer to me.
    “Sorry. This isn’t… isn’t really a second date thing.”
    “It’s okay,” I said. He was right, this wasn’t a second date
thing, but it was hard to deny we had a connection, and I could hear his heart
hammering under my head. And I was really uncomfortable with just having
ordered him around the way I had if he’d been abused. Sex games weren’t the
same as abuse, and I knew that… but with no discussion beforehand I needed
little more explanation to be okay with what had just gone down between us.
“You can tell me whatever you want.”
    “Okay. Okay,” He blew out a breath. It didn’t slow down the
beating of his heart. “Umm… so… I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about
an old girlfriend on a second date, but she was… awful. She was controlling and
not just… I don’t know, whatever people think that means in a normal
relationship, but she… I don’t even know how she managed it. It’s like, at
first we were dating, like normal, and then somehow I couldn’t talk to my
friends and she was checking all my texts at dinner and deleting the numbers of
people she didn’t want me to talk to and throwing fits so that I couldn’t make
it to group projects and I was trapped in a lease I couldn’t afford with her
and I was missing classes and she… she just completely controlled every aspect
of my life. I don’t even remember how it all happened, but at the end she
controlled what I ate, she threw out most of my clothes and controlled
everything I wore. She’d insult and degrade me in front of everyone we knew to
the point that no one talked to me anymore. I was… totally cut off. I felt like
was going crazy.”
    I hugged him a little closer “And no one believes that it’s
that bad