Free Safeword Interrupted (The Cattail Club Book 1) by Dakota Trace Page B

off campus and no roommate, so I put it where he couldn’t miss it. Then I stripped down to my underwear, presented myself much like I did yesterday for you. Can you believe I read every book I could find on High Protocol – only to be shot down?” She paused to chew on her lower lip
    “Shhh. Don’t do that.” Deacon smoothed his thumb over her lip, freeing it from her teeth. “You have nothing to be embarrassed of. If I’d been in his shoes, you wouldn’t have escaped my clutches for hours. I’d have tied you to my bed and played with your body until you screamed for mercy.”
    She gave him a rueful grin. “Because you’re into that kind of kink.” She straightened her shoulders. “With Ryan, however…well, let’s just say it wasn’t one of my finer moments.”
    Deacon shifted uneasily. “He rejected you?”
    She glanced away from him, but shook her head. “Not so much as rejected my offer, it was more along the lines that he wasn’t alone.”
    “He had another girl with him. Oh, Bethany, I’m sorry…men who fuck around should be castrated. Want me to go do the honors?”
    She suddenly burst out laughing, as if imagining him chasing down some now middle-aged business man to introduce him to the business end of Burdizzo pinchers. He wouldn’t even have to use the castration tool on Ryan. The man would probably die of fright. “Thanks for the offer, but Ryan wasn’t with another girl. No, I had the rotten luck of trying to seduce my boyfriend the same night he brought his mother home for dinner. His very ‘Catholic, no sex before marriage’ mother.”
    “ Oh, shit.” A chuckle slipped free, even as he could only imagine the horror a younger Bethany had gone through.
    “Yeah.” She glanced at him, mirth that only time and distance could bring in her gaze. “It was in that moment, as Ryan struggled to find an explanation to give his mom about why his very proper girlfriend was kneeling nearly naked in his front hall, that I realized that we would never be right together. He’d spend the rest of his life either apologizing for my actions, or I’d end up like a Stepford wife.” She placed her hand over his under her shirt. “I couldn’t live like that, so I broke up with him. Then a few months later I went and had the tattoo done – a reminder to myself that I didn’t have to settle for vanilla - that I would one day find the balance the triskelion represents.”
    “Yet you claim you’re not submissive?” He shook his head. “It takes a very strong person to be submissive, little one. The fact you knew ten years ago that your ex couldn’t give you what you wanted, but still walked away with your head held high proves that. My only question is why I haven’t heard anything in the local scene about you. Surely you didn’t give up after one try? Not when there are clubs like Cattail around.”
    Her cheeks flushed even more. “I…I toyed with the idea of joining, but the idea of putting myself out there, with people I might know from our area as a lone submissive, seemed pathetic. I didn’t want to be the poor sub girl in the corner begging for scraps.” She shook her head. “So I tried role-playing instead.”
    And settled for half a loaf instead of a full measure.
    He cocked his head. “And how did that work?”
    She shrugged. “A couple of the guys I dated, flat out refused me, while a few others got into the swing of it, but usually fucked it up by apologizing to me if they thought I was hurting. My last boy-friend, he did okay until the day I came home to find him wearing my underwear and begging me to punish him because he was a naughty boy.”
    Deacon actually sputtered. “Randall Duncan actually wanted you to punish him?” The thought of the staid banker dressed in one of Bethany’s skimpy thongs was almost too much. But the last time he’d run into Randy at the Co-op, the banker had been hanging with a known Domme. So maybe Bethany’s tale wasn’t so farfetched.
    She