Feral King (The Dominant Bastard Duology 1)

“Do you like them?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you ask me for time to see them?”

“We were – never close. They moved to Africa to do missionary work after my sister’s wedding. They’re nurses.” She shrugged. “They’re nice people, but they don’t understand where they went wrong with me.” The one-shouldered shrug said it didn’t matter, even though he could tell it did.

He got a handle on the unexpected rage this roused in him. How dare they think there was anything wrong with her. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re fucking perfect.”

She blinked at the ferocity of his words.

“If you locked me in a tower and threw away the key, it would be years before they noticed I was missing.” Her voice was quiet, but her expression was one of self-mockery, as though her pain was silly and inconsequential.

Her pretty mouth twisted mischievously, apparently done with being sad. That momentary flash of vulnerability, though, clung in his thoughts. So many fucking people were alone in this world, sometimes even the ones who supposedly had families.

“I’m too...sexual to fit into their world. They completely wrote me off at sixteen after I asked for birth control.”

“Sixteen?”

“Yeah...I probably shouldn’t have told them my boyfriend was in college.”

“You were fucking a college boy?”

“Kind of.”

“How can someone kind of be in college?”

“Well...he worked there.”

“As?”

She sighed then smiled wryly. “A professor.”

Protective urges surged. Some asshole had taken advantage of her when she was hardly more than a child? Had the guy been prosecuted? Had someone broken his fucking legs yet?

Her hands went up in a warding gesture, and she grimaced. “Don’t blame him. I worked at the coffee shop on campus. He thought I was several years older than I was, and I never corrected him.”

He snorted. Ridiculous. Like anyone would have believed a sixteen-year-old was an adult? “You seriously think he never figured it out?”

“Oh...when I ended up in his freshman class a couple of years later he was horrified. I don’t think he could have faked his reaction to finding out my real age at that point. I got a great mark in that class,” she mused.

He started to laugh, but was still skeptical about the guy being that obtuse. The funny part to him was that Minnow was obviously still proud of her conquest, even though in retrospect she had to know it had been completely inappropriate. “So you’ve always been a hellion?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “It’s hard to be a good when I get a total girl boner for men in authority.”

“Should I be checking your ID to make sure you’re not underage, Miss Korsgaard?”

She gestured at her handbag, which was on a chair by the bedroom door. “It would be less embarrassing than what you’re going to find if you keep going through my shit.”

If that wasn’t incentive to keep going...

“So who introduced you to kink?” he asked casually as he piled the trinkets he came across on top of her dresser. A small stuffed bunny that had obviously been well loved, a bundle of ancient-looking letters tied with ribbon, a child’s jewelry box with a fairy on it. Handcuffs, nipple clamps, a vibrator.

“The professor,” she replied. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I was kinky even when I was a kid.”

“Was he your first lover?”

“No.”