She seemed to relax a bit. “Good. I was worried you didn’t know.”
“I do, and I will think about everything you’ve said to me today. But Vanessa, please let me pick up this very small bill. When you have money, I’ll let you buy me a beer. This isn’t an exchange of anything but comfort and kindness.”
“It’s hard for me to accept…”
“Don’t say charity. It’s coffee and a couple of pastries.”
She sniffled, but a smile broke over her face. “Okay.”
She was facing him when MaeBe eased over and gently pulled the phone out of her bag. Michael held her hand and for a moment wondered what it would be like if he was only her training Dom. How would he handle her if he had no other intentions than to see if they could work as a D/s couple?
He squeezed her hand as MaeBe walked to the bathroom, and the door closed behind her. Then he sat back. It was time for some charm. “So now that we know this is all about sharing an experience I would like to have with you, can I offer you some of my friend’s treats? He’s a master. In both senses of the word.”
Her lips curved up. He was starting to label her smiles. They were all very different. This was her happiest smile, the one she had on her face when she was genuinely amused. “Do you know any vanilla people?”
He thought about that for a moment. Did he? “My parents. And if they’re not, I don’t want to know.”
Vanessa’s laughter rang through the room. “I will give you that. I wouldn’t want to know either.” Her eyes lit as she looked down at the platter. “All right, what’s your favorite?”
“The mini donuts. They are why I work out.” He reached for her plate and started filling it for her.
MaeBe slipped out of the bathroom as Vanessa tried one.
She never saw the phone go back into her bag.
He wished that didn’t make him feel so fucking guilty.
* * * *
She should never have eaten that first donut. It was way too easy to look at the little sucker and tell herself it was perfectly fine to eat because it was so small.
But then so was the éclair she’d eaten, and the muffins, and so on. They’d managed to eat the whole platter while they’d had coffee and talked about what she should expect from The Club.
“So I’ll see actual sex happening on the dungeon floor.” She was still wrapping her head around it. It was a good thing the café was quiet right now. They were having a frank conversation. Luckily the only people sitting around them were a young woman who seemed completely engrossed in the book she was reading and a man who’d walked in fifteen minutes before and had taken a seat close to the restrooms.
His lips kicked up in a grin. “Yes, this is a private club, and I assure you Julian ties up every single member in nondisclosure agreements. Everyone is carefully vetted. You don’t have to worry that you’ll be pressured to do anything you don’t want to do, nor will anyone talk about The Club around non-club members.”
There was one problem she could think of. “But I know most of his employees are also club members.”
“Would it surprise you to know that it’s more usual for a club member to become an employee than the other way around?” Michael asked.
“Really?”
Michael nodded. “Yes, and understand I’m talking about Julian’s closest group of employees. Not the guys down in the mailroom. I’m talking about the ones who work in the offices he goes into every day. A lot of them came from The Club. He lives the lifestyle pretty much twenty-four seven. Not in a high-protocol way or anything, but Julian prefers the well-defined boundaries D/s offers. He doesn’t want to have to pretend to be vanilla even in the office.”
It was one of the things she found intimidating about the man, but she didn’t think BDSM was the reason. Julian would be intimidating no matter how he related to his wife. And husband. Julian Lodge didn’t let a little thing like thousands of years of societal norms stop him from taking what he wanted.
Hadn’t she felt that way once? When she’d started out, she’d felt invincible, like she could fix things, make things easier for the women who came after her. She’d put herself and her career on the line. She’d tried to take the sexpot image she’d gotten from those first ten or so movies and turn it on its head, show everyone she could be sexy and smart.
She’d gotten ground to dust.
Did she have to stay dust?
She used to flirt and have fun with the people around her, and now she didn’t trust anyone but Ruby and Dani. She liked the man sitting in front of her. Michael Malone was funny and charming, and he knew who she was. He didn’t seem to have a problem with it. The fact that they had an end date made it oddly easier to consider getting closer to him. He could be a baby step into the world again.