Descent (Black Heart Romance)

“I make no apologies for what happened that night,” he states, calm, but immovable. “I warned you not to go on the date, and you disobeyed me.”

My eyes widen. “I didn’t know the stakes! If you had communicated them to me, then I wouldn’t have gone.”

“Well, I’m communicating them to you now. You’re mine, and I don’t share. If it crosses your mind to go out with another man again, it should follow logically that I’m going to take retribution on the sorry fucker.”

I manage to keep my aggravation reined in, but just barely. “We weren’t dating.”

“We are now.”

I sigh. “Fine. I’m obviously not going to go out with anybody else right now, while I am… tied to you,” I say, for lack of better word. “But I didn’t then, either. I did what I said I would. You and I were over as far as I was concerned.”

“Obviously, you were incorrect.”

I meet his gaze dead-eyed, but I don’t swallow the bait. “I need to know you won’t do it again.”

“I promise not to do it again without warning you—explicitly—first. There. How’s that?”

I narrow my eyes at him, not altogether satisfied, but I suppose that’s good enough. “All right. I guess that will have to do.”

“Mm-hmm. Anything else?”

“Um… exclusivity. We’ve covered the need for mine, but not yours.”

I’m tentative to bring this up, knowing I don’t have any real currency to barter with. He’s put me in a corner with the stuff he has on Charity. This isn’t a normal situation where I have the option of leaving or saying no, and that makes me pretty powerless in this whole relationship. He can do whatever he wants, apparently, but there are practical things to consider. The man will not put a condom on his dick, so if he’s shoving it in other women when he’s not with me… well, I have a problem with that.

“Exclusivity isn’t an issue,” he says. “I wouldn’t go to all this trouble if I wanted to fuck anyone else, Hallie.”

His words are reassuring, but not good enough. “This ‘relationship’ is very uncomfortable for me the way you’ve set it up. It’s highly untraditional. You have all the power and I have none. If I have dinner with a male friend and you don’t like it, you might shoot him. What can I do if you do something I don’t like? Nothing, because you’ve taken every bit of the power for yourself.”

“I understand that,” he says. “I’m not an easy man to be with, Hallie. There’s a reason I had to resort to blackmail to get you here.”

“I realize that, but the way things are now, it’s very unfair to me. Does that matter to you? Or are you fine with being unfair to me as long as it means you get what you want out of the arrangement?”

His brow furrows. “Of course that matters to me. I’m not above bullying you to get you where I want you, obviously, but now that you’re there I’d prefer that you’re happy.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do to make it feel less… high-risk for me?”

“I’m not sure it’s what I can do, but what you can do.”

My eyebrows rise. “Me?”

“You have to trust me. You call our type of relationship untraditional, and I suppose it is, but it’s not unheard of. I have friends who are involved in the BDSM scene who have relationships exactly like that. They work because their partners trust them to take care of their needs.”

“I knew you were into BDSM,” I mutter under my breath.

“I’m not, they are.”

“Right. You’re not, you just like to have BDSM style relationships, sex, and—oh, yeah—the torture machine in the corner. But yeah, you’re right. Definitely not into BDSM.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m not. I told you I’ve dabbled. The club we met at is a common playground for people who enjoy the lifestyle, but it wasn’t enough for me. I did that for a while because it was the closest to a satisfying experience I could get, but even that grew dull. That’s why you’re here. In BDSM, the sub is the one who truly has all the power. Because of those rules—safe, sane, and consensual—she would be the one with the ultimate power in the relationship. That’s not what I want.”

“You want a prisoner.”

I swear, the man almost says yes, but he stops short, probably realizing that is not a socially acceptable thing to admit.

“You can tell the truth,” I tell him, shrugging one shoulder.

He regards me carefully, but I suppose because I’m calm and blasé about it, he feels comfortable admitting it. “I want someone who can’t leave.”

I nod slowly. I’m sensing some deep-seated abandonment issues. “Do you realize that by not giving someone the ability to leave, you’re also stripping away their ability to choose you?”