“I’m so glad I can be helpful.”

He smiles against my shoulder. “Tools are helpful, Charlene. You in my bed this morning is a treat.”

My heart flutters at his words and the warmth of his lips on my skin. That fluttery feeling echoes through my body as his palm glides down my stomach.

“And I plan to enjoy you as I would the most decadent dessert,” he whispers in my ear before he bites the lobe.

By the time we’re done I’ve had two more orgasms, which Darren happily adds to his running tally. He quite literally keeps track of my orgasms, like they’re part of our sex stats.

I curl up against his side, blissed out enough that my brain and my mouth are on a disconnect, so I ask a question I’m not so sure I want the answer to. “Did you find anything out about the expansion draft?”

“Just that Alex and Randy are safe. The rest is up in the air until they announce the other players they want to hold on to.”

“Do you think you’ll be one of them?”

He runs his fingers through my tangled hair. “It’s hard to say. At thirty-four I’m closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Because the Vegas team owner has a hard-on over you?”

Darren sighs. “Yeah. Here’s hoping he doesn’t throw away one of his picks on me, but if he does, I guess I spend a year in Vegas playing like shit so they don’t renew my contract.”

I don’t know whether he’s intentionally left me out of the equation or not.

He checks the clock on the nightstand. “Fuck. I didn’t realize it was so late. I need to go. I have practice in half an hour.”

I regret bringing up the expansion draft when we don’t have time to really talk about it. He rushes to get dressed and gives me a quick peck on the lips as he shoves his wallet and phone in his back pocket.

“Your face smells like my pussy!” I shout as he rushes out of the bedroom.

“It’s my favorite cologne,” he calls back.

I expect to hear the door slam shut, but instead he pounds his way back up the stairs. He appears in the doorway, expression unreadable as he tosses my phone on the bed and then climbs up after it. “You have a thousand messages from Violet. She’d like to know if you’re being kept in my lair and if so, do you have a cage, or are you allowed to sleep in my bed.” He straddles me, eyes dark as he leans down, fingers sliding into my hair at the nape of my neck. His lips ghost over mine. “Feel free to answer that however you like.”

I wait to see what he’s going to do. Apart from a few brushings of lips and teasing of tongues, there wasn’t much kissing last night. Our mouths were too busy on other things.

He sucks my bottom lip between his and then his tongue flicks out, stroking along the roof of my mouth, causing me to jerk and flail. He pulls back, eyes searching my face as one side of his mouth twists in a malevolent smile. “Change the setting on your phone so there’s no preview of the messages, Charlene. Unless you want me and the rest of the world to know the content of your conversations with Violet.”

With that he releases me. I flop back down on the mattress as he gracefully rolls off the bed. He pauses at the door. “Next time I’ll kiss you for hours before I let you come.”

And with that, he disappears down the hall. I cover my mouth with my palm and smile behind it. I don’t care if our relationship is weird; I wouldn’t trade it for all the normals in the world.

I pick up my phone and key in my password. Darren wasn’t lying. I have a million and one messages from Violet. Half of them are gifs of the Fifty Shades movies. Most of them feature Christian Grey half naked, so I get distracted by the pretty as I scroll back through them. They stopped from midnight until eight this morning, and then started up again. The most recent ones are requests for proof of life.

I’m about to take a selfie, but then I realize I look like I could be a kidnapping victim with how messed up my hair is, so instead I search the internet for pictures of sex dungeons and send that to her instead.

I love Violet, and she knows more about me than anyone else in this world—except maybe my mother, and in some ways, Darren. But after my mom and I left The Ranch when I was a teenager, it was drilled into me to gloss over personal details. The less I share, the easier it is to keep myself and the people around me protected from my past. It’s part of the reason Darren and I work so well. We’re both private people when it comes to our pasts, and that makes him safe in a way a lot of other people are not.

Almost as soon as I hit send, my phone rings. “You do realize Darren and I have been dating for two years. I think you’d know by now if he chained me up and kept me in a cage,” I say by way of greeting.

“Alex said the living room looked a BDSM porn set.”

“It was just a few toys and some lingerie.” I’m downplaying it, by a lot, but Violet is prone to exaggeration, and those two are pretty vanilla—apart from the costumes she makes for Alex’s penis, anyway.

“Lies. Go wash Darren’s pearl necklace off your chest and get your ass in your car. I need to know exactly how much you’ve been keeping from me so I know how angry I’m supposed to pretend to be when the rest of the girls get here. Oh, and pick me up a dairy-free latte on the way over.” With that she hangs up.

I’m relieved that she doesn’t seem nearly as upset as I expected. I take a quick shower, not because there’s jizz on my chest—although there might be some in my hair—but because there was a lot of sweating between last night and this morning, and I’m a little ripe. I also smell like I bathed in sex perfume.

I put on my dress from yesterday since my bag with extra clothes is still in the car. I have an extra outfit or two in the trunk of my car at all times. And an emergency escape kit, just in case. I think it might be a PTSD thing from the whole fleeing The Ranch when I was a teenager, but I’m not willing to unload it on a therapist, so all I can do is hypothesize.

For years after we left, my mom and I always had a bag of essentials packed: three changes of clothes, hair dye, toiletries, Miss Flopsy (I will love that stuffed bunny forever), five thousand dollars in cash—obviously small bills, a burner phone and new identification, and a few other essentials. Was it overkill? Probably. But then my mom isn’t playing with a full deck. She’s missing pretty much every face card there is. But I still love her.

I’m on my way downstairs when I hear a code being punched into the front door. I freeze on the stairs. It can’t be Darren coming back; he has practice. The front door opens, and the warning alarm beeps.

“Mr. Westinghouse! It’s Gertrude. I am here for the housekeeping!”

I let out a relieved sigh. Gertrude has been Darren’s housekeeper for years. I take the rest of the stairs at a light jog, my calves tight from last night’s awkward, but fun, sex positions. Gertrude appears in the hallway as I reach the bottom of the stairs.

Now here’s something interesting about my relationship with Darren: we don’t have a lot of sleepovers. He’s a light sleeper, and I’m a flailer, so I feel bad when I wake him up with my acrobatics routine in the middle of the night—at least this is the excuse I usually give him.

I mean, I do feel bad when I accidentally elbow him in the face, and once I charlie-horsed him with my knee, but sleeping beside someone else is . . . strange. You really need to trust someone to be unconscious next to them for a lot of hours in a row. Waking up the way I did this morning, with Darren wrapped around me, makes me feel vulnerable, and also protected, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there it is.

“Hey, Trudes!”

Gertrude startles and nearly drops her cleaning gear. “Oh! Miss Hoar! I am sorry to surprise you!” She looks past me, up the stairs. “I can come back later if now is a bad time.”

I wish she would just call me Charlene. She always forgets the H in my last name – Hoar –is silent. “You’re good,” I sigh. “Darren’s at the arena, and I’m on my way out.”

She smiles, looking a little relieved. I don’t think she likes cleaning when Darren’s home. He makes her nervous. He makes a lot of people nervous because he’s so quiet and intense, sometimes even me. But it’s the good kind of nervous.

“I will get started right away then.” She heads for the living room. Two seconds later, she shrieks.

I rush to find out what happened and cringe. The remains of the kinky sex toy wheel of fortune are still scattered around the living room. The dragon dick stands majestically in the middle of it all, right beside the ball gag and the latex body suit. I don’t know what I was thinking when I pulled all that stuff out yesterday, other than I wanted to erase my fear and make Darren happy.

I scramble for a reason all of this stuff to be here. “I’m so sorry! We had a party last night.”

She glances at me with wide, horrified eyes.

“I mean with my girlfriends.”