“All those times you’ve asked me if I was scared of you, you were serious?”

“It was with good reason.” He leans forward. “I’m not trying to tease you or frighten you unnecessarily. But I’m hard on the people I love. It took me a long time to learn that, and you are too important to me for me to treat that lightly. You have to know that you can stop anything about me—my words or my body—at any time. You have to know that you can leave me at any time.”

I’ll never want to leave. The thought appears unbidden and I shove it aside. But it’s harder for me to shove aside the word love, as if I’m one of the people he loves, because to be loved by Ash…I’ve wanted that since I was sixteen.

“If you don’t have a word in mind, you can use my name—my first name.”

“Maxen?”

He nods. “You say that when we’re alone together and everything stops. For a break—if you need one—or completely, if that’s what you need instead.”

I think for a moment. The kind of pornography I watch and the kind of books I read—well, I’m definitely no stranger to this kind of thing. In fact, certain facets of this lifestyle have been the subject of my fantasies since I was old enough to have fantasies. But faced with the reality of a relationship like this, I find myself shy. Not out of fear necessarily—although there is a little fear and I’d be foolish not to be at least a little wary—but out of an acute awareness of how little I know. Of how meager my experience with any kind of romance or sexuality is. When I speak next, my voice is hesitant. “Does all this make you…the kind of person who dominates people?”

Another nod. “Yes.”

“Are you going to whip me or something?” I ask, suddenly nervous.

“Not all Dominants are sadists, Greer. I won’t always want pain or humiliation, but I will always want control.”

“But you will want pain and humiliation sometimes?”

He leans back again, his face thoughtful. “I’m approaching this wrong. You’ll have to forgive me…it’s been six years since I last initiated a relationship with someone, and I’m out of practice. And in any case,” he says, rubbing his forehead with his thumb, “I didn’t know enough about myself then to warn Jenny.”

It’s Jenny’s name that galvanizes me. It’s a sick urge, to want to show up a dead woman, to prove I’m as good as she was, but it’s an urge I can’t fight in time to control myself.

“Show me,” I say. “Show me what you need to warn me about.”

9

The Present

“Show me,” I repeat.

His eyes lift to mine.

“You said we were going to have a conversation among other things, right? Let’s do it. I know what to say to make you stop. I trust you.”

“You barely know me,” he points out.

“You’re a war hero and the President of the United States. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody.”

He smiles again at that. “You make a specious case, given how many manipulative Presidents there have been, but I want to be convinced, so I’ll allow it.” He reaches down and slips a high heel off one of my feet, repeating the action on the other foot, rubbing gently at the red line left above my toes. “Why you act afraid of pain when you already wear these is a mystery to me.”

I giggle a little, and the look on his face at the sound of my laughter is electrifying. Belvedere, Embry, me…the President seems to love the laughter of others. The realization strikes me with a chord of melancholy. What loneliness and darkness does he carry in his heart that he needs such people around him?

He places my left foot on the arm of the chair he’s sitting in, and as soon as I see that he’s going to do the same with my other foot, I instinctively pull it back, since that would entail me spreading my legs in this short skirt. He doesn’t react, other than to look up at my face, and I realize that he’s waiting to see if I’ll say his name. My new safe word. I bite my lip and force my body to relax.

I place my foot back in his hands, and he sets it on the other arm of the chair. I’m grateful that our relative heights mean that he’s at eye-level with my chest and not my pelvis, but that gratitude disappears when he says, “Pull your skirt back for me.”

My hands shake when I obey, partly from excitement and partly from nervousness. I wasn’t lying when I told him it felt natural to obey him, but I’ve also never exposed myself so brazenly, so intimately and deliberately. Despite the impassive look on Ash’s face, I can see that he’s fascinated, aroused by bossing me around like this, and that bolsters me.

“I’ve never done this before,” I admit as I finish pulling my skirt up. Cool air wafts around my inner thighs and against my lace-covered pussy.

“Which part?” Ash asks, keeping his eyes on my legs, on the sliver of lace between them.

“Listening to someone. Showing myself off. I’ve only ever had sex once,” I confess.

His head snaps up. “Only once?”

I nod, swallowing. “When I was twenty.”

He groans, resting his head against my knee. “You mean I’m going to be the second man who’s ever been inside you?”

“You sound so certain that you’re going to take me to bed,” I tease, but my teasing comes out breathier than I mean for it to. It’s the way his dark head looks as it leans against my bare thigh, the way his legs are spread all strong and casual in the chair…yes, he should be certain that he’s going to take me to bed. I’ll take myself there if he doesn’t.