“Stellan finds the one that’s worth it, he’ll break his back, sell his soul, work his fingers to the bone to win her and keep her.”
“And you can’t tell me why you know that about him, of course,” she remarked.
“I can tell you you’re gold in one of my playrooms, and the amount of subs out there whose mouths just set to drooling just ’cause you slid your ass out of a booth lays testimony to that. But you got a long way to go to earn the premiere status of Domme that everyone thinks you have. You rock at the practical, but if you can’t read that on Lange, you might have it all in practice, Sixx, but you’re not hiding from me you don’t have a lock on the most important part of the scene. Theory.”
“How disappointing that I have to strike off my to-do list starting my Dominatrix Academy,” she returned sarcastically. “And here I was, had the curriculum all set and everything.”
She knew she’d pushed Aryas too far when he spoke again.
“Lived most my life watching the two most important people in it, my mother and my brother, do without,” he fired back. “She did the best she could for her boys. Gave it her all. And we still had dick. Think it was daily growing up I told myself I’d do something about that. And I did. So now she’s good. He’s good. But if you got that in you from the moment you learned how to breathe, wanting the best for the people in your heart, you can’t get away from it. So get pissed. Put up your shields. Go play with some sub who means dick to you when the man who’s taken hold of a piece of your heart is sitting thirty feet away. But don’t expect me to like it. And don’t expect me to keep my mouth shut about it.”
“You know, you’re intensely annoying when you’re being all that’s you, especially the good parts,” she retorted sharply.
He shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“Can I go force some orgasms now?” she requested. “Or are you still feeling the lecture?”
“You can if you promise to think about it,” he replied.
“Think about what?” she asked.
“Being happy.”
Sixx stared at Aryas Weathers’s face.
Years ago, he’d had a nasty problem, and she’d been referred to him to assist in solving it.
When she had, she’d found out what he did, and he found out who she was and guided her to being all she could be with that. During that time, she’d kept taking jobs, but she’d made Phoenix her base, coming home there.
Coming home to him.
Because he was her friend.
The only one she had.
Also because she owed him huge chunks of her sanity.
And right then, she owed him reining in her smart mouth as well as giving him that promise.
Just doing that her way.
“How about I won’t actively avoid it?”
He shook his head but did it with his lips curling up.
“Go,” he ordered. “Play.”
Sixx turned from him, took a step away, and turned back.
“I love everything about you,” she whispered. “I’d break my back, sell my soul, work my fingers to the bone for you. There is precisely one human being on this planet that has that from me. You.”
With that, in order not to give him a shot at replying the way the beauty of his face told her he was going to, she immediately strolled away on her four-and-a-half-inch, pencil-slim heels, pointing at two male subs as she went but not breaking stride to the door that led to the playrooms, knowing with no doubts they’d follow her.
They did.
And she did this also knowing she had one pair of male eyes on her and only one.
Aryas’s.
But Sixx’s awareness was unusually incorrect.
She had two pairs of male eyes on her.
And that second set stayed on her all the way through the room and didn’t move, even after she disappeared behind the door.
Seven months later …
It was like a whisper of wind against her skin when the door opened, and Sixx knew to turn and look, not because she’d do that as a matter of course just to be aware of her surroundings and who was occupying them (something she would do).
But because something told her what was coming she could not miss.
And she was right as she sat at the bar at the swank restaurant in Washington, D.C., and watched with some surprise as Stellan Lange walked in the front door.
He looked magnificent, as he always did. Though she’d never seen him in the way she was seeing him now, with the black, cashmere overcoat covering his sleek, bespoke, dark gray suit.
The suit was de rigueur for Stellan.
But he lived in Phoenix where overcoats were entirely unnecessary.
Sleek, she thought, her eyes roaming him, consuming him, devouring him.
That was Stellan. Not slick, sleek.
From the top of his head that was covered in thick, dark brown, perfectly styled hair all the way down the six-plus feet that made him to the tips of his shining, custom-made, Italian leather shoes.
He was an Aquascutum ad. Cary Grant with a kick, all the polish, good looks and sophistication with a rugged, dangerous edge.
He was perfect.
She wasn’t on the job at that very moment, so considering her heart started tripping a faster beat, her first inclination was to lift her hand, call his attention to her, take this surprising circumstance away from Phoenix, from the Honey, and turn it into a drink among friends all the way across a continent.
Turn it into time with Stellan.
Just time … with Stellan.
She didn’t care what they did. She didn’t care if he could only be in her presence for thirty seconds to give her one of his charming smiles, one of his head-to-toes that took every minute detail in and made her clit pulse, then touch his smooth cheek to hers and whisper a hello in his deep, silk voice as she smelled his amazing cologne.
Without bidding them to come, the words filled her head.
Think about what?
Being happy.
Yes, even if it was just thirty seconds with Stellan, that would make her happy.
But then he swung his head from the hostess he was looking at to sweep his gaze across the space toward the dining area, and she caught sight of the expression on his face.
A chill slid down her spine, and Sixx was not used to that kind of chill.
Murderous.
He looked like he wanted to kill somebody.
Perhaps not the time to ask him if he’d like to take this surprising opportunity to have a chat over a noontime Scotch with a friend from home.
He was nodding peremptorily, seeming impatient as well as homicidal, as the hostess spoke to him and moved from behind her station with a menu clutched under her arm.
“Ready to order?”
Sixx tore her eyes from Stellan prowling behind the hostess toward the dining room to look at the bartender.
“Filet, medium rare, and err on the side of rare. French fries,” she ordered, beginning to turn her attention back to Stellan.
But the bartender said, “All we have are pommes frites.”
Was he serious?
She held his gaze probably looking a little like Stellan did as he’d walked in and replied slowly, “As I said. Filet, medium rare, and French fries.”
“Right,” he muttered.
She glanced quickly to her left and then to the back of the bar to see the shelves holding liquor were framed in mirrors.
Mirrors she could now see Stellan through as he stood tall and straight, proud and arrogant in that oh-so-special way of his, at a table in the middle of the dining room with the hostess standing at his side.
“I’ll be moving down to the end,” she told the bartender. “Cool?”
“Sure,” he replied. “I’ll nab your Pellegrino.”
Sixx grabbed her bag, he got her sparkling water, and with her gaze fixed to the mirror, she moved down six stools to the one at the end of the bar against the wall. A darker space, more removed, not as easy to see her.
But with that mirror, she had a view of the whole dining room.
She sat with her eyes glued to what was happening with Stellan in that room.
The hostess had disappeared, and an older man was standing with Stellan. Stellan who had not taken off his overcoat and also appeared like he had no intention to do so.