He raised a brow. “Is this based on your burgeoning career as my stalker?”

“You’re not denying it.”

“I’ve never had a girlfriend, Marcie.”

Noah returned then to top off their wine, give them the status on their dinners. His hair was smoothed once again, his lips no longer glistening with her juices, but it was impossible not to remember what he’d been doing to her during the appetizer course. He gave her a slow smile when their eyes met, but he deferred to Ben on whether they required anything else at the moment, not asking her preferences. He knew how this game was played as well, and it was as distracting as all the rest of it.

But she wouldn’t be distracted from this. No girlfriend. Thirty-two and he’d never sought a long-term relationship with anyone but the men with whom he worked. Even the women with whom the society column paired him for short durations were superficial, brief hook-ups with physical benefits for them both.

His mother had abandoned him in an alley outside a church when he was three, old enough to remember her. After that, he’d been in and out of foster-care situations, most of them bad, as if he’d been born with an unlucky star over his head. Before he hit puberty, he was on the street. It was then that star finally changed. He’d picked Jonas Kensington’s pocket and gotten caught in the act by Matt’s savvy father.

Even though things got better for him after that, his childhood hadn’t been the kind where he kissed the pretty girl in his third grade class by the monkey bars, or hoped someone would ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance in middle school.

She cocked her head, making sure her face didn’t reflect the compassion she felt toward that boy. The man before her didn’t need pity, not like that. He’d overcome, made something of himself, yet it had come at a cost. The cost was the wall she kept hitting, she knew that. She didn’t have a psychology degree, only her intuition and her determination that she could love him like no one else—if he would just let her.

“I’ll be your girlfriend then,” she said lightly. “You can take me to a carnival. We can share a broken coin necklace, pass notes during work. I’ll even take you to prom. If you promise to put out. Won’t be worth my time otherwise.”

Crossing his arms to lean on the table, he considered her at an intimate distance. The curve of those lips, the warmth that entered his gaze, eased some of her trepidation that she was treading dangerous waters. “What kind of notes would you pass me at work? Ones with Xs and Os, a lipstick mark pressed to the paper?”

She gave him an arch look. He hadn’t let her bring her wallet, but she’d balked at not bringing some toiletries. Fishing her lipstick out of her small bag, she freshened her lips, cognizant of the way he watched the soft give of her mouth against the color. Then she pressed it to one of the extra napkins Noah had left by the bread basket. Pulling out a pen, she put a couple Xs and Os around it with a flourish and pushed it over to him. “There. We’ll have to do the coin thing another time.” She paused. “Do you still have the collar you took off me?”

“Do you want it back?”

“Yes, but only if you’re putting it on me.” She raised her chin.

“Not our agreement.” His impassive expression returned and he sat back to sip his wine once more.

She pressed her moist lips together. She couldn’t make this dinner about that. So she looked over the potted plants to gaze at the mural painted on the building across the street. It was of a trio of black musicians, blue and white dogs dancing around them. As whimsical as it was, her eye was caught by something much closer, on the rail, screened by the fern. “Ben, look.”

He leaned forward. She started to rise to shift out of his view, but his firm touch on her elbow kept her sitting, reminding her of her exposed state from the waist down. Instead, he stood to look over her shoulder as she twisted around for a better view.

It was a pair of bright green salamanders. They’d been mating, or perhaps still were, because their lower bodies were connected. The much larger male was curled around the female in a tranquil, resting state, limbs and tails twined. Their tiny pulses rose and fell in their throats, and they seemed somnolent, relaxed.

“It’s like they’re spooning,” Marcie said, keeping her tone quiet, not wanting to startle them. “Aren’t they lovely?”

“Only you would notice that.”

“No. You would have too. I was just blocking your view of them.” She was aware of his chest pressed against her shoulder blade, his lips close to her ear. When she turned her head, they were close to her own mouth. She glanced up. “Kiss me, Ben. Please?”

Curling her hair around her ear, he studied her face. Then he bent, teasing her mouth with his own. When she sighed into his mouth, he turned it into a warm, lazy kiss that made everything settle, his tongue briefly caressing hers. When he sat back, though, she saw his face had that closed look once more.

“Adjust your skirt,” he said. “We’ll eat our dinner, then head for the house.”

Marcie: What do you do when it becomes too much?

Ben: You take a breath, and make yourself a promise. The bastards aren’t going to win.

Phone call between Ben and Marcie during final exam week

Chapter Eight

A Master stayed in control, particularly with a new sub, one experiencing that wild vacillation of emotional and physical reactions for the first time. He was entirely responsible for her well-being while under his dominance. Yet Marcie had a way of taking him off guard. He shouldn’t have given her that kiss. It was too intimate and personal, contradicting what he’d said only a few minutes earlier, that he was merely her mentor. Contradictions, inconsistencies. They would lead to real problems in an actual, intense session.

It wasn’t the first time he’d told himself that, but it didn’t seem to help much this time either. As they walked the few blocks to his place, she kept stopping to peer through the iron fences at the alley gardens, the hidden treasure trove of the Garden District. The gardens were as diverse as the people who lived there. One narrow space might look like a miniature English garden, right out of the pages of a home magazine; another was a chaotic design of homemade wire sculpture, English ivy and an old wooden chair painted to look like a cat’s grinning face. Marcie was a sensual creature who noticed things like that, took pleasure in them. Like she had the salamanders.

Her attention to detail would make her an excellent corporate investigator. Hell, no “would” about it. She apparently knew his life up one side and down the other. It was outrageous. He’d noted her decision not to follow up on his statement that he hadn’t ever had a girlfriend, which meant she knew why. She wasn’t the type to hesitate over asking a question if she didn’t know the answer, no matter how inappropriate the asking was. Yeah, he bet she was doing a bang-up job freelancing for Steve Pickard, impressing his veteran investigators.

When she turned to look at him, a small smile playing on her face, he reached out. She took his hand, that smile warming like a welcome touch of late afternoon sun on a winter day. As they kept walking down the street, her hand felt good in his, slim and restless, fingers tightening, little teasing strokes as she pointed out this or that, asked him questions about the neighborhood. The silver beads he’d helped her acquire still swung on her neck. He’d removed his, added them to hers, so the two colors sparkled together.

“Is Cass happy running Pickard’s satellite office here?”

“Are you kidding? She loves it. She misses the Lakeshore house in Baton Rouge, but she and Lucas found such a nice place, she’s feeling better about it. The Lakeshore house was one she bought with her own money, and after all she’d been through to reach that point, it meant a lot to her.”

“After everything you’d all been through.”

“It was hardest on her. She was in charge of everything.”

“You were second oldest. When she was working, you were in charge of the kids. The nanny Pickard hired was only part-time.”

“Well, I took over because I wanted extra spending money.”

“Yes, that was your official story. Pickard paid you the money he was paying the nanny, and you turned around and used it to help out with expenses for the kids and the house.”

She shrugged that off, but he wouldn’t let it go. “All of you had to deal with what happened with your parents. Jeremy.”

“It was okay. We were okay.” She didn’t like where this was going. Plus, she didn’t want the uncertainty and stress that had marked most of her teenage years to mar this moment.

“Marcie.” He stopped her. “You’ve been goal-oriented since you were in puberty. You were planning to be a business major before you were out of middle school. Your whole life was about taking care of those kids, dealing with your parents’ instability and planning for a career. You didn’t walk through a carnival holding hands with a boyfriend either.”

“Well, I can now. Given the company, it was worth the wait.” She lifted their clasped hands, put her other one over it. Daring, she dropped her head, pressed her lips to his knuckles, rubbed her cheek against him. His hand fit his large frame, the fingers deliciously thick when they pushed inside her, but in appearance they had a masculine elegance, like a master artist’s. She thought of his cooking again, as well as the other things he could do with those talented digits.

Sighing, he brushed his other palm over her hair, tugged until she lifted her head. “You don’t have to be goal-oriented in every aspect of your life anymore. You can still have your career, but enjoy dating, getting out and seeing the world. Having fun with friends.”

She withdrew, went back to strolling. “It’s funny how people say that. ‘Put off getting married and having a family, because you need to live your life first’. To me, loving someone is living.” She stopped then. “When you talk to someone who’s done all that traveling, experiencing and ‘living’, you know what they say? That they wish they’d had someone special in their life, sharing it with them. Marriage isn’t a prison sentence—it’s an invitation for someone else to join you on your journey, experience all those things together.”