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  The lights flickered to life right on cue, and the shushing sound of Lycra and flesh against towel-covered mats centered her. The practice never changed. The teacher—or leader as they insisted on being called—recited the familiar words. She needed this time, and after about six months of forcing herself to show up every day, it almost caused her physical pain when she skipped it. She rolled her shoulders, did her little pre-yoga mental pep talk routine, ignoring everyone around her as usual.

  She found it easy to sink into a sort of a blank mental space, dare she call it a subspace, when doing the daily torture. But knowing what she did about subspace, she acknowledged this would be as close as she ever went to that particular sensory rabbit hole ever again. Not after enduring the final humiliation…she shook her head as the teacher—no, the leader—began her script. The same words every time, soothing in their familiarity.

  By the time they finished the warm up, the first four postures including wrapping her legs and arms around each other like pretzels and holding some of the most awkward poses the human body might possibly endure, anxiety still zinged through her. After a year of daily practice, many times she would zone out, and glance up at the final breathing exercise, shocked that the hour and a half had passed already. But not today, apparently.

  With a heavy sigh, she took a sip of water before heading into the balancing series. Without warning, a strange sensation slithered down her spine. The annoying, constantly-rattled state she seemed to operate in lately had to stop. She got a grip on her psyche, gave it a shake, used her inner Domme voice, and stared straight ahead at the mirror. Wedged into one of the more crowded classes, she only had a small sliver of herself visible. She began the set up for standing head-to-knee pose, one of the more difficult ones she’d recently mastered. Her leg trembled, but she kept her knee locked as instructed, with her other straight out in front, her legs a perfect letter L-shape, both hamstrings singing out with dismay until adjusting to the stretch.

  Her fingers slipped around the ball of her raised foot ever so slightly. She took a breath, glanced up into the mirror, and immediately met the gaze of the man/boy who’d knocked her world off its tenuous axis all those weeks ago. Goddamned Brody Vaughn was in her fucking yoga class, two rows up. He clutched his foot. Sweat pouring off him in rivers. His face registered simultaneous surprise and dismay.

  She lost her focus and her hands loosened, making her topple forward, and sending the row in front of her murmuring and moving to make room. Falling out of a posture occurred all the time. Falling flat on the floor like a marionette with its strings cut—not so much. She bit her lip, forced away tears of embarrassed frustration, and sat. The instructor never missed a beat, making her slow, skinny way toward the hapless practitioner sitting on her ass on her mat and kept up the mantras, the words, the same stupid words every fucking day over and over, amen.

  “I’m fine.” Sophie scrambled to her feet and shot Brody a quick frown of admonition. His already-red face flushed a deeper shade, something only someone in tune to the subtle changes of a submissive’s signals would notice. He held his damn pose though and kept his eyeballs off hers admirably. Deciding to wait out the pose for the moment, she used the opportunity to just…observe him.

  Every inch of her skin prickled as she took in his black, close-cut hair, broad shoulders, the muscled expanse of his torso, and the most luscious ass she’d seen in a long time. Her tongue darted out, touching her upper lip of its own accord. She drowned in him, imagining herself touching him, tracing her tongue along all the ink covering his firm flesh.

  The man sported more tattoos than she’d ever seen on one body. In addition to the obvious and very unique linked chain around his neck, he had elaborate tribal designs on both shoulders, and some calligraphy letters traversed the breadth of his upper back. She tried to make sense of them, but they were random.

  It hardly mattered. She’d only seen part of his god-like physique during practices. Now, wearing nothing more than shorts and a sheen of sweat, he was like a living sculpture, his every muscle standing out in bas-relief, begging for her touch.

  The bodies in the room shifted, moving on to the next posture, leaving her behind. She jumped, mortified at how naturally her thoughts about the sexy young man skidded right off the rails into visions of ropes, cuffs, whips, and those full, kissable lips, and what she’d make him do with them.

  “Jesus, woman, get a grip,” she muttered under her breath and spent the ensuing seventy minutes using every ounce of energy to avoid looking at him.

  Once the class wound down, she pondered skipping her usual five or so minutes relaxing like a limp noodle. She lay there, aware of every small sound around her, negotiating internally for the entire time whether to leap up and escape or to let him stumble out first. Finally, cursing her sudden indecisiveness, she rose, rolled up her mat and left the room, ignoring everyone, including him. She managed to yank her sweat pants over her bare legs, jam a hat down onto her wet hair, and had her hand on the door, escape within her grasp.

  “Um, Mizz, uh.” His deep voice hit her low where it shouldn’t.

  She grimaced and turned, fixing a glare of aggravation on her face. When their eyes locked, the abject need in the huge, brown depths of his forced her to stumble.

  “Sorry.” He took a step away from her.

  The small foyer of the yoga studio did not accommodate the mass of sweaty bodies milling around, trying to regain a collective equilibrium, get re-dressed, and get the hell out of there. Someone shoved into her hip, and she lost her footing. But he did not drop his gaze from hers, and she hung onto it like a lifeline while sweaty body parts floated around them. She leaned into him, unable to stop. He latched onto her arm. Startled, she stared at it.

  She opened her mouth to protest, to tell him to take his fucking mitts off her, until she noticed he had kept her from embarrassing herself further by falling to her butt outside the hot room.

  “Let go,” she said, mildly, feeling an odd sort of rightness in her brain. He tightened his hand on her for a split second and then obeyed, keeping his gaze trained to the floor. A bright, clear vision appeared to her at that split second. She forced it away. Mainly because it seemed so very…right.

  “Can I buy you a coffee, or something?”

  “Huh?” She stared at him, dumbfounded, remembering at the last minute to snap her mouth shut. “I mean…no…uh…thanks.” Escape. That had to be her goal. Get as far away from him and his needy perfection as possible.

  “Okay,” he said, his face devoid of anything including disappointment. “See ya around.” He moved around her smoothly, his hip grazing hers, yanked the door open, and walked out leaving her flat-footed in the middle of the milling, post-workout crowd.

  ****

  The simultaneous sensations of relaxation and excitement thrummed through Brody’s brain. He’d never felt so at ease in his skin yet ready to leap out of it. He floored the Merc, relishing its throaty roar across Interstate 94 toward his nameless, soulless, suburban home. He’d been a big fan of yoga generally since giving it a try in Nashville, once his coach had forced the entire team to practice it in order to improve their flexibility.

  Desperate for something to do to dispel his ever-increasing state of high alert, he’d Googled hot yoga and found a few locations including Birmingham and Ann Arbor. Figuring he’d not checked out the college town to the west, he headed there. And had run right into the woman he blamed for his current overwrought state.

  Unable to suppress a smile, he downed the rest of the water in his bottle and opened every window in the expensive, obnoxious car. Sophie Harrison would, of course, be waiting for him in the Ann Arbor class. She of the intangible, unexplainable…something that he craved but didn’t understand since meeting her in that stifling office with her too-short skirt, severe hair, glaring at him with angry blue eyes.

  He caressed the soft leather steering wheel as the cool fall air blew through the car’s interior. Moments like this, his
body at rest, his brain on automatic, memories of Her, his Mistress, would sometimes blindside him. He gulped at them now, his body hardening under the loose-fitting shorts.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit…. Ah, goddamn it!” he yelped, smacking the wheel and willing her gone. When would she be—gone, well and truly, from his consciousness?

  Arriving at what passed for home, he parked under the huge building, his chest tight with stress. His phone buzzed in the seat next to him. He gripped the wheel, trying to wrap his mind around the hard fact that, at that moment he would just as soon keep driving at sixty miles per hour straight into the wall he currently faced as get out, get a shower, and go pick up the horrible Kelli. They had a date. He had to take her to a concert, then bring her home and fuck her, barely remembering any of it as usual.

  “Help,” he whispered to no one, meaning it more than he had ever meant anything in his life. The unmoored sensation of being completely un-fucking-hinged made his head pound.

  He hauled out of the German-engineered monstrosity, leaving the windows down, not caring if anyone took the fucker and even pondered leaving the keys on it, posting a sign on the window that said, Steal Me. Such were the depths of his not caring.

  By the time he entered his not-quite-penthouse unit, he recalled he’d left the damn phone on the passenger’s seat. Totally not like him—he was just not the type of person to leave windows down, doors unlocked, to have such blatant disregard of the accepted behaviors. He stared into the mirror over the front hall table, acknowledging that he, Brody, simply was not the man he used to be—and would likely never be.

  Sophie’s face wavered across his consciousness—that split second he’d grabbed her, and she’d rejected him, outside the yoga room.

  “God, it was just a cup of coffee,” he muttered, wandering into the kitchen and downing another glass of water.

  His laptop sat open on the huge, granite-topped island. He tugged it close and hit the touchpad. He’d done some research apparently, if the pages open from three in the morning were any indication. He remembered that moment now, The itchy, skin-crawling horror of need that drove him to dig deep into the local Internet, to find what he required.

  And in black and white—well, red and purple, to be exact—he’d found it. Madame Katrina, it stated in classic block letters on a sort of velvety backdrop. The only image, a tall, leather, high-heeled boot, the sort that he used to lick his way up on command, dominated the center of the screen, the trailing ends of a whip near the toe of it, as soft and inviting-looking as he remembered.

  With a grimace, he clicked on the scheduling tab, noted the price without flinching—amazing what a six-figure salary will do for a single guy—and observed the professional calendar-style system. Madame Katrina, Dominatrix for hire—that was what he’d been reduced to. He wished there was a photo of her to ensure she didn’t weigh three-hundred pounds and give her commands from behind a computer screen. He required the real thing, not some lame-ass fraud.

  The investigating he’d done, contacting some former clients anonymously, all pointed to one conclusion: if he required a hard discipline session, then Madame K should be his next stop, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Sophie’s face flickered to life in his upper brain as the lizard version did something else to him entirely.

  Her shock at seeing him in class, the way she blatantly checked him out, thinking he didn’t know, her tall, firm, taut body, mostly bare in the minimal hot yoga garb, hardened him all over. Yeah, a trip to see the famed Madame Katrina should be on his calendar if he was going to be worth a shit to the team that paid his salary, much less not drive his stupid car off the nearest bridge.

  A knock at the door startled him from the absentminded stroking of his hard-on. He glanced down at himself, startled and unable to recall when he’d taken off his shirt. Frowning, he walked to the door, throwing a T-shirt over his bare torso. He rested his forehead against the door for a second, then sighed, stomped back over to his computer, and set his date with the mysterious Dominatrix, at three-hundred dollars an hour, for two weeks from the following Friday.

  The team had games the next day, Friday, and following Wednesday, and then a long break until a stretch of travel along the West Coast. Maybe, just maybe he’d get something resembling the old Brody back, under the supposed expert hands and whips and ropes of the good Madame, her address not far from the Black Jacks’ stadium. Convenient, he mused, without a trace of irony.

  Opening the door, he suffered the attentions of Kelli-with-an-i until he woke, naked, wrapped around her nude and bony form, remembering absolutely nothing.

  Chapter Eight

  Sophie glanced at the private phone buried in her purse. The system she had set up to screen all applicants by requiring them to provide a real name and driver’s license number—or they could take their needy bullshit down the street to the whorehouse—had served her well so far. Considering her history, she still wondered how she trusted anyone to tell the truth. But through hard experience, she’d found men such as this who desired her special services were desperate enough to tell her anything she asked. The clients remained anonymous. She never knew real names or histories.

  Only the hulking, dark-skinned man who took twenty-percent of her fee got the real stories behind the men standing at her door on any given night. By providing screening and bodyguard services during the sessions, Lance Peterson—the name he’d given her and she’d run through an old contact at the Detroit police department—had proven her savior, in more ways than one.

  His latest text informed her she had a new appointment in a couple of weeks, and the guy had cleared all levels of the elaborate background checks.

  He says to call him Robert, the message concluded. But he’s good. Experienced. Should be a piece of cake for you, sweetheart.

  She smiled, already hearing his dark, deep voice in her ear. A gay man in a long-term, committed relationship, Lance had roamed around the hardcore BDSM scene for a time, been in the military police for ten years, and now served as her right hand man.

  Okay. Thanks. See you then. She entered the information on her smartphone calendar before turning to the tasks of legality surrounding the soccer team.

  Her computer screen displayed several windows, including the latest gossip site that had latched onto the Bad Boys of Detroit like a leech, following them around everywhere they went, finding all the bad and very little good, best she could tell. The strange part—the site itself had been set up by their own marketing department as a ruse, an excuse to talk about their team members under the guise of being an objective blog about the new expansion league and teams—never far from her disbelieving mind.

  Yeah. Talk about a clusterfuck of epic proportions. She hated the damn thing for a lot of reasons. It made her job a hundred times harder when evidence of misbehavior amongst the players and, in one case an assistant coach who’d been quickly fired, got smeared all over the Internet within moments of said occurrence. She took notes on the day’s collection of bullshit on the glossy, annoying site.

  Once she’d pointed out what should have been obvious—that their own organization spread potentially damaging gossip and photos about their players—the powers that be rallied, Jack leading the charge, demanding the site be dropped like a hot potato. Of course, some trolling Internet smartass snagged it, slightly altered the name, and it went on and on and on as the photographers and gossip mongers figured out how to earn their own measure of notoriety by posting phone videos and pictures straight to it.

  She narrowed her eyes as the screen refreshed itself and a slew of new pictures emerged. At least one good thing had started happening with it—since there were ten total teams in the expansion league the fans who posted on it had a few other targets not just the Black Jacks, although the boys from Detroit were absolutely the darlings of the cheering, and jeering, public.

  Thanks to the marketing ploy, she had already slogged more hours than necessary trying to get the overgrown k
ids out of jams they had no business getting into. It wasn’t that professional athletes didn’t ever get into trouble but never before had a group of them gotten into so much, seemingly on camera. Jesus, they might as well call it Black Jack Gentlemen: The Reality Show.

  Something on the newly updated site caught her attention. She slid her glasses up her nose, the constant gesture of the hopeless myopic. Her close encounter with the young Brody at the yoga studio had faded, although she’d had to take a series of cold showers to dispel not only the physical but the emotional needy vibe he had slung at her. As if she required more excuses to stalk the kid.

  Because stalk him she did. Using the convenient excuse of her position to monitor both his Facebook and Twitter accounts, which he maintained religiously, and on the level, posting exactly twice a day as instructed by the genius marketing office and making generic comments about training, games, and other soccer matches he watched. Nothing but the basics and only one photo that he’d kept the same for months, as opposed to the Internet promotion whores on the team who seemed to like posting shirtless photos of themselves ad nauseum.

  But that picture had mesmerized her for nearly an hour when she’d seen it the first time. He leaned on the handlebars of a large motorcycle, one eyebrow slightly cocked, his hair suggesting that a long ride had just occurred—disheveled, windblown, much longer than he wore it now. His wide, genuine smile lit up every corner of her brain as if he had flung open the blinds on a bright summer day. His face, shoulders, and arms filled the frame. The longer she studied the lines of his bone structure, put together in such a way to suggest a strong, rugged personality with a hint of darkness, the more obsessed she became. A darkly attractive almost-man who had worked hard for his sport, and one she itched to touch, to soothe, to cradle to her in ways she did not comprehend.