Disciplined by the Dom (10 page)

He didn’t like it.

He told himself that his own discomfort was most likely because of the things Roman knew about him, and not because of anything having to do with Catie, but the twinge in his gut was…new. Like so many things having to do with Catie. He remembered when he’d returned from speaking to Roman, he’d found Catie going through his wallet. And she’d shot back at him:
you deserved it
.

She had been right. More to the point, he had
felt
—rather than simply understood—
why
she was right.

Another new thing.

Now he felt uneasy.

He looked up to find Catie looking just as uneasy. No, she looked miserable. Wretched. But why should she? Just because he was behaving badly?

“Ok,” Eileen said, clapping her hands together to break the silence. “I came in to see how you were doing, Jakey, but they have stuff for me to do downstairs, so I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you need to do, all right?”

“Do you work with the kids?” Catie asked Eileen, looking suddenly interested.

Jake held his breath. He watched Eileen pause, only just, and her eyes close, just a beat too long to be a blink. He watched Catie slowly realize something had gone wrong, something she couldn’t identify. He watched Eileen open her eyes and smile valiantly.

“No, dear, I just stuff envelopes and whatever else they give me. I don’t have the training for that kinda thing.” Eileen gathered her things efficiently, quickly, without looking at either of them. “I’ll just leave you two to work out how you’re not involved. Jakey, I’ll see you later,” she said, only a little too cheerfully, and bustled out of the room without waiting for a reply.

There was a silence.

“What did I say?” Catie finally asked. Her expression was…sad. Genuinely sad. At the idea that she might have inadvertently hurt a woman she’d only just met. She looked like she felt Eileen’s pain herself, no matter how hard Eileen tried to shield them both from it, no matter how much of a stranger Eileen was to her. Jake stared at her, trying to work out what that must be like.

“She works here because her son died,” Jake said. “If there had been a place like this, maybe he wouldn’t have.”

Jake did not add:
If I had been different, maybe he wouldn’t have.

“Oh God,” Catie said, turning to look over her shoulder, as though her sympathy could follow Eileen down the stairs. “Do you think…no, I mean, I know it can’t help for me to talk to her. I just thought…she seems so easy to talk to…”

She is, if she doesn’t hate you
, Jake thought, and then admonished himself for it. This was not a good time to wallow in past resentments.

“I feel terrible,” Catie said softly.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said, wanting to get past the whole incident. “Now tell me what it is you think you’re doing here.”

Immediately he regretted challenging her. It only brought out that flashing fight in her that he’d found so attractive. It only reminded him of things that were not appropriate for the time and place.

She straightened her back, which unfortunately had the effect of pushing out her breasts under that thin merino sweater, and said, “I told Roman I was in school, and he decided I’m supposed to write some copy for the Valentine’s Benefit catalog. Lola said I’d need to do a tour of Stephan’s House to get a feel for it.”

Jake laughed. “Did they tell you what the benefit
is
? What kind of catalog it is?”

“No,” Catie said, somewhat deflated for not being in on all the details. “I’m just writing the parts about Stephan’s House.”

What a relief. And what a disaster. That this woman should make him feel so uncomfortable, that she should be so suspicious, that she should be involved in the two things he held most dear—no, it was a farce.

“I suggest you give me a tour,” she said. “And then I will be out of your hair, don’t worry.”

Oh, but you won’t
. He realized then, looking up at Catie’s stubborn, angry face, at the way she was so invested in how he would reply, at the way she had
expectations
for how he would behave—and, perhaps even more so, realizing that he had his own expectations, and that he had not been quite himself since catching her in Lola’s office—he realized that this had already become disastrously personal.

He had violated his one rule—not to allow a trainee to get attached—and he had done it in the one instance in which he could not immediately extricate himself because of the risk of exposure for Volare. And, perhaps even more unforgivably, he had done it for the worst possible reason: because Catie appeared to let him feel something new. But novelty was not enough of a reason to expose her to this; a leopard didn’t just suddenly change its spots, and Jake was no closer to being a normal human being now than he had been five years ago. He was no more capable of giving normal human beings the affection they deserved than he had been then, and it was abominable to allow Catie to believe that he was. It could only result in terrible things.

And yet, he could not simply cut her loose. There was the ongoing question of her thesis, and the many things she already knew.

There was only one solution. He would have to be so horrible that no woman in her right mind could feel anything for him. He would have to be an utter bastard, for her own good.

“Are you wearing the ben-wa balls?” he asked suddenly.

She blushed, and looked briefly around, even though they were alone. “It’s Tuesday,” she said. “You said Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“So it is. Did you have fun Googling me over the weekend?”

Now her blush intensified. “I already knew most of it.”

This surprised him. He had expected her to be too embarrassed to admit that she might have looked into his past.

“And no,” she said, the heat returning to her face, “I did
not
enjoy it. It was just sad.”

Jake felt as though he’d been struck. He was used to the tabloid sensationalism, to eager, salacious, predatory gossip. He was prepared for her to regard him as source of entertainment; he was prepared to see her revel in
schadenfreude
. He was not prepared for Catie to
sympathize
with him.

“Don’t pity me,” he said quietly.

“Who said I was? You’re a freaking Jayson.”

That he was, with all that it meant. Jake took a deep breath. Fine. A tour. If she wanted to see what the Jaysons were truly like beneath the veneer of wealth and breeding, he would show her. And by the end, she couldn’t possibly be enamored of him.

“Follow me,” he said.

chapter
10

Jake began with the administrative pool on the opposite side of the top floor, mostly to give himself a chance to think. Catie was gleefully and immediately swarmed by the energetic volunteers and paid professionals who ran his charity for him, as he knew she would be. Jake suspected Eileen had hinted that he and Catie were dating, and too many of the grandmothers who volunteered their time wanted to see him “settled down,” for some reason, and so Catie had been taken well in hand.

Which was annoying, but bought him some time. He had not thought through the idea of tour. He’d never had to
give
a tour; one of the perks of funding a charity entirely by yourself was that you never had to worry about impressing donors.

The trouble was, once you got down past the top floor, there were privacy issues. Issues of respect, and dignity. He didn’t particularly want to ask any of the residents who were trying to get clean and get their lives back on track if they’d be comfortable giving an interview.

Here, would you like to bare your soul at its lowest moment for the benefit of a charity catalog?

No. That was awful.

He didn’t have a solution.

“Well, I have been officially educated about how New York City regulations suck, and about how much food restaurants throw away on a regular basis,” Catie said, walking over with a bit of a dazed expression. “But I think the rest might have just…gone in one ear and out the other.”

Jake grinned, in spite of himself. “Did they talk all at once?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling back. “Mostly about you.”

It was as though they’d forgotten to fight. She was lovely when she smiled.

Jake was the first to snap out of it.

“There is a problem I hadn’t anticipated,” he said. “I’ve never given a tour for a reason. I can’t violate the residents’ privacy just for your convenience.”

“It’s actually not all that convenient,” she said dryly. He deserved that. “What do you do when someone comes to you for help? You give them a kind of tour, right, so they know what the expectations are?”

She wasn’t looking him in the eye anymore. It was very noticeable.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “In fact, we do. But we call it an orientation. We find it eases people through the transition and into a sense of community.”

“Give me the orientation,” she said, looking up at him with grim determination. “Pretend I have no place to go and need help.”

Catie held her chin high and didn’t move when a strand of hair fell in her face. There was something there, something behind this. He remembered suddenly very well what she’d looked like when she’d admitted that she had no one to call if she were in trouble. She’d looked like this. Brave.

Jake stepped back, trying to identify, once more, what this new feeling was. He thought he had it, finally: he felt out of his depth. Always, with Catie, he inevitably felt out of his depth. If it were anyone else, he would have pointed out that this, too, was not entirely appropriate—unless Catie truly did feel she had nowhere to go, and was in need of help. But somehow, looking at her, like this, reminding him so much of the previous week, he did not like to think of the answer to that question, and instead found himself nodding along.

“All right,” he said.

Keep focused, Jake.

He was failing miserably at driving her away from him. Not that he was particularly charming her, either, but he was too disoriented to do much of anything purposefully. This was another new feeling, and it was perhaps the polar opposite of the blissful control he normally felt as a dominant.

He opened a door for her and he smelled her perfume as she walked by. He was gripped by a desire for her then. Not just a desire for her, but for the known, elegant space of a domination scene, with
her
. BDSM had been the way he found he could most approach normalcy, the closest he could come to human expressions of love and intimacy; that’s what the act of domination, of controlling another’s reactions and sensations, was to him. It was only way he knew to get close. And with her, it had been…it had been as though he were no longer leading, and neither was she; there was something bigger than both of them, and he forgot, for once, how apart he was from everything.

No, that was ridiculous. It had been twice. Two encounters. This was simply more evidence that he could not be trusted to keep her at arm’s length. And if she had the sort of sensitivity he’d seen her feel for Eileen, if she felt that way about everything, he could hardly avoid hurting her.

He must do better.

“Which Roman general did you want to be?” he asked as they waited for the elevator down to the main floors. He put a little bit of sneer in his voice, and hated himself for it.

That threw her. From her breathing, he could tell she was thinking about the circumstances under which she’d told him about that.
Perhaps a misstep
.

“None in particular,” she said. “I wanted to be…my own.”

“I thought you’d made that up,” he said, satisfied to have been proven right.

She turned on him, but she didn’t look angry. Just amused.

“You thought I made up a childhood desire to be a Roman general? Really? Why on Earth would anyone do that?”

He shrugged, smiled. “Many people like to pretend at familiarity with the classics. It makes them feel cultured.”

She laughed. She
laughed
.

“Yeah, my dad was one of those. Hence the books with the fake leather binding. But I read them, because I thought he was really into it. So I talked to him about Pompey or Agrippa and he looked at me like I’d grown a third arm, and eventually I figured it out and tried to talk to him about other things. But what that weirdo education
did
give me,” she said, jamming her finger into the elevator button again, “was the ability to tell when someone is pushing a weak offensive as a last, desperate defense.”

He said nothing. The elevator pinged open, and Catie walked inside.

“Are you done with that now?” she said, holding the door open. “Because I’d like to start the orientation.”

It was at that point that Jake felt he might have gone some way towards convincing her not to feel anything for him, though not in the way he’d intended. Yet another new experience, courtesy of Catie Roberts: feeling like a total ass.

He guided her through the rest of the building in a state of stunned silence, all the while trying very hard not to notice the curves under that sweater, nor to think about the look she’d flashed him, and what that might have been like in a scene. Thinking about sex—any kind of sex—in this building made him feel like a terrible person. And he could not be around Catie without thinking about sex.

Luckily, today was not a particularly busy day. There weren’t any scheduled group therapy sessions, and he’d forgotten that most of the residents were on a field trip to Chelsea Piers.

“This is an empty building,” Catie said.

“It isn’t normally. And I won’t let you into the dormitory areas,” he said. “Look, usually it’s quite busy. This is one of the main recreation areas, where the residents can hopefully relax and socialize.”

She looked around at the well-used ping-pong table, the comfortable looking couches, and the collection of DVDs strewn about in front of the television.

“So these are all runaways? Kids at risk?” she asked.