Photo Slave (The Art of Domination #2) (5 page)

This was it, that
moment when ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have drawn back their
shoulders and denied having any such interest or tendency, no matter the
behavior to the contrary. The modern woman, at least as much if not more so
than today’s man, was required to be aggressively independent to earn
acceptance and respect, especially self-respect. Never be yielding or
vulnerable or emotionally exposed, or so the cultural meme demanded, no matter
how alienating and destructive the deception. Strength required religion,
self-righteousness, and asexuality. Anything else was base, animalistic,
savage. And uncivilized,
delightfully
uncivilized.

This was the moment
when I waited—for the span of a hard heartbeat and an anxious breath—to see if
Iva Moreau was going to own up to what we both already knew, that she had
enjoyed what had happened between us on that couch in my studio. That taking
orders from a lover who made her face her darkest, dirtiest urges simplified
her life if only for an hour. That not being in control was a rare respite, a
place of safety protected from the demands of an overly complex, judgmental,
duplicitous world. And that it felt fucking good to be coveted and taken and
owned in all the ways she wasn’t supposed to want.

When I saw Iva square
her shoulders and her jaw, I felt that familiar wave of nauseating
disappointment and… vindication, I supposed, at turns both smug and sad. I had
been right about her running hot but also right about her insistence on
smothering that flame for the sake of cold, decrepit respectability. Just like
I had been right about all the others. Apparently, the first lessons learned
always stuck, and for good reason.

I had entertained the
possibility for a few days that Iva might have been different, might have been
scared into assuming her cardboard cutout persona rather than coming by it more
deceitfully. It was hard to decide which was the greater shame: that my
instincts were wrong, which I never enjoyed, or that they were right and Iva
was just going to choose to stay in her shell.

Then she nodded nearly
imperceptibly in the twinkling, shifting club lights and said, “If that’s what
it takes to get this out of my system.”

That was all the
invitation, all the
consent
, I needed
from
my
submissive. I surged forward
and forced Iva abruptly against the balcony rail, pressed my tensed body the
length of hers. Taut muscle against full, warm curves. Thigh to thigh. My knees
flexed just enough to fit my straining erection into the juncture of her groin
even through unyielding clothes.

I smiled with my lips
against hers, with the scent of vanilla and peach filling my senses, as Iva
sighed out a sudden raspy groan. “Get what out of your system?” I asked.
 
“How much you enjoy the music and the lights?
Or the bristle of adrenaline stinging the inside of your veins as you wonder
what’s going to happen next? Or that artist’s lifestyle you find so
distasteful?”

While Iva turned her
head to avoid my words, my lips, while she tormented us both by denying the
kiss, she also pushed the swells of her breasts and her restless thighs against
me. Her mind was arguing with her body, and I had a clear favorite to win.

“Or me, Iva? Are you
thinking you’ll get me out of your system? Because colder women than you have
tried and failed. With that hot blood in you, there isn’t a hope in hell, Brown
Eyes.”

Iva bent away from me
but not to avoid me. She bowed her spine so that she could lean backward over
the dance floor with my arm around her waist and with the rail to keep her from
falling. She drew in a long slow breath that seemed to fill and fill and fill
her. Her loose hair swayed in the air. Then she spread her arms like she’d have
let herself tumble back, but like she knew she wouldn’t fall. The posture
pushed her hips forward into mine and ground us against one another at the
groin. When I gently bounced her, so slightly, she sighed haltingly and arched
deeper. It was possibly one of the most open, sensual, trusting, submissive
positions a woman had ever assumed with me. Only feeling her impaled on my
painfully rigid cock like this would have made it better.

“I’ve already learned,”
Iva crooned in a drugged, languid voice that rang of sensuality at its purest,
“that too much of a good thing….”

“Is still a good
thing,” I finished for her.

She shook her head,
brown curls swinging again, and corrected me, “Is still too much. This is too
much. You are too much. The constant tension and the excitement… the
indulgenc
e, it eats away at your
judgment and frays you at the seams. The… the center cannot hold.”

“Yeats,” I breathed hot
against the swell of her cleavage and felt Iva shiver.

“You know the poem.”

“I wrote the lines in
lipstick on models’ bodies for a European photo shoot last year.”

Which made her laugh,
even if it rang sullen. “Heathen.”

“Oh, you have no idea,”
I promised Iva as I hauled her up from her dancer-like bow and dragged her
behind me through the crowd until I found a semi—very semi—private corner in
Haute’s maze of luminescent glass walls.

Iva lost her breath as
I shoved her back against the glass bricks. Stepped up flush against her, I
pulled her arms above her head, loomed over her. “Keep your hands there,” I
instructed her clearly despite the rampaging hunger grinding my voice to
gravel. And she obeyed, holding her arms stretched aloft in surrender as my own
hands roughly explored the yielding curves of her full breasts and hips and
ass.

My lips kissed a
ravenous path down Iva’s neck to the swell of one breast above the immodest
neckline of her dress, my tongue flicking and testing the light salty sweetness
of her skin. And she trembled. Oh did she tremble, so defenselessly, so
perfectly. It was this kind of… purity that I’d have given anything to catch
and preserve—distill—in a photograph, but the kind of moment that would forever
elude capture. Like a dream I could vaguely remember so long as I didn’t
concentrate on it. The attempt to grasp it only made it dissipate.

I laved my way back up
the slender column of Iva’s throat to whisper into her ear, “No mask. No
anonymity. Does that bother you? That people can see how much you like this?”

While Iva surrendered
with her actions, she challenged me with her tone. “This isn’t my first time in
a club, Mr. Beal. I’ve seen worse.”

My teeth at the lobe of
her ear made Iva jump. “But you haven’t seen better,” I said before spinning her
to face the wall and making her assume again her position with arms stretched
above her. “And I believe you know the proper way to address me. Say it.” She
didn’t. “
Say it
.”

“Nolan.”

This time, my touch was
a feathery trail of fingertips up and down Iva’s prickling skin, goose bumps
rising obediently. Along her naked arms, across her shoulder blades, down her
tensed flanks, up the backs of her thighs and behind her quaking knees. Did she
understand what I was doing? Did she suspect at all what was coming as these
lightest of caresses sensitized her skin? Iva rested her cheek against the
rippled glass of the wall, face hidden in the crook of one arm, and writhed so
subtly to meet my touch. She paid no obvious attention to the dull hiss of my
belt sliding through the heavy denim loops as I drew it from my pants.

Less than a second.
That was how long Iva had to realize what was happening as I stepped back just
a half measure, just enough. I laid a lash from my thick leather belt along the
backs of her thighs below the hem of her dress. It was a light strike but a
predictably shocking one. She jumped again, as did the straining member in my
jeans.

More light, quick
lashes against her bare legs kept Iva tensing and flinching, until I gripped
the hair at the nape of her neck. The gesture was less about keeping her still
than about the warm, tickling shudders I knew it would send through her
shoulders and down her spine. Awash in sensation, her body and mind stopped
resisting in the slightest. She no longer recoiled or winced as I belted her
harder, across the ass where I knew the thick rayon and spandex of the bandage
dress would buffer the blows.

I knew what I wanted
then, and I wasn’t willing to wait for it long enough to get Iva back to my
studio. With my tensed body at her back, sealing us together, I reached around
her and pulled the hem of her dress up her parted thighs. I clearly heard her
bite down a whimper as my fingertips found her engorged clitoris through the
warm material of her panties. One finger stroked the tender pearl of flesh
while two more delved between the lips of her pussy. The silky underwear kept
me from pushing my fingers deep into her. It was an agony we both relished.

“You know what you are
supposed to say,” I reminded the submissive.

Iva’s shiver against me
told me she knew what I was implying, what I intended to do in the heat and
glare and throbbing chaos of the club. Then I went about it in earnest, rubbing
her clitoris in furious circles. Her breathing raced to match my pace. Her hips
matched my motion. My cock was ready, head slicked with moisture.

But I wasn’t going to
fuck her tonight. I was just going to make her say my name. I was going to make
her give me her climax, her body at its most vulnerable moment, despite the
time and place. No,
specifically
here, because the lights of Haute were shimmering and shifting like a fever
dream. Because the music was vibrating and pulsing through the walls and the
floors and the sea of bodies, through our feet and our hands and our chests.
Because the air was thick with the smell of champagne and pheromones and a
hundred exotic, expensive perfumes. Because Haute was the kind of place and I
was the kind of man she was running away from. I wasn’t going to let her escape
from me. From the moment. From what she really wanted. From her true nature.

“Nolan!”

IVA

He left me hanging for
a week.
Bastard
.

I didn’t know what to
expect from Nolan Beal after… after I’d compromised myself with him that first
night in his studio. Then with the obsessing over the memory of the way he had
touched me, handled me, dominated me. Then that night in the club.

Humph. That sounded
more like I didn’t know what to expect from me.

I stood now in front of
my painting easel in my garage, a cold and cloudy Saturday afternoon coloring
the small, high windows a moody gray. A battered old space heater wheezed out
warm air to beat back the chill that otherwise would have emanated from the
bare concrete floor and the sheetrock walls. I thumbed the charcoal stick in my
hand and stared aimlessly at the faint image of the portrait of Pop I was
outlining on the canvas propped up in front of me, mindful of the fact that I
was supposed to be working on my graphic art portfolio at the computer right
now. It wasn’t like I didn’t already have a dozen portraits of my grandfather,
each trying to convey his avid French sensibility, the steel in his back and
his bones from his time with the military, the weathered soul that had lost a
wife and a son and worried for his granddaughters. Whereas my portfolio was
only about halfway finished—my heart wasn’t in it.

At the moment, my heart
seemed to be calling all the shots. Well, my heart, my libido, and Nolan Beal.
I’d had my taste of that hedonistic artist life again—the late nights and the
clubs and the very hip people talking about their gallery shows and their
fashion lines and whether the chorus to their new song sounded too much like
Linkin Park or Fort Minor. The itch to draw and paint, with brushes on a canvas
instead of with a mouse on a screen, had prickled under my skin like a fiend’s
need until I came out to my makeshift studio.

I was just taking a
break, I told myself, from clicking on pre-drawn shapes and digital color palettes
that composed slick images someone might use for selling high-rise condo space
or techie toys or insurance. Maybe I could have compromised and worked on one
of the paintings standing against the wall in a corner, the landscapes and
abstracts and stylized still-lifes I’d been experimenting with for the office
and restaurant market. After all, every city in the country brimmed over with
waiting rooms, exam rooms, conference rooms, and dining rooms, and all those
rooms had walls that needed art. Pretty art. Inoffensive, easily understood
art. Art that matched the carpet and upholstery.

Who was I to get all
high and mighty about commercial art versus fine art? I was a secretary, and I
had bills to pay. It was either this or brace myself for groveling to Mitsy for
the next fifteen years. Maybe I could have taken my chances with another admin
job somewhere else, but that was risky—might have been better, might have been
worse. It was all about minimizing risk now, making the tough but smart
decisions. The scholarships and the fellowships and the limitless life of the
artist, without a timecard or a predictable forty-hour grind or even a 401k to
think about…. Well, I had pissed all that away in my youthful arrogance. Time
to grow up.

The only hitch in my
five-year plan was Nolan Beal. And me. Me ignoring my portfolio. Me having sex
in lavish hipster studios. Me making a spectacle of myself in nightclubs. Me
holding a charcoal stick in one hand and my cell phone in another, waiting for
the call I’d been receiving each day for a week, since Haute.