Shades of Pleasure: Five Stories of Domination and Submission (32 page)

Why was he ushering her out?

“Where are we going?” She dragged her feet.

“We just want to talk,” Damon said, his voice smooth and
reassuring.

They pulled up a chair for her.

 “Okay.” She sat and concentrated on breathing and
swallowing because neither function was coming naturally at the moment.

Trey and Damon both pulled up chairs and sat in front of
her.

“Blair, what have these past two weeks meant to you?” Trey
asked.

“Gosh, I don’t know how to put that in words.” Blair
struggled to think of what to say and then gave up. “These past two weeks have
been magical.”

Damon shook his head. “No, we need to know more, Blair. Be
specific. We’re not sure what to think.”

“Think about what?” Her gaze hopped back and forth between
the guys. They were being vague, cryptic, and she had no clue what they were
getting at. What did these nights mean to her? “When I saw you that first night
onstage, so many things went through my mind, so many emotions, memories of how
things had been with us.”

Trey nodded, encouraging her to continue with his eyes, a
hint of a smile.

“And then I found out you had not only seen me but you’d
sought me out, and I was over-the-moon thrilled. These two weeks have been more
than I’d ever imagined. More exciting. More sweet. More sensual. More intense.
I learned about bondage and about myself. I learned I’ve been hiding from
something for a long time, and finally last night I accepted the fact that the
secret I’ve been hiding has been poisoning me.”

Damon tipped his head slightly, his lips thinning almost
imperceptibly. “What’s that mean, Blair? What secret?”

She couldn’t look at Damon. Instead, she stared down, at her
hands, clasped in her lap. “I haven’t been totally honest with you. But I want
to be. After we moved, things got worse with my mother and stepfather. Much
worse. My mom got stoned on pills every single day, to the point where she had
no clue where I was, what was going on, whether we had food in our house. My
stepfather, the bastard, took advantage of her being so out of it.”

She couldn’t believe she was about to tell Damon and Trey
this, to actually reveal something she was so ashamed of, she’d punished
herself for it for over fifteen years.

“I felt like I was invisible, like I didn’t exist anymore.
Nobody cared whether I was alive or not. There was no hope I’d ever find you
two. My mother…she was lost. I dropped out of school shortly after we moved. I
had no friends. I was totally isolated.”

“What happened?” Damon leaned forward and took her hands in
his. “Did the bastard rape you?”

“No, it’s much worse than that.” She studied his hands.
Neatly trimmed fingernails, skin slightly roughened. Strong hands. Masculine.

“Worse how?” Trey asked.

“He had a party one night, and his friends noticed me. They
talked to me, made me think I was special. But it was all a game, a bunch of
lies. I found that out, but not until after it was…too late. He might have
forced me to…do things to him, but they didn’t have to. I did it. Willingly.”

Damon squeezed her hands. “You were young, Blair. Lonely.
Desperate for attention. You wanted to believe they felt something for you
because you had no one else. They manipulated you.”

“I was their whore,” she confessed coolly. “But only that
one time. I left that night and never went back. I tried to get back to you but
couldn’t. Eventually, I ended up in a home for runaways and it was okay. I met Sandy there. Made friends. Got my life together. But I wouldn’t have sex again after that.
Because I didn’t want any other man playing me, taking advantage of my
weaknesses to get what they wanted. Sex was about power. Not love. It was
empty. Dirty.”

“You had sex with us. You played our games.”

“It’s different with you two. You don’t take. You give.
Don’t manipulate and lie. You see? You taught me that sex could be about
giving, about loving, rather than just about taking. And so when you ask what
these past two weeks mean to me, I have to say they meant freedom and truth.
Through submission, I gained liberty from both the guilt of believing those
assholes’ lies and from the chains that had bound me, not allowing me to accept
my own sexuality. And through your games and illusions, you helped me face the
truth, about myself and the past I’d been punishing myself for.”

“Thank you for sharing that with us,” Damon said.

There was this awful, agonizing silence that Blair wasn’t
sure she could endure. It lasted at least a half an eternity too long. Finally,
Trey asked, “Do you know why all our gifts had rubies in or on them?”

Why were they talking about rubies now? After what she’d
just told them. “No, other than maybe you remembered that rubies were my
birthstone.”

“No, there’s more to it than that.” Damon pulled on her
hands, tugging her to him. She shuffled around and settled on his lap, leaned
back into his warmth. She felt so safe. So cherished. Loved.

“Do you know anything at all about rubies?” Damon asked.

“Not really.”

“Let me explain.” He laced the fingers of one hand through
hers. “The ruby is a very rare and precious gem, a symbol of the relationship
we shared when we were young.”

Still confused why they seemed to be skirting around what
she’d just told them, she nodded. “That’s very sweet. And romantic.”

“The stones are refined with heat, their brilliance and
color amplified,” Trey added.

She glanced at him. What were they trying to tell her?
“Heat?”

“With heat—trial, pain, conflict—our relationship has been
refined too, just like a ruby, to become what it is now. Fiery passion, abiding
trust and…lifelong devotion.” He pulled a small red box from his pocket and
lifted the lid, revealing a sparkling ruby ring.

Finally, something she understood. Lifelong devotion. Ring.
Marriage. Oh God! The breath caught in her throat.

“After what you’ve just confessed, I have no doubt that
we’ve made the right decision. We said we had to leave in two weeks,” Damon
explained. “But we hoped we wouldn’t have to leave without you.”

“We had to make sure it was what you really wanted,” Trey
added. “Not every woman would be happy in a relationship as complicated as
ours.”

Happy? What she felt went beyond joy. But this was too
wonderful to be true. She wanted to believe and yet she was afraid to. She
needed to hear one of them say the words, to tell her exactly what that ring
and what all this talk about rubies meant. “You want me to go with you?”

Damon nodded, his eyes sparkling with love and hope. “We
want you to be our wife, to share our lives. We don’t want to live another day
without you.”

Wife. He’d said it.

The world was spinning. Or she was spinning. Or maybe it was
both. She squeezed her eyes closed and clung to Damon, half expecting to wake
up and realize she was still sleeping, that the whole night had been a dream
and she was still hours away from seeing Damon and Trey for the last time.

One of them stroked the back of her head. “Baby, are you
okay?”

“I think so.”

“Do you need some time to think about this?”

What was there to think about? Sandy would be sad but she
would understand. Sandy was a true friend, wanted Blair to be happy. “I-I
don’t. No.” She forced her eyes open and stared into Damon’s dark gaze, seeing
for the first time a spark of fear. He was afraid of what? Of losing her? She
flattened her hand against the side of his face. “Where are we heading?”

“California.”

“That sounds good. I can pack light. But how much time do I
have to wrap things up? There’s my friend Sandy, the rental house and my job. I
need to give notice.”

“Take as long as you need,” Trey said.

“To hell with that,” Damon snapped, the fear evaporating
from his eyes. “We’ll pay a moving company to get her stuff and move it to our
place, and the job…”

“The job’s nothing,” she said, laughing through the sobs
gathering in her throat. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I can quit
tomorrow. After all, if I’m not important enough to promote, then I can be
replaced in a day or two. Right?”

“Exactly,” Damon said, kissing her cheeks, her nose, her
chin. “Not important enough to them, but you are to us. You can’t ever be
replaced.”

Blair leaned back. “Was this your plan all along? To see if
I might fall in love with you and agree to go on the road with you?”

“Not exactly.” Damon and Trey exchanged smiles. “After
spending years searching for you, months working out our schedule, and weeks
devising a way to get you to our show…we were thinking much, much bigger. Our
plan was to make you fall in love with us and convince you to marry us,” Damon
corrected. “That was our hope. Our dream.”

“I can’t marry both of you. It’s against the law.”

“You’ll be legally married to Damon but married to both of
us in all other ways.” Trey plucked the ring from the box and slipped it on her
finger. Smiling, he said, “It fits perfectly.”

“Yes, it does. But I want to know one more thing. About the
woman in red. You’d asked me if I knew who she was, and I said ‘me’. Damon, you
said that was sort of true. What did you mean by that?”

“I meant she was you, but the red dress represented your
acceptance of our protective love, a love that will never let you down again.”

“Okay, I understand now. But you need to forgive yourself
too, Damon. You did all you could at your age. And you never gave up. It’s
because of you that we have a lot of wonderful years to look forward to.”

For the first time in her life, Blair did look forward to
the next five, ten, more years. Because she wasn’t living in the shadows of a
secret. She had Trey and Damon, their love and their magic. Freedom.

“By the way, you call yourselves Masters of Illusion, but
the magic you perform is real. I think I’ll call you Masters of Magic from now
on.”

“You can call us anything you like.” Damon kissed her,
showing her yet again how very real and very powerful his magic could be. And
then Trey did the same, and she knew she would never again doubt the fact that
magic was real. Or look at another ruby without thinking of her two wonderful
men and the many gifts they’d given her. The most precious one being their
hearts.

The End