Page 57 of Taming Scarlet

Especially after working on getting to know the woman better.

The thing was, she wasn’t the superficial, pampered, sometimes selfish person she came off as if you only knew her on the surface.

Underneath that was a lot of depth, a lot of grief and loneliness.

She’d been a young girl who lost her mother. And in doing so, lost her father as well. To his grief for the love of his life. Then to the work that he used to mask his own pain.

She’d been left in the care of a nanny who, by all accounts, seemed to resent everything that Scarlet had been given, making her mean and judgmental. She had never been the maternal figure Scarlet had been needing as a young girl, but instead was someone chasing a check and doing everything in her power to tear down a lonely kid.

It seemed Scarlet’s penchant for running babysitters out of her life started with that nanny.

She’d told me stories about all the ways she’d made the woman miserable until even the paycheck wasn’t enough reason to stay.

After that, she’d been alone.

Her father worked and traveled nonstop, leaving her alone in his place from age fifteen on.

To make up for his absence, he showered her with gifts.

Which, of course, she didn’t want.

But, eventually, she turned all that opulence into a sort of career online.

Those strangers gave her the attention she’d been craving her entire adolescence.

Eventually, she got addicted to it. Then she catered her life to their approval when she could get it, then to their attention when she couldn’t get anything else.

It was why she could never be away from her phone, away from those hits of attention she craved.

It was also why when I put her in a kneeling position and left her alone with nothing but her thoughts, she broke down.

She was forced to face the emptiness for the first time.

Seeing that made me want to help fill her up.

But with something better than a stranger’s approval.

With her own.

But that was a process.

It came with breaking down her walls, then making her trust me, then learning to trust herself and her own desires and goals.

It was something more than I’d ever attempted with a sub before.

And as I watched her talk to the guy at the club, the jealousy that built in me let me know that this was more than just scenes, more than just a power exchange.

I was invested.

Interested.

I cared about her in a way that extended beyond play.

But I wasn’t sure if she was ready to hear that yet.

I’d have to play it by ear.

Contrary to ignorant beliefs, power play between a dom and their submissive was always led by the sub. By their desires and needs. There was no dominating without a their sub’s desire and willingness.

---