Page 100 of Dominate Me

Epilogue

Five months later

Haley

My fingers played at the collar on my throat. A smile stretched my cheeks until they burned. From the small mirror I was looking at in the passenger seat of his car, I barely recognized the happiness glistening in my eyes.

I hadn’t stopped smiling since Jensen came through the front door earlier, walked directly toward me, and handed me a jeweler’s box.

“I had this made, just for you,” he’d said, with all the confidence in the world like he tended to do. Fortunately, he was almost always right.

As soon as I’d opened it, I had to force the tears to stay in my eyes so they didn’t ruin my makeup. When he’d placed it around my throat, kissed me at the back of my neck before he locked it into place, he’d whispered, “Mine.”

My knees had almost buckled and I was thankful for his strong arms that held me against him to prevent my collapse.

“You keep touching it,” Jensen said, looking at me from the driver’s seat where he’d just pulled into a parking spot outside Luminous. “Scared it’ll disappear?”

I reached for him. “Wishing I would have had more time to look at it. It’s just...so beautiful.”

“Not as much as you.” His eyes spoke his truth, something I had long since stopped doubting.

Five months ago, the day after Jensen told me he loved me for the first time, was the day I stopped doubting him. When we had to go to the police station and file a formal report against Timothy, he stood by my side as my lawyer and my lover, and listened while I explained the entire story all over again.

Never once did I feel fear. As soon as I’d seen the safety had never been flicked off on the gun, all my fear had evaporated anyway. Weeks later Timothy was charged for his crimes and while his trial hadn’t yet started, Timothy was a small annoyance in my past, one I no longer thought about. I’d be called to testify, but I wouldn’t give him, or that night, any headspace until I was forced to.

Since then, Jensen and I had moved forward in our relationship.

Every day, he proved the words he’d whispered to me that morning were true. I was his, to do with what he wanted, but he was also mine, and he took that role seriously. He was my lover, my protector, my friend—my partner in everything.

And last week when a construction crew broke ground on a new house we were building together, just off the resort property, it was then he’d stood on a dirt-filled space with Lake Michigan and a hole that would soon become our basement in the background, got down on one knee—not caring that his suit pants got dirty—and asked me to be his wife.

But tonight...tonight was even more beautiful.

Because he’d given me the very last thing I could have ever dreamed of having.

Collared.

To everyone inside and outside the lifestyle, I was now permanently and officially marked and claimed as his.

“Are you ready?” Jensen asked, as my fingers pressed against the stamped metal collar for possibly the billionth time in two hours. “Tonight is yours, whatever you want, my pretty girl.”

I inhaled a deep breath and nodded.

We had come to Luminous often, but only to watch and to mingle with Dylan and Gabby, mostly. We had gone further than the first room I’d seen before which I had quickly learned was the tamest playroom at the club.

The other rooms held furniture and implements and devices for the kinkiest of sorts.

Those rooms had also become my favorite ones. Not because of what they were doing in there...but because there was no shame in what they were doing or what they enjoyed.

The first time I entered that room, a weight lifted, a weight I hadn’t even known I carried. But it was what I had feared or what had kept me from pursuing this lifestyle further when I was younger—the fear of what people would think of me.

But that night, as I watched people being fucked with dildos of enormous sizes, a man being fisted by his partner and other acts that made my eyes pop open, the certainty of being where I belonged settled firmly inside me.

And Jensen had been at my side and at my back for all of it.

Tonight, though, was different.

It was my birthday.

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