Page 27 of The Bodyguard

“Look around you, Princess. What do you see?”

For the first time since finding him alone, I allow my gaze to fall over the room. It’s not a conventional bedroom.

Chains hang from the ceiling. It’s nothing like the Victorian furniture from downstairs. Here it’s more insidious. Leather benches are shaped in strange ways. A glass cabinet housing ball gags, cuffs, other deviant items I can’t name. One side of the wall has an array of whips, floggers, crops, canes, paddles.

I’ve walked into a club that caters to dominants and submissives. I may not know everything about them, but I know enough to know what kind of a club this is.

I gasp without meaning to. My body melts in a strange way. I’m hot and scared but I can’t move away from the fire that is the man before me and the room behind him.

Then images of him and another woman in this very room slither into my head. How did Igor know to find him here? It’s not like Igor would frequent a place like this. Unless he brought his wife because he is maddeningly happily married.

Igor knew to look for Kayne here because this is where Kayne comes to. I’m engulfed with questionable rage.

My relief of finding him alone quickly transforms my rage into full-scale jealousy yet again. I want him to do the same things to me that he does to women he brings here.

“You think I won’t hurt you when my cock is this hard for you?”

He presses his body into me. I feel the concrete hardness of his cock dig into my body. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can only say his name over and over again.

Wetness pools in my panties. I throb and ache everywhere for him. For his touch.

“Leave,” he says but he doesn’t release me.

“No.”

“You think you know me?” he roars at me.

“I do. Kayne Langley. Thirty-two years old. Six-foot four. Blue eyes. You were born on a farm in Wyoming. Your parents loved you. You saved your sister from a vicious fire when you were twelve years old,” I say softly. “The same fire that killed your parents. That’s how you got the scars on your back, and this one,” I bravely reach out and touch his jaw. I feel him vibrate with anger and frustration and for a moment defeat when he closes his eyes at my touch.

“I know you had to go and live in New York afterward. I know you had to live with your uncle, Benjamin—”

“Enough,” he shouts and I shrink back in genuine fear.

“Don’t say his fucking name.”

He pins me to the wall again, crushing my breasts against his chest. He grips my jaw then uses his thumb to brush over my lips as if he were trying to erase what I just said.

“Don’t say his fucking name, ever again.”

“Okay,” I say, scared, not of him, but for him. “I won’t.” I listen to him because I didn’t think he would show me this side of him. Wild rage mingled with the sorrow of a young boy.

What did his uncle do to him?

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