Three days.

  The time between episodes was getting longer. The crescent of light that glowed when the dark eclipsed the light had gotten slimmer and slimmer. Totality never came. The moon was already moving away from the sun.

  There was a knock at the front door, and I froze. Why didn’t he come in?

  Did he want me to open the door naked onto 87th Street?

  The satin lining of my coat was cool on my back. I checked myself in the mirror and let the collar loose so it fell over my shoulders as I clutched the placket together at my breast. I opened the door. Colin stood under the front light.

  “Jesus, Colin!”

  “You invited me for dinner. Where are you g—?” He stopped himself when he saw my bare feet, then he raised an eyebrow at me, a smile curling one side of his mouth.

  “Not tonight.”

  I tried to close the door in his face, but he held it open. “Are you all right?”

  I got the coat up around me. “I double-booked. Sorry. We have to get dinner another time.”

  “Sis. What’s going on?”

  “My husband’s getting home for the first time after days of back-to-back surgery. I’d like to spend my evening doing what married people do, not letting my brother continually ask what’s wrong, okay?”

  The gears in his head turned. Behind him, people walked the street below. I was a woman in a coat talking to a man on my stoop.

  What I wouldn’t have done for a porch and a driveway.

  “Fine, I get it. You two. Jesus.” He shook his head.

  “Tomorrow,” I called when he was halfway down the steps.

  “Sure, sure.”

  He opened the front gate just as Caden approached with a stride and a face stiffened with jealousy. It turned into a charming smile when Colin turned and Caden could see him. They shook hands. I went inside and closed the door but didn’t lock it. When Caden came in, I was on the couch in my coat.

  He locked the door. Looking at me, he tossed his keys onto the table. His beeper. His wallet. The bulge in his pants was distracting me, but not him. He was slow and deliberate, as if nothing could rush a man without feelings.

  “I said naked,” he said.

  “Colin came to the door.”

  “Put your heels on the edge of the couch and spread your knees.” He put his jacket on a hook and came to me, rolling up his sleeves.

  I got my knees up, spreading them to show myself. His businesslike gaze had physical presence. He didn’t just look between my legs; he stroked without even touching me.

  “Naked is naked.”

  I shook off the coat. He undid his buckle, metal clicking on metal. Every cell in my body was drawn to him. Every inch of skin trembled for his touch.

  I’d never seen him like this. He was as stone cold and far away as he’d ever been. I didn’t know he could be this far inside himself.

  And yet, he was still the guy in the stairway. The man who was afraid he would hurt me. The husband who risked everything for our marriage.

  He looped the belt, holding the ends in his fist. “Don’t flinch.”

  He tapped the loop of the belt in his palm, looking between my legs. My breath picked up, getting shallower and faster.

  “What’s naked?” he asked.

  “Naked.”

  He slapped the inside of my thigh with the leather, and I flinched before it struck, then gritted my teeth from the raw sting, twisting with my knees together.

  “Open your legs.” He pulled them apart. “What are you afraid of?”

  “You’re going to hit my pussy with the belt.”

  He acted as if the thought had never occurred to him, raised the belt, and let it fall gently between my legs, sending sensation from my clit to my knees. The second tap was a little harder, and the third made me jump.

  “You’re afraid,” he said, “and you’re turned on.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think those two things might be related?”

  A hard swipe fell inside my other thigh, leaving a burn behind.

  I kept my legs open this time, daring him to do it again.

  He smiled and bit his lower lip. “We do this thing every time. I hurt you or I control you, then I lose it for a second, and boom, I’m back to normal until I’m not anymore. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  He reached his arm back, looking right at my cunt for aim, and I flinched. I flinched a lot. He put his arm down and smiled before he dropped the belt. He kneeled between my legs.

  “What I thought today on the way here was, why do I rush to that middle part?” Then he pressed four fingers flat against his mouth and licked them. “Why? When you like getting hurt so much?”

  He slapped his wet hand hard against my clit. It hurt so badly I lifted my bottom from the couch and screamed, but every sting, every jangling nerve blossomed into pleasure, and I gasped.

  “You like it.” He slapped again, and the pleasure bloomed bigger.

  “I love it.”

  “What are you going to do when I feel too guilty to do this?”

  The slap after was harder than the others, and I howled. He yanked my legs apart, and when I looked down, he had the belt again.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Come on, Grey. What’s a limit if you can’t push it?”

  He hit me with the belt. The pain was extraordinary, exquisite, nearly unbearable, and so was the explosion of pleasure. I cried to God when he touched my raw clit, pinching it between two fingers. I was overstimulated and sore, overwhelmed with sensation.

  Tight in his fingers, hood pulled back, he exposed my bare, red clit, pinching until the blood flowed to the rawest part. I got up on my elbows and locked eyes with him as he lowered his head and flicked it with his tongue.

  My body expanded, taking up the entire room in electricity and heat, but I didn’t explode. The detonator got warm but didn’t blow.

  “I think I knew the minute I met you.” He gave me a tortuous lick. “I think I knew about you, but I didn’t know about me.” Still pinching, he flicked his nail on a raw membrane and thousands of nerve endings screamed in pain.

  “I knew!” I cried, biting back a scream that would bring the police to the door. “About me.”

  He licked the bulb between his fingers. I was so close, yet he pulled away, leaving me on the edge. “Has it occurred to you I have no significant war trauma because my desire to hurt you is trauma enough?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  Another flick and I writhed in pain.

  “I can’t. Caden, I can’t take it.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  He put his lips around my clit and softly, gently, barely sucked on it. Then he let his fingers go. As the blood flowed back, expanding the capillaries and thrumming against the nerves, the pain grew explosive, but the pleasure of his mouth was just ahead of it, pulling the pain out to the brink of orgasm.

  Then he stopped.

  “Correlation,” I said breathlessly. “Not cause.”

  He stood over me like a tower pushing up against the limits of the ceiling. “You’re saying I’m not traumatized by my own needs, but that they just happen to correlate to this disaster of a marriage?”

  Disaster of a marriage?

  That was an ice-cold knife in my gut. Through everything, neither of us had labeled our union as anything but a buoy in a rough sea. The one stable, invariable thing through his ever-changing mental state.

  I put my legs down. “What did you just say?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Really, Greyson. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up in love again. Ready to conquer the world with my woman. Et cetera, et cetera.” He put his hands on my knees and pressed them open slowly. I resisted. “But when you look at it objectively, and really, I’m the objective one here, this is a nightmare.” He jerked my knees apart with more strength than I had to keep them closed. I fell back. “And you’re feeding it.”

  He wedged himself between my open legs and pulled down his zipper.

  “Are you angry?” In this state, he usually didn’t feel anything. If he was angry, it was a step in the right direction.

  “No.” His cock was in his fist. “Not angry.”

  Seeking leverage in soft cushions, I tried to get up to a sitting position. “There’s a name for this. For you.”

  “I’ve been called an asshole already.”

  “Not asshole. Something clinical.”

  “Really, baby?” He lined his cock along my entrance.

  “Sadist.”

  “No, no. That’s—”

  “Your father. And you.”

  He thrust his cock into me, and I was torn between rage and the edge of climax. “I wasn’t like this until you.” He pushed so deep it hurt. So deep his body rubbed my raw, sensitive clit.

  “You were too weak to see it.” I looked deeply into the firmament behind his eyes. “Sadist.”

  He twisted me, pinning my right arm under my own weight and my left behind my back, fucking me as though he wanted to push through me. “You made this monster. How do you like it?”

  Did I create this? Did he become what I wanted?

  Did it matter?

  “Sadist.” I squeaked it one last time before his hands found my throat.

  He bent me harder, pushing on my windpipe to growl in my ear. “Is this what you wanted?”

  “Yes.” I was choking.

  “You like the monster I’ve become?”

  “I love it.” Barely a breath.

  “I knew it.” His fingers tightened.

  I was handing him my life and my sex and my orgasm with both hands. I’d fantasized about this since I was a girl and finally… I had only a single breath to use to stop him.

  “I love you,” I croaked before he cut my air off completely.

  In my last gasps, the orgasm detonated. Hot shrapnel pinged off the shell of my skin, stinging my armor from the inside, fighting for life, stiffening with pleasure as I looked into two holes punched through a rigid, red face, open to the blue Iraqi sky.

  And black.

  Chapter Eleven

  GREYSON

  His face, briefly.

  His lips on mine, briefly.

  Then a breath like sucking charcoal.

  Burn.

  Breath again.

  Cough.

  Burn.

  Darkness.

  Cold.

  Heave.

  I got on my hands and knees, gulping air. Rolled to sitting. Shook out my bad wrist. No pain.

  The lamp was still on, but the light in the sky was completely out. His clothes were all over the room—shirt on the coffee table, jacket over the fireplace grate—as if he’d stripped on fire.

  If anything between Caden and I had ever been bad or dangerous, it didn’t come close to what had just happened on the couch.

  Was it the Blackthorne treatments? Were they stretching the time between episodes but making them more severe?

  I got my coat on and clutched it closed against a coldness it couldn’t protect me from. A chill from inside me. My feet were frigid against the wood. The front door was still locked. Between my legs, soreness and overuse hung like a weight. That had been the most intense sex I’d ever had. I didn’t know if I’d live through it again.

  “Caden?”

  I flicked on the kitchen light. Empty.

  Up the stairs. Lights still out. No sound.

  “Caden!”

  Office empty. Spare bedroom empty. Our room. Nothing.

  I went back downstairs, continuing to the hall between my office and the back door.

  Locked from the inside.

  My eye caught the basement door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I opened it, and a waft of cold air hit me. I thought of running for shoes but decided to bear the cold, creaky steps.

  Halfway down, shrouded in blackness, feeling the stone walls for the conduit to the light switch, I knew he was there. I couldn’t see or hear him, but I knew.

  “Caden?”

  No answer, but I found the switch and clacked on the light. It flickered and steadied to a flat blue with a constant buzz.

  Down to the dirt floor I crept, moving the false wall to the speakeasy and turning on the lights to illuminate the crumbling boxes and mosaic floor. I didn’t waste time calling his name or looking in the corners. I knew where he was. The wall with the false vase was already half open. I made my way to the safe and opened it, turning on lights as I went.

  The light right outside the safe was off. I flipped it on and opened the false wall in the back, crouching to get into the concrete room.

  Caden was in the bottle room, huddled in the corner, naked and shivering. His beautiful body was rendered sexless in distress.

  I rushed to him, dropping to my knees.

  He didn’t look at me.

  Putting my hand on his cold skin, I squeezed his arm. “Hey.”

  His eyes were open and he was breathing evenly, but he didn’t reply.

  “Captain,” I whispered, “it’s cold.”

  He turned to face me. His eyes were the clear blue sky, his lips were full and soft, and his jaw was strong and square.

  I knew that face, but I didn’t.

  But I did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I knew that face in the moments before his release, in the sorrow of the man who’d wept in my arms after holding death and pain in his hands for eight straight days. This was the face I’d loved on my wedding day and in the broken hours of night.

  I put my hands on that face and said his name.

  “Damon.”

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Get On The Edge today!

  The Edge Series is four books.

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  Rough Edge | On The Edge | Broken Edge | Over the Edge

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  Also by CD Reiss

  The Edge Series

  Rough. Edgy. Sexy enough to melt your device.

  Cutting Edge | Rough Edge | On The Edge | Broken Edge | Over the Edge

  * * *

  The Games Duet

  Adam Steinbeck will give his wife a divorce on one condition. She join him in a remote cabin for 30 days, submitting to his sexual dominance.

  Marriage Games | Separation Games

  * * *

  The Submission Series

  Jonathan brings out Monica’s natural submissive.

  Submission | Domination | Connection

  * * *

  Corruption Series

  Their passion will set the Los Angeles mafia on fire.

  SPIN | RUIN | RULE

  * * *

  Forbidden Series

  Fiona has 72 hours to prove she isn’t insane. Her therapist has to get through three days without falling for her.

  KICK | USE | BREAK

  * * *

  Contemporary Romances

  Hollywood and sports romances for the sweet and sexy romantic.

  Shuttergirl | Hardball | Bombshell | Bodyguard

  Consolation

  Corinne Michaels

  Copyright © 2015 Corinne Michaels

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the author.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or publisher.

  * * *

  Editor: Lisa Christman, Adept Edits

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  Interior Design: Perfectly Publishable

  (http://www.perfectlypublishable.com)

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  Cover design: Okay Creations

  (http://www.okaycreations.com)

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  Cover photo © Perrywinkle Photography

  (http://perrywinklephotography.zenfolio.com/)

  To Crystal, there are few women who can endure the life you do. You’re strong, beautiful, and no one’s consolation prize. I hope you never lose your sparkle.

  Prologue

  Natalie

  “Oh, Chloe, if you’d like to come out, please wait until your Daddy gets back,” I insist, holding my belly as another Braxton Hicks contraction hits. I grip the dresser and try to breathe through it. It seems like they’re coming more frequently.

  Once it passes, I try to finish what I came in here for. Aaron is away, but I want the nursery done so we can enjoy the next few weeks once he returns. I walk around what will be her room, putting a few more of the pretty pink dresses in the drawers. Aaron and I have fought about the vast array of pink things that are now strewn around the house—he hates it, I love it.

  He insisted we paint her room in camouflage. Brown, green, and black camouflage for a girl? No. I almost sent myself into labor with that argument. I got home and he and Mark were drawing it out on the walls. I launched various household items at Mark while throwing him out of the house. My husband found out shortly after how much he could suffer by my hands. I may not be a SEAL, but you don’t mess with me either. In the end, I won with purple walls and the sheer netting around her white crib.