“You want me to tell him you’re mother-henning him?”

  “You want me to paint your toenails in your sleep again?”

  Rory snorted. “I keep telling Mom we need to take your key.”

  “Like I need one around here. When we bought this place, Marcus couldn’t believe there were no locks on the doors. Total culture shock.”

  Rory chuckled as he pulled up in front of their house. “Okay. I’ll make up some reason I’m here.”

  “No, don’t bother. He’ll know I called you. I wouldn’t lie to him about it anyway. I just don’t always give him advance warning when I’m looking out for him. You know the personality type, right? A controlling alpha you can’t do anything for, unless you go through the backdoor.”

  “I have no idea who you mean, but now I know you’re worried about him. You made the joke for that way too easy.”

  “Shithead.” Thomas cut the connection, leaving Rory grinning ear to ear. Which fuck, somehow connected to his neck and shoulders, and sent another ripple of agony through the muscles he’d worked. He assumed honking the horn until Marcus came out so they could have a talk through the open window of the van wouldn’t fly, so he reminded himself that movement was the friend of sore muscles.

  After he rolled down his ramp, he saw Thomas in the barn loft, offering a wave and pointing downward, telling him Marcus was in the barn office. Rory gave him a thumbs up and Thomas turned back to whatever he was doing up there. Usually he had several easels set up with works in progress. If they were sketches, concepts, he kept the doors open to nature, like today. Final paintings meant the upper doors would be closed or he’d have a curtain of plastic strips pulled across the opening, so he could get the light but didn’t have to worry about anything blowing in and sticking to the paint.

  As Rory entered the lower level of the barn, he heard Marcus finishing up a phone call. Perfect timing. He also understood why Thomas had reached out to him—the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

  Marcus didn’t have a lot of tells, but that was one. The guy smoked when a bug had seriously crawled up his ass. Guilt twinged. He probably should have called last night or first thing this morning, confirmed everything was good. Like everyone else but Thomas, Rory always just assumed Marcus was fine. But that was why Thomas was Marcus’s person and vice versa.

  He pushed himself into the doorway of the office. Marcus had a desk in here, a chair and a couch. Pretty spare for the roomy space, but it gave him pacing room, like now. He was more casual today, in faded jeans that fit him like an action star’s and a loose cotton shirt. The shirt was a deep purple with a graffiti style design of the New York skyline. Probably some designer label, since it had that casual yet fashionable look Marcus pulled off as effortlessly as the hair.

  But when Rory glanced at his face, he nixed the mildly insulting volley that usually opened their conversations.

  Marcus’s command of himself and his surroundings could be as intimidating as hell. Even his pissed-off side was calculated. Rory should know, since he’d been on the receiving end. The guy had once thrown a hundred-pound sack of grain at him when he was in his unbraked chair. But at that time it had been a targeted move, to get Rory to wake up and stop adding to the straws that were making Thomas’s life a nightmare.

  Marcus not looking in control and smooth made the world feel out of balance. But no one was invincible; Rory knew that as well as anyone. What surprised the hell out of him was that Thomas thought he might be able to help Marcus feel better.

  “Hey,” he said. “Thought I’d stop in and let you know Daralyn is doing good this morning.”

  Marcus’s attention had been on him as soon as he appeared in the doorway. Now his serious mouth tilted a little at the corner. It didn’t make him look less tired, but it gave his expression a wryness that eased Rory’s concerns. “Thomas.”

  “Can’t blame him. You look a little rough.”

  Marcus sat down on the sofa, stretching his arm out along the back. “I’m all right.”

  Rory made a noncommittal noise. “Don’t know if Thomas told you, but she’s going with me to Florida.”

  “He did.” Marcus tapped out a cigarette and lit it. It was a good thing most people didn’t look like a black and white film star when they smoked, or everyone would be lining up to get lung cancer.

  Marcus considered Rory a long moment. “The way you handled things by the barn last night. You were as calm as any Dom I’ve ever seen during a crisis with their sub. How did you know what to do? If I can ask without invading your privacy, or Daralyn’s.”

  The compliment took him off guard, but it also reassured him. “Some of it…I just knew. Felt it. Does that sound crazy?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Not for a natural Dom, one that has all the raw material and drive already in him. But you said that was only some of it. What’s the other part?”

  He weighed his answer, decided it was okay to discuss, since it was a memory Thomas knew, and Thomas said he didn’t hide things from Marcus.

  “When Daralyn first came to live with us, we all had some sit downs with the court-appointed shrink. The one before Dr. Taylor. And with Mom and Dad. It helped us get on the same page about how to deal with certain things. Particularly her panic attacks.”

  She’d had them almost daily when she first came to live with them. After a couple particularly bad ones, the psychiatrist had suggested meds as one of the alternatives.

  “Mom and Dad decided against it.” Rory recalled his mother’s explanation.

  “That girl has had to suppress so much of herself for so long. If she needs to yell and scream, cry and act out…well, she's overdue for it, isn't she? We help her, be there for her and protect her, and give her the space to work it out.”

  His mother and Daralyn had struck another deal. If things happened with Daralyn that worried Mom, Mom would talk to the shrink about them. Not tattling. Not that way. Mom had figured out early that Daralyn had a hard time telling the psychiatrist anything, but if the doctor already knew enough to ask Daralyn more targeted questions, she made better progress with her. A win-win, and a good safety net to head off more serious missteps.

  “You'll have to trust me, honey. When I talk to Dr. Katz, it’s not because you've done something wrong. Not ever.”

  Elaine had had that discussion with Daralyn at their kitchen table, while Rory had been in the living room, doing his homework. He’d heard Daralyn say “Yes, ma’am,” in her quiet way, and Elaine’s even quieter sigh after the girl asked to be excused to go to her room. There was no way to tell how Daralyn felt about any of it. Not in those first days, when she accepted everything with the same eerily blank face.

  But no matter her personal doubts, Elaine had been firm on one point. “If we get bogged down in second guessing ourselves or overreacting when she has a bad day, we'll never help her look forward. And whatever small steps she makes forward, we celebrate those moments with her, rather than dwelling on the darkness she's endured.”

  He paraphrased that for Marcus. Marcus drew on the cigarette, tapping the ashes into an open paper cup. No ash tray, but Thomas didn’t like him to smoke. Marcus was the unquestionable Dominant in their relationship, but there were other gives and takes between two people who loved each other.

  “How do you think Elaine figured that out?” he asked.

  That was easy to recall. Especially since every memory he had that involved Daralyn recently seemed to be tagged and transported to his frontal lobe, which made it easier to sift through the information, figure out how it fit with where he wanted to go with her.

  “During that first summer Daralyn stayed with us, when the courts were trying to decide where to put her, she was helping Mom with a project in the attic, helping her clear out some things. She got sick. A bad flu bug. She hid it.”

  “How do you hide a bad flu bug?”

  “Through a lifetime of learning to hide everything about yourself because you had to,” Rory said flatly.

  The hard spark of recognition in Marcus’s gaze reminded Rory of one thing Thomas had let slip about Marcus. He’d spent his teen years on the New York City streets.

  “So Daralyn's up in the hot attic, doing most of the up and down ladder work because of Mom’s bad knee,” Rory continued. “Her stomach is cramping, she’s nauseous, but she carried some plastic bags up there and got sick in them, hid them behind some old suitcases. Mom assumed she would have taken them to the outside trash when no one was looking. But then on one of her trips down the ladder, she almost faints. When Mom grabs her, she realizes Daralyn is burning up with fever.”

  Elaine got Daralyn into bed and called the family doctor. Rory had been outside doing chores while the situation unfolded. When he’d come to the house to get some iced tea, he’d ended up standing outside the open screen door, listening. In those days, his parents had had a lot of kitchen pow-wows about how to handle things with Daralyn.

  “The panic in her eyes tore me up,” Elaine admitted to her husband, her voice strained. A quick glance inside showed Rory that his dad was gripping Elaine’s shaking hands with one of his large ones, the other on her back, the strength of his wide palm supporting and reassuring her. His weathered face and dark brown eyes reflected concern for his wife, and pain for the damaged girl they’d decided to take in.

  “Even as I’m holding her because she can’t hold herself up, she kept saying ‘I’m fine. Really, I can do it. It's all right.’” Elaine shook her head. “I called Dr. Katz after I got her settled the way Dr. Mourning said to do. He’ll be here in about an hour. Dr. Katz said that Daralyn thinks if she can’t do something we want her to do—anything at all—we’ll send her away. Those monsters told her that getting sick, being useless, was what bad girls that nobody wanted did.”

  “Son of a bitch,” his father had muttered, a sentiment that Rory emphatically agreed with. He hadn’t been sick often in his life, just the occasional cold or flu, but the one thing he’d never doubted was his parents’ care and patience about it. Evident when his dad made him stay in bed, not letting him help with chores or go to school until he was okay. Or his mom, fussing over him with fluids and blankets, checking his temperature with her cool, competent hands as he slept the sick away with bedrest.

  He came back to the present and Marcus. “This all happened before Mom realized we couldn’t overreact. The flu thing got to her, and for the next few days she had all of us tripping over ourselves to care for Daralyn, do a hundred things to tell her how much she was part of the family. We just about smothered her.”

  Rory grimaced. The more comfort and reassurance they tried to push on her, the more she shut down.

  “That was when Mom realized coddling her made it worse. Ever since then, she’s treated every stumble Daralyn has the same way she’d react to one of us falling when we were toddlers. Caring, but brisk, practical. Pick us up, brush us off and help us move forward.”

  It was at night, in her husband’s arms, Elaine had wept over it. Or talked to him about how much it shredded her, to see Daralyn struggling with the simplest things, trying so hard to cope. Rory found that out from Les, since her bedroom shared a thin wall with theirs.

  “So that was what helped you keep it together last night,” Marcus observed. He’d stubbed out the cigarette and was studying Rory closely.

  “She needed me to keep it together,” Rory said, which was the answer that mattered. But he added, “Her childhood was a nightmare. But through some miracle, there were things happening that allowed Daralyn to become Daralyn, and she hasn’t let that go. They didn't break her. When last night happened, I admit I had a bad oh shit moment, but I also stepped outside my own head and thought about how shattered she’d be if she thought she’d messed up what had happened between us inside her house. When I told her to come to me, when I didn’t act like something had gotten really fucked up, I told her she hadn’t.”

  The smile that crossed Marcus’s face now was more genuine, though still serious. "I should have remembered that myself. A sub isn't trusting you to be perfect. They're trusting that you're putting their wellbeing at the top of your list. If a mistake happens, you're going to fix it. Which includes helping them make it right."

  From last night’s positive outcome, Rory agreed, but it relieved him to hear Marcus reinforce it. And led him to another topic, since he was here. “I’ve read the stuff you sent me. I think you were on to something the other night, what you said about my parents and how things were between them.”

  Rory lifted a shoulder. “In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what freaked me out more, that I was going down this road, or that it was way more natural-feeling than I expected. But when it takes over between us, I don’t feel like some guy wanting to tie her to a big cross or have her kneel naked beside me while I eat my dinner. It’s more like…I’m taking control, and she’s giving me that control.”

  He took a breath. “Not just the sex. It’s like I’m pulling her under an umbrella I’m holding. And when I read stuff about domestic discipline, head of the household, that kind of thing, that connects to it, closest fit, but not perfect. There’s this control, gentle-like most the time, but steady and firm, forming the center of our relationship. Fuck it, forget it. I can’t figure out how to say it.”

  Marcus’s gaze warmed. “You said it well enough. Better than. How you feel things is even more important than how you describe them. But if I had to guess? I’d say what you two have is a very deep psychological Dom/sub relationship.”

  Marcus tapped his head and chest. “All relationships exist in the head and heart, more than anywhere else. But for some people, the physical manifestation is going sky diving together, hiking Machu Picchu. For others, it’s Friday night television and sharing the paper on Sunday morning. Neither one is wrong.”

  Marcus paused, considering. “Would you and Daralyn like the chance to see different Dom/sub relationships in action, in a lowkey environment? Not in a club. This is a private party happening around the time you were planning to go to Florida.”

  Rory raised a brow. “I don’t know. Maybe. Where?”

  “Outside of Tampa. Julie and Des would be there,” Marcus added.

  Julie was a close friend of Thomas and Marcus’s. Over time, she’d practically adopted Rory’s family as her own, such that she was present at most of their holiday get-togethers and weighed in on any family dramas. While she loved her own family, she compared them to a group of polite aliens, a total cosmic mismatch with her outgoing and affectionate personality.

  Though Thomas had met her in New York, she currently ran a theater in Charlotte that specialized in erotic productions, an artsy community theater style thing. As a result, it wasn’t surprising to hear she’d be at something like what Marcus was describing. “Is Julie recruiting for her next show?”

  “Not exactly.” Marcus met his gaze and what Rory saw jolted him.

  “No way.”

  Marcus chuckled. “Julie told me it was okay for you to know. I clued her into what was going on with you and Daralyn. High level only. I wasn’t abusing your privacy, because she’d already picked up on it. It happens when you’re deep in that world. You start to have a radar for it.”

  “So she and Des…”

  Rory had a blink to imagine Julie as a flamboyant Mistress, complete with boots and whip. She was an outspoken person with a flair for drama, so that image worked.

  “Yes. Des has been her Master for some time now. Before they got married.”

  Okay, got that wrong. He should have realized there were no assumptions with this stuff. While Daralyn being a submissive would surprise no one, Thomas wouldn’t fit what most people would think about when they said the word. Yet that day on the back porch, it had been clear; not only did Marcus hold those reins in firm hands, Thomas needed that, down to the soul level.

  Much like Rory felt about Daralyn, when she opened that part of herself to a deeper view.

  On the flip side, imagining Julie’s husband, Desmond Hayes, as a Dom was new ground. But when Rory considered it, framing the quiet yet resolute Des as a total take-charge, still-waters Dominant was spot-on. And he should have figured that out quicker, because while he could fleetingly imagine Julie with the stereotyped Dominatrix gear, he could not in any reality, even for a second, imagine Des as a sub.

  Yeah, Marcus might be right about that radar.

  “So is this where we cue the Joan Cusack moment from In and Out?” Rory asked.

  “‘Is everybody kinky?’” Marcus chuckled. “I’m still so proud of you for watching that movie. Your red neck is all but disappearing.”

  “Not in this lifetime. Fuck off, Light-Loafers. Go get a manicure.”

  “Ah, there it is, fresh as a sunburn after plowing a corn field. Anyhow, back to Florida. Do you remember Tyler Winterman from our wedding?”

  “Vaguely. Isn’t he the guy that pisses you off because he outbid you on some weird Japanese sculpture of a wave and a sword?” As Rory spoke, he sifted through the blur of faces in his head from his brother’s wedding. “Though I admit, the samurai sword sounded sweet. You could detach it and melt the rest of it down for scrap.”

  “I’m going to ignore that,” Marcus said. “How about the stunning woman with white-blond hair and blue eyes? Do you remember her?”

  A light went off. “Yeah. Definitely remember her.”

  “Figured,” Marcus said dryly. “That’s Marguerite. She’s his wife, so he would have been the guy sitting next to her. Anyhow, Tyler holds an annual fundraiser carnival on his property, a total kink fest, but he also hosts a couple smaller, quieter events during the year, with a closer group of friends. By special invitation only.”

  “So Julie knows him?”

  “Yes, but the reason they received an invite has to do with Des. He’s a well-known rope artist in the BDSM world, so he’ll be doing a demo at the event. Plus, Tyler’s interested in recruiting some of Julie’s theater performers for future events, so they’ll also do some networking.”

  Marcus waved a hand. “But business isn’t the main purpose of the event. It’s enjoying the pleasures of BDSM in an environment where people can attend openly as Dominants and submissives. You’d see a variety of things. The setting is also ideal. He has a fantastic place, a restored plantation house, with a handful of guest houses on the property.”