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I arched my eyebrows. I got off the bed and crouched on the rug, peering into the darkness. I spotted a clear plastic bag, and reached under to pull it toward me. It had a coating of dust, but not enough to prevent me from seeing its contents.

This gets better and better.

I tossed the bag full of coiled rope onto the bed, then got to my feet. I sat beside him on the bed, my heartbeat racing as I went through a mental check list of all the clues. Based on everything Robert had done so far, I dismissed the fantasy idea, because there was one more obvious explanation.

“You’re a submissive.” Not only that—he was a good,experiencedsub.

He nodded.

“How long have you been into kink?”

His breathing caught. “A long time.”

His words from our ride that morning came back to me with added significance.

‘For reasons I’m not going to explain either, I prefer to be frank and open about things like this.’

Yeah, this was an experienced sub. No wonder he’d felt comfortable talking about things first.

Then it hit me. My stomach clenched.

“Oh my God. You and Kevin… You weren’t just fuck-buddies.”

He shook his head. “When we were around others, he was Kevin and I was Boss, occasionally Robert, because he’d been the foreman for years, and no one batted an eyelid at him calling me by my first name.”

“And when you were alone?”

He swallowed hard. “He was Sir. And not just in the bedroom.” His eyes glistened. “When I lost him, I lost my anchor, my weathervane, my rock… He grounded me. He took my daily worries and anxieties, and made them vanish. I gave it all to him, and he let me.” Another swallow. “He took it all away.”

My heart ached when I thought of him the last five years, adrift on an ocean of pain and guilt, moved by the tide, never reaching a satisfying destination.

I wanted to help him reach the shore.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” I murmured, wiping his tears away with my thumbs. Then I straightened. “But now that I know everything—” I peered at him. “I do know everything, right?” He nodded. “Okay. We need to decide where we go from here.”

He blinked. “Where we… go?”

I leaned back on my hands. “Let’s be practical for a second. I’ve got a week-and-a-half left here. So as far as I see it, there are two options. One—we buy a shitload of condoms, and we fuck like bunnies.”

“What’s option two?”

I looked him in the eye. “You’ve missed it, haven’t you? Submitting, I mean.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

But I would. He couldn’t turn off his submissive nature any more than I could turn off my dominant one.

“So much that it hurts,” I guessed.

He swallowed, then nodded.

“Then option two is… We talk. We discuss limits. We get tested, wherever it was you used to go—”

“Bozeman. There’s a clinic.”

The speed of his response told me that would be pretty high up the To Do list. I nodded. “That would be item one on the schedule then. We’re not gonna waste time, not now I understand why you’re hurting.” He winced, but I knew what pained him wasn’t physical.

I also knew what he needed was not some quick fix, but something more long-term. And suddenly my mind was going wild with ideas: phone sex; games of denial; putting him in restraint until I got back to—