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~ brIDGET ~

It was a shock when Sam told me they would let him testify. He’d wanted to from the start, but the lawyers said no. They were afraid of what he might get cornered into in front of the jury. But I guess they had to change their strategy after our marriage was revealed.

The best part about the day he was called to the stand was that it gave me an excuse to sit there and watch him for hours. Let my eyes trail over his shoulders, his hair, his chest—like I’d do with my hands if I could.

The worst part was that they were asking questions about his work as a Dom again. And this time it wasn’t just me and a handful of asshole lawyers. It was the women in the jury, the journalists, and anyone who’d come to watch the trial.

With his own lawyers asking the questions, everyone got to hear how hot Sam was.

Sam said the theory was that if his team asked the difficult questions the jury could see that Sam wasn’t ashamed or hiding things. And his guys could control the narrative.

“…please, explain for the jury how you formalize these agreements?”

Sam answered looking directly at the jurors, one by one. “We have contracts—like legal contracts. I used spreadsheets that list all the possible types of interactions we might have in the course of a hunt and take down, and they indicated which of the things they would like, which they were unsure about, and which was a flat no for them.”

“That sounds incredibly detailed.”

“It is. It takes hours—sometimes days—to talk through all the possibilities and for them to answer my questions about how they’d like me to approach certain situations.”

“Can you give us an example of the situations that would be clarified in those discussions?” Sam’s lawyer asked calmly.

“Well… some women like to take a risk of being interrupted by other people and others don’t. So, if we heard someone nearby, or thought we might be discovered, some women would want to abandon the hunt and have my assistance to get away without being caught. Others like to see that as a challenge to be overcome and wanted me to attempt to keep them quiet and overpowered until the threat had passed. Others wanted to take the risk with me.”

“The risk of being caught having sex?”

“Yes.”

“And did you?”

“Take the risk?”

“Yes. Were you ever caught having sex in public?”

“Not precisely. It’s not a kink for me to be seen, so I never took that risk intentionally. And given the type of interactions we were planning, I usually pursued the women in places other people wouldn’t see or hear us. But there were some close calls. I couldn’t be sure because I never spoke to the people involved. They might have seen something. They might not.”

Arousal sang in my core at the same time my skin crawled.

Arousal because I wanted to be out there with Sam. I could picture him, pinning me against a wall, hand clapped over my mouth, hissing at me to be quiet—maybe even still thrusting—as someone walked past on a nearby sidewalk.

But the problem was, the moment I saw that, my head turned the picture to him doing exactly that to someone else. Someone prettier. Or with bigger boobs. Or less mental—

“Was there ever a time when you got one of these wrong? Perhaps made a mistake and forgot one of your client’s preferences? Or simply made a wrong judgment?”

“I can’t think of anything significant. ”

“You were always correct? About every hunt?”

“No, but I was never hunting more than one woman at a time. It takes a great deal of planning and preparation and I had a job. I didn’t have time to work with more than one woman. So that probably made it easier to keep track of their needs and boundaries. But it’s inevitable in a situation like this that details crop up that weren’t covered, or that could be interpreted in multiple ways.” He shrugged. “If anything ever happened that she didn’t like, we covered it in the debrief. And I made notes to ensure it wouldn’t happen again in other hunts.”

“Give me an example of a detail that might be interpreted differently?”

“Well, in the example we already discussed—my judgment of what she considered to be a risk could be different. I had one client who I removed from a situation when, in her mind, the people hadn’t been close enough to warrant abandoning the hunt. But of course, I’d already carried her away by the time I learned that.”

“How did you resolve that, Mister Priestley?”

“We talked about it. I made more notes. She wanted to be hunted again, so the next time I had a clearer idea what she viewed as a risk.”

The lawyer nodded, then returned to the podium to look at his notes, his lips pressing thin before he looked at Sam again.

“I think it’s important that we cover the violence that is inherent in this kind of interaction. You’ve been very candid with us already, but I know it’s a sticking point for a lot of people. So, I’d ask you to explain how the boundaries around exposure, injuries, blood loss, and aftercare are established, and what that looks like in practice.”

I bit my lip, my mind taking me back to that beautiful, tender shower Sam had taken with me, washing every inch of my body without even the slightest hint of anything sexual. His tenderness and care making my heart squeeze and tears blur my vision.

But he was describing these scenes with other people. Once more I found myself sitting there—in a roomful of people I didn’t trust—having to listen to my husband talking about how he measured whether a woman was comfortable with him baring her breasts in a park at night. Whether he could or should undress her, or take her with clothes moved aside. How he had to have permission to enter her home and clean her up afterwards…

And I felt sick.

Then I looked at the women in the jury and got sicker.

One woman, younger, with dark hair and bright eyes, was watching Sam avidly. Clearly fascinated with what he had to say. But in the row in front of her was a woman who looked to be about sixty. Her nose was wrinkled up and her mouth kept turning down at the sides whenever Sam was explicit.

Don’t you judge him, you bitch. Don’t you do it. He doesn’t deserve your—

“And in the course of your, er, hunt, the women would orgasm?”

“Usually.”

I stopped breathing.

There was no wicked or cocky suggestion from Sam on this question this time. But somehow that made it worse.

“That was the goal?”

“Always. Success can depend on a lot of factors. Sometimes women want to try this, then find out they don’t like it, so it’s hard for them to reach a climax. Others, we were interrupted and had to abandon the hunt before she reached that point. But most of them, if I paid attention and she was enjoying it, we’d get there.”

We. He said we…

“By get there, you mean, have an orgasm?”

“Yes.”

“As a direct result of your, er, work with her?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to stand up and scream at Sam’s lawyer to stop asking about fucking orgasms!

And at the same time, I wanted them to keep going—to show those fucking pearl clutchers that just because they were frigid, didn’t mean we all were.

I was miserable and itchy and horny and disgusted.

And the problem was, as I watched the jury listen to Sam and heard the lawyer remind them over and over again that the actions Sam was describing weren’t crimes as long as they were consensual, I couldn’t push it away like I had last time .

I was bathed in jealousy and fear.

Sam might go to prison and they might stop me seeing him if Jeremy was successful in getting that no contact order. What then? Would the nurse in the infirmary hear this testimony and pull Sam in to service her?

Rage, jealousy, and nausea swept through my body. My foot bobbed and jerked, my heel bounced like a jackhammer. I wanted to scream at the uptight people who were turning their noses up at Sam. I wanted to plead with Sam to stop thinking about these other women. I wanted to run away and ignore them all, because they were all picturing me doing this and even though I wasn’t ashamed of it, I also didn’t want to share it with them.

My chest was a churning storm of emotions I couldn’t seem to turn off.

Sam looked at me.Just checked in. A bare glance, but I saw it in him— You okay?

And I wasn’t. I fucking wasn’t.

I turned my face. I fucking turned away and it was the wrong thing to do because it made him shaky—so then I was a raging bitch as well.

I knew all this was in the past. I knew he didn’t love them like he loved me. I knew he was different now than he had been. I didn’t want him holding onto my sexual past. But this list of conquests and knowing half these listening women wanted him, and the other half were terrified… it grated .

And that fucking lawyer kept going.

Prick.

“I don’t want confuse the issues of your sexual practices with consenting adults, and criminal behavior. So I’m going to ask you some rather private questions: Since you left prison, did you ever harm a woman in a way she wasn’t aware might happen and hadn’t given permission for you to do?”

“No,” Sam said emphatically. But I’d made him shaky. His hands were clenched in his lap. I stared at him, begging him to look again, but of course he wouldn’t because he needed to keep his focus and I fucking screwed it up.

“Did any of the women who engaged your services in this way ever complain or get angry or upset? Did any of those women themselves ever file restraining orders—or make reports to Police—”

“Objection, Your Honor. Speculation. It is entirely possible this could have occurred without the defendant’s knowledge.”

“I’ll allow it,” the judge said without hesitation. “Answer the question, Mister Priestley.”

“No. At least, not that I’m aware of,” Sam said quickly.

“Was there ever a conversation, or interaction with authority that would indicate one of your clients wasn’t as happy with your interactions as you were?”

“No.”

“And how did your relationships with those women end?”

“In every case, I was able to build enough trust with them to talk them through the things that were hurting them, change their minds about wanting to die or self-destruct, and they ended the relationship by using the safe word. That was part of the original agreement: When they gave the safeword, either in person, or via text in some form, I would never pursue them again. At all.

“Once a woman gave me the safeword, I deleted all her information from my devices and never contacted her again. But some of those women referred other women to me. Most of my more recent clients came to me through word of mouth. Some I found online, but they always came to me. I didn’t pursue them.”

I knew it was right. Knew it was true. And knew it didn’t matter what I thought. It mattered what that jury heard or felt. And none of them looked impressed.

Sam’s lawyer completed his questions and walked back to his desk, but that gave our team a chance to ask. I held my breath—and was pleasantly surprised and deeply relieved that they didn’t redirect any questions to Sam. After all, these were the points they’d been so smug about in the depositions.

I should have known it wasn’t that simple.