Page 56 of Theirs to Desire (Club M: Boxed Set)

KAI

T here are rules to this lifestyle.

Carefully negotiated boundaries.

Safe words.

Checklists.

Hard and soft limits.

The rules are in place for a reason. To protect us. The dominant and the submissive, both.

I’ve been playing this game for a very long time. Most of my adult life, if I think about it. From time to time, I experiment with vanilla, but it doesn’t hold my interest. It never has.

I’m thirty-six. I’m comfortable in my skin, unapologetic about my desires.

I never spend more than two weeks with a woman. I’m not interested in permanence. I’m not interested in commitment. I like my submissives experienced and trained.

I’ve been called a dick more than once, and if I’m being honest, I’ll admit that yes, it’s sometimes justified.

But I never lie.

I never pretend to be something I’m not.

I never pretend to be in love.

Not like Avery.

I don’t break hearts.

I’m a cardiovascular surgeon. I fix them.

Well, I did. Until Melody Simon died on my operating table seven days ago.

Don’t let yourself go there. Not now.

“You look like you need a drink.” Maddox walks up and sets a glass of Scotch on the glass-topped table. “And some pussy.”

“Elegantly put.”

He chuckles as he pulls up a chair, and then his expression turns serious. “The post-mortem results were due today, weren’t they?”

“I’m in the clear.”

“That’s good, right?”

I down the Scotch. “Good?” I ask bitterly. “Melody Simon was thirty-three. She had a kid two years ago, a little boy who’s going to grow up without a mother. I was the surgeon in charge, Maddox. I don’t care how many times Joanna Wadsworth tells me it’s not my fault.”

Losing patients is part of the job. There’s not a single surgeon out there that’s got a perfect record, not unless they’re cherry-picking only low-risk patients.

I’m not that person. I’ve had people die on the operating table before, but those were high-risk cases. The patients knew that the odds of them surviving it were low. It didn’t make it better, but at least there was a reason. Once the hurt passed, I could make peace with it.

Melody Simon was different. Her death was unexpected. Inexplicable.

“You’ve got to shake it off.” Maddox’s voice is bracing. “I remember I was in Mali once, and our hotel got attacked by a group of armed men. It wasn’t fun. People died that day. My next assignment was in Benin. I didn’t want to go. I went anyway.”

I raise my hand for another drink.

“When’s your next surgery?” Maddox asks.

I hold my right hand out. There’s a tremor there, one that hasn’t gone away in seven days. “I’m not cutting anytime soon.”

“Oh.” Maddox is at a rare loss for words. “Fuck. I’m sorry, buddy. Have you talked to someone about it?”

“Joanna Wadsworth suggested I talk to a shrink.” The hospital administrator had done more than suggest. She’d flat out insisted. “I declined. I’m taking some time off instead.”

Maddox gives me a sidelong look. “How much time?”

As long as it takes.

I shrug. My Scotch arrives, and I gulp it down. “Are you looking for a submissive?” he asks. “To scene with?”

Yes. Everything feels out of control. I need to be in charge tonight.

Then a woman walks into the room, her dark hair gleaming under the golden light. She’s wearing a short black skirt, a black leather corset, lace stockings and high heels.

My breath whooshes out in an exhale.

Avery Welch.

After all these years.

As gorgeous as she was the last time I saw her.

No, more beautiful.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Every head in the club turns. I see the dominants in the club check her out, their gazes covetous and avid.

What the hell is she doing at Club M?

Maddox freezes at my side.

“Beautiful woman,” a voice next to me says. Xavier Leforte sits down at our table. “I hear you two know her.”

Maddox raises his head and glares at our friend. “What the fuck are you playing at, Xavier?”

The club owner spreads his hands. “Nothing,” he replies. “She filled out the form, and I interviewed her.”

“She’s into BDSM?” Ten years ago, Avery had been relatively innocent, but brightly curious and eager to explore. In the hands of the wrong dom… I clench my hands into fists.

“Totally new to the lifestyle,” he replies. “I asked Caleb to show her around. Maybe they’ll hit it off. He loves training new submissives.”

I want to punch him. I’m not the only one. “You asked Caleb?” Maddox growls. “What the fuck, Xavier?”

He frowns. “She said you were involved once,” he says. “I assumed you wouldn’t want to show her around. Besides, since when did either of you train new submissives? Maddox, you’re never around long enough, and Kai, everyone knows how you roll. Two weeks, isn’t that right?”

Caleb says something to Avery, his head bowed, his mouth close to her ear.

There’s a smirk on his face, and when I see how close he is to her, a pulse of pure anger runs through me.

It’s been ten long years since I’ve seen her, but I remember everything.

How she moaned when I nibbled her earlobe.

How she came when I pinched her nipples, her thighs pressed tightly together, her eyes hazy with desire.

We’d been in London, Maddox and I. Maddox was working his way through Europe, using London as his base.

He hadn’t needed to; his maternal grandfather had died shortly after Maddox turned twenty-one, and he’d left him a fortune.

But Maddox was trying to build a name for himself, and the only way to do it was to take every freelance assignment that came his way.

I was doing two years of residency at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Both my parents were surgeons, and it was always assumed that I’d follow them, but I’d wanted to travel before I picked a discipline.

Of course, being a resident meant that I worked sixty and seventy hour weeks, falling into bed exhausted at the end of every long shift.

I didn’t get to see as much of London as I would have liked, but I loved it nonetheless.

Camden, where I rented a small one-bedroom flat above a bustling cafe, was a world away from the quietly affluent Kalorama Heights neighborhood I’d grown up in.

We’d met Avery at a bar called the King’s Arms. She was a bartender, young and fresh-faced.

From the moment she’d poured me my first pint, I’d been attracted to her, but I’d fought it as much as I could.

Avery was an innocent, and Maddox and I were drawn to darker things, desires that would send the laughing bartender screaming.

Or so I’d thought.

For more than two months, we kept going back to that pub.

I flirted, of course. I never pretended to be a monk, after all.

But my true desires, I kept hidden. I wanted her to kneel on the wooden bar, naked, her knees spread wide, just because I told her to.

I wanted to spank her round ass, and most of all, I wanted to watch her suck Maddox’s cock while I sank into her tight cunt.

I wanted her to be overwhelmed with sensation, delirious with the pleasure that I gave her.

I wanted to introduce her to perversion.

I still do.

That inconvenient realization shocks through me like a live current.

She always flirted back, Avery. She was never coy. She didn’t play games. Then one day, late at night, when it was almost time for the bar to close, she’d asked us to stick around. “Today’s my last day,” she’d told us.

The idea of never seeing her again had felt like a lead weight in my stomach. “Onward and upward?” I’d asked her, suppressing my disappointment. She’d once let it slip that she was working at King’s Arms while she went to Cambridge, though she rarely talked about her school work.

A strange look had flashed across her face. “Something like that,” she’d replied. She’d swallowed then, her cheeks coloring. “I’m taking two weeks off,” she’d murmured. “I’ve never been to Ireland.”

“I have two weeks off too,” I’d replied. “And Maddox doesn’t need to be in Rome until the end of the month.”

At my side, Maddox had narrowed his eyes speculatively. We’d both resisted her. We’d both done our level best not to corrupt her, to taint her sweetness with our darker desires.

“I know.” Her voice was soft, so quiet that even in the empty bar, I had to strain to hear her. “Would you like to come with me?”

I’d lifted my eyes to her face. “You know what you’re asking for?”

She wasn’t a fool. We were both attracted to her. Neither of us had made any secret of it. The question was, was she brave enough to take the plunge? To do what society considered unconventional, scandalous?

“Yes.”

I’d tried one more time. To save her. To save myself from her.

I had known instinctively that Avery wasn’t someone I could walk away from.

The attraction was too strong. Too visceral.

We would ruin her, and she would wreck us.

I’d known that from the moment I set eyes on her. “Are you sure, little one?”

Her lips had curled into a smile. “Nobody’s called me that before.”

“We’re going to share you, Avery,” Maddox had said, low and dangerous, his words deliberately crude. “We’re going to fuck the sweetness out of you. Take you in every hole. Make you beg for it. Beg for the pleasure that only we can give you.”

If he thought that he would scare her off, he was wrong. “Should I beg now?” she’d responded, her cheeks still flushed. “I’m nineteen. I’m not a virgin. I know what I’m asking for.”

She might not have been a virgin, but in the ways that counted, she was an innocent. And heaven help us, we wanted to corrupt the fuck out of her.

For two glorious weeks, I thought we’d found the perfect woman.

What Xavier and Rafael had with Layla Shleifer, we’d found with Avery.

For two glorious weeks, when I wasn’t thinking of her, my head was filled with plans for the future.

I didn’t have to head back to the States to finish my residency.

I could stay in London. Maddox could restrict himself to shorter assignments.

It would be tough, but we’d make it work because Avery was worth it.

Then, on the fourteenth morning, when I woke up in a hotel room in Dublin, reluctantly aware that we had to head back to London that evening, she was gone.

No note. No explanation. Nothing.

Frantic with worry, we’d tracked her down.

Then our world had crumbled in front of our eyes.

Because the day after she left us, she’d married another man.

Victor Lowell.

Who had been twenty-seven years older than her.

Titled and wealthy.

Who she’d never once mentioned.

The bleak truth stared us in the face.

She’d sown her wild oats with us. Then, she’d married for money.

Avery Welch taught me a very important lesson when I was twenty-six. One that lingers to this day.

Because of her, I’ve never been with anyone for more than two weeks.