Lindsay's offer had come with a video attachment by email. The message simply read: “Last chance. Want to share this one with me?”
Damian must have jerked off to that video thirty times in the following days. And then... Lindsay had invited him to the office to meet her. They'd staged the ambush together, and she was just as perfect in person as she'd been on the screen. Shannon was everything he hadn't known he'd always wanted. The sweet obedience. The tragic vulnerable beauty. The princess in the tower he couldn't help wanting to help save.
He hadn't had a pet of his own in years. The last situation had ended badly. It had been a total power exchange relationship, and the girl, Angela, had been a brat with a trust fund. She didn't need Damian, she'd just wanted cheap thrills. So when the relationship became more work than pleasure, she'd bounced. She'd had no real need for the brand of kink Damian offered. And he hadn't really owned her anyway. It had been the standard... boy meets girl at a BDSM club and it goes from there sort of scenario.
He met Lindsay at a charity function several years ago, and despite a bit of an age difference, they'd become fast friends to the point that Lindsay trusted him with things. He'd offered early on to set Damian up with a girl from their house—for the right price, of course. Though Damian didn't judge, he hadn't wanted direct involvement in what was clearly a very illegal business. He wasn't the type of man willing to expose himself to that much risk. Not for sex. Even though the idea of it... the simplicity of it was appealing.
He'd long given up on the idea of finding what he really wanted by accident. Or at a kink club. Because every sub he'd encountered told him what he wanted to hear until the moment they could start manipulating and using him. He was done with that scene because in the end all the risks were the same whether it was kinks or vanilla. Someone was always using him for his wealth, and he lost the power the second they'd become blended into his life.
But Shannon was different. She was real property. She wasn't one of these girls looking for a cheap thrill who would be out of his life as quickly as she'd entered it.
What would it be like to truly own someone—someone who couldn't leave but deep down didn't want to get away? Damian had an opportunity a few years back. Lindsay had made a second and more specific offer a little later, a girl from the house named Mina—very damaged, scars... didn't do intercourse.
Admittedly that one threw him, but he could have worked around that parameter. After all, there were plenty of sexual activities that resulted in pleasure for both parties that weren't so prosaic as standard sex. And he didn't mind the scars. Things like that didn't bug him, nor was he the type of person who saw these imperfections as terrible flaws that made someone unworthy of love or somehow ugly.
It was just a piece of your life that had stuck to you in a visible way. Everybody had those things... scars. Most of them just weren't physical. In the end, Damian had turned Lindsay's offer down and had spent years kicking himself for it.
So when the offer for Shannon came around, Damian wasn't so quick to dismiss it. He knew her history, the things she'd been through at the house, the attempt on her own life. He was sure she'd hate him knowing that, but if he and Lindsay were to truly share her, Damian had to know everything, and he couldn't count on her to willingly give up the information to a man she barely knew.
She was only a couple of years younger than him, but she seemed so much younger than that, so lost. Usually trauma aged a person, but it had done the reverse to Shannon.
Lindsay planned to ease her into a dual-master situation where she would submit equally to both of them—then at some point in the future when their age difference became too large to ignore, Lindsay would hand her off to Damian completely. It was like a timeshare with the option to buy out the other party. Shannon had not yet been enlightened to this plan.
At thirty-three, Damian already had more wealth than he knew what to do with. He'd inherited a lot, but he hadn't squandered the opportunity to make the money he'd been given grow exponentially. He had a gift for investing—knowing just where to put money and the exact moment to move it somewhere else. He'd been labeled a massive success story to be so young and had been featured in several business and investing magazines since he was twenty-three. He wasn't sure if having good intuition about where to put money counted as a success the world needed to know about or worship.
And though his success continued to be impressive for one so young, now past thirty, the Boy Money Wonder thing was starting to thankfully die off as he was able to blend with the rest of the upper class around him.
He didn't have a career or a business of his own. He just knew how to take advantage of a situation, and he'd started out with a lot to begin with. Maybe it was why he gave so much of this bounty to charity. It felt like more of an accomplishment, and it softened the edges of his reputation. Given the way he made his money, if he didn't give so much of it away, he'd come off like an opportunistic asshole. Maybe that was also true, but Damian's name was known in circles of wealth for his philanthropy more than his wolfish ability to stalk the misfortune of those who had built businesses only to lose them in the end.
The one thing he didn't have—and couldn't seem to acquire with his skill set—was someone special to share all this wealth with. He wanted someone to spoil.
And here she was. Damian turned when he heard her enter the room. She hovered near the kitchen island, appearing vulnerable and uncertain. The black silk wrap from the previous night was wrapped around her body. He knew she wasn't doing it to be sexy, though it was... sexy.
“Good morning,” he said, flipping the omelets.
“Good morning,” she replied, clearly unsure of how to be with him the morning after that party. He would love to be a fly on the wall of her mind right now. What could she possibly be thinking?
They hadn't had sex the previous night. She'd been so tired. He'd simply changed the sheets on the giant bed down there and tucked her in, going back up to his own room and leaving her to rest. He had the whole weekend with her. But that gesture of kindness seemed to have made her even more shy and unsure around him.
Damian pointed with the spatula toward the stairs. If you go upstairs, the third door on the right...the guest room... there are clothes for you in the closet.
“Lindsay sent clothes for me?”
Yeah, she might figure out what was going on well before Lindsay could break the arrangement to her. She was smart, and the sudden shrewd look in her eyes like she was putting together a very complex puzzle made it laughable that the doctor really thought he could keep this a secret until he was ready to lay it all out for her.
The shrink better figure out how to tell her. And soon.
“No,” Damian said. “I bought the clothes for you. Go put on whatever you like, but be quick. The food's almost ready.”
He watched her move up the stairs, anything but quick. She seemed scared of them. It was a pretty normal reaction, they were glass and see-through after all. But there were rubber grips on the stairs and solid backs behind them, and a wall on one side and a railing on the other. It was perfectly safe.
Shannon tried to reassure herself the stairs were safe. It wasn't as though they were slippery. And the little rubber grips felt comforting against her bare feet as she climbed to the second floor. She definitely wouldn't slip. But she could see through them. It was disconcerting.