Though the first time he’d seen Ashley, he’d thought about what it would be like to have a woman living in his house again, knowing that she would be waiting for him at the end of every day.
“So you’re not looking for any kind of permanent relationship with a sub?”
“No. If you’re trying to pair me up with a sub, you should know that I don’t believe in marriage. I’m not that man. I want a casual relationship.” It was all he could handle. It was absolutely all he deserved.
Taggart slapped his hand on the desk, the sound echoing through the office. “Excellent. All my guys are mushy assholes. They’re all getting married and spitting out kids. It’s disgusting. We need some manly men around here.”
“Didn’t you just get married?” Ryan had told him about the collaring ceremony the big boss had participated in with his wife a few months back. It had followed some kind of vow renewal.
A little groan came out of Taggart’s mouth before he sipped his coffee. “Nope. I got married a long time ago. I was way stupider then. I got lucky because she died, but then she came back. What the hell am I supposed to do? The only reason I let her back in is she buys me lemon donuts.”
Keith was pretty sure the guy was fucking with him, but with Taggart, he couldn’t be certain. “Well, I’m not interested in getting married.”
“Good because once my guys got married, they handed their balls over to their subs, and now I have the distinct problem of needing a couple of Doms who are available as play partners. I expect to lose Jesse at any moment. All a sub will have to do is offer him a sandwich and he’ll be hers forever. Seriously, the kid can eat and he’s got attachment issues. He attaches to everyone, and we can’t get rid of the little fucker. We have five regular subs who like to play and struggle to find a Dom for the night. Simon can’t tie them all up and Damon won’t work with more than one at once. Claims he can’t pay them proper attention or some shit.”
“If you’re looking for someone to play with the regulars, why are you asking me about Ashley? She’s not a submissive, much less a regular.” Now that he really thought about it, Taggart wasn’t making a lick of sense. The couple of times he’d come in as Ryan’s guest, he’d watched her and she’d never left the bar. “I’ve never seen her play so why is she involved at all?”
What the hell would he do if he had to watch her with some damn Dom? He wouldn’t be able to look away if she was naked. He would stand there and stare at her like a Peeping Tom.
“Because Ashley is an employee and if I choose to take you on, you’ll spend the first six weeks playing with her and her alone. Until I’m certain you’re trustworthy, you’re not allowed to play with the club members. Ashley is a newbie. The rest of the regulars have been in the lifestyle for a while. I want to see how you train a new sub.”
Training Ashley? God, it had been a terrible idea when he thought it would be a single encounter, much less weeks and weeks of having her at his command. Yeah, that was very likely a horrible idea. If he trained her, she would be under his direction, available to him. He would be responsible for her behavior, for her discipline, for her pleasure. He would have to touch all that sweet, soft skin. That ridiculously vulnerable skin. Young skin. Yes, she was too fucking young for him. He would have to remind himself of that every single time he looked at her. He was on the slow slide to forty and she was twenty-freaking-five. There was a whole decade between them.
And she had a baby. She was a baby with a baby.
All very good reasons to not train her.
“It would be a completely up-front relationship,” Ian explained, his words continuing even as Keith’s brain exploded with all the reasons why he shouldn’t listen to Mephistopheles in leather. “You’ll sign a training contract with her. She understands that you wouldn’t have any kind of relationship with her outside of the club.”
He stopped his inner diatribe. “Ashley knows about this?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t be here asking you if Ashley hadn’t already agreed to it.” He slid a piece of paper across the desk. “She’s already signed the contract.”
Holy shit. Ashley Paxon had actually signed a goddamn BDSM contract, and there was his name sitting right alongside hers. There was no way she was expecting someone younger, fresher, less jaded. She was expecting him.
He stared down at her signature. Her handwriting was pretty and feminine, like the woman herself.
He scanned the verbiage, each word meaningful to his trained eye. Taggart knew how to write a contract, and Keith wondered if he’d gone to a professional for it. He would love to see some of his tight-assed colleagues dealing with a D/s contract.
In short, the contract gave him rights to train Ashley, but only on the grounds of the club. For the brief time that the contract was to run, he could see her off grounds if she needed him for anything, but there would be no sexual contact outside of the club. He got to the part of the contract that read This means no touchy touchy.
No. Taggart definitely wrote this himself. No one who had spent three years and a couple of hundred grand on law school would ever write that.
Of course, it also left sex open to them as long as they had it at Sanctum.
He could fuck Ashley and it would be all right because she wanted to explore. He could fuck her and then maybe his head would be on straight and he could stop thinking about her twenty-four seven. Maybe when they were done, he could fuck someone else.
He knew he needed a sexual outlet. He’d kept several submissives over the years, letting each one go after the terms of their contract were over. He’d never written a contract for more than a few months and he never, ever extended one. He often found them new Doms, and several had married the men he’d found for them.
It should have been just another day in his life, but when he’d seen Ashley at Ryan’s house, he’d been hit with a bolt of lust like nothing he’d ever felt.
He hadn’t touched another woman since that moment, hadn’t even wanted to. He’d been celibate for six months, and it was slowly killing him.
Ian Taggart was handing him the keys to the kingdom. He could have her and see that she was just like all the other women in his life, and he could send her happily on her way.
“What about her baby?” He thought the child’s name was Emily, maybe Emma. He didn’t like to think about the baby. Ashley’s youth, her inexperience, her innocence he might have been able to handle, but he couldn’t handle the child.