He put the boxes back, closed the drawer, straightened and took one last look around.
It was a well-equipped playroom. She could get creative and be clean and safe doing it.
He cast his eyes down to the top of the dresser, lifted his hand and swiped it along the top, shining his flashlight on his fingers when he was done.
Dust.
She hadn’t been in there in months.
He drew breath in through his nose, switched off the light and turned his attention across the studio toward the wall beyond which was her house.
Aryas had made him an offer.
He needed to make a decision.
So he needed to go there.
He went there.
The inspection he made of her house was cursory. She liked furniture. A lot of it. She liked it to be comfortable. She liked knickknacks, all of which, if he’d paid much attention, something he didn’t do, likely had a story or meant something to her.
The Willo district might have been set with land purchases made in the Victorian era, but homes hadn’t been added until the twenties and thirties. Her bungalow, his research had told him, had gone up in the late twenties.
Still, she decorated like that particular queen was going to rise up, make a visit and cast her judgment.
The heavy, cluttered, busy, flowery, frilly, fringy shit was not Branch’s style.
Then again, he didn’t have a style and he wasn’t moving in.
He was just deciding if he wanted the woman who lived there to fuck him.
So how she decorated didn’t factor.
On this thought, he moved from the living room up the narrow, steep-angled stairs that had been added at the front of the house when the attic had been converted.
The stairs led to a landing that had one of those plush lounge chairs women liked, a marble-topped table and standing lamp, all illuminated in that moment by the only window to the space that was original; the others were two sun lights set in the ceiling. Those sun lights would let in light, but with her trees, they wouldn’t bake the room.
He turned to take the last, short flight of steps, which went from a right angle to the other stairs, and saw her four-poster bed.
It was colossal.
Definitely made for the space, not something you got in a store.
Branch wondered if she’d had it made.
Then he wondered why he wondered.
With that, he stopped wondering and walked to the bed.
She was sleeping, smack in the middle of it.
Her huge mass of dark curls were easily visible against the light sheets, and her small body barely took up any of the large mattress.
He looked away immediately and did the checks he needed to do.
Silk ropes hidden under the bed, tied securely to the feet of the footboard and headboard. Nothing but a vibrator for her in the left nightstand (also excellent quality and a premier brand).
The bathroom off the left side of the room was sunken, the ceilings in the eaves of the house, so the large, oval tub with jets at the end was recessed even further, in the floor and down two steps. The shower at the top, though, was big enough for two (or three).
And the room was pale green and baby pink and also decorated busy, frilly, flowery, so over the top, it nearly made Branch smile.
Nearly.
The walk-in closet to the other side of the room was close quarters, nowhere near as big as the bathroom (but still large), two steps down and stuffed full of clothes.
In fact, he’d never seen so many clothes. And shoes. Shelves and shelves of them. And handbags.
She kept her playroom neat and organized.
Her closet, however, was a disaster.
He found what he was looking for, silently slid it out, made sure the closet door was tightly shut and again engaged his flashlight to look into her toy chest.
He almost didn’t bite back the low whistle when he saw how she liked to play in the intimacy of her bedroom.
Picking up a huge, black plastic phallus, he stared at it, his teeth in his lip to bite back his reaction.
“She likes to test a man’s manhood, that’s for fuckin’ sure,” he muttered.
Unbidden, thoughts of that cock shoved up his ass while he was in her massive frilly bed in her frilly room in her frilly house, maybe with his face stuffed in her wet pussy, Branch dropped the toy, closed the chest and pushed it back where it was meant to be.
Without delay, not looking at her sleeping in bed or making a sound, he exited the house, locked up behind him and walked to his truck.
He got in, fired his baby up, turned around in her drive without switching on his headlights, and he was all the way down her street before he turned them on.
He drove to his condo, parked in the underground parking and took the stairs at a jog up to the fifth floor.
He let himself into his place.
He had a TV. A DVD player. A sectional. A coffee table. Two stools at the bar (even if he was the only one who’d sat on either of them). And a bed in the one bedroom with a single nightstand and one lamp.
He had blinds.
He further had dishes. One pot. One skillet. One pint glass. And a set of four forks and spoons but only three knives he bought at Goodwill. He also had a bread knife, a butcher knife and a toaster.
These, and some clothes, belts and shoes in his closet, his truck and his gear, which was stored somewhere else, were all his worldly possessions.
He could move in with Evangeline Brooks in her frilly house in an hour, not needing his furniture, not having any problem at all with leaving it behind.
On that thought, he went to the packet on his coffee table and upended it.
One DVD fell out.
Aryas’s handwriting in red marker was across the clear front.
Watch this, it said, and call me.
He didn’t go for the DVD.
He went to one of his unsurprisingly empty kitchen drawers, yanked it out, turned it upside down on the counter and ripped off the big manila envelope taped under it. An envelope that Aryas had given him eleven months ago.
The two DVDs in that envelope he took to his TV.
The one marked #1 on the front he pulled out, shoved in his player, and turned on his TV.
He went back to his couch, slouched in it, pointed the remote to the player and hit a button.
What filled his screen didn’t stir him and not because these days it took some serious extreme to stir him, and even that often didn’t work anymore.
No, it didn’t stir him because he knew what happened two days after what was recorded on that tape at Aryas’s club, the Bee’s Honey.
And also because, the morning after that, the man on his TV screen being fucked up the ass by a Dom while he ate his Mistress’s pussy, Branch had beat half to death. He’d then spent the next month dismantling his life so he was now living with his mother in Baltimore, unemployed, with a lisp that he’d never get around since he’d bitten off part of his tongue when Branch was kicking his ass, and he was totally broke in a way Branch had fixed it that it’d take some doing for him to stop being.
Aryas had told him to relay the message.
When a situation warranted Aryas not offering those communications himself but instead calling Branch in, Branch was always instructed to relay strong messages.
But the one Branch had delivered was not entirely Aryas’s style.
And Branch had no qualms that he took that straight into overkill.
She didn’t share, that fucktard’s Mistress. Her slaves were hers alone. She might let people watch her work in a room at the club, but that was rare and that was all. She didn’t even go to the social room at the Honey unless it was as an observer and she never went to outside parties except simply as a guest to be with her brethren, which meant for most of the festivities, also solely as an observer.
She played in a playroom at the Honey with the blackout, or if she was in a certain mood, the silhouette blinds down, her playroom in her studio, or in that huge-ass bed in her bedroom.
Her gig was intimate. It was just him and her. Every sub she had, Aryas had told him, it was that way.
But this sub in particular.
The fuckwad had wanted what Branch was watching on his TV. Begged his Mistress for it.
And Branch watched as he took his ass fucking and loved it. Even if the Dom’s meat was impressive and the man wasn’t holding back—the sub’s ass had to be raw—he still lost his cool and shot his load on the floor before he was given permission.
The Dom he requested his Mistress allow him to serve didn’t fuck around, which meant, as Branch fast-forwarded to it, he was made to lick his cum off the floor even while he watched the Dom eat his Mistress until she came.