“He’s Dom dog,” Tilly joked.

Leah joined Shayla and Loren in the backseat, while Clarisse took the front passenger seat. She gave Tilly directions to a restaurant on the Sponge Docks. Shayla couldn’t help feeling like a tourist as she tried to take everything in.

“Don’t worry,” Clarisse told her. “We’ll take a stroll up and down the main street to walk off the meal.”

The restaurant wasn’t very crowded due to it being early in the day before the lunchtime crowd arrived. They were seated at a large, round table in the back of the restaurant.

Clarisse hungrily eyed the menu. “I think I need one of each.”

Leah laughed. “Are your guys harping on you to eat healthy?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding? They’re close to tossing food at me to keep me happy. Apparently I’ve had a few tiny mood swings, as Mac called them.”

“Where are they this morning?” Shayla asked.

“They departed early to go look at nursery furniture. They’re researching everything. You’ve never seen two men so obsessed with making sure everything is perfect and safe.”

“They’re not giving you a say in it?”

“Oh, they will, once they narrow their choices down. Nothing but the best, as far as they’re concerned. They won’t let me look at price tags because they know I’ll want to go for the cheap end of the scale.” Clarisse put down her menu. “I spent a lot of years scrimping and saving before I met my guys. Old habits die hard.”

“How did you meet them?”

Clarisse smiled. “I was a stowaway.”

“What?”

“Yep. I was on the run from my ex. He beat the crap out of me, and I was convinced he was going to kill me. I thought my uncle still owned the boat, so I hid out there.”

Shayla managed to stifle a shudder. At least James hadn’t beaten her. Then again, she suspected if he had, she would have left him the first time it happened.

At least, she hoped she would have.

“I thought Landry was going to cry when I made him sell his McLaren,” Tilly said. She looked at Shayla. “It was a ridiculously expensive Mercedes that he owned before I met him.”

“Why’d you make him sell it?” she asked.

“Because it made me nervous. It was worth several times over more than my house, and the insurance on it was outrageous. It had to stay parked in the garage because I was freaked out a bird might poop on it. I countered with the fact that if he was willing to send Cris packing on my say-so, then selling a car should be no big deal.” She grinned. “He finally did sell it. Besides, it wasn’t practical for the three of us. I told him if he wanted a substitute penis, he could buy a friggin’ strap-on and ditch the fancy car. I did let him buy a Mercedes SUV though. At least the insurance was reasonable.”

“So how did you get involved with Landry and Cris?” Shayla asked. “Tony said you were a pro Domme. Is that how you met them?”

Tilly nodded. “In a way. You sure you want to hear the full story?”

“If you want to tell it.”

Tilly played with her straw for a moment with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m not real proud of myself for some of the things I did,” she eventually said. She met Shayla’s gaze. “You know what it’s like to be hurt by someone you thought you could trust with your life.”

Shayla’s heart pounded, her throat going dry. She nodded.

A sad smile crossed Tilly’s face. “Then you might understand some of what I’m about to tell you.” She stirred her tea for a moment. The pensive look on her face told Shayla she was trying to gather her thoughts. Loren, Leah, and Clarisse didn’t speak.

Finally, Tilly continued. “I was Cris’ slave,” she softly said. “I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. He’s the man I would have considered marrying if he’d asked me. He helped me through a lot of emotional pain and scars that I’ve carried since I was a kid. I would have died for him to save his life.”

The faraway look returned. “Then, poof, one day he disappeared. He left me a note and a bunch of paperwork signing everything over to me. Said he had to leave and couldn’t tell me why, and he was sorry, but he had to release me.”

Tilly’s jaw tightened and she nodded toward Loren. “If it wasn’t for her and Ross, I don’t know what I would have done. I fell apart. Literally. They had to hospitalize me for a couple of days. When I finally got my head out of my ass, I decided never again. Never again would I open myself up like that.”

She stirred her tea some more without drinking any, the straw and ice making slow rounds in the glass. “I finished nursing school.”

“How did the pro Domme gig happen?”

“Well, it paid a lot better than being a nurse. I sort of fell into doing it. I was helping a friend out one night, and it went from there. Someone said I should start charging for it, and I did it to help pay the bills. Eventually, even though I was only taking pro Domme jobs on my off days, I was making twice the money doing that as I was as a nurse.” She smiled. “No sex. That was a hard and fast rule.”

Tilly focused on the glass and the slow revolutions of the ice inside. “After a couple of years I realized how dead I felt inside. One of my clients and I went out on a vanilla date and I realized how lonely I was. I hadn’t dated anyone since Cris left. Hadn’t slept with anyone. I was a vicious bitch. It was how I protected myself. My heart hurt too bad, felt too raw. I spent years after Cris left wondering why I wasn’t good enough for him to stay. Or if he’d lied about how he felt for me. You name it, I thought it.

“Then in walks this guy one night while I’m at the club with the client I went out on a date with. He wanted to talk to me about training his male slave. We met a couple of days later to talk, and he tells me he’s got cancer and wants to make sure his slave will be able to respond to another owner.”

“Landry?”

Tilly nodded as she met Shayla’s gaze again. “He shows up at my house with his slave for the evaluation session. I don’t see the guy’s face at first because his hair was long and he kept his head down and turned away from me. Then Landry spills the rest of the story. That his slave was someone else’s Master. That when Landry was in a wreck a few years before and nearly died, they discovered his cancer and the slave came back to him. But the slave left behind a slave of his own. Abandoned her.”

“Hell!”

Tilly nodded. “Yep. I tell you what, I could barely breathe as he told me the story. Then he makes this crazy proposal to me, literally. To marry him and help him through his cancer treatments, and he’d pay me well for doing it. And if he died, I inherited everything.” She smiled. “That’s when I found out he was a multi-millionaire.”

Shayla didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded.

“Then Landry said he’d be back at the end of the hour session and walked out, leaving his slave behind.”

“How’d that go?”

“Not well. At first Cris didn’t even want to look at me.” Her face reddened and she looked back down at her glass of tea. “I screamed at him. Beat the crap out of him. Wanted to kill him. But I agreed to Landry’s crazy scheme and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with Landry.”

“How do you live with a guy who hurt you like that?”

She shrugged. “Landry told me if I said the word that he’d order Cris gone.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She finally sipped her tea. “I couldn’t. He loved Landry, and Landry loved him. And deep down inside me, I still loved him, too. Like I said, I’m not proud of some of the things me and Landry put Cris through in the beginning. I did it out of pain and anger. Landry did it just because he’s a sadist, but that’s still no excuse.” She sighed. “Fortunately, I was able to forgive Cris and move on.”

“But how do you ever trust Cris?”

Tilly slowly nodded. “I don’t. Not like I used to. Not in the same ways. Forgiving him was for me, for my sanity, not for his sake. He did beg for my forgiveness. And I love him. I never stopped loving him, even through the pain.”

“I can’t reconcile that,” Shayla admitted.

Tilly put down her glass and stared at it for a few moments. “I’ll never have the same trust bond with Cris that I used to have,” she said. “Ever. Not possible. But over the past couple of years, as I’ve healed I’ve formed a new trust bond with him. During the rough times with Landry’s treatment, we learned to lean on each other. To work as a team. No, he’s not my Master. He’ll never be my Master again, unfortunately. But I love him and to be honest, once I knew the full story and calmed down and got some perspective, the slave part of me understood why he did what he did, and respected him for it.”

“I’m not trying to be disrespectful by asking this, but how can you respect a man who abandoned you like that?”

“Because yes, he did love me. He had some misconceptions, that if he revealed the truth to me about Landry, I wouldn’t respect him anymore and couldn’t deal with him being someone else’s slave. Not saying I agreed with him for doing it, but on the back side of it, I understood.”

“You didn’t know about Landry when you were with Cris the first time?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t talk about that part of his past. I knew he had a rough family history. So did I, so I could understand why he didn’t want to talk about stuff. He never lied to me about Landry. He just never told me about him.”

“How did Cris feel about you marrying Landry?”

She shrugged. “He’s Landry’s slave. He had no choice in the matter. Landry gave him two options—stay or go. And since Cris stayed, it meant he wouldn’t oppose or resent the marriage. He loves Landry, and he loves me. All he cares about is the people he loves are happy. I’m just glad he put up with me in über-bitch mode for a while until I got it out of my system.”

“That must have been hard on you, helping Landry through his treatments and dealing with Cris.”

“You have no idea. It was hard dealing with my friends, too.”

“Why?”

Loren snorted. “Most of us wanted to castrate Cris with our bare hands. When we found out he was back in her life, we thought she’d lost her mind.”

Tilly smiled. “I think it was harder on them seeing Cris come back than it was me. I took my retribution in private.” Her smile faded. “And looking back, like I said, I’m not proud of everything I did. But it’s what I needed to do to be able to put it behind me and move on. And now the three of us are happy together in our weird little way. What’s past is past. We have today and the future together, and I won’t waste it. Life’s too damn short and way too precious for that.”

“Amen,” Leah softly said as she raised her glass in a toast before taking a sip.

Shayla thought about watching Tilly scene with Landry the previous weekend. “What do you consider Landry then? Besides your husband?”

She shrugged. “Neither of them are my Master or Owner or any other term like that. I choose when I want to submit to Landry. I’d say our default mode is more of a Daddy Dominant kind of dynamic, although I don’t consider myself a little. I also don’t consider him my Dominant. I’m a switch. When I need to, I can…let go to him. But he doesn’t order me around or expect my service, if that makes sense?”

Shayla nodded.

“When I need a little more structure as a mental break, he slips into a dominant role with me. Usually in bed or in play, not as an everyday thing the way he is a Master and Owner to Cris.”

“What about Cris and you?”

Her gaze returned to her glass of iced tea. “I don’t top him. I…just can’t. I can’t bring myself to do it. Sometimes in bed I let him get toppy with me, but not as a scene. I can count on him in ways that both fulfill his need to be of service as a slave, and his need to take care of me like a Dominant might, and my need to be taken care of without bringing a D/s dynamic into it. Make sense?”

Shayla pulled her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. “Not really, no.”

Leah laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ve known them for years and it still throws the rest of us off at times. Labels don’t work with them. We don’t expect you to understand it all in one lunch.”

Clarisse snorted. “I guess I have it easy. I’m submissive to both my guys. Mac’s the switchy one, although Sully lets Mac get toppy with him on the boat. As long as I keep saying, ‘Yes, Sir,’ everything’s good.”

Leah jumped in to change the subject. Sort of. “I saw you’re coming to our shibari class on Saturday.”