Excerpt from Breathless:

“You can safe word,” he said to the top of her head.

She turned light-colored eyes up to him—blue or maybe grey, he couldn’t tell under the colored neon—and gave him an unsure look. Hippie as he’d assessed her back in the elevator or no, she had a look of exquisite recklessness about her, somehow fragile and hot-burning, at once.

“You don’t have to do this,” said Anson. “If you don’t want to.”

Now her brows knit to full skepticism, though she’d hadn’t moved out of contact. Instead, she turned her body to face him. To search his face—a blunt assessment that made his skin feel electric. She squeezed the fingers of her one hand in the other.

“Do you want to do this?” she asked.

Anson swallowed.

“Number eleven!” the DJ called out from onstage. The applause sounded faraway.

The first of any sort of worry made a fine line between her brows, and he saw the thing that had him backpedaling. Does he not want me? Am I not good enough? The voices of fear began to spread on her features like an infection. He was standing there making her feel the exact thing he’d been dreading all night.

And rather than remove herself from the source of anxiety, like Anson might have, Miss Pain went toward it, chasing after what she wanted, even with insecurity hot on her heels. Her eyes shifted downward, deliberate, and she angled her face with them. Off to one side, baring her neck, pouring it on.

Submissive.

“Sir,” she said, “I want what you have.”

He could barely hear her over the music and crowd, but the soft voice wrapped around his spine and spun downward to wake up his cock.

Here. In person. Real.

What the fuck are you afraid of, Morrow?

Autopilot Anson had had enough of his anxious bullshit. In what was for him an outrageous move with a stranger, he lifted a bare hand to splay just above her breasts. Her ribs rose and fell when he slid his touch up over her collarbone and let his thumb play in the hollow of her throat. She kept her eyes on the floor.

“You don’t know what I have, Miss Pain.”

Maybe some part of him was still trying to scare her off, but she only arched her neck into his caress.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “You have control. Sir.”

And if her last word didn’t have certain machinery grinding to life inside him …

Anson leaned close, just to be in her space. He let his fingers circle into a grip at the base of her throat. “And you want control, little sub?”

Her shoulders melted forward and he felt her exhale.

“No, Sir. I want you to have it.”

Her words made a shadow come billowing in over Anson’s psyche. A long-awaited eclipse, and he could do whatever he wanted here in the dark. Be whoever he wanted. No—be who he was.

“Time for lucky number thirteen!”

Anson slipped his hold down to her shoulder and scooped the woman in a rough move, so her back was to his chest. She didn’t even flinch, just curved her spine back against him.

Anson Morrow was a Dom. And tonight, Miss Pain was going to submit.