Cardinal's Rule Read Online Free PDF

humanized in a way he hadn’t been before. “Will they be able to cure it?”
    He shrugged. “Hopefully. Time will tell. I survived a bout of colon cancer a few years ago. My doctors are optimistic but there are, of course, never any guarantees.”
    She picked up a hint of something else. “You want him to be able to respond to another Master or Mistress, don’t you? In case you…” She couldn’t complete her observation once the full weight of it slammed home. She genuinely felt sympathetic toward him.
    He tipped his head in a nod. “You’re extremely perceptive, Mistress Cardinal. That’s why I feel slave will benefit in your very capable hands. I don’t wish to turn him over to another Owner if I’m not sure he can be completely open with them. I also don’t wish to leave him…adrift, should the
    circumstances turn against me. He needs a firm hand.”
    “Most of my clients aren’t serious players. They just like a little humiliation or domination on occasion. You sound like a serious twenty-four/seven relationship.”
    “I own slave. He gave himself to me. I do not take that responsibility lightly. He owns nothing in his name. He works for my company. We have a contract specifying my rights over him as his Master and Owner.”
    She knew serious players. Ross and Loren, for example. She’d been one herself, what felt like a lifetime ago. Before…
    “Mr. LaCroux, if you want vicious, I’ll be vicious. Short of anything that would permanently mark or disfigure him, I will use him. He’ll have a safeword. If he utters it, breathes it, thinks it, the session ends immediately and doesn’t restart. I won’t refund money if he safewords, even if it’s only five minutes into the session.”
    “He will not safeword, I can assure you.”
    She had a feeling that wasn’t just bullshit braggadocio either. “Where is he right now?”
    “He’s in our hotel room, naked, kneeling on the tile bathroom floor, waiting for me.”
    She hoped she kept the shock off her face. “How do you know he’s really doing it?”
    “Because I paid the maid cleaning our room one hundred dollars to randomly check on him
    several times. I also invited her to let some of her fellow maids take a look at him and make fun of him.
    I told her it was a hazing ritual.”
    “Creative.”
    “He despises humiliation. I normally don’t use it with him, but under the circumstances, he has earned harsh treatment. It’s part of his ongoing punishment until I turn him over to your capable hands.”
    “It’s not my hands I’ll be using on him.”
    He looked amused. “I’m counting on that.”
    * * * *
    They agreed upon Wednesday afternoon at five o’clock. Landry would bring slave, as he
    requested the man be addressed, to her house, leave after the initial negotiation, and return for him at six.
    She ran a few errands before heading home. Bob would stop by that evening and she had to
    admit she looked forward to it.
    Maybe she’d finally started healing. Long overdue, but the fact that Bob crossed her mind when he wasn’t in front of her hadn’t happened with any other client.
    Or any other man. Well, other than…
    She nixed that thought.
    He showed up, precisely on time. Bob never arrived late. All afternoon, something had pecked at her mind about him. She decided to find out. Instead of making him kneel like she normally would, she asked him to follow her to the breakfast nook and indicated for him to sit at the table across from her.
    He held her chair for her first, like the good boy he was.
    She studied his face for a long moment. Blue eyes, nice body, handsome looks. No movie star, but no slouch either.
    Scening with him lately made her wet, and that didn’t happen with any other sub. The only
    thing since her loss that inspired something remotely approaching passion in her otherwise emotionally dead body.
    “I’d like to ask you something and I want an honest answer, not some bullshit you think I want 
    to hear.