Perfect Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

easier to deal with than whatever it was that she was still holding in.
    He wasn’t entirely sure she’d let him pick her back up and put her in the tub, so he held his hand out to her instead. She stared at it for a good minute before sighing and taking it. He helped her step in, then got in behind her and nudged her down between his legs until they were lying with her back resting against his front.
    “Can you tell me what this was all about?” he asked gently.
    “You agreed to let me be in charge,” she reminded him.
    “Your two hours are up now.” His lips quirked, but he was pretty sure he managed to keep the amusement from his voice.
    “We haven’t negotiated a scene. I haven’t agreed to obey you.” She almost sounded belligerent, but it edged more towards tired and his smile faded away.
    “True.” The water was high enough, so he stretched for the controls, turned the taps off and the jets on. Then he ran his hands through the hot water and up her uncovered arms. “Can you tell me what this was all about?” he repeated.
    She sighed, let her head rest back against his shoulder. “I needed to say goodbye to someone. In a way I wasn’t able to before he…died. I…I’m sorry if you feel used. That wasn’t my intention.”
    “Not in a negative way,” he assured her. He continued to move the hot water up her arms, pushed a small wave to where her breasts rose above the water.
    “We’re going to be very clean tonight,” she observed.
    He laughed. “I guess we are. There are worse things to be.”
    Her eyes had closed and her hands had floated to the top of the water, tangling slightly with his.
    “Eric.”
    He waited patiently and was rewarded after three full minutes when she continued. “I was in love with my Master for a long time. Years. He died last month.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    She nodded her head. “It was…difficult. He was sick for a while.”
    Something in the way she said it let him know there was more. He stayed quiet, continued to move the water around them, let his arms tangle with hers, then separate.
    Finally she sighed. “I was in love with him, for sure, about six months after he became my Master.” Her voice was a little shaky and her arms moved back to wrap around her stomach. “At some point, I guess I wanted…needed more than he could give. But I loved him, so I didn’t leave. And then, slowly, I stopped loving him. I’m not sure he ever loved me. No, that’s not right. He loved me, in his way, but I don’t think he was ever in love with me. It took me a while to decide it wasn’t enough, and start to think about looking for more.”
    “Was it a club only relationship?”
    “Basically, without the club, though. We played at his house or play parties. He didn’t want a partner, a girlfriend. Only a sub.”
    “And you needed more.”
    “Yes. I came to. It wasn’t his fault, I knew from the beginning what he was looking for. And it worked for me, for a long time. I didn’t want a 24/7 Ds thing. He’d been in one and it had gone badly, so he was very wary of any kind of relationship outside of a scene.”
    “There’s a lot of ground between scene-only and 24/7 slave.”
    She was quiet for a while before responding, “Yeah, there is.”
    “And that’s what you started to want?”
    “Yes, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about it. Everyone I knew in the scene, I knew through him. I didn’t really want to start dating anyone else, or doing scenes with anyone else, but I realized I had to leave him so that I could get to the place where I’d be willing to look at someone else.” She rolled her head against his shoulder. “I’m not sure any of that makes sense. I hadn’t really sat down and figured it all out yet. Clarified it in my own head, you know? Because he got sick before I could decide what I wanted to do.”
    “And it was too late.”
    “Not just that, but he was sick, and his family came, and I…I wasn’t needed. He