The Training (Book 3: The Submissive Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

even from the opposite side of the house, I felt my master’s touch.
    I stopped just outside the door of my room.
    My master.
    It was the first time I thought of him as
my master
instead of
Nathaniel.
I didn’t dwell on it for too long, but hurried down the stairs, anxious to be near him again.
    He waited for me in the library, standing near the table of decanters. His eyes traveled over me as I entered.
    “The gown looks beautiful on you, Abigail,” he said.
    Abigail.
A reminder that, even though this was my library, it was still a weekend, I still wore his collar, and I was to behave as such.
    He wore his tan cotton drawstring pants and didn’t look half bad himself. I dropped my gaze to the tops of my toes. Watched them wiggle. “Thank you, sir.”
    “Look at me when we’re in the library,” he said.
    I looked up and met his eyes. They shone darkly with emotion.
    “Remember,” he said softly. “This is your space.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said. Last week, he told me I could use
sir
in the library or at the kitchen table. Any other place during our weekends, he expected me to call him
master.
    “How does it feel?” he asked, and then quickly added, “The gown, I mean.”
    “Delightful.” I swung my hips, and the satin brushed once again across the dull ache of my backside.
    He smiled as if he knew exactly what I felt. Who knew? He probably did. Everything he did was calculated.
    “Come on in,” he said, waving me farther into the library. He held up a wineglass. “Red?”
    “Yes, please.”
    He motioned to the floor in front of the empty fireplace. Piles of pillows lay scattered about with fluffy blankets among them, forming an inviting place to sit down. I took a tentative seat on a large pillow.
    He joined me seconds later and passed me a glass of red wine. I noticed he didn’t have one. Not too much of a shock, considering what he’ d told me days earlier.
    “You probably thought I was being melodramatic the night of Jackson and Felicia’s party,” he said, as we sat on his leather couch on Tuesday night after dinner. “When I told you that your leaving almost killed me.”
    “I did,” I admitted. “I never thought of you as being one for dramatics.”
    “I was bad after you left,” he said. “It started as soon as I returned from following you home.”
    I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Talking about that time in our lives wasn’t something I enjoyed. Certainly, he felt the same.
    He frowned. “I’m not sure how much I drank that day, but when Jackson found me, I was trying to burn down the library.”
    “You what?” I asked.
    His eyes closed. “I don’t remember it very well. Don’t remember parts of it at all. I just . . .” He trailed off momentarily. “I just needed to tell you. It felt important, somehow.”
    “You could have died,” I said, shocked at the nonchalant way he talked about burning his house down.
    “Probably not,” he said. “I was too drunk to do much of anything. At least, that’s what I tell myself. It’s not like I had a death wish. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted . . .”
    “To burn your house down?” I volunteered.
    “No.” He shook his head. “Just the library.”
    “That doesn’t make sense,” I argued. “You can’t burn just the library. The entire house would go up.”
    “I know,” he said. “I’m sure it made sense to me at the time. All I really remember is pain, emptiness, and despair.”
    I took his hand and stroked it. “No wonder.”
    He kissed my knuckles. “No wonder what?”
    “No wonder Jackson felt the way he did.”
    His lips stopped their kissing. “Did he say something to you? I swear, if he did, I’ll kick his ass.”
    I hushed him with a finger. “No. He never said anything. Now, Felicia
. . .”
I laughed, remembering her outburst the day she came home with a ring. “Felicia ripped into me something awful. It makes sense now. She’d heard Jackson talk about how my leaving affected