moved your home office, and brought your armoire over, and the locking chest.” We’d also incorporated some of his cookware in with mine, and we’d swapped my kitchen table out for his, since his was much nicer and actually fit my kitchen better than the one I’d bought.
He rubbed my arm and kissed my shoulder. “I’d like us to spend the night at my house tonight. One last night in the master suite. I’ll keep one of the basement rooms as ours, so we have a place to stay if we want to after a party on the grounds, or if we need to for safety, or...” He kissed my shoulder again. “Or for other reasons.”
It felt as if he had something in mind when he said other reasons, but I knew him well enough to know that if he meant to tell me those reasons, he’d have done so.
He kissed a line from my shoulder to my neck, and I felt it all over my body. Not quite goosebumps, but not far from it.
“I claimed you in public last night. Tonight, I claim you in private.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pleasure and pain. Sex. Control. I need to mark you in ways I haven’t before. Do you understand?” His lips were millimeters from my neck, so the warm air brushed it, heated by his body.
I closed my eyes and snuggled backwards, into him even more, which wasn’t really possible since I couldn’t physically get inside him. “I’m yours, Frost. Yours. I will proudly wear your marks as long as you want me to.”
“Even if I want a permanent one?”
There aren’t many ways to permanently mark a shapeshifter. A brand made with heated silver would do it. Cutting a body part off with a silver knife would usually do it, but not always, but that meant the loss of a body part, and I didn’t think he’d want to go there.
I’d heard it was possible to repeatedly make the same cut with a silver knife, every day for months, in order to make a scar stick. Years of changes would fade it, but if you kept at it with the knife, you could keep it fresh. Would he want a one-time mark, or something he had to keep up? I could see him enjoying the upkeep, but he talked as if he wanted it to be permanent.
“You want to brand me?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Not this year. Maybe not ever. I think I wanted your reaction, more than the actual brand, and I got it.”
“What did you get?”
“It wasn’t an automatic no. You were open to talking about it. I think that’s enough.”
“If it isn’t, we’ll talk about it.”
“Just so we’re clear, I want to hurt you tonight. Mark you and hurt you. You’ve seen a little of my inner sadist, but he’s just played with you. Tonight, he wants you to meet him.”
I knew he’d smell the fear and arousal his words generated, and that was okay. No secrets.
“I’ve never asked for a safeword, and I won’t now, either. If there’s a part of you I still need to meet, then that should happen. I’m glad you trust me enough to show me all of you.”
He kissed my forehead. “And I’m glad you trust me enough to walk into the future with me.”
Frost
We found more items to take to her house on our last walkthrough than I expected. A floor lamp, various knick-knacks, a few more kitchen items. She also decided to change out the décor in one of my bathrooms for the décor in the downstairs ‘company bathroom’ in her house.
It seemed important to Cheyenne that our house feel like both of us. I tried to explain that an interior decorator had designed all but three rooms of my house, but she said it didn’t matter because the decorator had done a good job of capturing my energy.
Of course, this also meant that we ended up carrying more of the pieces of my man cave to her house. It meant her den would have a whole lot of my man cave, but that was fine. My home office was already moved, and the parts of my kitchen I most wanted to take, so it was all good.
We put everything we were taking with us in the garage, and then I took her to my sub-basement, sat in a folding chair beside the hidden door, and ordered her to strip and kneel. The floor was cold concrete, the lights