the tail end of another round of chuckles, over something he hadn’t paid attention to. “Is there something I can help you with?”
Tyler’s gaze came his way, the tiger eyes assessing. Under Rory’s grasp, Daralyn’s hand tensed at the edge in his polite tone. He wasn’t pissed, though. Just protective. A lot of Masters and Mistresses had looked at Daralyn tonight, a casual assessment. Of him, too. But no judgment to it. The party had been everything Thomas had promised. No one putting on airs or going out of their way to make them feel uncomfortable.
This was something different.
Marguerite’s attention finally shifted to him, held. Then her head dipped, a courtesy. “When you meet another person in a wheelchair, you feel a familiarity, because you have a better understanding than most of the paths you’ve each walked. Wouldn’t you say?”
He didn’t sense she was doing the stranger in the grocery line thing, the one who thought asking him how he’d ended up paralyzed fell in the same category as asking him about the frozen peas he was buying. She had a serious purpose, and it involved Daralyn.
“Maybe,” he said. “But we’re all different. Like you sub for him,” he nodded in Tyler’s direction, “but you’re definitely not a sub. Not like Daralyn.”
Tyler’s amber gaze went from assessment to gun sight lock. He was ready to intervene if Rory became too forward, but that was warning for warning. Rory sent him a look that said he wasn’t backing down from it. Not while his own sub was in the firing line.
Fortunately, Marguerite’s lips curved in a small smile, her fingers molding over Tyler’s broad shoulder. Half the tension hovering over the table dissipated.
“Very insightful, Mr. Wilder. May I address your submissive directly? I can speak to you instead, if you wish.”
Rory glanced at Daralyn. She seemed to be doing her own internal conversation, because her chin had set and her back straightened a little. He saw her lips move silently, then she looked his way, managed a faint smile. She was unsettled, but okay.
He thought she’d said “just like a customer” to herself. He wasn’t sure if that method was going to hack it for whatever Marguerite intended, but he was here. He could help.
“Long as I don’t feel you’re upsetting her. She’s had a very good night tonight. I’d like to keep it that way.”
Marguerite’s pale blue eyes flickered. They were like pieces of the sky, just as vast. “I can understand that. Having someone willing to protect your soul with every bit of his own is a gift impossible to measure.”
That last part had been sent right past him to Daralyn. Daralyn’s gaze came up, slowly, and then met Marguerite’s.
Rory noted Tyler was watching Marguerite, too, in a manner too familiar for Rory to miss. He watched Daralyn like that when he knew she was balanced on a precarious edge. If he hadn’t been so closely locked into it with Daralyn, Rory might not have seen past Marguerite’s strength as a Mistress to note it, see it in Tyler’s protectiveness of her.
As the significance of that took shape in Rory’s mind, Marguerite bent and spoke in Tyler’s ear. His gaze softened, though his mouth remained firm. He brushed a knuckle over her cheek, tucked a lock of her silky hair behind her ear. Then he touched the pearl necklace, hooked it, a reminder, as their eyes held.
Rory’s gaze slid to the angel pendant resting just below the tender pocket of Marguerite’s throat, and that was when he understood. Or thought he did.
Tyler had intimate knowledge of where his goddess’s vulnerabilities lay. But it was more than the Domme goddess thing that drew people’s attention to Marguerite. It was the same quality that Daralyn had. They projected a spirit that was remarkably eternal and yet ephemerally fragile, in ways that could be so easily, terrifyingly missed. Which meant they weren’t as resilient to the world’s blows. Their souls had already absorbed more than a lifetime’s worth of them.
Marguerite and Daralyn had a kinship in their past that no one should have to share, but they did.
Marguerite straightened and looked at Rory again. The Domme look was back, but there was no threat here. This was a reaching out, an attempt at an important connection. He noticed Daralyn’s hand was no longer trembling in his grasp, and she was quietly looking at Marguerite.
“I’d like to show Daralyn a sculpture we keep in a private part of our gardens,” Marguerite said. “I