“Ma’am,” both Brian and Zach chorused as she looked at them. Brian tended to be quieter than the others—not shy exactly, he just didn’t say anything unless he felt he had something worth saying. He looked a little nervous now, though, probably because he hadn’t really faced off with Olivia since he and her friend Sharon had broken up a little over a month ago. Olivia didn’t care about that though; she’d never been the type to get in the middle of friends or exes.

“Good to see you all,” she said, and saw Brian relax marginally. “Are you ready for this?”

“Oh yes,” Mitch said, his smile changing to something more predatory as he eyed the small group of women. Silence on the other side of the room probably meant they were trying to overhear what Olivia and the Doms were saying. “Do we get to choose who we work with? Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

She couldn’t stop her chuckle. “Well, you know how I like it when you beg. You will all have to work it out among yourselves.”

“Dibs on Rae,” Mitch said immediately.

“You might want to wait,” she warned him. “Patrick told me there’s been a last minute addition to the class. Hopefully she’ll be here before we really get started.”

“You’ll let her stay if she’s late?” Zach asked, a little startled, since they all knew Olivia was a stickler for being on time.

“Total newbies always get a little more leniency,” Olivia said. “For all we know, she showed up twenty minutes ago and is out there sitting in her car, trying to gather up the courage to walk in. You’re all used to playing with submissives who have been in the scene for a while and you were new. Now the shoe is on the other foot; you’ve been playing in the scene and know what to expect, and you’re the dominant. As you all know, at least you’d better after our time together, it takes a lot of inner strength to be a submissive and let someone else have so much control over you.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they all chorused together.

The door at the back of the room opened up and Luke, Patrick, and Michael all came walking in, obviously still having been upstairs in Marquis. Olivia couldn’t help but wonder if they’d all been up there since she’d left—and what they’d been doing since she didn’t see Ellie or Lexie.

“Ready to start your class?” Patrick asked, his expression a little odd. The scar on his face sometimes made him hard to read, but Olivia felt a strange twinge at the amount of anticipation she saw on his face. A strange sense of impending alarm creeped up the back of her spine. He was up to something.