That’s okay. We understand each other. That’s why he, my special client, comes to me and no one else.

* * *

The Mistress wouldn’t say he was her favorite client, not to his face anyway. When he showed up she knew he would be the last person she saw that day. He took more out of her than any of the other men who came to her dungeon at the club. He took the most time, the most effort, and he never made an appointment.

Two weeks ago he came to her dungeon. It had been about three months since their previous session together. It might have taken three weeks for him to heal completely from it. She’d worked him over thoroughly that night, just the way he liked it. The other nine weeks between that night and this one, he’d been too busy to see her, or simply not in the mood to be destroyed. The mood struck him at the oddest times and for seemingly no reason. She never asked him the reasons why he decided to show up at her feet. He wasn’t there to talk. He wanted pain, and The Mistress wanted to give it to him.

On a Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. he strolled into her suite without knocking. The Mistress lay stretched out on the bed reading a book—Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. A disappointing book. Well-written but she was two hundred pages in, and no one had even been tied up yet. She looked up from her book as he swept in the door, shutting and locking it behind him. He did this often, came into her dungeon. He had every right to. But locking the door meant only one thing.

Play time.

She didn’t speak. She shut the book and tossed it onto the nightstand. From the small table she pulled an elegant black mask that covered only the top half of the face. Like the good and well-trained submissive he was playing that day, he kept his eyes on the floor as she approached him. In all the world, she’d only ever met one man she found more attractive than the one standing before her. Night and day, he and the other man were. The submissive masochist in front of her had olive skin, dark eyes, dark as a sin-stained soul, and black hair with a slight roguish wave that fell to right above his shoulders. And at the moment, he had on far too much clothing.

“Lose the shoes. Shirt off, too,” she ordered as she stood in front of him and slipped the masquerade mask over his eyes. It had eyeholes since she didn’t want to blindfold him, only put him in a mental place where he could become another person...someone other than the one who’d walked in her door and the one who would crawl out of it. Plus, no denying, the man looked fucking hot in the mask. With this particular client, she allowed herself to enjoy her attraction to him.