Nora took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom. She already had the gas log fireplace burning and the lights turned low. This was a short trip and Nora didn’t want to waste a single second.

“Need anything before I tie you to this bed and leave you there for about an hour?” she asked him.

“Only you.” He bent to kiss her again and during the kiss he untied the sash of her robe. He delicately stroked her sides and back with his fingertips, and the tickling sensation through the silk was utterly delicious.

“Did you miss me?” she said. “It’s been forever since we saw each other.”

“Six weeks,” he said. “Longer than forever.”

Nora had spent a part of August and September with Nico at his vineyard, playing chatelaine. By day, she wrote, read, and helped Nico with his vines. By night, she taught Nico how to serve her. She loved the days with him almost as much as the nights. That’s how she knew it was real love, even if it had complicated her life a little bit more than she’d bargained for…

“We’ll make it a good two nights,” she said as she touched his lips. Beautiful lips, soon to be swollen from bites and kisses.

“Good already,” he said, bending to kiss her again. “Perfect already.”

She didn’t let him kiss her this time. Instead she stepped back to tease him and he narrowed his eyes at her in playful frustration.

She sat in the large leather club chair with a seat wide enough it could have fit two of her. She threw her bare legs over the chair arm and waved her hand at him, indicating he should undress for her viewing pleasure.

Nora could tell Nico was trying not to smile and/or roll his eyes as he removed his black jacket, folded it in half, and dropped it on the ottoman. He wore a plain white V-neck t-shirt underneath, which he pulled off without fuss or fanfare.

“You’d make a terrible male stripper,” she said, even as she admired his lovely strong chest, his lovely stronger shoulders and arms.

He knelt to take off his shoes. “I can’t dance either.”

“My poor moosh,” she said, using her favorite pet name for him. He’d told her his grandmother always called him that as a child since he was so quiet. Moosh meant “mouse” in Farsi. “It’s okay. I didn’t fall in love with you because of your stripping or dancing skills.”

“Why did you fall in love with me?” he asked. He stood up and kicked off his jeans. Nora looked at his tight, toned twenty-six-year-old naked body.

Then she looked at it again.

“A few reasons.”

She stood up and walked to him, pressed a kiss to his bicep and breathed in the warm scent of his sun-kissed skin. When he reached for her she danced out of his reach again.

“Ah, you drive me crazy,” he said.

“That’s my job. Lie down on the bed on your back. Think happy thoughts.”

“I am,” he said. She wrapped her fingers around his erection and stroked it upward.

“I can tell.”

With a put-upon sigh, the sort Frenchmen were best at, he crawled onto the bed. He lay in the center, face up. Nora dug through her toy bag until she found the wrist and ankle cuffs she’d bought specifically to use on Nico. They were the softest, most supple leather she could find, ten times the price of any cuffs she ever used on her clients.

But Nico was hers, and he was special and it gave her enormous pleasure spoiling him even if he didn’t realize she was doing it. Though his vineyard was a success and he made plenty of money, he invested it all back into the company and rarely bought anything extravagant for himself. He and Kingsley were nothing alike in that regard. Kingsley spent years being driven around in a Rolls Royce. Meanwhile, Nico drove a twenty-year-old Land Rover and had seen a Rolls Royce once. In a movie.

Before Nora wrapped the cuffs around Nico’s ankles, she massaged his calves and feet for a few minutes. The feet were a personal part of the body, vulnerable. Very few people ever had their feet touched by anyone but a masseuse or pedicurist. She liked touching Nico’s feet to remind him that she owned all of his body, even the most vulnerable parts. Especially the most vulnerable parts.

Nico’s breath hitched as Nora rubbed his arches with her knuckles. It always took him a few minutes to get acclimated to being treated like a possession whenever they reunited. Unlike her, he had no other lovers when they were apart, nor did he want any, he’d said. He liked his quiet life. He liked his privacy. He liked giving all of himself to his vines and his wine. It took some getting used to, he confessed, to be touched again by someone other than himself. But those moments of rediscovery, of being touched again for the first time after weeks alone, he’d said, were like the first bite of an apple in autumn after a long season of waiting for them to ripen. The first might be so tart it would set your teeth and make your cheeks ache. Yet nothing in the world could stop him from taking that second bite.

That he said things like that to her without shame or embarrassment was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him.

Nora buckled the cuff around his right ankle. Nico closed his eyes while she buckled the cuff around his left.

“You enjoy this?” she asked.

He nodded. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Fools,” she said. “Fools and madmen. And dominants, which are the same thing.”

“You’re a dominant,” he reminded her.

“Yes, which is how I know.”

Nico laughed softly at her, one of her favorite sounds in the world and the perfect accompaniment to cuffing his ankles to a spreader bar. She threaded rope through the ends of the bar and tied it to the bedposts, leaving Nico’s legs locked open about two feet apart at the ankles. True, there wasn’t much more in the world Nora liked looking at more than Nico tied to a bed. However, the main reason she cuffed him was because it was difficult for him to just lay there and let her service him sexually when all his instincts told him he should be the one servicing her.

They were good instincts. Usually she encouraged them. But when she wanted to play with him like a pussy with a moosh.

Nora slid onto the bed and straddled Nico at his waist. Immediately his arms were around her, pulling her down to him.

“This is why I have to cuff you,” she said as he ran his fingers through her hair, caressed her face and neck. “You’re handsy.”

“How could I not be? You’re beautiful. But if you want me to stop...” He dropped his hands over his head on the pillow.

“Why are you such a good submissive?” she asked, smiling down at her beautiful boy. “Hmm? Any ideas?”

“When Rembrandt says he wants to paint your portrait, you sit down and you hold still and you say thank you to the master for picking you out of the crowd,” Nico said. “That’s why.”

Nora wagged her finger at him. “You…you are a silver-tongued devil.”

He shook his head no, and stuck his tongue out at her. It was red, just like hers.

“Put that tongue back in my mouth where it belongs,” she said before kissing him again. The kiss grew so heated so quickly that Nico forgot himself again and wrapped his arms around her. It wasn’t often Nora showed off around Nico. She didn’t have to. He was her lover, not a client, and he adored her whether she did whip tricks for him or not. But every now and then she liked to remind him what she did in her other day job.

Without warning, she rose up onto her knees, grabbed him by the wrists, and slammed them over his head into the bed. She used her full weight to hold him down and enough pressure to leave two thumbprint bruises on the sides of his arms. He inhaled sharply at the pain and went still.

“You like that?” she asked.

He replied with a single word: “Rembrandt.”

“Just for that,” she said, “I’m going to be very nice to you right now. Ready?”

He nodded.

Nora released his wrists to fetch the cuffs and the rope. When he was strapped to the bed unable to lift his hands, she reached back into her bag of tricks and pulled out a treat.

“For my moosh,” she said. “A kiss.”

And it was a kiss. A Hershey’s Kiss. Dark Chocolate—her favorite kind. She set it in the hollow of Nico’s throat.

“I can’t eat it like that,” he said.

“You’re not going to eat it. Not yet. You’re going to lie there while I ride your cock into this bed. If you move so much it falls out, then you don’t get to come tonight. And if you manage to hold still enough while I use your cock to make myself come, then you get to come. And then you get your treat.”

“You’re a sadist.”

“You asked for candy and mischief,” she said. “And that’s exactly what you’re going to get.”