My brain refused to compute the message my eyes delivered.

“Josh?”

A very different explosion went off in my head, seeing him sitting in a Barcelona armchair with a glass of Vals champagne ten feet away from us.

Now I was beset with doubts over which man had been buried inside my pussy. But that was the very least of my violent storm of need-to-knows.

“What are you doing here-?”

Here in this office. Here in the chateau. He'd flown back to New York, wait, what day was it now, last night, two night ago? He could not have come right back. Why hadn't he answered my calls and texts? What. The. Bejesus. Was going on?

I turned inquiring to Valentine, his eyes more tranquil now but still definitely not himself. He clasped my cheek in his palm and ran his thumb over my lower lip. I opened them slightly to take the fleshy pad between my teeth and bit down lightly. His eyes locked in mine, I increased the pressure harder, harder to the fullest force of my bite and he held my gaze without flinching even a flicker.

“I see you, Andie,” he murmured.

Oh why can't you see me as more than what you see, my heart pleaded its woeful dream. Just a girl who wants a man to love her as she is, without the games.

I wasn't trying to denigrate our play, knew my destiny was as some sort of submissive to the master. But there was also a woman who wanted his love and while I had it as his pet, I wanted it formally out there for all the world. The dungeon was a release mechanism for Jay's secret emotions, buried and hidden. But I refused to live my entire life down there.

“What's he doing here?”

My teeth unclamped from his skin but he remained stroking my lower lip, imparting the sweet saltiness of our mingled juices.

“I wanted you to choose,” Valentine husked.

“You could have just asked.”

“Not while you refused to surrender to me.”

“And what's his takeaway in all this?” I demanded, glaring at Josh who sipped his champagne as nonchalant as Valentine had been before tonight. “No don't tell me, this is some boyhood dare going on between you since childhood. I have never been more than a plaything for both of you. Batted back and forth between you like a friggin badminton cock.”

“Something more ferocious I'd say. Racquetball at least,” Josh said, licking the effervescence from his sultry lip. “Badminton's for girls.”

The bomb detonating in my chest threw me out of Valentine's embrace and hurtling across the room. I didn’t care about my ungainly one-shoe shuffle or the dress bunched around my neck and shoulders. I threw back the door and lunged down the hall while hauling the recalcitrant material down over my bare breasts, tugged it low enough to cover my ravaged chasm.

My ass was still bare when I pulled open the door to Valentine's Range Rover and climbed in, my cheeks squeaky against the leather seat. His massive SUV was the perfect, only, place to hide while the tears rushed at the backs of my eyelids. But once I tugged the heavy door closed and the interior light extinguished, they refused to fall and relieve the fury of hurt rattling through me. I blinked and noticed the starter chip was half inserted into the slot. I bashed my palm against it and the car purred to life.

The gates to the estate at the end of the drive were unusually open so I roared through and was free. I headed south, not knowing where. Soon I'd be on the freeway going nowhere, just driving with relish. I didn't notice the headlights come up behind me soon after I pulled out of the grounds of Valentine winery. The high car was like a tank, heavy and storming along the street like a bully. It required all my attention to drive. The enraged pain pounding through my chest wouldn't quit no matter how many deep breaths I took. Never again would I let myself be used as a toy.

The tears welled, but refused to fall, merely obscuring my vision. When the bend came up fast, I could have managed it with the truck's superb handling but for the high beams that blinded me and the car that came up beside, edging closer and I went over into the ditch.

I was flailing against the air bag, crying back angry tears when the door was jacked open and brutal hands tugged my arm from its socket. All the hatred for those two men-children flared up ready to fight them off. I was not going back to Valentine, never again. A massive hand covered my face, clamped over my nose. The sweet aroma swarmed my nasal passages through some puffy material and I toppled back into the dark.

When I came to, the auto-response triggered in my body before the brain cells had time to analyze the predicament. I was pinned and fight or flight went immediately to full offensive as I instantly thrashed my arms and legs in the attempt to escape or lash out at whoever was my attacker. But both defensive responses had been anticipated and hijacked long before.

I bucked, arching my back to unfurl myself without gaining a millimeter, so fast was my latest prison. I was wasting and depleting valuable energy for no reason. I forced myself to still, sucking deep breaths, blowing out a longer exhalation, impelling the compression of panic out of my armor-plated chest.

First – where was I?

By stretching my eyes from full on close up with my kneecaps, drawing them to the side where some light permeated my personal gloom and refocusing on middle distance, I deciphered no clue as to my whereabouts. This was entirely new, a different space from Valentine's usual torture chamber. The same cool, dank air of an underground chamber but not his regular dungeon. This was a surprisingly opulent room decorated with heavy tapestries covering the walls. And the air was heavier, somehow wet. With an odor of moss.

My body writhed slightly, seeking some comfort and relief from being curled up tight as a caterpillar. But there was not the tiniest unfurling to be had and every thrust caused a burning sensation at the back of my neck. A dense web of ropes had been so perfectly woven around my limbs, it was as though I’d been made into a living basket. Any shifting threw me out of alignment and was more uncomfortable.

I was naked as a baby, fetaly curled and hanging in a sling like a package ready for delivery in a stork's bill. But this baby was restrained at every joint, trapped tight in a mesh entirely constructed from rope, still creaking back and forth at its knotted apex, attached high above me in a thick old beam.

The constriction around me didn't allow so much as a champagne bubble of air to enter under the tight bonds of the rope web. For that's what it was- I was wound up tight in a lattice of intricately knotted ropes. Shibari was one of Jay Valentine’s obsessions but he'd outdone himself this time.

It must have taken him an age to weave the various strands of harsh rope tightly around my curves and joints with such byzantine knots at every juncture. Which meant I had been kept in total darkness for an eternity, completely unaware of him toying with my flesh, his toy while he worked to ensnare me. The man was a sicko but I had to admit as my eyes reached, they were beautiful, sculptural and absolutely perfect, lined up exactly, absolutely exact in size and form.

The pressure grazing various points along my spine indicated the numerous intersections of twine that splayed out to form the hammock I was encased in. The lowest knot at my coccyx, divided into two straps that girdled my pelvis and another two running the length of my ass crack in bands either side of my clit.

The dank air caressing the dampness between my legs emphasized the bulging open spread. The ropes were pulling my clit and splaying it wide in full view through the trellis of rope. The attention along with the cool air brought the prodding nub to life. My naked clit began to pulsate with an ache that craved massaging. The need infused itself like a tisane through my coiled form and I quivered with longing.

The ropes pulling my pussy apart looped back to cuff my wrists in thick macrame bracelets, then continued in a series of elaborate large knotted pendants to loop a noose around my neck. Another set of ropes secured my ankles in a hog-tie connecting to my wrists. Any movement set up a scrape across every part of my flesh and stretched my pussy wider.

Valentine had excelled himself this time. I was repressed and unable to move a muscle without incurring discomfort, while electric shivers of delight ran from my bare slit up my thighs with an agony I had no chance of relieving. The level of heated loathing powering through me was set to explode the moment he entered the room to start my punishment.