Exclusive Excerpt: 
​To be released March 15th

Red Zone

​Memphis caught me around the waist again, pulled me up to face him. “I would never hurt you or make you do anything you didn’t want to do, understand?”
“Then take off these fucking handcuffs!”
“When I can trust you not to run, I will.”
“Please. Just let me get out of here. I want to go home.”
“To do what? Finish what you started? Not a chance. Now come on, we’re going to dance.”
I must have looked at him like he’d truly lost his mind, because he laughed out loud. “That’s right, dance. That’s what happens to bad boys who try to run away from me. Maybe you’ll think twice next time. I doubt it, but maybe.”
He pulled me by my belt loops back into the bar and onto the dance floor. I could feel my face burning in shame, but to my surprise, nobody even so much as glanced in my direction. It was funny—I could allow myself to be tied up naked and suspended on a St. Andrew’s cross to be beaten. But the idea of Memphis making me do something? It just killed me. I knew Memphis! It would be too real—too much. My eyes went immediately to where I’d last seen the cheerleaders, but they were nowhere around.
“They left when you did. As spooked as you were, I guess, at the idea of rumors getting around about them.”
I looked up at Memphis pleadingly. “Let’s sit down. I won’t try to run again, I promise.”
He shook his head and smiled down at me. “Let’s dance,” he said softly in my ear for the second time that day. Only this time promised to be totally different. He was holding onto me with both hands on either side of my waist and he began to tug at my belt loops again, moving my hips and making me go along. The song was “Drowns the Whiskey” by Jason Aldean, a bluesy, not-too-fast, not-too-slow tune that was easy to sway to. And that’s all I did at first, still so embarrassed and thinking everybody was watching me. I thought this was only about humiliating me, but Memphis stayed on the floor with me, his fingers still controlling me by my belt loops.
“Okay, Kingston. This is how it works. You said you were a sub when you came here, but most subs actually like a little bondage. So maybe you should pretend to like it too and pretend to be responsive to your Dom’s needs.”
“Oh yeah, smart ass?” I said, still letting him push and tug me around the floor. I wasn’t sure why. “So, what’s in it for me?”
“Well,” he said, grinning at me. “In return, I’ll pretend to be responsive to yours.”
I twitched restlessly under his hands, refusing to look at him.  “Thanks for nothing. And I’m not pretending anything.”
“Sure you’re not.”
“I’m not!” I said hotly, struggling against the cuffs again.
He took me by my shoulders, pulling me up on my toes so he could whisper in my ear.  “Aren’t you tired yet, Kingston? Wouldn’t it feel good to just let go and let me handle things for a while?”
I stiffened and blew out a long breath. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll dance for you.”  I slowly began to move my body against Memphis’s, rubbing my groin on his thigh and moving my feet a little in time with the beat.
“Is this more like it…Master?” I asked, looking up through my eyelashes at him, trying to get under his skin. Hell, this had to be as uncomfortable for him as it was for me. Wasn’t it? 
“It’s pretty good.” He let go of my shoulders, taking a step back and leaning against the nearby wall, folding his arms.  “Go ahead. Show me what you got.”
I smiled and closed my eyes, then threw back my head as I gave myself over to the music.  I twisted gracefully as I could and swayed provocatively to the music. I wanted to see him sweat.
I twisted and twerked my body in time to the music as a light sheen of sweat began to glisten over my abs.  Suddenly, Memphis leaned forward and gave one of my nipples a hard pinch. The pain shot right through me and my head fell back. My mouth opened on a soft “Oh.”   I felt myself straining forward for another touch. He turned me around instead and pulled me back against his body and held me there as the music continued.  I rubbed my ass against his groin, needing to make him feel something.  The music pulsed around us and I looked up over my shoulder at him.
“I thought I was too much of an amateur for you? You told me to go home and get in a chat room.”
Memphis smiled and leaned in, bringing his lips close to my ear and making me shiver. “That’s why I decided to teach you a few things.”
I wanted to say something smart—something mean. But he was leaning into me and his breath was gusting gently against my ear. I used to come to this club for one thing and one thing only—the rush brought on by the pain the Doms gave me.  The pain made me fly and feel alive. Memphis was right—I had never felt like a sub. But Doms weren’t the ones on the receiving end of the lash or the flogger, so if I wanted this—and I did—I had to play the part of one.  And role-playing was what it was all about as far as I was concerned.
From the time I was a little boy, I’d known I was different from other kids.  Not so much because I preferred the other boys over the girls.  Although I did. But also because I was so curious about sex.  I’d never forget my father finding me standing in front of the men’s magazines in a book store, years ago, and looking at the naked pictures.  That had been after my older brother died, and there had been several times I’d smelled something funny on his breath. He acted different too, like he was angry all the time.
That day, he’d been furious.  I had been looking at the pictures and getting a strange feeling in my penis as it inexplicably got stiff. I didn’t even know what it was all about, really. I was only about nine years old, but my father had slapped at the bulge he noticed tenting out the front of my pants and told me I was bad and dirty.  Later, I’d received the worst spanking of my life, and my father said I should be ashamed.  It took me weeks before I could look at him again.
After that, I had packed my sexual curiosity away with steely determination, refusing to let it see the light of day.  Later on, when I was older and got a boner in the showers or locker room, I would ruthlessly stand under an icy stream of water, digging into my thighs so hard with my fingernails that blood ran down my leg and swirled down the drain.  I came to associate arousal with pain, and on the mornings when I woke up early, sticky with cum, I stripped the bed in the pale dawn light, hoping my mother wouldn’t find them before I could stash them to wash and dry them separately before she got home from work in the afternoons.
Eventually, of course, I’d been able to have sex with partners, though it was always vanilla and therefore, safe.  It was a few years later that I’d tried my first BDSM club, looking for answers, and found out how much I loved the role play, the dressing up in leathers, the way the Doms talked to me. Lying naked on a bed bound to the bedposts with leather restraints or hanging from a St. Andrews cross wasn’t safe at all.  Then I was forced to be a complete sexual being, one who liked it dirty and rough to the point of discomfort. I could leave behind my former self and be someone else entirely.  The restraints, the futility of struggle, the pain, the master's words telling me I was a good boy—these things enabled me to fully connect with sex in a way I’d never been able to in real life.
“Look just at me,” Memphis was saying. “Nobody cares, but don’t worry about who’s watching anyway. Dance for me,” Memphis was saying and his voice was like the whisky in the song, smoky and dark and intoxicating. My heart was thudding in my ears and the look in his eyes was making it hard to breathe.  Dance for me, that look said, you know you want to.
And I did. I wanted to show him, to prove to him I was as brave as he was. As fearless, even though both of us knew that just wasn’t true. For that one moment, though, I thought maybe it was. I wanted it to be. I turned in his arms and looked just at him and not anywhere else. Those dark eyes of his were swallowing me whole and even though I wanted to close my eyes, I couldn’t. All I could do was sway to the music because he’d told me to. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to agonize over any kind of decision—he’d taken that power away from me. I simply had to obey, and that’s what set me free. Knowing that he was there to catch me if I fell or if something went wrong meant…everything.
He stepped up closer to me and slipped his arms around my waist, and it was the most natural thing in the world for me to put my head down on his shoulder. God, he smelled so good. He pressed his body closer to mine and nudged his knee gently between my thighs, and I looked up at him just as he was gazing down at me. He nuzzled his face against mine and kept moving me around the floor. I forgot where we were or about anybody who might be watching…I almost forgot to breathe. His hand moved over my back, caressing every place he touched. He lowered his lips to my ear and murmured something low and sultry that I didn’t quite catch.
And then the music stopped.
I gasped, suddenly coming back to myself, and I shrank away from him. He let me go, backing away almost as fast as I did.  We looked at each other across a widening gap and all the loneliness, all the fear and indecision came rushing back in. I was in fucking handcuffs in a club, dancing with my shirt off and my hands cuffed behind my back—with Memphis Sabine! 

Dragon's lair--Dragon Prophecies 3

“A little magic can take you a long way”

 Chase
I had always known Dragons existed, of course. Everyone knew that. Those old maps that had "HC SVNT DRACONES,” or “Here be dragons,” printed at the edges of their known world hadn’t been kidding. In those early maps, you might also see images of sea monsters or stylized pictures of Dragons. I guess it was a way for those old map makers to say, “Be careful. There's bad stuff out there."
I had also heard that pure-blooded Dragons were touchy and easily offended, and that they were a surly bunch who were evil-tempered. As a general rule, they didn’t care much for humans, though they certainly liked them well enough for sex. They jealously guarded their treasures, being greedy and covetous creatures, obsessed with increasing their hoards. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Dragons were dangerous and bad to know. They were driven by their love of treasure, were motivated by it, spent their time guarding it and would literally kill to increase it.
Very much like my own father, actually, who was not a Dragon and therefore, had no excuse for his love of money and the crimes it caused him to commit.  
The fact that I knew the Solokov Dragons in particular existed was due to my father’s transgressions and mine for allowing myself to be sucked into them. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and my knowledge, or the lack thereof, about Dragons is really not a part of the story. How I came to help save the world is the real story here, and it—like my relationship with the gorgeous Dragon, Alexei Solokov—was, as they say, complicated.

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