And Lori had turned out to be absolutely correct.

Once Katie was naked and shackled and gagged, she’d discovered something she didn’t expect-she was afraid. This man wasn’t a psycho. He’d made her sign an agreement, they’d negotiated a safeword and limits, they’d worked out the scene, just exactly what he would do to and for her. She knew she was taking some risks. She was, after all, in his basement, in a soundproof, padded room-but it was a nice, suburban house with a picket fence for god’s sake! And Lori knew where she was and why she had come. She had safeguards.

So why was she trembling with fear?

As Patrick plucked equipment off the wall-a crop, a flogger, things they’d discussed-she suddenly realized her mistake. She didn’t trust him. For whatever reason, she didn’t trust this man to take her where she needed to go. In fact, she was quite sure that he couldn’t, that this, whatever it was they were playing at, was wrong. After all her anticipation and dreaming about this moment, she knew, as Lori would say, “with every fiber of her being,” that she needed to stop.

She knew her safeword-she’d had it in her head for months and had told Patrick what she wanted to use-but she couldn’t say it because the red ball gag in her mouth made her effectively silent. He’d given her clear instructions though on how to “tap out” if she was gagged-three short taps on the mat and the scene would end. Except her hands were restrained above her head. And she was sure Patrick hadn’t anticipated her wanting to end things before they even really began!

Patrick turned toward her, tall and lanky, a handsome specimen of man in his snakeskin boots and leather pants, his shirtless chest smooth, his belly flat and ridged with muscle. There wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with him. She liked him a great deal, in fact, had since the beginning, or she wouldn’t have agreed to any of this in the first place.