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  Somebody maintained this place. Or somebody had created this place, building it from the ground up.

  So where were they?

  “Hey!” I called. “Hey.”

  My voice echoed against the buildings and then got swallowed up by the forest beyond.

  He wouldn't kidnap me and leave me here. He wouldn't. This was more of the head game.

  The truck was gone though. Easy to see that much. The town was two blocks end to end. There were no vehicles anywhere.

  Two horses, a matched pair of bays, were munching oats from a bucket in front of a building I suspected of being the saloon. Something about the swinging doors.

  I pushed my way inside. “Hey!”

  A hum and then lights, presumably triggered by an electric eye. There was a generator somewhere.

  I pushed through a second set of swinging doors. Two men sat at a small round table, a bottle of whiskey and a silver pot of coffee between them.

  The man with Brayden Brent wore leather chaps over distressed jeans, which seemed excessive in May if you weren't actually mounted on a motorcycle. Black boots with scuffed toes. Black mesh shirt with lots of chest fur peeking through. A skull on a chain hanging from the right ear. A black onyx plug in the left. Toss in the knuckle tats, and this old boy probably wasn't the new professor of philosophy I'd heard they'd hired down at the college.

  An interesting collection of tools and toys dangled from his belt.

  They shook hands, and Brayden stood up. He wore jeans and a single piece of equipment on his belt—a pair of steel handcuffs.

  “Oh, hell, no.” It was my automatic reaction, and it got the automatic response.

  “I already explained the rules. I won't explain them twice.” Brayden made a little circle motion with his finger.

  I took a deep breath and turned to face the wall. Brayden cuffed my hands behind me. “This really isn't necessary,” I said.

  “Gag your low-quality untrained excuse for a slave,” the other guy said. “I don't want to hear this back chat the entire time I'm working.”

  “No fucking way—” My objections were rudely interrupted when Brayden thrust a balled-up scrap of fabric in my mouth. His sweaty bandanna. I could taste the skin salts on it.

  He tied a second bandanna over it to hold the gag in place. Oh, I could still make some noise, but it wasn't anything you'd want to brag about.

  “There's a hand signal you can use if you want to safeword out.” His big hand closed over my right hand and shaped it into a fist.

  He felt warm like that so close against me. Sexy, even, although again I told myself a normal guy wouldn't be excited. Anyway, he pulled out my index finger and thumb while curling the other fingers in—the classic hand pistol. “That's it. Just shoot me if you want to end the session.”

  I nodded.

  “Show me.”

  I opened my hand, shaped it back into the pistol, took aim. Thanks to the cuffs tight around my wrists, it was like a kid pretending to shoot the bad guy in the ankle.

  “The next time you do that, it's over. Everything ends, and we leave, that's it. Game over. No questions asked.”

  “Does this guy know fuck-all anything?” Toolkit Guy asked. “What have you brought to me, Bray? You've got some fucking virgin watching our scene?”

  Brayden laughed the kind of laugh that's more of a short bark than anything else. “If you ask him, he knows every fucking thing. That's apparently why I'm called upon to educate him.”

  “Fucking college kids. If I'm appearing in some sociology paper, you better make sure he spells my name right.”

  I made a muffled sound behind the bandanna. English majors think we're smarter than sociology majors. We just do. I wanted my displeasure known but somehow I couldn't get it across.

  They both laughed.

  “Everybody was a virgin once, Eugene,” Brayden said. “Even you.”

  Eugene. That was a townie name if I ever heard one.

  Brayden got out a stout chain with a steel clip on it. He attached it to my handcuffs and yanked me forward. A leash. A motherfucking son of a bitching leash.

  It wasn't a very long chain. Maybe eighteen inches. As a result, I was practically treading on his heels as he led me out of the saloon. It was unintentionally sexy because I kept bumping up against his hard ass, which directed some interesting sensations into my cock. Or maybe it wasn't unintentional. Probably it wasn't. Probably Brayden knew exactly what he was doing.

  Fuck. Test or no test, I'd rather not be throwing a woody with the other guy on the scene. If I wanted to admit to having any kind of leather fantasies at all—which I'm not saying I did—then they were about the intensity of experience with one dom focused entirely on me. Having the other guy there created some screwed-up mixed feelings. I wasn't going to safeword out, but I was glad I had the option.

  Funny thing. The more I tried not to brush up against Brayden's ass, the more I seemed to knock into him. It almost seemed like he was arching back a little, all the better to make it unavoidable.

  All that boxing, all that training, had left him with a round, lifted ass that felt like it was carved out of marble.

  Did he know what he was doing to me? Cock-teasing fuck.

  There was a small corral in back of the saloon. Trampled grass, wooden fence, a hitching post.

  That wasn't a horse hitched up there.

  Eugene unlocked the reins from the post and smacked the guy's bare bubblebutt with a riding crop. The bit in the guy's mouth stopped him from squawking, but he wasn't making any huge effort to run away. His dick, already half hard in some kind of harness made up of an intricate series of buckled straps, began to stretch and grow. He twitched his ass, the better to show off the butt plug complete with horse's tail hanging out.

  “Pony play.” Brayden's voice was dispassionate, as if he was giving a lecture in music theory instead of observing a domination.

  How stupid-ass did he think I was? I knew what pony play was. I'd seen porn. I just ... I just hadn't expected to see it here, off camera, as something somebody did because they were enjoying it. I assumed it was something you had to pay people to do.

  It was one of those things that are sexier in real life than on the screen. Something about the smell of the guy's sweat or the fact you knew beyond any doubt that he wasn't a performer...

  I wriggled my wrists in my cuffs. I needed to break free. I needed to get away.

  I needed to watch.

  Eugene slapped the dude's ass until he took the hint to spin around and get on his heels. That pose was more puppy than pony, but it must have put some pressure on the plug in his butt. His hands were hot and fast on Eugene's leather jeans to pull them open, but his tongue was hotter and faster.

  Oh, man. He was giving Eugene head right in front of us, without any sign of shame or, indeed, any real acknowledgment that Brayden and I even existed. I couldn't help but imagine myself in his ... well, I couldn't say, “shoes,” since the guy's long feet were bare. In his ... position, maybe. A plug up the butt. A dick in the mouth. A couple of curious observers watching the whole show.

  His face went long, his cheeks hollow. His throat bobbed up and down. Eugene grunted and grasped his head hard to hold it in place. Ponyboy made all sorts of interesting little wheezing and gobbling sounds as he drank down every drop. His hips kept jerking forward, and I realized the straps of his cock harness could only do so much to delay his own ejaculation. Suddenly, messily, he was spewing wildly all over his own belly. Some of the mess went high enough to slap the underside of his own chin.

  Some of it, of course, spewed across his master's leather thighs.

  “Lick it all up,” Eugene said. “Don't leave a speck on my legs.”

  Somehow, even though all I was doing was standing there, I stumbled backward. Thanks to the chain, my wrists were jerked up short, and Brayden immediately caught me to stop me from falling.

  “Intense,” he said, but he didn't sound as if he meant it. If anythin
g, he sounded bored. “You can't even handle watching. How would you handle performing?”

  I flushed but I refused to look away from those golden eyes. We stared at each other longer than you'd think, considering there was a live sex show in front of us we could have been staring at instead. My hand twitched, and I started to make it into a fist without thinking, but then I deliberately relaxed my fingers.

  You won't get me to safeword out that easy. Bring it. I'm not scared of anything you've got to show me.

  On the ground in front of us, Ponyboy was back on all fours showing off some trick he had for twitching his ass muscles to make the horse's tail spin in a circle. He could flick that thing as easily as a real horse could use his tail to flick away a fly.

  “What are you asking for, boy?” Eugene asked.

  Ponyboy bared his teeth and made some kind of whinny. His tail whipped around faster. This dude was really getting into his character. It made me feel queasy but also... intrigued. What would make a guy let himself be used like that? I told myself I would never understand it, but my real fear was I might understand all too well.

  Eugene reached out to grab the flicking tail. A yank and a jerk, and the plug was out of Ponyboy's asshole and flying across the dusty road.

  Ponyboy's asshole was pink, flushed, and puffy. Distracted by the flight of the plug, I hadn't seen Eugene slap on the lube, but the big man was rock hard again and glistening, and it wasn't just the spit-shine from the blowjob.

  A stallion mounting a stallion. A domination ritual. This was so far beyond anything I could write about for my senior thesis that it wasn't even funny.

  I glanced again at Brayden and realized he'd been studying me all along. The golden eyes were calm, giving nothing away.

  Could he tell how I breathed a little deeper? How my heart beat a little faster?

  I'm not turned-on. I don't want to be down on all fours like that. Not me. Nuh uh.

  But somehow I couldn't stop watching. Eugene tilted and then thrust, and his hard belly slapped Ponyboy's butt cheeks with an audible smack. Despite the speed and power of the fuck, it couldn't end quickly, thanks to the load Eugene had emptied down Ponyboy's throat not ten minutes before. This fuck seemed to go on and on.

  “When you get scared, boy, you remember the hand signal.” Brayden sounded so fucking smug. He was so fucking certain he was getting into my head and exploding my tiny mind.

  Fuck the fucking hand signal. I'll give you a hand signal.

  When Brayden realized which finger I'd extended, he laughed out loud.

  Chapter Seven

  “You'll never break me down like that,” I said. “Can't fucking happen.” My mouth was dry from my time wearing the gag, and my voice creaked several times. I didn't like how young it made me sound.

  “Is that what you think you saw, Nicky? A man breaking a weaker man?”

  Brayden Brent's know-it-all tone made me squirm. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, so I felt off-balance perched behind Brayden on the broad back of one of the bay horses, my legs spread by the animal's wide body. There was no saddle, just a blanket, and I felt I had no alternative but to lean hard into Brayden's backside to keep me from tumbling to the ground.

  Brayden won't let me fall. He'll never let me fall.

  Whoa. Where did that come from? And yet I sensed it was true.

  Falling off a horse wasn't sexy and wouldn't test any limits. It would simply be a stupid-ass accident. Ergo, he wasn't going to let it happen.

  “You don't understand anything yet, Nicky,” Brayden said. “You and your roommate, you play all these artificial games to test yourself. What you just saw with that ponyboy is the real thing. Your ability to submit is the real test of strength. Are you strong enough to surrender? Only the weak ego needs to always be in control.”

  I couldn't accept that, even sitting in cuffs in the bitch seat. “Don't call me Nicky.”

  “Don't evade the question.”

  Clop, clop, clop.

  “I'm not afraid of being tested. I can submit, I guess. I mean, I don't want some fucking ponytail up my ass, but I'm not afraid of it or anything. If you think I'm scared of a little kink...”

  “What I thought. You're cocky.”

  “I... um...” The fuck was he getting at?

  “See, the normal reaction to the scene you just saw is not necessarily to sprout a hard-on the size of Texas.”

  I was glad I was looking at the back of his neck. It meant he couldn't see the heat in my face.

  “The normal reaction is fear. You think you're beyond fear, but nobody's beyond fear. If you don't feel fear watching something like that, there's another factor at play.”

  I said nothing. The path was a little steeper here, and the horse was choosing its steps even more carefully. My thighs gripped so hard I could feel a muscle cramp.

  “You should be afraid. You should be very afraid.” He had that teacher's voice, like he knew everything and I knew nothing. Infuriating. “You're going to learn more about yourself and your true desires than you've ever been willing to acknowledge.”

  Clop, clop, clop. Off in the distance, a singing bird cut off in mid-trill. The horse paused for a moment, and my thighs relaxed their grip. Then we were moving again, and I leaned even harder into Brayden's back.

  “Such tests create a unique bond between the person being tested and the person administering the test,” he said. “I'm not sure you're ready for that.”

  All this talk was a form of reverse psychology. I could see what he was doing, but I couldn't stop myself from reacting the way I always did. If you'd asked me two minutes ago, I might have agreed I wasn't ready. Did I want to be harnessed, chained, cuffed, locked up? Flogged and ridden and used as a living sex toy? Leave that crap for Ponyboy, I would have said.

  Yeah, I knew exactly what Brayden was doing. And yet the play still worked on me. How fucked was that?

  I sat up straight so I wasn't pressing so hard against his broad back. “I can handle anything you throw at me. If by ‘unique bond,’ yeah, yeah, I took the usual freshman psych class. I know all about transference. If you think I'm going to fall in love because you smack me around, you've got the wrong guy. That's Ponyboy, not me.”

  “You know all the things, Nicky. Or at least you think you do. I want you to be certain you know what you're getting into.”

  By this point in Fight Club, they were already blowing up buildings. I hadn't even had a dick in my mouth. “I think I can handle it, professor. Are we done with the disclaimers yet?”

  We'd reached a white frame house in a flowering meadow with a neat wooden fence around it. Two men waited to take the horse and lead it in the direction of the barn. I didn't recognize them, which didn't mean much. They wore black leather cowboy hats pulled down to meet their oversized wraparound mirrorshades—a disguise almost as good as a mask.

  Brayden's truck was parked nearby, looking all shiny and freshly washed. The leather hood, its polished buckles gleaming, lay draped over the bumper.

  “We don't need that,” I said. “Come on. Don't you trust me not to talk? I'm not going to tell anybody where filthy town lives.”

  “I trust you to use the safeword if you find your situation unacceptable.”

  “Fuck.” Not a safeword. Exactly as he knew I would, I turned and gave him my back so he could pull the hood on over my head. Like before, adjusting all those straps somehow involved my backside bumping against his front side. He might not want to admit it, but there was a puff of pride in those jeans of his. I bumped back harder, aiming more deliberately for his bulge.

  He smacked my ass and pushed me forward into the truck. I took the hint to scramble up into the cab, cuffed hands, hooded eyes, and all. He leaned over me to strap me in.

  A big hand felt for the front of my jeans. Squeezed hard. His first real acknowledgment that he knew how turned on I was.

  “I'm going to take you home so you can process.” His hand was hot, but his voice was cool.

>   “The fuck you are,” I said. “The actual fuck?”

  His hand went away. My balls ached. More of that torturing and teasing crap. More of him reminding me who'd come to who.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “I'm supposed to beg. Well, you'll wait a long time to hear me beg.”

  Chapter Eight

  The truck's motor wasn't starting. We sat there in what, for me, was utter darkness.

  “I'm sorry to hear that,” he said after a while. “I'm not sure what you consider begging, but I'd like you to tell me exactly what you want. I want you to face what you're feeling and claim what you want.”

  I heard those words coming muffled through the darkness, and I felt a rush of heat all through my blood. How do you know if the blood rush is from excitement or if it's from shame? Those emotions were all mixed up for me. My wiring was not the norm.

  There were a thousand words I could use, a thousand excuses I could make. Except, at the moment, I couldn't think of any of them.

  “I can't,” I said.

  “It's a direct order.” He squeezed my bulge again. “Talk to me. Tell me what you want.”

  There I sat, cuffed and hooded in the passenger's seat of a truck that could take me anywhere, even the places beyond roads, and I should have been afraid. I was his toy, and he could do anything to me.

  I wasn't afraid. He was right about that much. I felt something but it wasn't fear. Call it “conflicted,” for lack of a better word. I didn't want to be excited, but I was.

  I'd been searching a long time for somebody to take me underneath the surface of things. I wanted to know what it was to be a real man. I wanted to know if I had the mental toughness. Being the son of Nicholas Pembroke Kensington the Second didn't exactly prepare you for a soldier's life. I don't know what it did prepare you for. Life at the country club and the law office, I suppose.

  A nice life. Trophy wife, trophy kid, trophy mansion, trophy vacation home. Some golf trophies too. Lots of five hundred dollar bottles of booze.

  Maybe it satisfied my father, but it wasn't enough for me.