Disciplined by the Dom by Chloe Cox

one to call if she were in trouble. She’d looked like this. Brave.
    Jake stepped back, trying to identify, once more, what this new feeling was. He thought he had it, finally: he felt out of his depth. Always, with Catie, he inevitably felt out of his depth. If it were anyone else, he would have pointed out that this, too, was not entirely appropriate—unless Catie truly did feel she had nowhere to go, and was in need of help. But somehow, looking at her, like this, reminding him so much of the previous week, he did not like to think of the answer to that question, and instead found himself nodding along.
    “All right,” he said.
    Keep focused, Jake.
    He was failing miserably at driving her away from him. Not that he was particularly charming her, either, but he was too disoriented to do much of anything purposefully. This was another new feeling, and it was perhaps the polar opposite of the blissful control he normally felt as a dominant.
    He opened a door for her and he smelled her perfume as she walked by. He was gripped by a desire for her then. Not just a desire for her, but for the known, elegant space of a domination scene, with her . BDSM had been the way he found he could most approach normalcy, the closest he could come to human expressions of love and intimacy; that’s what the act of domination, of controlling another’s reactions and sensations, was to him. It was only way he knew to get close. And with her, it had been…it had been as though he were no longer leading, and neither was she; there was something bigger than both of them, and he forgot, for once, how apart he was from everything.
    No, that was ridiculous. It had been twice. Two encounters. This was simply more evidence that he could not be trusted to keep her at arm’s length. And if she had the sort of sensitivity he’d seen her feel for Eileen, if she felt that way about everything, he could hardly avoid hurting her.
    He must do better.
    “Which Roman general did you want to be?” he asked as they waited for the elevator down to the main floors. He put a little bit of sneer in his voice, and hated himself for it.
    That threw her. From her breathing, he could tell she was thinking about the circumstances under which she’d told him about that. Perhaps a misstep .
    “None in particular,” she said. “I wanted to be…my own.”
    “I thought you’d made that up,” he said, satisfied to have been proven right.
    She turned on him, but she didn’t look angry. Just amused.
    “You thought I made up a childhood desire to be a Roman general? Really? Why on Earth would anyone do that?”
    He shrugged, smiled. “Many people like to pretend at familiarity with the classics. It makes them feel cultured.”
    She laughed. She laughed .
    “Yeah, my dad was one of those. Hence the books with the fake leather binding. But I read them, because I thought he was really into it. So I talked to him about Pompey or Agrippa and he looked at me like I’d grown a third arm, and eventually I figured it out and tried to talk to him about other things. But what that weirdo education did give me,” she said, jamming her finger into the elevator button again, “was the ability to tell when someone is pushing a weak offensive as a last, desperate defense.”
    He said nothing. The elevator pinged open, and Catie walked inside.
    “Are you done with that now?” she said, holding the door open. “Because I’d like to start the orientation.”
    It was at that point that Jake felt he might have gone some way towards convincing her not to feel anything for him, though not in the way he’d intended. Yet another new experience, courtesy of Catie Roberts: feeling like a total ass.
    He guided her through the rest of the building in a state of stunned silence, all the while trying very hard not to notice the curves under that sweater, nor to think about the look she’d flashed him, and what that might have been like in a scene. Thinking about sex—any kind of