Nine months later

Paperwork had kept her late, so the flicker of relaxing candlelight on the back screen porch should have been a welcome sight as Violet took the Stealth over the marsh bridge to their street. Instead, for just a moment, she was torn between wanting to go in and bury herself in his arms, and turning the car around and driving it as fast and far as she could, to outrun the ache that had been growing in her chest ever since he'd returned to active duty a couple weeks ago.

"Damn it, get over it," she snapped.

She pulled up next to his bike and noted that the Aztec lilies she had planted were coming into their second blooming of the summer. Bright, vibrant, passionate red. She had a sudden urge to rip them out of the ground. Instead, she worked her fingertips into the tightness in her temples, staving off the headache, taking a deep breath before she got out of the car.

Once in the house, she tossed her keys on the kitchen table and gave Boscoe his required ear scratching before she blocked out the jumble of emotions, composed herself the same way she did right before she went to work, and headed for the back porch.

Mac rose from his hammock chair, his smile easy but his eyes showing his concern, and she knew she wasn't masking her feelings well enough. He touched her face, curling a loose auburn strand back behind her ear, brushed his lips across hers. She fought back the urge to devour that firm mouth, to press her nose against him and just inhale all of him into her.

"Good day?" he asked, pulling off his wire-framed reading glasses, a very sexy accessory she hadn't even known he used until she had moved in here six months ago to oversee every halting and occasionally harrowing step of his return to health.

During that period, Violet learned that time could be slowed down and valued, one tick of the minute hand after another. Insurance and the same family trust fund that had paid for her Stealth paid for a home nurse when he was allowed to leave the hospital, but she took over the evening shifts, effectively moving into his home.

Boscoe staked out a spot on the sofa and became Mackenzie's watchdog when she wasn't around. She planted mums by his door in the fall, set a poinsettia on the kitchen table at Christmas and held Mac's head in her lap when he fell asleep on the sofa at nine-thirty on New Year's Eve night.

There were many times that the powerful man she loved had been filled with rage at the weakness that barely got him to the bathroom on his own. When it got to be too much, he took out that anger on her, the nearest target. In return, her fear would goad her to tear his ass apart verbally when he did too much and wore himself out.

But then one day the tide turned, and she saw him start to grow stronger. He began to do desk work for his job, investigative work, and returned to working out with weights to build up a body that had gone lean and gaunt from the months of recovery.

She would come home and find him sweating and tired, but with a triumphant gleam in his eyes that told her he was getting better.

They made love several times then, carefully, gently. But she was afraid to do more, demand more. Over the nine months it took him to recuperate, D/s was an area they did not touch. He had reclaimed the bracelet, asked for it the moment they would let him wear jewelry in the hospital again, but she had not moved to reclaim the rights that went with it.

She couldn't initiate it. She didn't know why, because she knew the longing was still there in her, but she had no emotional strength to face what it was that was keeping her from going there with him. When they made love, she sensed a hesitance in him, as if he was waiting for something from her, but she turned away from it, squelched it with the passion of vanilla lovemaking, and stopped the topic from coming up.

"Good enough," she responded, taking a seat across the side table from him, close enough that they could link hands as they always did, establishing a loose connection.

He poured her a glass of wine, and then he surprised her by bending over, untying the canvas sneakers she'd changed into before she came home, and took them off her feet, his hands gently taking her feet up to his lap to massage them.

"Mmmm." She made the casual noise of pleasure, but her gaze was riveted on the way those long-fingered hands moved over her arches, caressed her toes. The way his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders as he bent to remove her shoes. "We stopped a car carrying a kilo of coke this afternoon, but they're trying to get off on a technicality. You heard about that?"

"On the radio." He nodded at the police issue he kept just inside the door of the house. "Caught the tail end of it when I got home. George was an idiot, searching the car the way he did."

"So do you think we have a chance of making the bust stick?" As he gave her his opinion, she put her lips to the glass, let her eyes fall shut. That deep, melodic voice, the joy of being able to listen to every syllable, set off an odd trembling deep in her stomach, a need so strong it spread through her limbs.

She didn't know when the words disappeared. His voice just became the music her soul yearned to embrace, to compose the right notes to make their songs come together again, as easily and beautifully as they had before.

His hands touched her face, and her eyes jerked open. She stared at him, leaning over her, and he lifted his hand, showing her the tears from her eyes wetting his fingers.

He studied her, and she saw something in his expression, something that made the ache spread.

"I'll go check on - "

"No, you won't. Come here, sugar," he murmured.

Before she could object, he had his arms around her and he pulled her over onto his lap, cradling her. She knew he had built up his strength again, but it was surprising to feel how much, because she hadn't availed herself of it. For so long, she had been focused on the areas of his health that needed bolstering. Her body tightened in need and want in a way she had not permitted it to do for some time.

"Let it go, Violet," he said softly against her hair. "I swear to God, if you don't, I'm going to slap you around."

She shoved against him, trying to get away, and he simply yanked her back. She struck at him, and he blocked her, captured her arms proving without a doubt he'd regained his physical supremacy over her. She punched and pummeled, shouted at him, and he hung on grimly, until words became curses and curses became tears.

At last, when Mac thought he was going to have to shake it out of her, great racking sobs tore out of her chest. She collapsed against him, too exhausted to fight anymore.

Thank God.

It was the hardest she'd ever cried in her life, Mac was sure. What was more, he knew the cause of every single tear that dampened his shirt front.

For nine months, he had watched her suppress every tear, every complaint, every worry for him behind an inhuman level of energy focused on making him better. Now, at last, she cried for each awful moment since that terrible night in the dungeon. For every time she'd been vicious to him to make him take his medications. Every countless instance she'd bullied, coaxed or teased him into resting so he wouldn't kill himself with the frustration of inactivity. All the times he'd felt her lie awake for hours next to him, barely breathing herself as she'd kept a hand on his chest. Her terror that he would leave her in the night had been a palpable thing. Too weak to hold her or comfort her, at times he'd wished he could die, just so he wouldn't cause her such pain.

But she wouldn't let him, and he learned that a person could love too much. She had shut down her own emotional and physical needs so effectively that she didn't know how to get them started up again. Him going back to active duty had been the catalyst for her deteriorating temperament, the reason as obvious to him as it was incomprehensible to her. Well, he was better now, and he wasn't having any more of this bullshit.

She had soaked his T-shirt. When she ran out, ran down to hiccupping sobs, he removed the garment so her cheek wouldn't be against the wet. He used a dry portion of the cloth to wipe her running nose, dab at her eyes. She watched him as he did it, her beloved face confused and young. Pushing her head back beneath his chin, he coaxed her into nestling her cheek against his bare skin.

They quietly watched the sun go down. He didn't say anything, simply stroked her back, her neck, her hair. Her hand crept over the scar on his belly, her other palm around his back, on the marks of the lash that would always be there.

He lifted his head, brought his hand to her jaw and made her look into his eyes.

"It's over, Violet," he said, and his voice was rough. "Don't let it take any part of what we were from us." He caught her hand from his stomach and bit her fingers, not gently.

"I'm yours. I never stopped being yours." He kissed her lips, hard, willed her to nip at him as she had done once. When she would have turned her head away, shielding her reaction, he caught her chin in a hard grip, yanked her face back to his. Saw a flash of temper.

"I didn't die, because you ordered me not to. You don't get more 'yours' than that. I wear your collar." He raised his arm, showed the bracelet to her. "Because I want you more than I've ever wanted any fucking thing on earth. So don't deny me any part of yourself, and goddamn it, accept me again. Let me please you, Mistress. Tell me what you want."

Her throat worked, but he didn't see tears. He saw a glimmer of something, something he had hoped to see for nine of the longest months of his life.

"I love you, Mackenzie," she said at last.

"I know that."

She smiled, a tentative gesture, but genuine. "Arrogant jerk." His hand slid down her shoulder, grazed the side of her breast. During the summer, she always changed out of her uniform before she came home from work, so she wore thin cotton drawstring trousers and a cropped halter top. He placed his palm on the bare expanse of her stomach and moved up, taking up the hem of her loose shirt, sliding it until her left breast was uncovered, displaying the lace of her bra cup. His fingers traced the nipple beneath, and then he pushed the cup down and lowered his head to suckle her. His hand came around to her ribcage, to hold her firmly to his mouth, and she laid her hand on his head, tugging on those curls as his head moved.

"Mackenzie..." she murmured, her thighs loosening, wanting him, aching for what she felt going on beneath her squirming buttocks. She wanted him so much, she was just so afraid...

"Damn it, Violet. I'm yours. I'm yours, sugar." And in his frustration, he scored her with his teeth, caught the side of her breast, goading her.

Something cracked within her, something that was pain and joy both, a bright, excruciating light, merciless in its heat and power. It felt like a granite wall breaking up inside her body, pummeling the softest, most vulnerable parts of her.

She caught his face, pulled it away from her, met flashing silver with her own determined gaze. "Then fuck me, Mackenzie. Take me. Make me as much yours as you are mine. Leave your mark on me, be as rough as you've wanted to be all these months.

Let me feel the animal in you I've always known is in there." They stared at each other for a long moment. The sun was melting on the horizon, a flood of orange fire that glinted off the light in his eyes and matched what was rolling through her blood, flame hot as the purifying depths of hell.

There was a moment of hesitation, but only a moment. Abruptly he was out of the chair, taking her with him, and he spun her, shoving her down onto her belly on the mosaic table. "Spread open for me then, sugar," he whispered. She gasped as he ripped the seam of her loose sweat pants and the panties beneath in one tear, exposing her to the humid air, relieved only by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan above them. She had a moment to adjust her knees before his foot was against her instep, knocking her feet out wider, a cop move that made her instantly, gloriously wet. His arm snaked around her waist and he yanked her back against him, her hips in the air, her feet leaving the floor, toes not even brushing. She caught hold of the rough grooves in the table surface, the pads of her finger holding on, looking for an anchor, but there was none but him.

He sheathed himself in her. Hard, brutal, shoving home into her like the slamming of a magazine into the stock of an automatic. She screamed at the combination of pain and pleasure, and knew how much she had missed this, the desperate urgency of a powerful man. Her powerful man. He pulled all the way out, stroking her clit with his broad head, then slammed into her again, jerking her body forward on the table.

"That's your cock, Mistress," he gasped. "Take every goddamned inch of it and scream for mercy, because I'm not feeling merciful. All I want is to feel that sweet pussy of yours sucking on me until eternity crashes down on us." It was absolution. Because she felt it from him, all of a sudden she understood it, understood why she hadn't been able to let go, embrace him again as she'd wanted to do. It was so absurdly obvious.

She'd blamed herself. She thought she should have been faster, better. She was supposed to keep him safe. He was giving her the punishment she wanted, stroking away the pain while offering her the gift of himself, a complex give and take she was helpless to explain. With every stroke, she knew he was telling her that, come hell or high water, she was his Mistress.

His hands cupped her breasts, gripped them in his long palms, used that grip to increase the impact of each hard thrust into her, squeezing her nipples between the fingers of both hands.

"You've got a beautiful ass, Mistress," he muttered. He lifted her up higher so it was arched high in the air as his cock continued to pound into her relentlessly, her feet dangling. She was leaving nail marks on the table.

"You'd rather sink those little claws into me, I know," his breath was hot over his ear. "And you will. Again and again, until I carry your scars on my back and I'll be proud as hell of them. But tonight you'll wear my mark." She sucked in a gasp as his teeth sank into her shoulder, quick, precise, deep, and the pain surged through her blood like a sweet drug. He held on, like a stallion holding a mare in place with his strength. God, she couldn't believe how much she'd missed his strength, that strength that could mesmerize her, but was also all hers to command.

The climax built higher and hotter than the hottest Florida sun, and she was whimpering with each stroke, unable to get a purchase on the table, not wanting one, but feeling out of control, rushing at breakneck speed to where they were going. All her fear and guilt were being swept away before physical response, and her breath was harsh and loud as the slap of his thighs against the backs of hers. His fingers dipped, caught her clit and began to manipulate it.

"Oh, no..." She went over the crest like a rocket, her hand clinging to his other arm, now anchored firmly just above her breasts, so her body strained forward, unable to do anything but convulse in the throes of the strong climax as he brought her down on him again and again, until his thighs quivered, his breath rasped, and she cried out with him again. He shouted out his release, his cock working inside her like the power of life itself, virile and potent, creating mysteries beyond the desire for knowledge, taking them into the realm of blind faith.

She clung to him, let him make her serve his cock until he chose to slow, until her cries became soft, mewling whimpers. At length, he eased her forward so she was flat on the table, his knuckles rubbing a soft caress between her shoulder blades as her deep pants slowed into soft sobs, quiet hitching breaths.

He leaned down and placed a soft kiss in the center of her back, dwelling there, a tender, rubbing caress.

"My Mistress is generous, and kind," he said softly. "But she's done nothing to deserve a punishment from her slave."

"It's not a rational thing," she whispered. "I just needed to know...I needed to give you that."

"As I said, my Mistress is generous," he responded simply. She was limp in his arms as he turned her, lifted her into a sitting position so they were facing each other.

His cock was glistening with her come and his, and the beauty of his slightly damp, living breathing body overwhelmed her. He fastened his jeans and then lifted her in his arms.

"Should you - "

"Ssshh..." He took her inside, to the bathroom, set her down on the lid of the commode. "You worry too much."

"What are you doing?" He took out a bottle of peroxide, several cotton balls.

"I want to make sure I don't cause you any infection." She turned her glance to the teethmarks. "I wasn't expecting that." He went to one knee, dabbed the cotton at her shoulder.

"You wanted the animal. You can call him when you want him." Something in his voice turned her to him, made her lift his chin so she could see his face.

Mac closed his hand over hers, held her gaze. "I've seen it enough to know it lives in all of us, and it's not always a bad thing. You bring it out in me, and only you can harness it. Don't stop being my Mistress."

"It's not a choice I have," she smiled. She placed her forehead against his, closed her eyes. "Oh, Mac."

"I know, sugar." His hand cupped the back of her head. "We made it, and you did it. I love you with all I've got. Let me take care of you again, as I've wanted to, for nine fucking months. Don't be afraid."

Everything inside her loosened inside at his low, fervent tone. "I want to spend my life being your Mistress," she raised her head, looked at him kneeling at her feet. "I want to make you beg for my pussy, see your fine ass every day and know it's mine to do with as I wish."

He arched a brow. "Pretty unorthodox marital vows."

"Is that a marriage proposal?" she teased, though her voice shook a little. "I guess it might be. What do I get, if it is?"

He put down the cotton balls, took both her hands in his. "I'll make you feel so loved and desired, sugar, you won't know where one ends and the other begins. What's more, it won't matter. You won't need to separate them."

"Okay," she said, only a little terrified. "So, how will this go, then? You promise to love, cherish and..."

"Obey," he murmured, a whisper from her lips.

The kiss was hungry and powerful, and she gave herself over to it. To have his tongue inside of her mouth, her own curling deliciously into its grasp, feeling his flesh give way under the not-so-gentle bite of her teeth. To be as rough as she wished, to hear him growl against her with need. When she pulled back, she saw he was fully erect again against the crotch of the jeans.

"I think you have a little trouble with that last vow," she gasped. "We'll have to work on it. In fact, I'm thinking I might need to take you to bed and remind you who your Mistress is. Right now."

Lord, please, now.

"There's no one I'd rather have set me straight. Though I expect it will take a lifetime." He smiled that smile that melted her heart, started to get to his feet.

"We'll see," she sniffed. "I'm giving you sixty or seventy years to shape up, Mackenzie Nighthorse. After that, I'm dumping your ass." He grinned, caught her lips in a kiss again, swung her up in his arms. "Try it, sugar. Just try it."