Own Me, My Love

An eBook By Reese Gabriel.

CHAPTER ONE

The young painter was giving her the eye.

And Carrie was looking back. Twice already she'd come up to the widow's walk, ostensibly to check the progress of the job, but really she was checking him, his lean, hard body dangerously advertised in tight jeans and tank top. He was like a big cat, his every motion languid and sensually charged as he perched on the ladder, dipping his brush over and over, expertly swathing the seashell pink walls in a fresh coat of storm cloud gray.

He'd come highly recommended by the real estate agent she was using to sell the beach house, though Carrie wondered exactly what else the woman might have been recommending him for.

With those haunting blue eyes and expressive, ironic lips, he was no doubt chased after by every woman for miles up and down the coast. He'd arrived in a pickup, loaded with all the right supplies, though she could see him far more easily on a motorcycle, with mirrored shaded, his black hair flying behind him in the wind, his sun bronzed skin glowing with life. All that power between his thighs, his fingers gripping the handlebars of his steel mount.

It had been an eternity since Carrie Renfrew had thought of a male this way. As an assistant fashion designer, she was around enough of them, many of them drop dead gorgeous, but since her husband's death six months ago, it was as if that part of her had died.

Her ability to get wet and horny, it seemed, had been buried with Roger, along with her ability to laugh, to love and so much else. Sure, she'd survived. A hectic work schedule insured that. Her boss, the flamboyantly sympathetic Simon Grigio, had allowed her to pour as much of herself into it as she wished.

Fourteen hour days, seven days a week, no sleep, if possible. Sleep only brought nightmares. A thousand variations of the same theme. She'd be somewhere in public with Roger, in a crowd or at a restaurant and they would somehow become separated. She would try and chase after him, but each time she caught a glimpse of the back of his head or his broad shoulder, he would disappear yet again. Sometimes she would grab hold of some man from behind only to have him turn about and be someone else, her stepfather, or one of the various other men who'd been so terrible to her in her life before Roger came along.

Always the men would laugh and she would become increasingly desperate. Onward she would run till eventually--and here the dream was always the same--she would end up on the floor of the hospital where Roger had died. Ahead she would see him running, in a hospital gown, his well kept fifty year old body taking easy, loping strides down the hall. She knew he was in trouble, though, that death was chasing him. She'd try and intervene but doctors and nurses would block her way, pushing gurneys in front of her. Corpses would sit and grin at her, or sometimes skeletons.

Finally she'd arrive at the room where Roger was, but always she'd be too late. Inside on the bed, she'd find him wasted, nearly to nothing, just as he had in real life.

She still shed tears of anger over that one. Roger was a warrior, damn it, a lion. He shouldn't have had to go out that way. The doctors told her that her feelings were normal. They gave her pills and told her to be patient with the grieving process.

How could she explain to any of the doctors, though, that Roger was so much more to her than just a spouse, that theirs was a special relationship, one of loving master and devoted slave?

Carrie gripped the railing of the all too ironically named widow's walk, feeling strangely woozy. Having the beach house painted was proving to be more of an emotional drain than she'd been prepared for. Coming out to the coast at all had been grueling, filled as the place was with memories of Roger. At least in the city she had her life to lead, some semblance of normalcy. Here there was fresh loss at every turn, echoes of every laugh they'd ever shared, all those kisses on the sand, the lovemaking in the surf under silvery moonlight.

And the endless dreamy discussions on the balcony over bottles of mediocre wine. Giggling, debating, conspiring. The best of friends. And the power games, the secret ones originating in their bedroom combustion and seeping deliciously into every nook and cranny of their relationship. The looks given across a crowded room, letting her know how fucking hard he was and what he intended to do about it. Her eyes lowered shyly, heart racing as she anticipated his wild whims.

The chains circled round slender limbs. The leather crops and paddles. And even more simply, his hand, seizing lovingly and possessively her auburn hair to position her for a kiss, or on her ass, his palm searing and punishing and mayhem-reeking.

No one had to know she called him Sir or knelt for him in the quiet of their home. It was no one's business if she found her most glorious fulfillment, her most free sense of self in bowing to kiss the feet of her lover, the one who guided, nurtured and challenged her.

Without him she'd been lost, in ways no one could understand. Thank god for her boss, who'd been able to keep her busy. Simon the eccentric, ever energetic businessman, the one with the flair, the one whose name went on the label. Carrie liked it in his shadow, she like to see the dresses in her mind and make them real. She liked to turn her work over to others and get a fair price back. She liked parameters and boundaries. She was a submissive woman. At her best performing for a brilliant man.

She wasn't weak, she wasn't stupid and she sure as hell wasn't short changing herself in life. Roger had taught her all these things. To be proud of who she was, to see that everything is relative to the happiness of each person. She could no more be told to give up her desire to live with a collar and the strict regimen of a testosterone filled male than she could tell a woman's libber to put on an apron or a gay man to suddenly start getting off on pussy.

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