Unconditional Read Free Page A

handle. It was absolutely all he deserved.
    Taggart slapped his hand on the desk, the sound echoing through the office. “Excellent. All my guys are mushy assholes. They’re all getting married and spitting out kids. It’s disgusting. We need some manly men around here.”
    “Didn’t you just get married?” Ryan had told him about the collaring ceremony the big boss had participated in with his wife a few months back. It had followed some kind of vow renewal.
    A little groan came out of Taggart’s mouth before he sipped his coffee. “Nope. I got married a long time ago. I was way stupider then. I got lucky because she died, but then she came back. What the hell am I supposed to do? The only reason I let her back in is she buys me lemon donuts.”
    Keith was pretty sure the guy was fucking with him, but with Taggart, he couldn’t be certain. “Well, I’m not interested in getting married.”
    “Good because once my guys got married, they handed their balls over to their subs, and now I have the distinct problem of needing a couple of Doms who are available as play partners. I expect to lose Jesse at any moment. All a sub will have to do is offer him a sandwich and he’ll be hers forever. Seriously, the kid can eat and he’s got attachment issues. He attaches to everyone, and we can’t get rid of the little fucker. We have five regular subs who like to play and struggle to find a Dom for the night. Simon can’t tie them all up and Damon won’t work with more than one at once. Claims he can’t pay them proper attention or some shit.”
    “If you’re looking for someone to play with the regulars, why are you asking me about Ashley? She’s not a submissive, much less a regular.” Now that he really thought about it, Taggart wasn’t making a lick of sense. The couple of times he’d come in as Ryan’s guest, he’d watched her and she’d never left the bar. “I’ve never seen her play so why is she involved at all?”
    What the hell would he do if he had to watch her with some damn Dom? He wouldn’t be able to look away if she was naked. He would stand there and stare at her like a Peeping Tom.
    “Because Ashley is an employee and if I choose to take you on, you’ll spend the first six weeks playing with her and her alone. Until I’m certain you’re trustworthy, you’re not allowed to play with the club members. Ashley is a newbie. The rest of the regulars have been in the lifestyle for a while. I want to see how you train a new sub.”
    Training Ashley? God, it had been a terrible idea when he thought it would be a single encounter, much less weeks and weeks of having her at his command. Yeah, that was very likely a horrible idea. If he trained her, she would be under his direction, available to him. He would be responsible for her behavior, for her discipline, for her pleasure. He would have to touch all that sweet, soft skin. That ridiculously vulnerable skin. Young skin. Yes, she was too fucking young for him. He would have to remind himself of that every single time he looked at her. He was on the slow slide to forty and she was twenty-freaking-five. There was a whole decade between them.
    And she had a baby. She was a baby with a baby.
    All very good reasons to not train her.
    “It would be a completely up-front relationship,” Ian explained, his words continuing even as Keith’s brain exploded with all the reasons why he shouldn’t listen to Mephistopheles in leather. “You’ll sign a training contract with her. She understands that you wouldn’t have any kind of relationship with her outside of the club.”
    He stopped his inner diatribe. “Ashley knows about this?”
    “Of course. I wouldn’t be here asking you if Ashley hadn’t already agreed to it.” He slid a piece of paper across the desk. “She’s already signed the contract.”
    Holy shit. Ashley Paxon had actually signed a goddamn BDSM contract, and there was his name sitting right alongside hers. There was no way she