Also On The Corner of 5th

 Happy start of summer to those of us on the upper side of the equator!  We had some time and started work on the ongoing stories we've got started.  However, some maniacal plot bunny hopped all over the place until we finally gave up and followed him. What do you really need when you have a full length novel about three quarters done, and several novellas paused mid book? Well obviously, another different ranch story! 

You remember the story On the Corner of 5th? 


Well this is Also On The Corner of 5th.


R&R 


 

The tables were increasingly full in the grand dining room beneath the chandeliers.


Plenty of people in leathers, although there were suits and formal dresses, costumes and all the rest of the paraphernalia you would expect to see at a particularly high end BDSM event. Several of the waiters were serving in leather chaps and very little else, and there was at least one who’d walked past the stage on a leash. Champagne was still flowing in the wake of a highly expensive dinner, and the sense of anticipation in the room was rising.


What the hell are you doing?


Aware that his palms were slick with sweat, his knees were starting to shake, and that he honestly had little idea, Darcy stood a little straighter in the spot he’d been positioned in. It was officially backstage, although the stage had been created with curtains and screens and looked highly artistic and formal, while at the same time providing those working with easy glimpses to keep tabs on what was going on in the body of the room.


It’s perfect. I know; I designed it.


He’d supervised the setting up of this room personally. It had been the work of most of the past week, among organising the many other complicated aspects of this event.


There were plenty of staff quietly running the show back here, including amongst the number of Dominants, a couple who Darcy could see were looking at him increasingly frequently. There were fifteen of them in this line that the staff were supervising. Most of them very partially dressed, and almost all of them looking either excited to the point that it was becoming x rated, or blissed out with anticipation. Somewhere, early in his life, Darcy had cultivated what Gerry and Roger used to privately refer to among themselves as the Foxtrot Oscar expression. It was one of serene distance, a slightly amused and sophisticated air that had got him a long way. He was using it now, although the thought of either Gerry or Roger was one that he pushed away as sharply as possible. Tonight was no time to be thinking of them. At all.


“Here.” One of the older male Dominants, a man in a crisp tux that gave the impression the younger men in leathers were merely schoolboys yet to graduate, touched Darcy’s hand and Darcy took the crystal glass, gratefully sipping the iced water. The man’s eyes were sharp, and Darcy was neither used to nor entirely comfortable with the way they surveyed him, not stopping politely at his face but taking detailed, careful account of his body, a lot of which was currently very visible to view in this costume. There was nothing predatory or invasive about it at all; it was a look that searched for himself, how exactly are you doing right now? as if he couldn’t be relied upon to be sure. It wasn’t at if he hadn’t seen plenty of men do this many times before; just not at him.


“I’m a little warm,” Darcy said in the bright, cheerful tone that they’d all been familiar with him since the planning meeting. In which they’d all been wearing a lot more clothing. The man did not stop looking until he himself was done. Then he shifted his stance, just slightly, but it meant that Darcy was more screened from sight from the rest of the performers and staff waiting.


“I’m not sure that’s the truth. I’m going to remind you that you do not have to do this. It is perfectly fine to change your mind and we’ve had people step down even at the point they’re called on stage, it is normal. We do consent here.”


“I’ve signed everything you needed,” Darcy pointed out. The man’s eyes didn’t waver. Darcy smiled at him, finishing the water.


“Really. If I feel any differently I won’t hesitate to say, but it’s fine.”


He knew the look he got in reply to that too, and that was one with which he was personally very familiar. That was the look of a dominant man who was thinking in the privacy of his own head about if you and he had any kind of personal understanding at this moment, this conversation would not be over.
Several of the stage crew with headsets were starting to signal. One of them smiled at Darcy as she passed. He’d had the reputation amongst them in the past week of work that he always had with the crews he worked with. The high energy, unshakeable organiser with the expensive, high fashion clothes and the foot squarely in the high fashion world; slightly camp, slightly risqué, discreetly involved in a varied and exciting high life that they never more than glimpsed and gossiped about. A sophisticate, au fait with the wildest parts of society and with very few hang ups. They hadn’t been in the least surprised to find him involved in the night itself; the admiration was in their glances. This is exactly the kind of place and event you would fully expect Darcell Julian to be very at home in, if you knew his professional reputation.


A woman in a leather harness and gliding on astoundingly high heels was guided past him towards the stage. Lot number one. Available for seventy two hours of whatever her buyer chose, although the contracts were extremely specific and hard limits were not only very clear but had been very thoroughly checked by the organisers. Having had a hand in it himself,


And advised on, because goodness knows I have all the observed experience and can sound very convincing,


It had been really rather easy to cheat the safeguards placed to avoid a complete novice ending up on the stage.


What are you doing?


Mostly shaking.


The bidding for the woman went on for some minutes before it slowed down, and the figure paused in the realms of several thousand dollars. It was not surprising. There was a lot of money in the room tonight, and this was a well known event. By the time they reached the fourth lot, the room was increasingly relaxed with a large crowd of people enjoying themselves, and Darcy was aware he’d reached a point of unreality. The room seemed distant, the sounds muffled, everything very far away.


“Lot five.” The older Dominant touched his elbow, making a courtly gesture to signal Darcy ahead of him. He did not look any less grim about it. Darcy straightened his spine even further, pulled together the sophisticated, ever so slightly amused expression and strolled ahead of the man onto the stage. The lights were artfully arranged; he’d spent hours with the tech crew to ensure it. The Dominant announced the lot number, the few clear guidelines they had stated each time to specify what the purchaser should be aware of and the limits, which on the forms as Darcy had seen them, ranged in general terms from dinner companion and escort, no sex; to would like to be nailed through the floor day and night by a small team of deranged maniacs. His own given instructions…. Yes, this was not the time to go there.


He saw the numbered paddles raise without having heard anything much of what was being said. There was just a sea of faces ahead of him amongst the blinding shimmer of the stage lights. The Dominant’s hand was still on his elbow; not in any way pushing him forward. There was a hell of a lot more unwillingness to let him step any further forward than here’s today’s special offer.


The bidding had hit four thousand. It was still fairly high speed. The auctioneer at the podium wasn’t looking their way, all her attention on the room. Five thousand dollars. The bidding was down to three; Darcy could not see who. It slowed further. Dropped to two bidders. And very quickly the price froze and Darcy heard the gavel fall. Five thousand eight hundred dollars.


The Dominant guided him down the steps on the opposite side of the stage, and stood there with him. There was much going on out of sight in the holding area here; credit cards being cleared, payments organised, and due to the nature of the event several payments being made in cash. It was a blur around Darcy. The Dominant did not release his elbow, holding him well out of the way of the coming and going. It was only as the team clearing payments said a very polite thank you, enjoy yourselves and goodnight that Darcy felt himself being drawn forward.


“Lot five,” the Dominant said over his head, grimly. “He’s all yours.”


Man or woman? Darcy hadn’t specified on his forms. What was the point? It wasn’t as if it mattered. Heart sickly thundering, he saw black suit in a sea of black suits, and pulled himself together as it was definitely the time to smile, be charming, get the hell on with it.


Then a hand took his arm, and it was neither tentative, nor amorous, nor you’re mine boy, get over here. Instead it towed him smartly out of the way of several waiters passing through with trays, and Darcy looked up – and up again, as the man in the immaculate tux was taller than anyone else around them – and stared in shock as the man gave him an equally grim look. Wide shouldered, fair haired in an immaculate tuxedo, he glanced over Darcy’s head to nod to the Dominant, voice calm.


“Thank you Michael, I appreciate it.”


It was Jake.


It was actually Jake.


Jaw dropping, face turning so hot that Darcy felt it burning with absolute humiliation, Darcy watched the Dominant give Jake a nod and return to the backstage area. Jake, gripping his arm, pushed him very briskly behind a curtain and across to one of the service hallway entrances.


“How dare you?!” Darcy began in absolute fury about halfway down that hallway as his stomach returned to its place and his knees began to shake in earnest. “How dare you Jacob! What are you doing here? Get off me-”


“Give me,” Jake said very calmly, very pleasantly, still pushing him at high speed down the hallway, and there was no way that Darcy could have pulled free of that large hand wrapped around his arm, “Just one more excuse and I will swat you. It’s already taking all the self control I’ve got. And in that outfit, I really don’t think you want me to.”


In this outfit… goodness knows he’d let the family see some of the weirder stuff in his time, it was something he did quite deliberately to shock them, but this one was not one he’d have ever allowed any of them to have seen him wearing, even in his worst nightmares. He was barefoot, something he only remembered when Jake took him straight out of a side door onto the street and to one of the waiting cabs in rank. With no choice about it, Darcy climbed where he was pushed, didn’t hear what Jake said to the driver, and ran his hands over his face, too humiliated and furious to think straight.


“You have no right at all,”


“I have every right, I bought you.” Jake interrupted him. “Considering you could be headed anywhere with anyone with any agenda right now, and you were open to that, you don’t have much grounds for objecting to it being me. Sit down, be quiet.”


That was a tone Darcy knew well although the family didn’t use it with him. Jake looked at him before he had time to argue, blue eyes glinting and voice soft, “And before you remind me that you don’t play those games, I’ll remind you that’s exactly what you signed yourself up to tonight.”


Darcy froze, flushing even more darkly. The cab didn’t go far. It was only a couple of streets before it halted, Jake passed some bills to the driver and got out, holding the door for Darcy to follow. There he pulled off his tux jacket and wrapped it around Darcy’s shoulders.


“Put that on.”


“So I’ll look respectable?” Darcy snarled at him. Jake put a hand in the small of his back, pushing him faster than he could comfortably walk into the glass foyer of an expensive hotel. He did not pause at the desk, simply took Darcy straight into an elevator and a moment later down a carpeted hallway where he unlocked a room. By that point, Darcy was utterly terrified that they would find Tom in it. It was some relief that it was empty, other than a single rucksack by the bed, and the hanger and wrappings from the hired tux Jake was wearing. Jake closed the door behind them, put the lights on, and put Darcy down on the end of the bed.


There were any number of things Darcy would dearly love to have spat at him. But that threat to swat was still very much in the air, and animal instinct said that at this moment, he’d probably never been closer to it becoming a reality.


Jake was moving around the room. Furious and utterly humiliated, Darcy wasn’t paying attention to where until a glass landed in his hand and Jake pulled him up off the bed by his arm, took the jacket off his shoulders and took him into the bathroom. A bath was running. Jake tapped the glass.


“Get that down. Now.”


“I’m-”


“You’re shaking like a leaf and you’re frozen.” Jake said bluntly. “Then you can get yourself out of that contraption you’re wearing, because if I have to do it for you it’ll be with a pocket knife.”


“I hate you, Jacob.”


“We’re both going to survive the experience.” Jake folded his arms. “Want me to count?”


Foxtrot Oscar.


Darcy drained the single finger of amber liquid in the glass. It was brandy, not at all his taste, but there was only about one large swallow there. It still made him choke, like a kid on his first drink, and burned from his nose to his gullet. Jake took the glass from him.


“Get that thing off.”


“I’ll bet if you saw Tom in this you wouldn’t be complaining.” Darcy couldn’t help the question that followed, “Where is he anyway?”


“Not in this city. You don’t have to worry.” Jake took the leather harness from him and waited. “Are those shorts spray painted on?”


“Oh shut up.” Darcy peeled off the leather chaps shorts and the g string underneath, dropping them to climb into the bath. He was shaking. He was also freezing; the water was the first warmth he’d felt in hours. Jake collected the abandoned clothes, which was almost more than Darcy could bear. He was gone a moment; Darcy heard the tap at the door and Jake’s voice answering, and a moment later he brought a large mug of hot chocolate to the bath, putting it into Darcy’s hands. The tub was more or less full. Jake turned off the taps and sat on the edge of the tub, looking down at him. Darcy looked down into his mug.


“What the actual fuck, Darce?” Jake said after a while, conversationally.


He was the only Top in the family who’d swear like that. It was a habit Philip had never managed to convince him was a problem, and he was fairly immune to Tom’s stern tellings off about it too. This was probably in fact the least shockable Top of the entire lot of them, but Darcy suspected he’d managed to do it.


“It is my life, I’m a free adult.” Darcy gave him a furious look over the mug. “You have no idea what I do in my free time and nor should you.”


“Except when I get an alarmed call from Michael Morrison saying a total novice has apparently lost his mind and is determinedly trying to pass himself off as an experienced submissive, he can’t let it go ahead but he also can’t find a way out for you without humiliating you.”


“He’s managed that.” Darcy said bitterly. Jake snorted.


“No. He didn’t. According to everyone else in that room you were sold like anyone else, and for a very good price. He managed that for you, your public reputation is as exciting as you apparently wanted it to be. But only because I swore to him I’d outbid anyone else and he could be certain if he let you on that stage you wouldn’t end up in anyone else’s hands but mine, and even then he had a plant in the room to bid for you in case. Experienced sub?”


“Neither you nor Michael know anything about what I do in my free time-”


“Oh Morrison knows, you weren’t fooling anyone.” Jake interrupted him. “Not anyone with any actual knowledge or experience. As a prospective buyer I picked up a copy of the information you put in your auction papers, Darce.”


“Argh!” Darcy buried his face in his knees as Jake pulled several folded sheets out of his pockets and unfurled them, turning them for Darcy to see.


“All these things you’re apparently experienced in? Hard limits…. Well not many, let’s put it that way. What were you doing?”


“How does Michael even know you?”


“He was a friend of Philip’s, and he knew you were one of Philip’s boys.” Jake said rather softly. “And he knew me as a relative of Philip’s. He tracked me down through the family lawyers in Boston. And that’s not what I asked you.”   


“I do not have to explain myself to you.”


“You’re forgetting a few things here.” Jake folded his arms, looking down at him. ““I bought you. I’ll remind you, for over five thousand dollars. According to what you signed up to, which states your commitment to being ‘pliant to my desires within your hard limits’, I get to do whatever I want with you for the next seventy two hours. And unlike you would have done with any other Top in that room, you know how I roll, Darce. You know exactly how we all do, you’ve lived alongside it for decades.” He waited a minute, letting that sink in before he went on in that same, sweetly sinister tone. “And that means you know I carry a paddle when Tom and I travel. As a matter of fact, I think the martinet is probably in there too. So if I tell you to explain yourself, that’s what you’re going to do.”


He waited a long moment. Darcy stared at him, eyes huge. Jake looked right back. As the family Tops went, he was not at all one of the stern ones, or the ones Darcy was slightly careful to mind his manners around, in spite of himself and of being known neutral territory. James was. Flynn was. Kit was. But not Jake. And yet he sat there with that genial half smile on his mouth and those glinting eyes, and he looked right now, every inch one of them.
Darcy knew the script; he’d seen Gerry and the others begin right now what Dale referred to as rabbit trailing, and which Dale could certainly do with enough skill that a lot of the time many of the family missed entirely that they had been managed. He’d also seen them called out for it. In words of one syllable, often with a verbal or a practical reminder as to what happened to those who tried what was, in fact, a direct act of disrespect and treated as such if the Top in question wasn’t feeling indulgent. Right now, Darcy didn’t think he’d get away with it if he tried.


Instead, and pathetically, he found himself putting his head down on his knees and balling up, with a tone that had no business coming from a man of his age, experience or sophistication.


“I won’t. Leave me alone.”


Jake unfolded his arms, removed the hot chocolate and stood the mug on the side of the tub. Then his hand closed on Darcy’s arm, hoisting him part way out of the water, and the swat that landed across his backside – it was resounding on bare, wet skin, Jake’s hand was large and covered plenty of ground, and Darcy’s mouth dropped open at how badly it stung. Before he’d had time to process more than the sheer shock of he did it! he swatted me! Jake put him back in the water and stooped down to him, face close, voice very soft.


“That is the last warning I will give you. Do you understand me?”


He’d heard it said so often it came without him having to consciously think first, bursting out urgently, fast, with his heart thundering. “Yes sir.”


“I am waiting.”


He’d never known Jake could be this scary. And there should have been a part of him pointing out that he was sitting in the bath with a member of the family a lot younger than he was, who he’d hung out with eating chocolate in front of the fire and swapping bad jokes with at Christmas, who he’d shared breakfast in pyjamas with, had known for decades. All he knew at this moment was that Jake’s large hand was holding his arm, painlessly but very firmly, and that to argue with him any further would be a really terrible idea. And at that point he found the shaking get right out of control and the tears spilled. There were a few seconds where he balled up even tighter around himself and sobbed, and then Jake’s arms wrapped around him and he was pulled far enough out of the water to get his own arms around Jake’s neck.
 




 
            It took a while to calm down enough to drink the overly sweet hot chocolate that Jake insisted on. It was around then that Darcy realised Jake thought he was in shock. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe and warm for the first time in hours, he did not want to think about the possibility that Jake might be right.


“Where’s your phone?” Jake asked him, hanging the tux back in its wrappings on the rail. He’d changed back into his travel clothes; jeans, a shirt and jacket, with the heavy boots he always wore that worked for climbing, hiking or riding. It was the work clothes of home, and that didn’t help. He’d almost been easier to take in the unfamiliar suit. Darcy wrapped his arms tighter around himself.


“At my apartment.”


“Wallet? Keys?”


“The hotel are holding them for me. They did for all the subs in the auction.”


“Presumably you have proper clothes there too.” Jake surveyed him. “Where’s Luath this weekend?”


“Out of town, so you can’t dump me on him.” Darcy said bitterly. Jake took a seat on the edge of the dressing table, crossing his long legs at the ankle.


“Out of town where?”


“Dallas. He had a meeting in Dallas.”


And would stay a few days with Wade while he was there. They both knew it. Jake nodded and collected his rucksack off the floor.


“Let’s go.”


“Where?”


“Your apartment to start with. I want to see your phone.”


“You are not invading my privacy by-”


Jake Looked at him. Darcy stopped and swallowed. “…. I can’t travel like this.”


“Looks like you’re going to have to.” Jake herded him off the bed and into the hallway, deaf to protests.


He said nothing on the cab ride across the city, and he slipped the lock on the apartment door in seconds, with the dispatch of an ex cop.


“Spare keys.” He ordered as soon as they were inside. “And phone. Show me where they are.”


Bastard.


Darcy thought it several more times, as he had done at being forced to walk through his apartment building barefoot and in a bathrobe. The fact his neighbours had frequently seen him in far less modest attire was neither here nor there. Jake took a quick and very untactful look around the apartment, followed him into his bedroom, accepted the keys Darcy took out of the drawer, and held out a hand until Darcy unwillingly handed him the phone on the nightstand. He could have taken it himself, it was only a few steps away. He still waited and made Darcy unlock and hand it over himself. Having watched many such acts of discipline enforced on men he loved and was very close to, to the point of having quite an extended academic understanding of it, he was still not at all prepared for how it felt in person.


“You have no right to go through my phone,” he said uselessly at Jake, feeling increasingly small and embarrassed as Jake scrolled directly through his texts. Jake didn’t look up.


“Put some clothes on. Something warm.”


“It’s nearly eleven o clock at night, you’ve made this a truly horrible evening, I want to go to bed.”


Jake ignored that too. “So you didn’t let any of them know,” he said at length. “According to this text this afternoon, Gerry and Niall believe you to be heading out for a hot date with someone called ‘Rufio’. I’m fairly sure I saw that movie.”


“Well I wasn’t going to explain it to them, was I?” Darcy said bitterly. Jake raised an eyebrow at him.


“That they wouldn’t understand, or they would have questions you wouldn’t have liked?”


“That they’d have gone running to their partners who’d have pulled the same Captain Saviour crap you’re pulling right now!”


“Well the fact you didn’t put them in that position is a plus.” Jake said dryly, putting the phone away. “Because if I’d found that any of them had knew and hadn’t done something about it, it wouldn’t just be you sitting uncomfortably tonight.”


Did he mean that swat? Not daring to ask, Darcy hoped, seriously, that he only meant that swat.


Jake indicated the closet. “Dress.”


“Why?”


Jake leaned over and appropriated the clothes brush from the dresser, weighting it thoughtfully in his hand. Darcy hurriedly opened the closet and dressed as fast as possible in the plain shirt, jeans and sweater Jake handed him. After which Jake put him in a jacket, locked up his apartment and pocketed the keys, and took him downstairs. He went to the edge of the pavement, raising a long arm to flag down a cab. Darcy dug his hands in his pockets, shaking his head as a truly horrible suspicion became a certainty.


“If you think we’re going where I think you think we’re going-”


“We’re going to the airport.” Jake said bluntly as the cab pulled up. “Dale isn’t the only one that can pull planes out of the sky when necessary.”


“I am not going there, you can’t make me!”


Jake leaned on the open cab door, giving him a very straight look. “Darce, I am tired; Tom is in another state to me; and my patience is getting really thin. If you want to try negotiating for a scene on the sidewalk go for it, but it’s going to get you more than swatted.”  






*

 

 

The training of Tops is a Difficult Matter
It isn’t just one of your Holiday Games…

It had been one of Philip’s sayings, something Flynn had heard him murmur, usually to make one or more of them smile in a difficult moment. Up on the landing strip, Flynn folded his arms, leaning back against the hood of the jeep as he watched the sky. Jake’s message had been succinct, arriving via the house phone at a little after two am.


Houston, assume the position. 2.30am.


It had followed Tom, who had arrived that evening with few details but the key ones. Jake had gone to New York to an emergency which appeared to involve Darcy; he would decide once there what the best course of action was. Clearly, Jake had felt it necessitated bringing Darcy here, and with all speed instead of via a commercial flight.


And Luath does not know.


Ash and Gerry were close to Darcy. Bear and Theo. Niall and James. But it was Jake who had received the message, dropped everything from the site in Barbados where he and Tom were working, and immediately got on a plane. Jake, who was one of the unlikeliest Tops in the family to be pulled out to cover this kind of crisis. Which usually stemmed from the more vocal members of their family, but there was no whisper from Gerry, from Bear or Wade who were usually the most reliable sources of anything bubbling up. And Luath, who knew Darcy closest and best, was always the first to look after him. 
He always had been since the days when it had been Darcy and Roger permanently joined at the hip.


The training of Tops is a difficult matter….


It was making him think of a night, about three years ago, when Jasper had driven him through the darkness of the Teton forest where the trees loomed thickly on either side, on his way to Jackson and the first flight he could catch to New York where Luath and Dale were…. not doing so well together. He’d been hearing Dale’s voice over and over again in his head every mile of the way, his words from the phone call.


“Luath is being rather too nice about it. He asked me to take a rest this afternoon, and I sneaked out and went for a run instead.”


To inexperienced ears, that would have sounded like the confession of a remarkably well behaved brat with a penchant for honesty. To the ears of the four of them to whom Dale belonged, that detached, dispassionate tone might as well have come with an alarm siren. I am sufficiently desperate now to manipulate Luath and to break our rules to self medicate in order to cope with this. I don’t know what else to do.


And Luath was clearly not being of much help. They’d sat in silence around the table for a few seconds after Paul ended the call; not a relaxed silence either. Riley had said it first, bluntly and simply.


“That’s a scream for help.”


Yes. It was. Flynn looked at Paul, then across to Jasper’s dark eyes which were thinking the same thing as he was. He put a hand over Riley’s to squeeze it and got up. “I’m headed out there.”


“Good.” Riley said shortly.


“And we’ll tell Luthe what?” Paul asked him.


“Nothing.” Flynn headed for the stairs. “There’s no need to worry either of them. I’ll turn up and we’ll take it from there.”


And we’ll hope in the meantime Dale doesn’t get desperate enough to spin any further, because it sounds like he’s on his own.


The jeep’s headlights had picked out the frame of a deer in the road ahead of them, head raised, antlers shadowed, looking towards them. Jasper had slowed to a stop, waiting. The deer continued to survey them.


“How are you going to do this?” Paul had asked as he’d watched Flynn pack.


It was a loaded question for all three of them who knew and loved Luath. Flynn hadn’t answered, just putting an arm around Paul’s waist to kiss him as he took his rucksack downstairs to where Jasper was waiting, coat on and car keys in hand. To Riley, sitting on the arm of the sofa and keeping Jasper company, it was no more complicated than: Go there. Be there. As if his mere presence was the solution in itself. That Riley saw him that way was something Flynn found deeply touching, but…


It’s a bit more complicated than that, halfpint.


“The training of Tops is a difficult matter.” Jasper quoted. Flynn looked at him. Jasper gave him a wry smile that said he remembered too, and it was on his mind as well tonight. Philip had trained the both of them. He hadn’t trained Paul. Nobody trained Paul; Paul just did it by sheer instinct and there wasn’t a Top in the family who didn’t get out of his way when he did. Even Philip hadn’t been able to do anything with Paul. Paul who was the one other of them who could get on a plane tonight and go where Dale so clearly needed them; but with his customary generosity, and Paul had a bottomless pit of it, he hadn’t so much as raised the subject of which of them should go. He could certainly handle this situation if he had to. Possibly better. But however tactfully this was done, there was no way to do it that didn’t let an older, more experienced family Top know he wasn’t doing a good job with a family brat, to the point they were forced to step in and help.


“What’s Luath doing?” Flynn demanded of Jasper, and he’d known on that night that Jasper had no more answers than he did. “What’s the matter with him?”


“I guess you’ll find out.” Jasper said simply.


Ahead of them, the deer had apparently reached a decision and paced slowly across the road, disappearing into the forest.


The first lights of a plane coming in appeared in the sky. Flynn watched it descend, following the landing strip lights he had switched on half an hour ago. The same question was as strong in his mind tonight as it had been on the road to Jackson three years ago.


We have a vulnerable member of this family in a bad way, right on Luath’s turf. Where is he in all this? What is he doing?


The plane touched down and taxied to a halt, and the door and steps released.


It would have been clear even to an inexperienced Top that the smaller of the two men who came down the steps and across the grass did so under protest. And that the larger was being less protectively tender with his companion than moving in a style Flynn associated with get your butt moving right now young man, if you plan on being able to sit on it. And he’d never seen Jake pull that one before. Once they were close enough to see faces, Darcy looked furiously, miserably angry. Jake looked like Jake; laid back, relaxed, except for the eyes that met Flynn’s and swapped a few succinct messages. Taking note of them, Flynn offered a hug to Darcy who very uncharacteristically stepped away and dug his hands in his pockets.


“I am not here on a social visit.”


“It’s kidnapping.” Jake said to Flynn, opening the jeep door. “With menaces. But it’s all legal, I’ve got the contract. There’s a whole section about fantasy scenarios.”


“I hate you so much Jacob Forbes!”


That was quite a spit, and more fury behind it than Flynn had ever heard from Darcy, although he got into the jeep. That was something to be grateful for; Gerry or Riley would have been either sitting on the grass and refusing to move, or stalking off into the distance by now. The energy in the venom was reassuring too; any family member that good and mad, as well as walking under their own steam, was not in that bad a way.


The lights were on downstairs in the house as Flynn drove in through the open garage door.


“They’re all up, aren’t they?” Darcy demanded with loathing, and to Flynn’s ear the tone was getting increasingly brittle.


“Jasper and Paul are, yes.” Flynn said levelly. “They were worried about you. Dale and Riley are in bed and asleep,”


“If you believe that you’ll believe anything.”


“And Tom was reading in his room when I last saw him.” Flynn caught Jake’s eye in the rear view mirror since Jake had, without comment, got into the back beside Darcy. “They won’t come downstairs until breakfast, as they have been told not to.”


Or at least, in Tom’s case, he wouldn’t come down via the stairs until breakfast.


“I’m staying here.” Darcy informed the jeep roof. Jake opened the door and waited. He got a look of utter loathing, but Darcy nevertheless slid out and stalked ahead of them into the kitchen. Paul immediately got up from the table with his arms open. For the first time in Flynn’s memory, Darcy ignored him and walked the other way around the table.


“We’re in the middle of a really lovely paddy,” Jake said cheerfully to Paul, going to hug him instead. “It’s somewhat better than the state of shock I found him in around ten pm this evening. He’s still shaky, he’s doing his best to hide it, but he could use a hot drink and something sweet. Darce, put your butt in a chair. Now.”


Looking still more furious, Darcy yanked out a chair and sat. Paul met Flynn’s eyes over the table and raised his eyebrows in a what the….? Flynn shook his head slightly in reply. No idea. Waiting.


“Hi.” Jasper said quietly to Darcy. Darcy looked down at his hands and didn’t answer, and that was the confirmation of how bad this was; Flynn had never seen Darcy not respond to Jasper.


“Does anyone want to explain please what on earth is going on?” Paul said rather crisply for Paul. Jake reached into his pocket. Darcy buried his face in his hands, cringing.


“You’re going to utterly humiliate me in front of them too, and it’s none of any of your business! None at all! I don’t belong to any of you,”


“Utter nonsense, of course you do.” Paul said definitely. “Stop shouting, before you wake the others. What is this about?”


Having seen Paul handle a number of their more challenging older brats like this, in the same way he’d done when he lived with them years before Flynn ever came to this house, Flynn let him get on with it and moved quietly around the table to put milk, honey and cinnamon in a pan. He had an eye on Darcy as he did so; the angle of his shoulders, what his hands were doing, what his breathing was doing. Jake put the papers where Paul could see them and Darcy more or less put his arms over his head. Jasper came to stand behind him, resting his hands on Darcy’s shoulders and rubbing very slightly as he looked with Paul. Paul turned over one sheet, frowning in what looked to Flynn like growing bewilderment. Jasper glanced at Flynn with a faint signal of eyes and shoulders that said he had no idea what he was looking at. It was apparent that Paul did; he turned over the third sheet and then reached over to pull Darcy’s hands down.


“Darcy look at me right now. Is this what I think it is? How much of what is on these sheets is you? Honestly?”


Darcy didn’t answer. Jake leaned on the table on one hip, arms folded. He was quite intentionally looming over Darcy; something Flynn had never seen him do, but had seen plenty of other Tops use with a brat they were communicating to. “According to the guy in charge, none at all. I got a call yesterday when he managed to track me down to say he had a ringer in this event, a guy he liked and had no wish at all to embarrass, and could not see how to get him out of the corner he’d painted himself into.”


“How far did it go?” Paul demanded. Jake shrugged.


“All the way. I bought him on an auction block around ten pm this evening.”


“Jacob go away!” Darcy erupted to his feet, scarlet and near to tears. “I’m going to bed, you can talk about me all you want!”


“I have not told you to go anywhere.” Jake signalled at the chair with one finger and he hadn’t got off the table but he’d straightened enough to make his height and the breadth of his shoulders clear. Flynn did the same thing with Dale sometimes, mostly in reply when Dale unconsciously did it to him, programmed from years of using body language to manage difficult clients. Bigger than you are, kid. Stand down, or you won’t like what happens next.


Darcy growled at him, a sound of sheer, mortified fury. “You got me here, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by people you can tell all about it, what more do you want?”


“I am getting really tired of the dramatics,” Paul pointed out. Jake shook his head at Darcy.


“I’ll tell you what I’ll ensure. You won’t find the car keys tonight, nor get near the computer, and whichever room you plan to sleep in I will be sharing it with you. Sit. Down.”


He didn’t raise his voice in the slightest. He didn’t need to. Tears started to fall, but Darcy sat. Hard.


“Right now I plan to leave you alone like I plan to come to breakfast wearing whatever the hell it was you were modelling tonight.” Jake went on. “I’d remind you you’re sitting here because this is where I chose for you to be. Which is exactly what you signed up to. Neither you nor I have any idea where any other buyer might have chosen for you to be. Or what they’d intend to do. Or how you planned to cope with it, or what you intended to do when it went wrong. So however much you want to shout at me right now, however much you don’t like having this conversation, you are having it in a safe place, with people who love you, who will make damn sure that you don’t come to any harm.”


“Other than stamp all over my privacy and my independence.”


“In about the same way I’d stamp all over your privacy and independence to jump off a bridge.” Jake said flatly. “Yep. We’re on the same page.”


“Honey, if any of this form is true tell me.” Paul said a lot more gently. “If you were doing this for fun because you wanted to, and you had all the experience you’ve listed here then we’d gladly hold your coat and say go enjoy yourself. Is Jake wrong? And this organiser, whoever he is?”


“Or are we,” Jake added, “talking about a form that’s three pages of lies and wishful thinking, and would have put you as a complete novice in the hands of someone who had every reason to believe they were playing with an experienced, and fairly extreme end sub, who knew exactly what they were doing?”


It was brutal, but it needed saying. Jake shook his head in the silence that followed.


“You’ve lived in this house and been part of this family for how long? You know exactly how we run and what consent looks like. You were part of it when Riley had to talk and talk for days to convince them he knew what he was getting into. You saw how hard they made Dale work, and wait and think, and he was an experienced, grown adult. You have these friends, you go to these places, you know all this, you’re not this naïve. So what the hell were you thinking? What did you think would happen when the poor sap playing with you had to tell you they’d seen through you? Or worse, pick up the pieces of a screaming or terrified sub and feel responsible? How did you think they’d feel?”


“It would not have been that bad!”


Jake tapped a finger on the paper on the table. “Plugs. Whips. Fire play. Fisting. Tom searched that thing and only calmed down when he found breath play was explicitly banned, otherwise it would have been him who came and got you and you’d have never got near the stage tonight.”


“He’s got nothing to do with this and you have no right getting judgy about-”


“You are not talking about what you choose to experiment with in the hands of a trusted partner,” Jake said and his voice dropped half a semitone, getting no louder but considerably icier, “You are not even talking about a well supervised event with monitors to ensure safe play. You are talking about a total stranger, alone in a hotel suite. And Tom is the one of us here who does have an idea of what he’s talking about and is experienced, and he was horrified, Darce. Horrified and furious. As he said, thank God for Morrison and his team that they saw and wouldn’t let it happen. I suppose you didn’t think either about what it would do to their and the event’s reputation if you had managed to fool them and it went wrong? These situations run on trust and honesty, being able to absolutely trust in the honesty of the others you are with, and you know that because you have always lived it here with us. So I’m back to what were you thinking?”


Darcy stared down at the table. Flynn poured the now steaming milk into mugs, putting one in Darcy’s reach and sharing out the others.


“I’m tired.” Darcy said eventually. “It’s the middle of the night, I want to go to bed.”


“And I say I own your time right now, so you’re not going anywhere to get out of this conversation.” Jake sipped milk, staying right where he was on the table. “I’ve got all night.”


“Honey, can you see how dangerous this looks to us?” Paul asked him. Never above a bit of good cop bad cop to get an upset brat talking, his soft tone was a considerable contrast to Jake’s. “It looks down to the point of self harm. If I’m wrong about that you need to tell me, because I’m getting pretty worried here.”


“It is not self harm.” Darcy muttered at the table. The tone was holding Flynn’s attention. Darcy was tired, he was fraught, all the shields were right up, but this was the kind of grumbling whine typical of some of their brats in the grip of avoiding emotion, and it was very unlike Darcy. Anything less than self-possessed, perceptive and emotionally controlled was very unlike Darcy. But then to Flynn’s memory he’d never seen Darcy on the end of an interrogation like this before. If Darcy was involved in some mischief or mess with the brats of this household then he did mostly maintain as much neutrality as was possible. He respected both sides of the situation, he walked the line usually with a great deal of care and awareness for it, and they all respected his position. The most Flynn had ever seen him receive was a telling off, which he usually responded to with amused but honest apology. He was therefore always on the fringe of a scene like this; never on the receiving end. His response to it was interesting.


Jake glanced up, still drinking milk, and Flynn read his question.


Are you seeing this?


I’m seeing it.


Across the table, Jasper’s eyes were thoughtful. Not communicating anything, he wasn’t sure yet, but he’d seen it too.


“Then what did you want to happen?” Paul said patiently. Darcy shrugged, still staring down at the table.


“I don’t know.”


“Sit up, look at us, stop the shrugging and answer respectfully when you’re spoken to.” Jake said bluntly. “You know the expectations around here, and right now you’ve signed up to them with me. For seventy two hours there is no such place as Switzerland.”


He did sit up. And he lifted his eyes, swiftly and Flynn thought very nervously, looking to Jake first although then to Paul who was currently the most sympathetic around the table.


“There isn’t anything I can say. I can’t explain it.”


“Did you want to be hurt?” Flynn said mildly. Darcy put his head down on his hands. The lack of reply…. Well there was no attempt at denial there. Paul looked up at Flynn, and the concern was clear in his face.


“Right.” Jake said, finishing his drink. “We’ve got that far, at least that’s an answer we can start with. We’ll take James and Niall’s room, let’s go.”


“You’re not seriously…” Darcy mumbled. Jake waited pointedly, looking at the mug on the table. Darcy picked it up and drank it.


“I’m serious.” Jake told him when the milk was gone. “Get the sheets from the linen closet, make up the bed, I’ll be there in a minute.”


“I’ll help you hon.” Paul said quietly, and went with Darcy upstairs. Jake waited, listening until the footfall was out of earshot before he got off the table and collected up the mugs.


“The instincts,” he said, rinsing them under the tap, “Are getting stronger all the time to push this to a catharsis, turn him over my knee and absolve it. And then we might move on and get to what’s got him into this state, and how long it’s been coming.”


“I agree he’s asking for it.” Jasper said reflectively. “Repeatedly.”


“I’ve been badly tempted ever since I hauled him out of the hotel,” Jake said unequivocally, “I did swat him. I only had to do it once to get him convinced I meant it, but so far I’ve threatened him more times than I’d expect to get away with without an action demonstration if it was any other brat of ours. But it’s working. Which makes me even more inclined to grab a paddle and spank his behind until I’m certain he never does anything like this again, because it reaffirms to me just how bloody inexperienced and easily frightened he is, and how bad this could have gotten. What I don’t know is how much he’s asking for it right now because it’s a part of whatever’s going on, or how much it’s with an intentional, genuine idea of what he’s asking for.”


“You’re doing a good job playing the part,” Flynn informed him. Jake gave him a slightly wolfish grin.


“I don’t usually have to pull this out for anyone but your brat. We got to tears when I swatted him, but he didn’t get that much release. He could use a lot more. Keys?”


Jasper took the ones from the hook by the door. “I’ll lock up and keep them with me.”


Flynn tossed Jasper the ones from the jeep. “The phone’s in our room, I’ll keep it there, and the office is locked. You’re the one who’s worked in security; anything else you want done?”


“Other than be physically in his way tonight?” Jake shook his head. “You’re set up for this with clients anyway. My usual security system is to set up everything I can think of and then get Tom to destruction test it. He finds any cracks in the system in minutes, but I don’t think Darce has anything like his experience, and this is less about any real concern he’s not safe than making it very clear I’m all over him. If he’s determined he wants something like this, then I’ve got it covered and I’d rather he took whatever it is he wants from one of us than a stranger.”


He’d been the one called out to New York to deal with one of theirs, a family member without a partner, and moreover, it was Darcy. Not a brat, and yet not exactly not either, and to the protective members of their group, he was very much counted as one of the vulnerable ones. My responsibility, my job to do. Flynn understood it.  He would have felt the same way, and Jake had a partner who was probably one of the most likely to understand. Tom had strong instincts himself for a soul in need. And Jake knew too, as they all did, he wasn’t one of the family members Darcy already had any sort of understanding with; he wasn’t one of the ones he teased or liked to play with as he did with the ones he was closest to. As a Top, Jake was one of the most unknown quantities to Darcy, which was quite possibly helping.  


 
 
 
 
 
            Riley was sound asleep when Flynn checked on him, arms folded under his pillow, shoulders relaxed. Dale wasn’t. With all this going on in the house, he would be no more able than Tom to let go, although in Dale’s case much of it would be to do with an inability to let it be someone else’s problem. He wasn’t trying to fake it either, although he was obediently in bed, with all the self control necessary not to put the light on or come any closer to listen. He must have heard the movement on the landing. Flynn undressed, hearing Paul go quietly down the hall to his room, which he would not have done if he was not satisfied Jake and Darcy had everything they needed. Tom was sprawled on the covers of his bed in the room he usually shared with Jake when they stayed; not undressed but to Flynn’s eye when Flynn checked in on him, much the same as Tom usually was in the early hours of the morning. He was slightly exasperated with Darcy and more than slightly concerned from what they knew so far, but that was all.


“How is he?” Dale asked quietly when Flynn slid under the covers. Flynn stretched out and reached for him, pulling Dale over into his side.


“Too early to say. He’s here, he’s physically ok, and Jake’s staying in his room with him. Get some sleep.”


“Tom thought at Christmas he wasn’t looking too good.”


Which you checked on, and I checked on and we all checked on, Jas included. Luath thought he was a little overworked, but hadn’t seen anything to worry about and he sees Darcy the most. Most days.


Luthe, why don’t you know anything about this?


He had dozens of memories of Luath with Roger and with Darcy since Roger and Darcy were always together. Both of them easy going, happy go lucky men who enjoyed each other’s company and anyone else’s who was around, neither of them given to angst or drama, although they were patiently tolerant of it in other family brats. Whatever they did they always had a good time. They were an unlikely pair in a lot of ways, Roger had been very ordinary looking, shy and on the quiet side and a lover of his home, his family and family life. Nothing like Darcy’s exoticism, vivacity and enjoyment of the highlife, the best clubs, the strangest fashions, the endless range of questionable boyfriends.


We’ve always known he liked talking that up and that at least some of it was exaggeration. Wade’s come straight out with it a few times when he’s annoyed enough, that he thinks more than half of these wild boyfriends are mythical. The clubs aren’t; or at least weren’t. I remember Philip getting quite firm about some of the ones he went into and the company he kept, but that was more than twenty years ago. How much has this just become an illusory habit he shows us because we expect it?


Luath probably knew the most of any of them, but he was discreet, his loyalty was with Darcy and he wasn’t saying. It had been Darcy first and foremost who had got Luath through the loss of Roger. Darcy who had more or less lived at the apartment with him, although he’d always been in and out constantly when Roger was alive. It was more than half his home and always had been. He and Roger and Luath were too close for it not to be.


So long as Darcy was happy, his career going well and his personal life as private as he wanted but satisfying him, they weren’t going to intrude. Darcy was in many ways a private person, a watcher on the edge of things where he was comfortable. But this wasn’t happy and it wasn’t ok, and that was when questions had to be asked.


Luthe, you see him the most, why haven’t you seen this?


He’d had to explore that before; on that morning three years ago that he’d arrived at Luath’s apartment in New York, deeply sympathetic and aware that this was difficult for him, but with the same essential question in mind.


We warned you. You knew Dale was a complicated brat, and you had to be alert. You’re good at this. Why didn’t you see he was struggling?


With Dale, there had been reasons, specific buttons that he hit in Luath. But Flynn was not ever going to forget looking through the glass pane of the office in the ANZ building in New York and seeing Dale at that table. Self possessed, wholly engaged in what he was doing, doing it perfectly. And exhausted. Numbed. All that ridiculous contrast of power and intelligence and command while, if you had the eyes to see deeper, looking like a lost little boy. It had turned his heart over. Almost as much as had the control with which Dale had, without an expression in his face walked him so courteously down the hall to an office and once the door was closed, thrown himself into Flynn’s arms so hard Flynn could still feel the crush of him hours later.  


Dale hit those same reflexes hard in Paul. Jasper. Jake. James. Ash. In fact pretty much every Top in the family, he quite unconsciously triggered the lot of them just by sitting quietly in the same room; Flynn saw him do it. But it had taken Dale in brat terms putting a bomb under Luath by heading out, in the night, to the one specific place Luath had told him not to go in blatant disregard of pretty much everything, before he managed to rouse those instincts in him. They’d been awake all right when he’d driven Luath to turning him over his knee in the park and impressing on him who exactly made the rules, and they’d been wide awake in that office. While Flynn had been focused on pushing as many buttons in Dale as fast as possible, the tones and the words that pulled his head into the right place and made him feel safe, grounded and able to let go at least some of what he was carrying, Luath had been tag teaming him in that lecture and letting off a whole lot of steam. He knew all the words too, when pushed to it, and he knew exactly how to use them. Expert, effective Top.  


Possibly we should have left Dale with him for another few days. And added Gerry, Ri and Wade.


It was a dry thought and not in any way a serious one, not least because to leave Dale with a Top who was not wholly on it at a time when Dale really needed to be able to rely on a good Top wholly on it, was something all four of them strongly agreed was not going to happen again. Since that incident, if Dale was working away from the ranch one of them went with him.


There were particular reasons why Luath had had a blind spot with Dale at the time. And yet….


I’m making excuses for him.


“It may be that he doesn’t want to, and he won’t again.” Paul had said at the time. “You think of him as that Top you knew and admired and learned from, but if that isn’t who he is any more, then I can understand. Losing Roger may have ended that for him. We don’t know. He might not know.”


“But when he’s here with us, it’s there. Not that strongly, but it’s there.”


“In a familiar place, with people he knows very well and has the habit with, yes. We live it, Flynn. All the time. Luthe doesn’t any more, and he may not want to.”


Raised as a young Top himself in this household, Flynn knew he’d learned partly through being part of a household where you couldn’t help but pick up on the expectations, the duties, the responsibilities set by Philip who was a quiet and gentle expert in the art. But mostly through seeing it modelled by older, experienced Tops who took the time to share their experience, their insights and what they’d learned through the inevitable trial and error with their partners, and through living in this house where brats were a constant part of their every day. If you had the instincts, you couldn’t live around them or without becoming involved, and as they became your friends, your loved ones, you became even more involved. Luath had learned the same way he had. And it had been Luath who had been part of the older generation who modelled and talked to and encouraged the young family Tops, from clumsy inexperience onwards. It was partly down to him that Jake knew so very exactly how to sit on the table tonight and use a tone and words he would never need to use with his own brat, and to be committed enough to a brat in trouble to insist on sleeping in his room. And it had been a couple of Christmases ago that Luath had dropped everything and gone to Paris to support Darcy in the midst of a brat texting fight and come to be with him to sort it out. Those weren’t the actions of a man who’d stopped feeling any pull towards his Top instincts.


So how much is he hiding from you Luthe? Because unless you’re trying very, very hard not to see, I don’t think you do or could ignore those instincts where you see a problem. Especially with Darcy.
 
 
 Darcy might be borrowing freely from Gerry’s chosen epithets and ‘I hate you’s at the moment – Ash had largely broken Gerry of that but he still came out with it without thinking at times – but his body said something else entirely.


Jake, in t shirt and shorts under the covers in one of the largest beds in the house, would have given Darcy all the room and privacy he wanted. The light had been out barely a minute when Darcy turned over and buried himself in Jake’s side. Jake wrapped his arms around him, rubbing his back under the weight of the blankets, and saying nothing. It was for Darcy to talk if he wanted to, or just to take what comfort he needed; they’d been friends a very long time and Darcy knew that always came with no strings attached. The older man felt slight in his arms tonight. Darcy had always been lithe and lightly built. Which made Jake think again how easily overpowered. Easily broken.


I still, seriously, want to turn you over my knee and turn your butt five kinds of red.


Darcy was asleep around dawn when Tom paused in the half open doorway, dressed for a run. He looked shaggy, unshaven and Jake read the bleak concern in the silent nod at Darcy.


He ok?


So far. You?


Going out. Watch him.


Jake blew him a kiss, got a raised eyebrow and a get a grip look in return, and Tom left. Quite possibly through a window; locked doors were not going to present much of an obstacle to him on his way in or out. He’d more or less had steam coming out of his ears reading Darcy’s auction documents. The kind of silent, tight angry that Jake associated with him being really, seriously mad. Although the first thing he’d said was a short, “I knew he wasn’t ok at Christmas. Bright and brittle and glitzy, and slumping the minute he thought no one was looking.”


“What do you think this is about?” Jake had asked him, aware Tom had far more knowledge than he did from several years hanging around scenes like this auction. Tom had grunted and said much what Flynn had last night.


“Well you don’t do something this naiively insane without some part of you wanting to get hurt. Although this is a rather different of achieving it to many other ways, and that’s worth thinking about. He’s always struck me as a rational adult. Doing something this nuts, this impulsive… that worries me.”


Me too.


I know there was a time there were parts of his social life that Philip warned him back from. But I’d have always trusted Darcy to know what he was doing, and to be enjoying himself instead of taking mad risks. World wisdom and common sense, he’s always had plenty of both. I’ve seen him rein Gerry and the others in many times. He often kept Roger out of trouble, and that took a lot of work.


When he heard Paul start downstairs, shortly after five, he eased gently away from Darcy, settled the covers more closely over him and left him sleeping. Paul looked more awake than anyone had a right to at not yet six in the morning, particularly after being up half the night. He kissed Jake on his way past to the fridge. A teapot and mugs were already on the table.


“Did he sleep?”


“Yes. Fairly quickly and he’s well away now. I won’t wake him for a while yet.”


“I’ve been fighting the urge to call Gerry and Bear and Wade and Niall and Miguel and that’s just my short list, and demand to know if any of them know anything we should.” Paul shut the fridge with his hip and filled the milk jug, adding it to the table. “Except I don’t want to spread this around any further unless we absolutely have to. Darcy’s embarrassed enough that we know.”


“I went through his phone before we left New York, there was nothing on it in email or text that suggested anyone knew anything, or there’s been any kind of fight that’s set him off.” Jake heeled out a chair and sat down. “As far as Gerry’s concerned, Darcy had a date last night, and that’s all. Luath sent a brief hi from Texas, a picture of him and Wade, he asked how ‘the show’ was going and Darce had said a lot of breezy stuff back about waiters. I don’t think Luthe had any idea it was a BDSM event.”


“Darcy did the event planning for it?”


“He’d been involved for a couple of weeks, the past week setting it all up and working with the organisers. Which is how, thank God, they realised the problem. Morrison’s a good Top, he did this as gently and with as much care for Darce as he could. He very tactfully sounded me out on how much I knew of Philip’s private life, and I could hear the relief when he realised not only did I know Philip was a Top but so was I, and he could speak plainly.”


“And the apartment looked ok?”


Yes, Paul would think of that. With the confidence of a history in security work and policing that made a swift, on the spot mental health assessment a familiar habit to pull out as needed, Jake gave him a nod of reassurance. “I checked. Tidy, bed made, fridge full, he’s been taking care of himself.”


“So we’re down to nothing at all unless he chooses to tell us.” Paul pulled out a seat beside Jake, waiting for the kettle to boil. “We didn’t get too far last night.”


“I haven’t yet pulled out the big guns, and I will if necessary.” Jake said shortly. “He’s not a novice in this household, he knows how we work.”


“We don’t exactly have his consent for that.” Paul reminded him. Jake shook his head.


“Right now, I do. I think what he could use is a good dose of hard bastard.”


 
 
 
 
            Waking up was a fairly horrible experience. For a moment there was just the warmth of bedding, the faint and very familiar baa of sheep in the distance and a feeling of not having had nearly enough sleep. And then the memory of yesterday hit like a brick and it took everything Darcy had not to crawl under the covers and hide.


The how dare he! was still strong. The utter mortification of seeing Jake standing there, of being dragged back here and everyone being told….


And it covered an even nastier little voice of relief that the worst hadn’t happened. That this morning he was here and not-


Well you wouldn’t be in a hotel room with a stranger right now, would you? By late last night you’d have been in tears one way or another with someone either very angry or having to pick up the pieces, who was owed about six thousand dollars.


If it was someone responsible.


Otherwise it could truly have been a whole lot worse.


He had totally humiliated himself in front of Morrison, a man he liked. He’d had no idea that Morrison had known Philip. And he’d never, in his worst nightmares, ever thought anyone in the family would ever find out about this.


Getting back under the covers and hoping, desperately, that all of this might somehow just go away, seemed like about the only plan.


They must think you’ve gone out of your mind.


They could be right.


He was still trying to find the courage to let the covers go when Jake pushed the door open, shaved, dressed, large and matter of fact. “Breakfast. Let’s go.”


I seriously can’t. Not this morning.


“You’re keeping up the whole Captain Universe thing then?” Darcy muttered at him, making it to the edge of the bed. Jake came quite unhurriedly but 
Darcy’s heart still lurched and he couldn’t help shrinking back.


“Keeping to the contract. Yes. You don’t seem to have clicked on this, Darce. You signed one with me last night, and it stands for another sixty hours yet. You wanted a Top, you’ve got a Top. No white card, and no hard limits other than you stated on the form you gave me. So get out of bed, put those clothes on, I don’t let brats hang around in bed all day or skip breakfast. Move it.”


“This is not a game!”


“I’m so pleased you realise that.”


“You don’t get to pull this crap on me Jacob!” Darcy, despite himself, rolled off the other side of the bed to get away from him. “I’m not playing around with you, I’m not Gerry or Tom, you’re not going to teach me any kind of lesson,”


“Watch me.” Jake said flatly.


Darcy stared at him in utter frustration, watching him fold his arms over his chest in a way that made his biceps rise, and seeing the grimness in Jake’s blue eyes levelled directly on him. For years he’d been watching men he loved do that with their partners or with other brats in the household. Sometimes they teased him with it. Sometimes he teased them a little and they knew on both sides it was a game with limits; something friendly and done in fun. Even Philip, whose lines were a little less easy to play with, and whom Darcy had never quite lost the genuine suspicion that pushed far enough, he might quite easily do what he threatened to and so treated him quite a bit more carefully, had been mostly joking. When necessary, the real Top guns they tended to pull on him was the coaxing and reasoning parts. That he’d had his fair share of over the years. And he’d laugh it off, he’d flirt or tease them.


Darling, I’m Switzerland. Go and play that game somewhere else.


But this was the first time ever that one of them had looked at him like that and Darcy had believed, down to his toes, that they meant it. Particularly after Jake had hauled him up out of the bath last night and swatted. There had been nothing fun or joking about that swat, it had been hard and it had damn well hurt, and he had years of experience that Jake, just like the rest of them, was wholly capable of doing every single thing he was threatening and a whole lot more. He’d seen them do it. Often. He’d spent several decades living in a household of wolves. Just with a not your little red riding hood exemption card.  


He muttered something obscene – very, very quietly – and got dressed.


There were the sounds of a family breakfast time going on in the kitchen. Darcy’s knees pretty much froze as he heard them; he did not want to be in that room this morning – and then Jake steered him instead to the study and Darcy discovered that no, the idea of the kitchen by comparison really wasn’t that bad.


Jake shut the study door behind them. A glass of milk and several rounds of buttered toast were waiting on David’s desk, alongside a highly ominous stack of lined paper and a pencil. For some reason the pencil was even more annoying than all the rest of it. Jake walked him around to the chair.


“Take a seat. Eat your breakfast, have a good hard think about how you want the next hour to go, and then I want a written explanation of what your intentions were when you got yourself put on that auction block last night.”


“I will refund you the damn money!” Darcy said in desperation. “I will pay you back every wretched cent,”


“Nope, I think the contract’s very good value. I’m quite happy with it.” Jake took a seat on the edge of Philip’s desk, folding his arms again. “Do carry on.”


And if I tell you to get stuffed?


In all honesty Darcy did not dare to say it. That kind of answer was easy to give in your head or in a friendly game of make believe. Not when you had a Top sitting right there, looking right at you in an extremely if you want to play so can I kind of way. He found his respect for Riley, for Dale and Wade who did at times come out with those kind of responses in this situation exponentially growing. None of them had a get out of jail card, or wanted it.
Jake raised an eyebrow at him, giving him a lazy smile that was deeply sinister.


“What’ll I do if you say what I can see you’d love to? Well there’s a corner over there. You’ll be making its acquaintance anyway this morning, but we can start there if you like until you feel ready to write.”


Argh. Pushed to the brink Darcy found himself nearly stamping in frustration. “For pete’s sake Jacob, I am not standing in a corner!”


“Plugs and bullwhips are fine but you’ve got a hard limit on corners?” Jake’s smile deepened. Darcy swore at him and dropped down in David’s chair.


“Ok, ok, ok! Stop talking like that.”


“Like what?”


“Like you know what you’re talking about.”


Jake’s eyebrow raised further with amusement. “I’d start writing if I were you.”
 






 
 
            How the others managed to do this was beyond Darcy; twenty minutes later he was still staring at a blank sheet of paper. And Jake was still sitting there as if he meant to go on sitting there forever.


I remember Flynn standing in that corner for hours. And hours. Locked in combat with Philip and refusing to give in.


Because Flynn is about as naturally submissive as an armour-plated bulldozer.


“Need an incentive to get started, Darce?” Jake asked gently.


“Not the kind you’ve got in mind.”


“Oh it’s pretty effective.” Jake shifted his long legs into a more comfortable position, continuing to watch him in that supremely disturbing way. “And it makes the point that doing it isn’t optional. You could start with what was going through your head when you filled out that form.”


Not over my dead body.


Darcy thought it, and knew as soon as he did that it had crossed his face, as Jake nodded.


“And there it is. You do know; you just don’t intend to give up that control yet. For an ‘experienced submissive’ that’s a whole lot of optimism. Ok, let the games begin.”


“You do not have my consent.”


“But I do. In writing. Next time you may want to negotiate your boundaries a little more carefully first. You know how wilful refusal to communicate works, I’ve seen you warn Roger and the others about it plenty of times.” Jake leaned down to the desk and opened the bottom drawer. Darcy froze in his chair at the sight of the lexan paddle he pulled out. He’d seen it before; it had never looked so big, or so heavy or so utterly terrifying as it did right now in Jake’s hand. His throat closed, he was sweating, his hands were shaking and his knees were starting to, and when Jake reached for him he found himself out of the chair and backing away from him, near to absolute panic.


“Jake! You won’t! I know you won’t!”


“You don’t, in fact.” Jake pointed out, following him with that paddle in hand. “You only know I haven’t up to this point. What you do know,” and he caught Darcy’s arm, jerking him briskly off balance. Darcy fell, hard into his chest, felt Jake’s arms lock around him and hold tightly enough to suppress the shaking, and Jake’s voice went on in his ear, “is that you trust me to respect your boundaries and keep you safe, and you are right. I don’t have your consent, and I certainly don’t have any belief you know or want what you’re getting into. Darce, look at yourself. You’re not finding the slightest thrill in this. You’re petrified, and that’s knowing me and knowing the worst anyone’s ever had in this room, the absolute worst, was a sound spanking. What the hell would you have done last night if I hadn’t been there?”


“I don’t know.” Darcy found himself clinging to Jake and the tears came out in a flood this time, part with relief, part with shock as it really dawned on him. “I don’t know.”


“What were you wanting?” Jake’s voice was still demanding in his ear, much as his arms were comforting. “I can’t believe you’d struggle to find someone in that group who’d be delighted to help a novice explore if that’s what you were after; you’d be fighting off Doms with a stick.”


“The auction.” Darcy drew a breath with difficulty, aware his voice was wobbling horribly. “It was a fundraiser. They lost a long term member of their group in the towers.”


“That was what you were doing?” Jake sounded shocked. And then Darcy felt him shake his head. “Darcy. There’s other ways to raise money, there’s other ways to support them, you don’t have to literally give them your blood,”


“This is something I get. At least partly.” Darcy said bitterly. “I’ve lived here long enough to understand, I’ve been a part of it for decades, it seemed… this is something I could actually do to help,”


“If you tried hard enough. And if you hurt yourself and scare yourself enough you’ll do what?” Jake demanded. “Have made a big enough sacrifice to atone to Rog? Make up the score sheet that you’re here and he isn’t?”


“I just….. wanted to help.”


It sounded as lame as it was impossible to express. Not the crushing weight of emotion behind it, not the huge muddle of thoughts that came with it.


“You have been tempting me ever since I got Morrison’s call, and I have honestly never been closer to putting you over my knee,” Jake informed him. “Although for your information, if you ever do successfully push me to it, it won’t be with a paddle in my hand. Go get me the phone. Now.”


Darcy didn’t dare ask him for what. The kitchen thankfully was now clear of anyone but Paul, washing dishes. Tears still flowing, Darcy went slowly to the cupboard where the hidden compartment held the house phone. Jake had followed him, he waited with hands on his hips until Darcy made it even more slowly back to him, then he took a seat at the table, took a firm hold on Darcy’s hand and dialled from memory.


“Luthe? It’s Jake.”


“Don’t do that to him!” Darcy began in a strangled sound of utter horror, but Jake held on to his hand, taking no notice whatsoever. “I’m at the ranch, I’ve got Darcy with me. Whatever you’re doing, trust me, you need to put it down and get over here right now. No. We’ve got him and he’s safe but he’s not all right. Ok.”


He killed the call with one finger. Paul, who had been listening to this in silence, went on drying plates. Darcy gave Jake a look of utter, horrified betrayal, and Jake put a hand to his face, running a thumb over his cheekbone.


“He’s on his way. And yes, this is exactly what we need to do.”


“He does not need all this put on him, and you’ll have just scared him to death!”


“There’s a time when being scared is the right, proportional response.” Jake put the phone back in the cupboard, keeping hold of Darcy’s hand. “Luath isn’t nearly as breakable as you think, and yes. He’s who needs to talk with you about this.”


“We did talk. We have talked. Endlessly, for bloody years!” Darcy pushed angrily at tears that were starting to fall again, with one hand as Jake was not letting go of the other. “We have said everything that’s possible to say,”


…. And then we stopped talking. Because what was left? It didn’t change anything. Rog still wasn’t there.


Jake shook his head with a lack of co operative sympathy that was not helpful. “Then one or both of you needs to start listening better.”
 
 
           
*
 
 
 
The training of Tops is a difficult matter…..


Raking the yard over, which it was late in the evening to be doing but gave a view of the drive, Flynn found himself reciting the phrase under his breath. The training never ended. In Philip’s opinion there was never a point at which a Top was no longer in need of learning.


“I have to agree with Darcy, Jake will have petrified Luath.” Paul had said earlier when he’d come out to bring Flynn a mug of tea. “Which he did intentionally; not that he’s explaining.”


“You, I and Jas are used to moving as a team.” Flynn pointed out. “Jake doesn’t Top via committee when he does it.”


And Jake wasn’t joking about feeling the realities of the contract to Darcy; no responsible Top would have done. He’d given Luath time to think on a three to four hour flight at best if he found one without connections, then a drive out from Jackson – a good long time to simmer.


“I think he’s seeing what’ll happen if he gives Luath a big enough jolt.”


“It’s a bit harsh.”


“I think we’re at the point we all need to know. We’ve been doing the gently-gently approach for a long time now.” Flynn leaned on his rake, sipping hot tea. “If Darce is still carrying all this and he can’t talk to Luthe or get the support he needs there, and if that isn’t going to change, then it’s time we knew. This has floated on long enough.”


“What does Dale think?”


“Didn’t you ask him?”


Paul shook his head. “He thought it was more important that he got out of the way this morning. He knows Darce has always been scared of him, he 
thought it wouldn’t help. And Darcy has always been clear on why, hasn’t he? He says it. Dale sees too much.”


“He does.”


“He headed out straight after breakfast, they all did. I didn’t have a chance to talk much.”


Both of their brats had decided they were going out to the barn roof on the tops that had needed repair for a while now. They intended to sleep up there tonight and finish the job tomorrow, and Tom had gone with them. It had been an extremely tactful gesture.


“He wasn’t saying much to me either,” Flynn agreed, “He was thinking a whole lot about it, but if I had to guess; data not yet analysed. Ri was nearer to hopping mad with Darcy, not wanting to let it loose and wanting to get out of the house as fast as possible before he said something unhelpful.”


“And you?”


“I keep thinking of Dale’s first work project out in New York.”


Paul sighed. “In fairness to Luthe, Dale isn’t the easiest brat in the family and he’s very, very good at snowblowing. It took us some months to really start to get a handle on it, and he was ours and living with us – you and Jas got there quicker, but it took me more or less a year. Rog was a darling, and he was a much, much more straight forward brat. Late, lost, unprepared, it was all right there in your face. He didn’t boil up out of sight the way Dale specialises in. And Gerry and Bear and Wade are the emotional, volatile type, where it all hangs right out where you can see it. Luthe’s brilliant with them, he always has been. Dale’s a very different type.”


“Have you ever seen any other Top in the family not react to Dale?” Flynn asked him. “Think about it. Right from the start. Ash came over all gentle and protective at the sight of him once he got over the initial good grief that’s Dale Aden. Theo talks to him like he does to Bear; Dale’s the only other one Theo does that with. He hits every button James has got. ‘Lito jokes about how much Colm starts flexing his shoulders around Dale and hovering – although he does that with Riley too, Colm gets like that about any younger brats-”


“I know. I know what you mean. I can understand though why Luath’s scared to let himself go there with Dale.”


“When I went out to New York it was Darcy who had Dale nailed.” Flynn said quietly. “Not Luthe. It was Darce who told him Dale was messing him around, it was Darce who asked Luath what he thought he was doing and pointed out how messed up his boundaries were. Darce could see Dale playing games when Luath couldn’t and he moved to protect Luthe. I think Jake’s right. If Darce can’t look to Luath for support in the way he needs, as a Top, then as a family we’re going to have to organise other ways to meet that need for him. We need to know now.”


Over on the swing, Jasper was sitting with Darcy. They were rocking slowly, Jasper had got Darcy talking about something he obviously found comfortable enough to be talking fluently about. Flynn could see the beginning of the graceful, active hand movements that went with Darcy chatting. Jas could usually get most of their shyer, quieter brats out of their shells, he’d been good at that with Roger and he’d always had a particularly soft spot for Darcy. Flynn thought he saw a vulnerability there that perhaps not all the family did; someone who watched and assisted from the sidelines without always being seen. 


That was a quality Jasper always recognised and appreciated.


Jake was sitting on the porch rail. Not participating, but he was using his size, using space, using his position to keep in clearly in Darcy’s mind all the time that he was there, and not as a casual spectator. He hadn’t left Darcy all day, he was on this job and Flynn had no doubt that he wouldn’t pass it to Luath unless he felt satisfied to do so. Less Jake now the friend and family member than Jake the family Top with a vulnerable brat he was responsible for.


This is the role we were trained in; it’s how Philip taught us. That responsibility comes first. Over everything else.


A car came into sight, bumping slowly over the grass track towards the house. Flynn recognised the car hire fleet colours from Jackson, and leaned the rake against the barn wall, walking around the house to meet it before Darcy had time to see it coming. Luath saw him and pulled in against the fence down by the winter shelter. He got out leaving the car door swinging, face grim as Flynn reached him. His shirt was crushed, his tie pulled loose, the ruins of a business suit put through a few hard hours.


“What is it? What’s happened?”


“Jake’ll let you know. He went to New York last night, and brought Darce out here with him.” Flynn took Luath’s arm to stop him, making Luath pause and look at him. “Take a minute and calm down. It’s taken a lot of the day to get past him bursting into tears.”


Luath pushed his arm aside and took the porch steps in one long stride.


Yep. Good.


Flynn followed him down the porch and around the corner. Darcy had heard them coming; he was hunched on the swing looking somewhere between miserable and alarmed. Jasper quietly got out of the way, making space for Luath who sat down on the swing beside him and pulled Darcy into his arms, running his hands over him.


“What’s happened? Stop shaking. Whatever it is, we’re going to be ok.”


Calm. He’d found the control over his tone in his deep, smooth voice that would reach and calm Darcy; and he took a minute to hold him before he turned up Darcy’s face. He must have seen the reddened eyes and his expression. He then looked directly at Jake, who had risen to stand, arms folded, weight square. Top to Top they rarely pulled punches. They tended to tell it exactly as it was with all the information up front that the other Top needed to get the most acute feel for what was going on at the heart of it, and handle it right.


“I had a call from an old friend of Philip’s, Michael Morrison,” Jake said bluntly, “That Darce had entered himself in a BDSM auction as an experienced submissive, and he was very concerned that this wasn’t the truth and he didn’t know how to deal with it without embarrassing Darcy. Who had organised and planned the event with them, so Morrison was keen not to blow his image in front of anyone else.”


Luath looked blankly at Darcy, who shrivelled deeper into the swing. “You did what? An auction?”


“And he went through with it. I bought him off the block, lot number five, for over five thousand dollars. Leather harness, g string and all.”


“Don’t.” Darcy implored through his hands.


Jake took no notice, watching Luath. “I swore to Morrison I’d be there and would win the bidding whatever it went to. Morrison actually had stationed another planted member of their club in the room in case for whatever reason I didn’t, he was that concerned. Looking the way Darcy does, with the brief he set out on paper? He had some serious players very interested. You might want to take a look at those.”


Despite Darcy’s pleas he handed the auction paperwork to Luath. Luath sat limply back in the swing, reading. His eyebrows rose steadily more steeply as he read.


“What? This is absolute rubbish, you’ve never – you what?”


“We’ve been through this.” Jake leaned on the porch rail, arms folded. “We’ve established it’s lies from end to end, we’ve been through that he could have been bought by absolutely any Dominant in that room who’d have been expecting a highly experienced submissive fully up for all of that with pretty much no limits,”


“Have you any idea how dangerous?” Luath demanded of Darcy, who was scarlet faced and tears were starting again. “What did you plan to do when it got real?”


“I think he planned to grit his teeth and suffer through it as best he could, in as much as he had a plan at all.” Jake said gently but directly. “It was an auction to raise money for a 9/11 fund, Luthe. The group organising it lost a friend in the towers. He’s been working with them for several weeks, it’s been intense stuff, and he said to me he felt this was something he could do. I suspect he meant ‘give’.”


“Damn.” Luath said it softly, and with absolute understanding. He’d kept hold of Darcy; all of Darcy’s curling up hadn’t managed to get rid of the heavy arm around his waist, and Luath wasn’t as tall as Jake but he was a big guy.


Jake watched him, eyes very level. “Flynn asked him the night it happened, if he wanted to be hurt. He couldn’t say no. I think that was at least part of it.”


“Well it would be.” Luath said grimly. “Trying to feel anything you can make sense of is… very much part of it. Right. I’ve got this, Jake. Thank you.”
The utter dismissal in that ‘thank you’ would have sounded rude and cold to anyone else, anywhere else. To Flynn, it was the best sign yet. That was the sound of a Top.


Luath took Darcy with him, peeling him off the swing without difficulty, and disappeared into the house. Left on the porch the other four Tops stood in silence for a moment, until very faintly, upstairs, a door closed. Then Jake lounged back against the rail, tipped his head back to look at the porch roof and the evening sky above it, and released a long, slow breath.


“Ok. Now we see.”
 
 
*

 

Luath took him to his and Roger’s room. The small room under the beams where Luath had been banging his head for decades, and where one of Roger’s bookcases crowded the room even further, his battered paperbacks in lines on the shelves. Many were family favourites which is why they went on sitting there; detective fiction, true crime, thrillers and an eclectic selection of biographies jostled each other for space. Roger had loved this room that looked out over the corral and the tops in the distance, the steady climbing of small hills up through plateaus with all the different shades and colours and the woods to the right to mark where the river lay. Luath closed the door, took a seat on the bed and pulled Darcy down beside him, folded the arm around his waist a whole lot tighter and held Darcy hard against him, hip to hip. He was a lot bigger and broader than Darcy was; something Darcy was deeply familiar with. It was common enough that they’d curl up together on the couch at Luath’s apartment much like this to watch something on television on an evening. There had been a time there would have been three of them piled together like this; it was a very old habit from a very long friendship.


Head against his shoulder, Darcy looked down at the deep black of Luath’s long, strong fingers below the silver of his watch, the free hand that rested on his knee. They said nothing for a moment, just sitting there in the quiet, although Darcy could hear his heart pounding in his ears. Then Luath said quietly in the way that more or less rumbled in his chest. “You didn’t tell me you were working with this group.”


“It was a memorial event.”


“And you didn’t want to upset me.”


“No point the two of us having to think about it.”


“Are you as tired as you sound?” Luath demanded. Darcy managed a forlorn snort of amusement.


“I had Jacob drag me out west in the middle of the night for an interrogation, I think we got to bed sometime around four am.”


“That wasn’t the kind of tired I meant. And I don’t like that kind of smartness when it’s something this serious.”


“Oh don’t.” Darcy pulled away and lay flat on the bed, closing his eyes. “Don’t, please. Jacob has jumped all over the whole ‘I bought you, I own you, you want a Top you have got one’ thing,”


“And did he?”


“Did he what?”


“Did he do what a Top would do? Since you were looking to be Topped, and thoroughly, without limits?”


Darcy coloured, swallowing. “Well I got swatted. That was a first.”


“When?”


“He took me from the auction to a hotel, I suppose he’d had to book a room to change, he had to rent a suit – he stuffed me in a bath there.”


“You were that shocky.”


“I was fine, I just had a large cowboy going all-”


“Ok, we’re done with this act.” Luath’s hand closed over Darcy’s wrist and pulled him upright, holding him face to face. “I am done with that tone, and that act. If Jacob felt you needed it, then you were in shock. Which scares me because that tells me what a state you were in on that auction block, and how much of a mess you were in to do this at all.”


“I have had all four of them going on and on about how serious this is!” Darcy snapped back. “I get it! It was not a good decision-”


“So you were in the bath.”


“Yes. And he hauled me out and swatted me.”


Which was still a shock to think of. Decades of threats, and that was the first reality, and it had not been a pleasant one.


“Why?”


Darcy swallowed. “…I guess I got a little smart with him. And he made a lot of threats. And finally he pulled that wretched lexan thing out of the drawer in the office and..”


For a moment he’d honestly thought Jake was going to do it.


“He made you think he might?”


“How do you know he didn’t?” Darcy demanded. Luath shook his head, voice still soft and level.


“Because I know Jacob. And I know you.”


Darcy swallowed, no longer at all sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. There was a moment’s silence.
“It scared the absolute life out of me.” Darcy confessed very quietly. “And Jake pointed out, it was him, here at home, and I knew nothing ever got any worse here for anyone than a spanking, I knew that- I saw Rog in serious trouble plenty of times, I know. I’ve heard it, I’ve seen it- and then I felt even more of a coward.”


“Neither Rog nor I require that of you.”


Darcy stared at the floor for a while. “Maybe I require it of myself.”


“No.” Luath said it very firmly. “I know what you’ve heard from Gerry when he’s angry and looking for a way to hurt you, but you know it isn’t true. It is ok to not want the whole lifestyle. You get to choose what works for you. It doesn’t mean you’re afraid of it or you’ve chickened out of the tough bits.”


“I’ve spent my life hanging around it and watching, Luthe. Maybe he has a point.”


“You have got to stop letting him and Wade get to you. Do you think Roger thought like that?”


Darcy gave him a ghost of a smile. “Oh Roger didn’t think at all about stuff like that. Rog adored you and he just took every hour and every day as it came, and I loved that about him so much. He didn’t have questions, just whatever we did was ok.”


There were still times he missed that dear, easy friendship so much it physically hurt. Roger had made it so easy to just be with him, to just do and enjoy with a total lack of questioning or worry. Always good natured, always content just for them to be together and entertained with whatever was happening. He’d be baffled by all the drama tonight if he was here. He’d be piled on the bed with them, listening, sympathetic, but focused mostly on yes, all right, now let’s get past that and do what really matters. He’d joked, plenty of times over Darcy’s head to Luath about picking up a paddle and using it.
He said to me, more than once, and fairly seriously, he thought I could use it.


But Roger was a gentle man, who didn’t push. Always accepting. Always tolerant. In many ways a man with a lot of chivalry. And Luath was like him. He and Roger had blended and merged in that beautiful, easy way that Darcy saw in so many of the closest, happiest couples he knew, in time with each other and effortless in what flowed between them. The hole in Luath broke Darcy’s heart. It had for years. He’d teased, he’d coaxed, he’d gently kept the apartment going until Luath was able to again, he’d kept the fridge filled, he’d gently dragged Luath out with him to a restaurant or a show or a comedy club or anything at all to keep him interested in life. Worn clothes that would shock him and make him look and rouse his interest, teased about boyfriends and a nightlife that made him laugh and make Toppish noises, which was good for him.


It’s been years. Maybe it became an act, a habit.

If Darcy was brutally honest, for the past five years evenings had been far more about a glass of wine, his work files and the tv in his apartment than in swinging in any club, shocking or otherwise. The dates he went on were casual, teasing affairs, but these days he very rarely took up the invitations that flowed to go back to a man’s bed and enjoy his closer company. He lived the life of a monk while putting up the illusion of living his day job, and it was something he thought most of the family would find far harder to believe than they had ever found the illusion.
Except Dale. Who looked, in that grey eyed, steady way, and saw….. way, way too much.


I am scared of their brat. Darcy had said it the first time he met Dale, and meant it. Even more so when he discovered Dale didn’t just notice too much. There was no knowing what that man picked up on.


He just knew, Gerry had said, months ago. I never told him. There was no way he could have known, but he knew the details. The place, what I said, what I was thinking…. He dreams it, or he just sees it or knows it. It’s like he tells Riley when there’s an email in their box or tells Paul where the car keys are before Paul asks him.


That was way more than Darcy was prepared to cope with. It was hard enough managing a fleet of Tops. And when Dale looked at him like that, sometimes it was too hard not to think of Philip, who had worn the same look at times.
And nothing was going to happen to hurt the man sitting beside him on the bed. A gentle, kind man with too much heart, who was too beaten down for all this. Who had already had to handle more than anyone like him should ever have to. Darcy curled an arm through Luath’s and laid his head back on Luath’s shoulder, hugging him.


“I’m sorry they scared you.”


“I think I needed to be scared if you’re struggling enough to have done something like this.” Luath said quietly. “You need to go back to that therapist. Yeah, you do. I’ll go with you.”


“There isn’t anything he can say I haven’t heard or read or couldn’t hear from Flynn any time I picked up the phone.” Darcy said wearily. “There isn’t an answer. This was a … mad decision. I know. I’m glad Jake ended it, I know this could have gone much, much worse. But it was just a perfect storm. They miss their friend, this event mattered so much to them, and you and I both know how that feels. I wanted to help, and I stopped thinking.”
That was a whole lot of bullshit. So much so that Philip would have laughed. Darcy would not have expected to get away with that with Jake this evening either. But he held his breath in spite of himself, leaning against Luath, carefully showing no sign of it.


Don’t look. Don’t think. Don’t question it, Luthe. Just believe me and we’ll be all right.


“Promise me you’ll see that therapist.” Luath said against his hair. Darcy nodded, accepting that for now. He could negotiate gently out of that later. Meetings, work calls,


No window in the schedule Luthe, it’s just so busy busy, you know me! I’ll find time in the summer. In the fall. After Christmas. In the never never.


“I will.”


Luath dropped a hard kiss on his hair. Loving. Understanding. And like that, Darcy knew they were done. This was accepted as far as Luath was concerned. Settled. Over. 


“I’m really tired.” he said softly. Luath’s arm squeezed around him.


“Want to stay with me tonight?”


They’d done that plenty of times, especially when the house was busy or one of them was lonely. Darcy had shared a tiny tent with him and Roger more than once, and Luath and Roger were affectionate people; he was more than used to hugs or being physically close to both of them. When Roger died, Darcy had fairly often shared Luath’s bed, to be there to hold him and give him the physical comfort he needed, or to chat about nothing much through the small hours as you could with your dearest friends. Chaste and platonic, and the best friend he knew how to be. With much love, Darcy put a hand against Luath’s jaw and kissed his cheek. Beautiful, sweet man, who always tried his best.
Jake should not have put this on you. This is not for you to carry.


“I’ll be fine, I just need to catch up on sleep. I was working ridiculous hours up to the event anyway. Thanks for coming.”
“You know I’m always here for you.” Luath turned him and hugged him strongly. “I always will be. Get some sleep. It’s going to feel better in the morning.”


No. It really won’t. But thanks.
 
 
*
 
 
 
Jasper had gone to lock up. Paul was setting bread. Out on the porch Jake and Flynn were sitting more or less in silence, trying not to look too obviously like they were waiting for news. Luath took a moment in the kitchen to fill a glass with water, smiled at Paul and pulled his tie even looser, walking out onto the porch to join Flynn on the swing.


“He’s ok. He’s gone to bed, he was exhausted.”


That had taken fifteen minutes at the most. Flynn looked at him, seeing the relaxed hands, the limp shoulders. Done. Relieved. He didn’t need to look at Jake to see Jake’s shoulders set in response.


“I’ll get him to see the therapist in New York that he worked with a few years ago.” Luath sipped orange juice, leaning back into the swing. “Thanks for rescuing him, Jake. He says it was a perfect storm and I think he’s probably right. I’ll take him home with me tomorrow,”


“Tom and I are out in Barbados at the moment, we’re on a diving project there.” Jake said and it was in his usual, genial tone, but Flynn read everything underneath it. “It’s all right Luthe. I’ll ask Darcy to come back with us. The vacation would probably do him good.”


“What are you diving?”


“Pirate wrecks. Literally. There’s a suspected well known one in the bay where we are. The hotel has plenty of rooms, it’s quiet, lots of time out on the beach, blue skies and sand and not much else to do.”


“If he’s free he probably could use that.” Luath agreed. Jake inclined his head.


“He’s free. I checked his schedule on his phone last night. Other than a few phone meetings he could do from anywhere he’s got nothing for the next ten days.”


“When did you check his phone?” Luath asked, surprised.


“I got him to take me by his apartment. I wanted to know if there was a work crisis we didn’t know about, or if he’d had another fight with Gerry and the others, or if any of them knew what he’d got himself in to and hadn’t told us.”


Luath nodded slowly, reflecting on that. “….yes. All good points. Bit invasive though?”


“Needs must.” Jake said lightly. And it was that which gave it away to Flynn more than anything else. Jake had the information he wanted, and now there would be no more waiting, no more arguing. And Flynn agreed with him. Regretful, sad, protective of Luath, and he knew they all were; if Luath wasn’t prepared to do it then they had to.


“How was Wade?” Jake asked. “Did he show you that new marina they’re building?”


And like that, he changed the subject. And Luath let him.


“It was bloody heart breaking.” Flynn said later to Paul and Jasper, when Luath had gone to bed.


“It’s his choice.” Paul said, and he was looking the most upset of any of them. He’d known Luath the longest; he and Luath had been close in the days before Roger and Luath were a couple. “The option was there.  He knows Darcy the best. So he’s choosing to let it slide, and not to take it any deeper, and we have to respect that. As much as we respected his right to step in and take over if he wanted. Luthe doesn’t have to do it, he gets to decide without guilt, without pressure. His consent counts too.”
 
 
 
Jake, sitting out on the porch in the darkness, heard the soft and uncertain footfall on the stairs a little after midnight. Tom was up on the tops with Dale and Riley; they wouldn’t be hard to find and Tom would be enjoying himself tonight, out in the open with the two of them. But he wouldn’t have left Darcy. He’d have been reluctant to even if Luath had been fully on it; as it was – Darcy remained wholly and entirely his responsibility. Which he’d manage as discreetly apart from Luath as possible, but he would manage it.


He leaned far enough from the swing to push open the kitchen door, unsurprised by who he found there. Slight. Barefoot. Large eyed. Darcy looked exotic when he was carefully dressed, but in a t shirt and sleep shorts, tonight he looked lost, fragile and miserable, in a way guaranteed to hit a wired up Top in the guts.


“I just wanted to get a drink…” he began lamely, although he hovered somewhere between the fridge and the stove as if he wasn’t sure what to do next. Jake got up, took his hand and towed him gently out onto the porch, resuming his seat on the swing and pulling Darcy down into his lap.
He’d seen Philip do this many times, and Darcy, presented with warm arms and someone confidently taking the lead, curled up on his chest. He was shaking a little with misery. Not tears. They’d had plenty of tears over the past twenty four hours, although in Jake’s opinion it was mere overflow and not getting near the real release he needed.


“What did Luthe say?” Jake said quietly as he rocked the swing. Darcy sighed.


“To see the shrink in New York again. I don’t think it’ll help, but ok. It was just a perfect storm. Bad timing, bad subject, bad idea-”


“Yeah, try that utter bollocks on someone who’s going to believe it Darce, don’t waste it on me.” Jake interrupted just as gently. “You could have got seriously hurt, and that was in part your intent, so don’t use that tone to me or pretend this is ok. It isn’t. This isn’t something we’re going to brush off or ignore, you and I.”


“Oh Jake. You’re being very sweet, but-”


“Contract.” Jake said shortly. “Signed. I’m headed back to Barbados with Tom in the morning. You’re coming with me.”


“I can’t-”


“I checked your phone at the apartment, I know your schedule. You can. You can make any necessary work calls from the hotel, and I can keep you under my eye. You can come willingly, or you can come kicking and screaming Darce, I’m not really bothered which. You are coming.”


“I’m not going anywhere with Tom!”


“I never thought you disliked Tom.” Jake said mildly. Darcy drew a breath, sounding increasingly close to tears.


“I don’t dislike Tom! Of course I don’t. I am just not going anywhere with him looking at me thinking what an utter, contemptible fool I am for…”


“He does not think that.” Jake hugged him closer, preventing the attempt to get up and walk away. “Neither of us think that. We’re worried that this was an impulsive, destructive action that suggests you’re feeling pretty numb, or pretty desperate, or possibly both. And if you’ve got questions around what you want, wanting domination, wanting that kind of play and you’re not sure of the reasons why or what it is you’re really after, then Tom’s probably the best person you could have to talk to about it. He gets it. He’ll be honest with you about his own history there. It took him a long time to figure it out.”


There was a long silence. Darcy’s voice was even less steady when he spoke again.


“Luthe said he thought this is to do with Gerry and Wade… they’ve always said when they’re mad enough and wanting to lash out, I play with the dynamic. I take the bits I want, and I’m too afraid to get real and go any further. It’s cowardice.”


“What do you think?”


“Luthe says it’s fine to choose the parts that work for me.” Darcy sounded deadened about that. “I pointed out to him I’ve been hanging around this lifestyle and watching from the edges all my adult life. Maybe Ger and Wade have a point.”


Luthe, he straight out told you. He told you clearly, right here. Jake mentally shook his head, torn between frustration and pity and concern for a Top he’d respected and loved since he was a kid. He kept his voice relaxed out of habit, the genial and easy one that tended to reassure Tom in an escalating panic.


“Yeah well you really didn’t have to fling yourself into the deep end of BDSM to try and work that one out, sweetheart. You’ve got plenty of us to turn to if you want to talk about it or if you’ve got needs to be met, we’re safer quantities.”


“And all of you know me,”


“Yeah, that’s it. Exactly. Right there.” Jake pointed out. “We don’t play, we’re very much for real. Which means yes we know you, and you can talk to us, and that makes me wonder just how real you are being with any of us lately.”


“Oh try for years.” Darcy said wearily.


“Yeah, I’m getting the impression that’s how you’re feeling.” Jake said with compassion. “And that you’re tired. Not physically but in a lot of other ways. And carrying way too much, and it’s getting on top of you, and this was a whole lot bursting out. In a pretty self destructive way. Am I getting anything wrong so far?”


The lack of reply was telling. Jake rocked the swing slowly beneath them.


“Darce, not everything has to be in the context of a relationship. Negotiation works in friendships too,”


“I’m not a brat.”


“You don’t have to take any label you don’t choose to. You know we don’t all fit neatly into those two boxes. I don’t think that you’re entirely neutral either, and never have been, not to mention that people’s perspectives and needs change over time. We all evolve.” Jake paused to let him think. “That part is all your choice and you don’t have to justify it, which is why we’ve spent years telling Gerry and the others to shut up and back off. But quite apart from that. If you’re looking for catharsis, and I think you are, then it’s going to be with me. And safely. With me making sure that you’re ok before, during and afterwards.”


“You’ve been threatening since yesterday evening, Rog and Luath used to threaten too, Philip did,” Darcy began, with the slightly brittle amusement that had worried Tom at Christmas when he heard it. Jake interrupted it without compunction.


“I’m not threatening. I’m saying I think that’s some of what you were wanting. I very much understand that feeling. I agree that sometimes that kind of a release can help a lot, and you know I speak from experience; Tom finds it very much so. And I’m letting you know I am willing to provide you with that release if you want it. And I’m also letting you know that if I see you go looking for it anywhere less safe again in this kind of unthought out, self destructive way then I will be providing it myself without waiting for you to negotiate first. I will take that as you making it very clear to me that you need me to step in. Understood?”


He spoke softly but Darcy still nodded, eyes large. “Yes.”


“Then let’s go on up to David’s map room. You’ve got a lot of associations with the study, I don’t think they’re all helpful ones, and we’re not going to get disturbed in there.”


Darcy’s eyes couldn’t have got any larger if he tried. Jake slid Darcy off his lap and got up, holding out a hand.


“I will remind you, you’re bound to be pliant to my desires within your hard limits for… well around thirty four hours more yet. And my desire is very definitely for you to do and take whatever you need for you right now. You’re the only one who knows what that is. So I’m offering, and you only do this if you want to.”


“If I come up to the map room, will you spank me?” It came out as mostly a squeak that had no business coming out of the mouth of a mature man. Jake gave him a calm, decisive nod.


“Yes.”


For no reason Darcy understood at all, even though his knees were shaking, he took Jake’s hand.
 
 
 
            It was cool in the map room. It was a room Darcy was intimately familiar with; a room much loved by those who had known David best. His spread out three d map was on the floor, with its harbours and ships and the ranch by the river. A single chair was in the light of the roof window, with a bookmarked book lying on the cushioned seat.


Jake didn’t pause to put the map lights on. He didn’t pause at all. He just gently and directly led Darcy to the chair and took a seat there, keeping hold of his hand. A large man, tall and broad and yet the grasp on Darcy’s hand was a gentle and a comforting one, there was no sense of being pulled anywhere.


“Are you all right? Try breathing.” He suggested it softly, teasingly but in his usual friendly way, there was no mockery in it. It was radically different from this morning when he’d advanced with a paddle and made a very clear demonstration of what it could be like.


Darcy drew a trembling, careful breath.


Jake nodded approval. “That’s the way. In and out.”


“I haven’t.” Darcy began somewhat incoherently. “I’ve never,”


“I know.” Jake sounded perfectly relaxed about it. “It’s not rocket science, Darce. Everyone had a first time once.”


It was something the family brats were unusually shy of talking about, as if it was something intensely sensitive. And now Darcy understood that as he never before had.


“You won’t pull anything down…?” he began stupidly, aware he was too embarrassed and emotional now to be coherent. Jake smiled at him, very kindly, shaking his head.


“Of course I will.”


Darcy had no idea if he was more horrified or relieved by that answer.


This is me. This is really me, standing here, about to……..


He was scared. Very. But it wasn’t the choking terror of this morning at all. And Jake’s grasp on his hand was comfort, support and not restraint. He wasn’t even noticeably waiting. He was just relaxed and there, and the kindness of that, the support in that, was making Darcy’s throat hurt. Jake was watching him, and Darcy felt the soft squeeze on his hand.


“Ready?”


It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what to do. He’d seen it. Many, many times. He’d heard it even more. He’d been part of the conversations about it between the brats, between him and Roger, for most of his adult life.


All second hand knowledge. All one step removed. Story of your life.


He took that intentional step forward, not at all sure how to do this, and Jake helped there too, not pulling but putting an arm around his waist that supported as much as guided him as he laid himself over Jake’s lap. It was high. His fingertips could barely brush the floor, his toes weren’t anywhere near. Jake’s hand clasped his hip, the weight of Jake’s forearm rested on his back, warm and heavy and making him feel held and stable rather than dangling. He knew even then he could have stopped Jake with a word. He knew it. He was trembling, his palms were slippery, his stomach was twisting wildly, his throat was dry, and he couldn’t swallow back an absolutely pitiful whimper as Jake did what Darcy knew he would do; grasped the waist of his shorts and lowered them, gently but efficiently and right out of his way to his knees. He wore clothes on a regular basis that others found revealing to the point of pushing the boundaries of acceptability. That was fashion. He wore those without thinking twice, they never made him feel vulnerable. It was absolutely no preparation for being bare bottomed over the lap of a highly competent Top. None at all.


“You’re ok.” Jake said softly, and his large, heavy hand rubbed soothingly over Darcy’s bottom. “Keep breathing sweetheart. You’re going to be fine.”


The members of Morrison’s club did this for fun. Right now Darcy had no understanding of that at all. That many of the people he loved most were frank about not finding this fun but still quite willingly exposed themselves to it and didn’t really worry that much about it was equally incomprehensible. And yet he still didn’t get up, or plead, or throw his hand behind him and try to defend himself, or do anything else sensible. He just went right on making those ridiculous, soft whimpering sounds.


He should properly have been thinking about here was the nearest reality to what it would have been like to have been taken from the auction by an unfamiliar Dominant who would have expected that he undressed and got involved in something a lot more challenging than an over the knee bare hand spanking. It should have brought home to him how nightmarish that really would have been; how there would have been nowhere for that situation to go from there that would not be awful for both himself and the poor Dominant involved.


He didn’t. He didn’t really think much about anything at all, there was no coherent thought, there was just being in his body and very aware of it, and very, very apprehensive, and then Jake’s hand lifted and slapped, and a sharp smart blossomed across one cheek, and was swiftly matched by one on the other side. He was more surprised initially than hurt. The swat in the bath had been much harder. But unhurriedly and steadily, Jake’s hand spanked against his bottom, firmly rather than sharply, covering a range of ground some parts of which were rather more sensitive than others to the point that he was aware of some jumping and flinching, and of… a growing warmth and smart that was uncomfortable right from the start. But it was an intimate and surprisingly calm experience. There was no panic. There was no conversation either and that was a relief; the communication was entirely non verbal and it made so very much more sense than any words did. It was to do with being bare, with being held like this across the lap of a man Darcy had loved and trusted for decades, with the entirely physical expression of that auction was a really bloody awful idea and there is only so long you can keep all this in. There is only so long you can last. It went deep, it really, really did. It went to places words never did.


The heat and the smart built up quite quickly, by about the third or fourth round of Jake’s hand landing no harder but definitely very firmly on already well smacked skin Darcy was aware he could no longer keep still, his hips were developing a life of their own and so were his feet. He was getting increasingly breathless and the whimpering he wasn’t able to stop was getting louder and less controlled. The calm steadiness of it all was perhaps what loosened his throat and his reserve the most; it just went on, quite composedly, the repetition doing the work, and somewhere after that he was actively wriggling and gripping Jake’s jeaned legs, and now it hurt, it wasn’t just uncomfortable, it hurt, and his breath was starting to come more and more freely and loudly, and his face was wet. Then Jake paused and Darcy felt his palm rub softly around the top of his thigh where the blazing, smarting throb wasn’t, and Jake’s voice was very kind.


“Still ok? We’re nearly done. We’re going to finish with some harder ones.”


That was not in any way a comforting or helpful thing to warn of, but somehow it had an effect, Darcy felt his breathing involuntarily sink with his stomach and the tears wash harder out of his eyes, and then Jake’s hand spanked down across his already very well warmed behind and it was a whole lot sharper, a hard spank that ripped out all his self control, and for what felt like an eternity Jake was delivering those hard, well placed spanks, one calmly after another right on target, and he was twisting and yelling and sobbing hard, and blubbering out a whole lot of incoherent stuff most of which he wasn’t sure of, and there was no coherent thought anywhere. There was just feeling and reacting.


When he got to the point he could hear himself think and was breathing rather than gasping and sobbing, his face felt drenched. His chest felt free, released and aching with it, his whole body felt limp and his butt felt torched. It throbbed, the fire of it was dominating. There was nothing anywhere in him that could compete with that for attention. It was quite a shock to take a break from all the things that normally and habitually dominated him. That was what he had been looking for and Jake had known it; something big enough and physical enough to get in the way of his head and give him an escape. To un-numb a lot of what had been frozen and stuck. He still couldn’t stop sobbing, not the sobbing of distress or pain so much as just a lot of things rushing free and releasing themselves; he couldn’t make his chest or throat contain themselves and swallow it down. Even when Jake helped him up, took him into his lap and rocked him, his big arms wrapped so closely around Darcy it was like being swallowed up, he couldn’t stop. Jake didn’t try to encourage him to. He just rocked and murmured quiet, soothing things, and let him cry.


They’d all done that. In all honesty they had all done that, they had been wonderful. He and Luath had always been able to cry all they needed to, there had never been any shortage of men from this family to listen, to hold them, to be there with them, to encourage them, patiently. Untiringly, and this wretched process went on for years. But it hadn’t been anywhere near so damn a powerful release as this.


Now he had some clue of what Gerry was talking about when he talked about an attitude adjusted or a mood changed, or about feeling absolved.


His face was extremely stiff with salt when Jake helped him to his feet and guided him by the hand downstairs to the kitchen. His butt was hot, somewhere along the line he’d reacquired his shorts in the right place and he could feel the heat through them, but none of the stiffness in the hips he’d seen in well spanked brats in this house. He suspected, even still sniffling and swallowing, that this had probably been a pretty mild spanking by the standards of the experienced. It hadn’t felt like it. Jake rested a hand on the warming plate then felt the kettle standing on it. He must have left it like that earlier; Paul never left it on the plate through the night, but it meant he poured them both a mug of fairly hot, milky tea. Darcy leaned against him, under Jake’s arm, and drank in the darkness of the kitchen. The house felt peaceful. Stable and safe, as it always had.


“What are we doing in Barbados?”


“Diving pirate wrecks.” Jake swallowed tea, giving him a hug. “Which is right in the bay, I can keep an eye on you on the beach. You can catalogue the gold as we bring it off.”


“Is there any?”


“That’s what we’re there to find out.” Jake’s aqua blue eyes gave him a lazy, teasing glint that always made it hard to know how serious he was. “You’ll need to raid the airport bookstore on the way out. You’re going to be swimming, sunbathing, reading and not much else for a few days. I want a close eye on you.”


“And then?”


“And then we’ll talk about what’s next.”


“I’m not your problem.”


“I’m family.” Jake dropped a firm kiss on the side of his head. “Can you sleep?”


“For a week.” Darcy admitted. “What about Tom? Is Tom going to mind? I don’t want to-”


“It was Tom’s idea.” Jake said softly. “I told you, if you want someone to talk to, you won’t find anyone who understands better than him. It’s ok Darce. You are going to be ok.”

To Be Continued...  

but it WILL take some time.  

Keep breathing, and remember that last line.

 

Copyright Rolf and Ranger 2021