Recovery (Doctor Dom Volume 5) (A BDSM & Medical Play Novella) by Tara Crescent Read Free Book Online Page A

safety, this wouldn’t have come to pass.
    I didn’t think that what I’d done – my reluctance to use my safe word the one session when I felt I needed to atone for my wrongs – I didn’t thi nk it was an unforgivable sin. But yet, we couldn’t move past it.
    I l oved Patrick. The way I felt about him was nothing like the way I’d felt about Nick. With Nick, I’d hated myself for wanting him. With each day Nick and I were together, I felt my respect for myself steadily erode.
    Patrick was good for me. My head and my heart were aligned. When I was with him, I felt like the best version of myself.
    But I missed his dominance so much that it was a physical pain. I needed him to possess me completely. And having been exposed to the sensually addictive sex, I wasn’t sure if I could live without it.

***
    I was sitting in my office on a Thursday afternoon, flipping moodily at a sampler pack of new upholstery fabric when I received a call from Jack, my contact at the city planning office.
    “Lisa,” he boomed into the phone, and I winced and moved the receiver an inch away from my ear. Jack didn’t have an indoor voice. “I have a set of approved permits here for you. Dawson. Millclerk. Joshi. Anderson. If you want them quickly, come down and pick them up, else I can put them in the mail for you.”
    “I’ll come get them,” I said hastily. The city had once told me they’d put something in the mail. Foolishly, I had thought they meant that day, or the day after. After three weeks of waiting for the permit, I’d befriended Jack and I’d taken to picking up the permits from him. “I’m leaving the office now,” I added.
    “We close at four,” he reminded me.
    “I’ll be there before then,” I promised him.
    ***
    Permits in hand, I called clients and started filling my calendar. Finally, there was only one call to make. Patrick.
    In some miniscule way, I was avoiding being the person that reached out. The D/s thing was a massive elephant in the room. Neither of us were talking about it, but we couldn’t ignore its presence entirely either. And so, I was starting to build tentative walls around my heart.
    He picked up on the first ring, as he often did. “Hey Lisa,” he said, a tone of pleasure in his voice. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”
    So he’d noticed that I hadn’t been calling him as much. I kept forgetting how observant Patrick was.
    “Your permit is here,” I replied.
    “Ah,” he said. His tone changed slightly, and I felt like a bitch. I was being unreasonable about the BDSM, and I didn’t deserve him. But how did you change what you craved in bed? My submissiveness was an integral part of who I was. The last time I’d tried to live without it, I had stayed away from relationships and love for thirteen years. I didn’t want to do that again.
    Be patient, I chided myself silently. Give it time. We will get past this. We will recover. We have to.
    “I can get started right away, if you still want to do this?” I asked him. “I can always recommend another designer, if you’d prefer.”
    He exhaled into the phone. “Are we really going to go over this again?” he snapped into the phone, and I winced. When Patrick was in Dom-mode, I knew this tone was a prelude to getting spanked. Outside Dom-mode? Not a clue.
    Only three weeks in, and the cracks were starting to show.
    “Okay, I can get stuff going,” I said. “How about I start on Monday?”
    There was a pause, and then he spoke, his tone even once again. “Sounds good,” he said. “Hey, tomorrow night. I have tickets to a play, if you are interested?”
    So we were going to ignore that little moment of discord, the same way we were ignoring the lack of BDSM sex. Okay then.
    “That sounds lovely,” I replied. We talked some more, and then, pleading an excess of work, I hung up.

Chapter 8
     
    Patrick:
    I’d been on my way to see my therapist when Lisa had called. I was still moody when I got to Jackie’s