Sweet Addiction by Maya Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

an accident. He was using a whip and he didn’t have much experience.”
    Lucas winced. A whip wasn’t for an inexperienced hand. Not at all. It took long hours of practice to be able to wield it without injuring your partner. He didn’t use whips. He didn’t like them. He liked leather. Crops. Belts. Or the flat of his own hand. He also liked wood. Smooth, treated wood so there was no chance of Ren being injured by splinters or rough surfaces.
    Then he frowned as a thought occurred to him. He turned her sothe scar on her shoulder was visible. It was about four inches long, curving over her shoulder blade.
    He traced the scar with his fingertip and then leaned down to kiss it. “Did he do this?”
    She swallowed visibly and nodded.
    Lucas gripped her shoulder, kissed her again and softly nuzzled the barely raised area of flesh. Had she been badly frightened? Had it broken her trust?
    “It must have scared you.”
    Ren rose up on her elbow so they were eye level. “That’s just the thing, Lucas. It didn’t frighten me. It hurt, yes. No doubt about that. Cole was devastated. I mean, truly devastated. He was so horrified that he’d hurt me. But I loved him. I trusted him. I knew he hadn’t meant to. I knew he’d cut off his right arm before ever willingly hurting me. I
knew
all of this. But he was the one who couldn’t get past it.”
    Lucas’s forehead wrinkled in confusion.
    “He was the one who walked away,” Ren said softly, pain evident in her voice. “I begged him. God, I begged him. He hated himself. I think it made it worse for me to tell him it didn’t matter, that I loved him and knew he hadn’t meant to. He made this comment about how often women forgave their abusers over and over and how they were willing to say it was an accident when they were hurt. In his mind, he crossed an unforgivable line and nothing I said could change his mind.
    “He began to question every aspect of our relationship. How he had complete control and dominance. How I complied with his wishes. He worried I’d lost my individuality, that somehow he’d swallowed me up. He was horrified that he’d become this monster who held me on such a tight leash that I had no life outside of him.”
    “Did he?”
    Her denial was immediate and he believed her. She was honest inall things. About herself. Her mistakes. Her shortcomings. If she truly believed that she’d been abused, she would tell him so now.
    “He made a mistake,” Ren said painfully. “One mistake. We were young. We were inexperienced. We were testing the waters of a relationship we knew defied societal norms. We decided together what did and didn’t work for us. He and I were both drawn to the idea of pain as pleasure and how much pain was too much before it overrode all else and simply became …pain. He was always so careful and he simply made a
mistake
.”
    “Was that the only mark?” Lucas asked. Cole’s reaction seemed extreme, but then he’d been a much younger man and it appeared as though he’d had a deep sense of responsibility toward Ren even at that young age. It was hard to know if Lucas would have felt the same if he’d made such a mistake in his youth with a woman he hadn’t cared for as deeply as Cole had cared for Ren.
    Ren frowned and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “No. But it was the only mark that left a scar. My back was striped. The skin was broken in three places but the place on my shoulder was the worst. The whip sliced open the skin and I bled a lot. Cole took me in to be stitched.”
    Lucas pulled her in closer, offering his warmth and the strength of his body. He knew it was something that comforted her, and her sadness was unsettling to him. He didn’t like the look in her eyes or the sound of her voice.
    He felt …helpless and it was an odd sensation. Not at all one he was accustomed to.
    She was getting to him. Worming her way deeper and he found it perplexing. Why her? What was it about her?
    “So he left?”