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definitely not me.”
    When she’d muttered a strained, “Fine. Have it your way,” he thought the fight was over, and that she’d gone to her room to have a good cry. Only an hour later she’d come down the stairs, dressed to kill in a too-short, too-tight red dress, looking like sex on stilts. Without a word to him, she’d tucked her purse under her arm and headed for the door.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa there, Oops. Just where the hell do you think you’re going dressed like that and all alone?”
    “Out.” With that flippant answer, she flung open the door and he’d had to slap it closed to keep her there.
    “I don’t think so. You want to go out, we’ll go out, but both of us have to change first.”
    “No,” she’d said, looking so defiant the Dom in him was itching to put her in her place. “I’m an adult, Gage. I’m going out and I’ll be home later.”
    “Like hell you will.”
    “Gage, you have made it blindingly clear that you don’t want me. That I’ve wasted all this time waiting to be old enough for you for nothing. Well, I’m not wasting another minute. You don’t want my virginity? Fine. I’ll find someone who does.”
    It was the fear he would actually hurt her if he stayed another second in the same room with her that allowed him to let her walk out the door. The killing rage he felt tinged the edges of his vision in red, and even now—hours later—still hadn’t cooled from his blood.
    He was going to kill the bastard, he thought, if she had the gall to follow through with her threat and let some asshole touch her. He was simply going to have to kill him.

Chapter Eight
    Zoe was too mad to cry. She was mad at herself for rushing. If she had put herself off a little longer, she was sure things would have worked out just like she wanted. It had started so great this morning, and then she’d ruined everything by panicking and blurting out the truth.
    Zoe took a sip of her latte. It was her fourth. She was in an internet cafe her parents always took her to whenever they were in the city. Her brother and his partner, Kent, came here a lot too. The coffee was the best in the city but they came now mostly so Kent could see his girlfriend, Angie. She was snarky and funny and always made Zoe feel at home. The cafe was the only place she could think of to go. She would never follow through on the nasty things she’d told Gage. She had never let any boy near her before, and she wasn’t going to change that now. Whether he believed it or not, she belonged to Gage Hollister, body and soul, and that was all there was to it.
    Her problem was, up ‘til today she’d had no idea what a Dom was. If she was going to be perfect for him, she was going to have to learn everything there was to know about what he wanted in a woman and show him she could be that for him.
    She looked down at her iPad and continued her search. What she’d found so far had shocked and aroused her. If Gage only knew what the writings and images brought to life inside her, he wouldn’t be so quick to refuse her. The things she had learned were so compelling, and each new facet only fascinated her more.
    She saw one image of a woman, naked except for a collar around her neck, kneeling at the feet of a man dressed in leather pants. He was holding a chain attached to her collar, and she was lifting a riding crop to him with such a look of pleading desire that Zoe had flushed from head to toe.
    She saw herself in that picture, and Gage towering above her as her master. Imagining that caused a sharp clenching between her legs. Every picture she saw, from the bondage and slavery to the flogging and punishments only intrigued her more. Here in this world of BDSM, the shadowy fantasies of her secrete desires were brought into full and vivid color. She couldn’t say she’d ever fantasized about some of these things specifically, because she’d never known about them to begin with. But those secret fantasies she’d always had,