The Architect (Nashville Neighborhood Book 3) Nikki Sloane (sight word books TXT) 📖

Andrew’s cross. It was angled back just a bit, and a support beam jutted out the back, probably to give it extra stability. It was impossible to look at it and not imagine what it’d feel like to be bound spreadeagle to it. I wouldn’t care which way he’d have me—either facing him or away, my body exposed for whatever he wanted to do to it.

Would he spank me?

Flog or whip me?

Fuck me?

I burst into flames at the idea. I’d never explored any kind of kink before, but I was a ‘try everything once’ kind of girl, and this had always fascinated me. A quick look at my internet browser history would reveal my sexual appetite was healthy and I had wide tastes.

And to do it with Clay? I imagined him delivering a sexy spanking, and then using that same hand to push his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. He’d evaluate me with an exacting look and then adjust my positioning or correct the arch of my back with a firm hand or a dark tone.

An ache of need radiated through my body.

There was a W-shaped logo carved into the back of the cross, matching the letterhead of the order pinned to the board. I trailed my fingertips over the carving.

“Wicked Architecture,” I read aloud.

I dug my phone out of my back pocket, typed it into Google, and found the company website in the search results. Like the piece of furniture in front of me, his website was slick and sexy. When I clicked on the portfolio page, I stared at the pictures of the various pieces he’d created.

Some of them were easy to understand how they were used. There was a barrel shaped horse and a spanking bench that sort of reminded me of a small, padded picnic table. He’d already done a more traditional cross, and then something labeled a milking table, which was long and padded, had a hole cut out of the center of it, and sat on top of a cage.

I got how the kneeler and the item described as Catherine’s wheel worked, but what was a queening chair? The licking bench looked complicated, and I couldn’t figure out who went where or what was even being licked. His portfolio was full of gorgeous pictures of furniture, showing off his high-quality work, but having a model in some of the images would have been helpful.

My curiosity carried me back toward the order form. The price tag for the stocks he was building was seven hundred dollars. The figure didn’t surprise me.

Clay may have used math to build it, but his architecture was more like art to me.

Noir had finished exploring the rest of the room, and she cautiously prowled toward the cross, eyeing it with skepticism. She sniffed it once, slinked around one of the beams, and then stretched up, latching her claws into the leather.

“Noir, no!” I cried, scooping her up into my arms, and extracted her claws as delicately as I could. Thankfully, it didn’t seem like she’d damaged the leather; I’d gotten her just in time. From now on, I’d make sure to keep her out of here and the door to the basement closed.

She squirmed in my hold, since she was a cat and preferred her independence, and reluctantly I made my way to the stairs.

It was then that I noticed there were thick planks of wood standing upright, resting against the wall, like they’d been stained and then left there to dry. Only one of them was on the floor at a strange angle. The board must have slipped.

“That’s what fell,” I told the cat.

She didn’t care. Noir was far more interested in being released. I hurried up the stairs, closed the door, and set her down. She skittered away, temporarily annoyed with me for confining her.

My gaze drifted back to the door, and my mind wandered down to what Clay was building in his workshop. He’d made pieces of restraint and confinement, and—fuck—it was so sexy. I wouldn’t be annoyed with him if he wanted to confine me . . .

In fact, I was sure I’d be thrilled.

Saturday morning, I had a shift at the clinic, as did my best friend Cassidy Sheppard. We’d meet two years ago when she began interning, and although she was a lot younger than I was, age was simply a number when it came to her. She’d turn twenty-one in a few months, but I’d swear she was in her thirties, maturity-wise.

Cassidy was an old soul, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Her boyfriend was in his early forties.

I spent the afternoon desperately fighting back the desire to tell her what I’d found in Clay’s basement. It wasn’t that I worried she’d judge him. I mean, she got up to all kinds of shenanigans with Dr. Lowe—or Daddy, as I sometimes called him. I’d sort-of-jokingly-but-also-seriously nicknamed him that behind his back, which she hated, but then again, she was sleeping with a guy who happened to be her ex’s father.

I didn’t confess my discovery to my friend because every time I thought about it, a voice in my head would pipe up.

Clay’s a private person, it scolded.

So, I kept it a secret, no matter how much I was dying to talk about it with her. Plus, I didn’t tell her how I’d spent last night studying every piece of BDSM furniture in his portfolio. Or how this morning I’d devised a plan to broach the subject with him next time I saw him.

“What are you doing tonight?” Cassidy asked me as she finished wiping down the table in exam room two. Had she sensed the excitement I was trying to hide, or was she simply making conversation? Daddy wasn’t on-call this weekend, and that was such a rare thing, I knew she’d be occupied.

“Not sure.” I played it cool. “I might go over to Clay’s.”

She stopped what she was doing so she could stare at me like