Someone should lock me up in the psych unit. Rona McGregor sucked in a breath of cool night air. Visiting a BDSM club held third place on her fantasy list, but she’d decided to take it out of order. Just this once. With an eager smile and her heart pounding, she lifted her ankle-length skirt and shoved open the door to the notorious San Francisco club named Dark Haven.

She walked forward slowly, trying not to gawk. Dark wood tables and chairs dotted the center of the long room. A small dance floor took up one corner in the far back; a shiny metal bar with two bartenders behind it occupied the other. All fairly normal. Where’d they hide the kinky stuff that her erotic romance novels had promised?

Then a man strolled past wearing nothing except a terrifying harness strapped to his cock and balls. Rona’s mouth dropped. Crom, but she could almost feel her nonexistent male equipment shrivel up in horror.

Shaking her head, she started toward the bar, then noticed the right and left wall each held a small stage.

One platform stood empty. On the other… Rona took an involuntary step back, bumped into someone, and muttered an apology without looking away from the stage where — surely that’s illegal — a man was whipping a woman chained to a post.

BDSM. Remember, Rona? She’d read about whips and chains and stuff — but seeing it? Whoa.

She pressed a hand to her hammering heart and squashed the impulse to go and snatch the whip from him. As if she could anyway. He stood a good six feet tall with a mature man’s solid build; she had a feeling that if someone were to punch him, he’d just absorb it. In keeping with the night’s theme, he wore a green silk vest over an old-fashioned white shirt. The rolled-up sleeves displayed thickly muscled forearms.

In contrast, his victim was completely naked, her dusky skin glowing dark red from the effects of the whip — No, it was called a flogger, right? The multiple strands stroked up and down her back so evenly that Rona could time her breathing to the rhythm. Mesmerized, she moved closer — threading her way through the tables and chairs scattered around the stage — and chose a table near the front.

Flogging. The word sounded brutal, but this…this was almost beautiful. The man swung the flogger in a figure-eight pattern, hitting one side of the woman, then the other. Rona leaned forward, setting her elbows on the table. He never struck over the brunette’s spine or flanks, obviously avoiding her kidneys with appallingly impressive skill.

He slowed and paused for a moment before whispering the strands across the woman’s back and legs. The woman had her side to the audience, and Rona could see her flushed face and glazed eyes. She was panting from the pain or… The victim’s bottom tilted outward, swaying in a way that implied arousal, not pain.

Arousal.

A grin flashed over the man’s tanned face. He stroked the woman’s inner thighs with the leather strands, up and down, each time moving closer to the Vbetween her legs. She moaned and wiggled.

Rona inhaled slowly, trying to damp the excitement sizzling through her veins.

The man started the flogging again, down the woman’s back, bottom, and thighs. Suddenly, he altered the pattern and flicked the lashes between her legs, right onto her pussy. The woman gasped.

So did Rona. She’d been so immersed, it felt as if the whip had hit her…there. Her insides melted into a puddle of liquid heat. The receptionist had had it right — this was an erotic flogging. Whew.

The music changed, beginning the dramatic conclusion of the movement, and even the murmured conversations died. Rona could almost smell the arousal in the room, and her hands clenched. So violent…so exciting.

He was flogging the woman’s thighs now, the blows gradually moving upward, even harder than before. And again he slapped the strands lightly between her legs. The woman’s squeak turned into a low moan. Then her back, down her thighs, and up slowly. The third time he hit her pussy, the woman shriek and climaxed, writhing in her chains.

A trickle of sweat ran down the hollow at the base of Rona’s spine, and her ragged breathing fought against the tight corset. How could something like this — a whipping — make her so hot?

The crowd cheered as the man released his victim. Although victim couldn’t be the right word, not with that satisfied expression on her face. Rona blinked in surprise when a younger man jumped onto the stage and took the woman into his arms. After a very tongue-laden kiss, the couple stopped long enough for the two men to shake hands and for the woman to kiss the back of the flogger’s hand.

He’d whipped a woman who wasn’t his?

Rona swallowed. Her fantasy of a lover tying her down, maybe even spanking her, seemed pallid next to the reality of what had just occurred.

Across the room, a man and woman began to set up equipment on the empty platform. As the music changed to Nine Inch Nails, the crowd divided: some to the other stage, some to the dance floor. Left alone, the man who’d done the flogging wiped down the post and packed his weapon into a leather bag. Hefting the bag over his shoulder, he strode toward the stage steps and halted at the edge, stopped by a small covey of — Rona snorted — groupies? Did BDSM have groupies?

Shaking her head in bemusement, she turned to look for a waitress. Maybe she should add “Try out a hot dom” to her list. She grinned. Her ex had always ridiculed her five-year goal plans — as if disorganization were better. He’d have had heart failure if he’d seen her fantasy list.

No waitress in sight. She returned her attention to the stage and sighed in disappointment. Empty, like many of the chairs around her. Most of the people had moved to the other side.

A thump drew her attention to the table next to hers, and she gaped like a moron. The man from the stage stood there with his leather bag at his feet. On the table lay a black frock coat and old-fashioned cuff links that he must have removed before starting his demonstration.

She watched as he rolled down the sleeves of his shirt. His dark eyes looked almost black, and his deeply tanned face was lean and hard. With the lines of pain and laughter around his mouth and eyes, and silver glinting in his neatly trimmed black hair, he must have been around forty. And yet when he moved, muscles rippled and strained the shoulders of his white shirt.

Not only a hunk, but older than her. Yet she didn’t even consider flirting. Not with this one. He was too…too intimidating. Not like a young, buff underwear model, all gorgeous and everything, but in a far-more-dangerous way.

Of course he’s dangerous — he has a flogger, and he knows how to use it.

All her minuscule experience with BDSM came from reading erotic romances. She’d always wanted to try a few things, but Mark had laughed at her and refused to do anything to liven up their sex life. Not that they’d even had a sex life the last few years.

Her horizons had definitely expanded since the divorce, but not enough for her to jump into seriously kinky stuff. She’d simply planned to watch and note some ideas to add to her fantasy list, but certainly not to make a pass at a really, really experienced BDSM practitioner.

No matter how gorgeous he looked.

Don’t drool. She tried to casually lean back but slouching in a corset was impossible. Stymied, she turned her gaze to the other stage, where a woman costumed as a schoolmarm wrapped ropes around a young man wearing only breeches. Rona managed to keep her attention there for, oh, a good minute, before returning to the man.

She frowned. He was trying to get a cuff link into his shirt and failing miserably. For some reason, the fingers of his left hand didn’t bend. His frustrated growl switched him in her mind from a hunk to someone who needed her.

She walked over, pushed his hand to one side, and fastened the heavy silver link. “There.” With a smile, she patted his arm comfortingly. “Now –”

She looked up into intent, powerful eyes, and every cell in her body went into a meltdown. He kept her pinned with those dark eyes, studying her as if he could see through to her soul.

He moved closer, forcing her to tilt her head back to look up at him. When her breath stuck in her chest, his lips curved into a faint smile. “You didn’t even think before coming to my rescue, did you?” he asked, and his voice was as dark and smooth as everything else about him.

She should apologize. “I-I’m –”

“Be silent.”

Her throat just plain shut down completely, and the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled slightly. “Submissive,” he murmured. “But no submissive would shove a master’s hands away and take over. You’re new?”

He didn’t wait for an answer but ran a finger down her cheek, her neck, across the tops of her pushed-up breasts.

His touch burned through her, leaving an aching need. The trembling inside her stomach worked outward until her legs wobbled. “Please,” she whispered.

He tilted his head. “Please what, pet?”

“Please don’t tease me.” Feeling like an idiot — a very confused, aroused idiot — she dropped her gaze and tried to take a step back.

His hand closed around her upper arm, firmly enough that she knew she’d go nowhere.

“Look at me.” A finger under her chin raised her face. His lips curved into a faint smile. “Very new, I see.”

“Yes.” Her next effort to move back met the same results — none.

“A submissive need not call any dom but her own ‘Sir,’ but if she approaches a dom on her own and then reacts like this” — his finger left her chin to stroke over her trembling lips — “then she had best address that dom as ‘Sir.’”

Acutely aware of the warmth of his finger still on her lips, she felt as if she were drowning in molten air.

He paused, then prompted, “Say, ‘Yes, Sir.’”

Oh. “Yes, Sir.” She’d used the phrase before, teasingly with the hospital doctors, sarcastically with idiots, but now it reverberated through her like the sound of a bass drum.

“Very good.”

A woman wearing only a corset, fishnet stockings, and high heels suddenly dropped to her knees beside the table. “Master Simon. Can I serve you in any way?”

He turned.

Freed from his gaze, Rona tried to retreat, but his hand, hard and ruthless, tightened. The feeling of being controlled swamped her senses.

Her heart raced as if she’d received an injection of Adrenalin, but with his attention diverted, she managed to pull in a steadying breath. I’m a mature woman, an administrator, smart and professional. Why do I feel like a cornered mouse? And it turned her on like someone had opened a hormone faucet.

She glanced down at the kneeling woman and winced. Not only willing to give Master Simon anything he wanted, but also blonde, slender, gorgeous. And young.

Rona was none of those. Escape. Definitely time to escape.