To her credit, Hannah's glance did manage to make Irons look momentarily abashed. This wasn't the first time a woman had come to his door to enjoy suffering under his attentions and make herself a playground for his toys, but usually there was an entirely different, more elaborate process involved; meeting in a fetish club or certain kind of specialist website, the slow dance of revealing and checking information, meetings, arrangements. That generated anticipation, true, but there was also a tiresomely predictable rhythm to it. Jon hated predictability. Bumping into someone at work whose secret desires just so happened to match one's own was definitely unpredictable... something he'd expected to find more in fantasy than fact.<br/><br/>And speaking of fantasy... his eyes wandered slowly up Hannah's body as she spoke, her legs, her stomach, her chest, finally to her lips and eyes and face, as if he hadn't just been savouring the sight of her climbing out of the car, as if he hadn't explored her form with his fingers when she was strapped to the chair. The thought of the modelesque actress writhing atop of one of his contraptions sent a flash of electricity through his skin. “Understood,” he replied amiably, demonstrating he could listen and ogle at the same time. He turned and strolled into the sprawling, rather open-plan interior, beckoning her in with a twist of his shoulder.<br/><br/>His house had the definite look of a place that had never had the rough edges filed off by a woman. There was a set of shelves made from planks and cinderblocks (but planed and sealed, making it an obvious aesthetic choice rather than a mark of desperation) on which an elaborate stereo set-up gleamed, pumping out hard rock with the volume turned down so the bass was just a throbbing undertone in the air. Leather couches and chair sat around a large TV on one side of the room, near another shelf that sported several mechanical clocks ticking in well-oiled unison, and a collection of books – mostly photographic collections of famous SFX work, industrial history, wildlife, and a few volumes of B&W erotica. There was a calendar on the wall, featuring a naked woman, all generous portions of silicon, blonde hair dye and tattoo ink practically making love to a super-charged motorcycle. On the other side of the room it morphed into a rather sparse kitchen, a well-stocked wet bar being the most elaborate thing there. Although the place had a certain Spartan fratboy air to it, it was clean and didn't smell too bad, apart from a faint, lingering whiff of motor oil.<br/><br/>In the middle of the room a space had been cleared, and Jon had taken various tools of the trade out of storage to put on display.<em>The showing of the instruments</em>, as the Inquisition used to say. A St. Andrew's cross, framed in blackened steel and padded with leather was fixed to the wall, buckled cuffs at the wrist, ankle, throat and waist positions. There was something that resembled a saw horse, with with more metal rings than was customary. There were also metal hooks and rings attached to the ceiling, she noticed. A device shaped like a saddle, but with a pair of dildos rising from it, the larger one at the mid-point, the smaller one just behind. Another apparatus like a set of articulated metal spider legs that seemed designed to hold clamps and vibrators at various positions across a person's body. The rocked-stool she had seen in his workshop was also there, alongside a large toolbox which sat open, displaying things other than spanners and screwdrivers... cuffs, chains, crops, plastic phalli of every shape and size imaginable (including some that beggared belief and physical capacity alike)... and something that looked like a variable speed power drill with a cock instead of a drillbit.<br/><br/>Irons stood to one side, cocking his head as he watched her, saying nothing. He was eager to see her reaction, if she was as curious and enthusiastic about his gadgets as she had seemed before. A perverse, contrary part of him instead vaguely hoped that she would be shocked, intimidated by what she saw... that that Hollywood bigshot persona might tremble, just a little.