Under His Protection

by Isabella Laase

  As long as she followed the instructions on the cleaning products, the shower and toilet were fairly easy to conquer, even if they were revolting with unknown hair in the drains and mildew stains that looked like giant spiders, but the more she scrubbed and rinsed the countertop with the spray bottle, the bigger the soap bubbles that streaked across the flat surface, engaging her in an endless battle of water and foam. She tried to wipe the whole mess with the tail of her dry t-shirt, but the cropped top proved to be far too short, so she took it off completely, leaving the simple sports bra that Matt had picked out for her. The bra had fit her well, but she never wanted to know how he’d guessed her size.

  Leaning across the counter to wipe down the mirror with her makeshift rag, she was deep in thought when Matt came into the bathroom. Obviously trying to fight a grin, he said quietly, “You don’t clean much, do you?”

  “Turn around,” she snapped with a glare, waiting until he complied to slip back into the saturated shirt. “And don’t judge me. There are a lot of things I do really well, and this just isn’t one of them. But, I suppose you magical Cruz brothers are some sort of experts at this, too.”

  “Watch your tone,” warned Matt, still facing the great room with his arms crossed. “I’m one of six kids with parents who worked fifty to sixty hours a week. I know how to clean. Let me help you before you destroy that shirt. I don’t want to go back to the store and buy more women’s clothes. People stare at you.”

  “‘You can turn around now,” she said, fighting a shudder over the slightly veiled threat. In an attempt to wipe that know-it-all grin off his face, she tapped his cheek to see if a blush would give her the upper hand and put her nerves back on a shelf. “And you can try to help me, but I’m guessing that you don’t have it in you, little boy.”

  As she’d hoped, the amiable grin evaporated, but left in its wake a scowl that sent an imaginary spank across her ass. “I wouldn’t play with any matches around here, sunshine,” he said darkly as Cruz opened the back door with his arms full of grocery bags. “I can deliver a whole lot of burn to your backside if you push me too hard. Despite my easygoing manner, remember that Alec always was the gentlest of the four of us.”

  “Says who?” Cruz asked, catching the tail end of the conversation. “That’s not how the rest of us remember it.”

  “Says every women we’ve ever played with,” responded Matt, moving his chin toward his shoulder, but keeping Victoria in place with his glare. “You know that you were just the comic relief during all those scenes, right? I’m explaining to your little lady here that she should be careful who she gets sassy with because not everybody plays by the same rules.”

  In a single glance, Cruz took in her wet shirt, Matt’s scowl, and her wide open mouth. “Yeah, I should have warned you about Matt. He’s not nearly as nice of a guy as I am. Wash your hands and get ready to eat, little bit. I brought a pizza back from town, and I just need to warm it up.”

  But facing two identically stern faces had kicked off some strange hormonal response that knocked down her ability to speak or sass. Goosebumps prickled across her skin and her swollen clit tickled against her labia. “I don’t want pizza,” she mumbled, lowering her gaze to the floor. “I think I’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

  “You’re eating dinner,” said Cruz in a flat tone, putting away the groceries and preheating the oven. “Get cleaned up and change that shirt before I get Matt to help you.” That mental image rattled her nerves even further, and she grabbed clean clothes before closing the bathroom door in both of their faces. Turning on the shower to sound busy, she sank to the tile floor and leaned her head backwards against the wall.

  Two trusted brothers playing with unknown women, sharing skin and sex with the ease, respect, and confidence that defined their close relationship. It was easy to drift into a silent fantasy of Matt joining them in the big bed with the soft down blanket providing a cozy warmth, a web of safety and security under Cruz’s approval. They’d talked about playing with other people, but that conversation had taken place curled up on his lap while watching the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. Like all great ideas, anything in the distant future was possible, but facing dual doms in a one-room cabin miles away from the real world wasn’t the same thing.

  “Hurry up.” Cruz’s shout interrupted her thoughts. “The pizza’s getting cold out here, and you had to have run out of hot water ten minutes ago.”

  She joined them for dinner and a dull conversation about football scores, but by the time darkness was fully entrenched, the endlessly long evening had morphed her frustrations into an undefeatable brattiness that was bound to piss them off. The first few snarky comments about being bored enough to scream appeared to be selectively ignored, so she sat on the couch next to Cruz and gently kicked his thigh. “Can’t we please go into town tonight? Bars are dark and nobody would see me.”

  “The nearest town has a few thousand people, tops,” he said, picking one of her magazines off the coffee table and dropping it next to her before returning to his book. “It isn’t exactly a booming metropolis, and it’s a work night. Even if it was a good idea, which it isn’t, you aren’t missing out on anything.”

  “Come on,” she whined. “Don’t be mean.” Cruz looked up with an arched eyebrow that clearly screamed a dire warning, but she couldn’t stop herself. “If you don’t take me, I can just go by myself, you know. You can’t keep me here if I don’t want to stay.”

  “Go to bed, Victoria,” said Cruz, nudging her off the couch with this foot against her butt. “And if you’re going to be a brat, you can sleep up in the loft by yourself. I’m not engaging in nonsense.”

  Disappointment ran so deep that she kicked the table leg like a five-year-old who’d been denied a cookie, but she wasn’t picturing one cookie. It was two cookies. Two luscious, decadent cookies with walnuts and rich, dark chocolate melted across the top.

  She needed to drop this, quickly, and put some distance between her and both men, but her mouth refused to support her common sense. “I’m not going up there by myself. I’m not tired, and you two aren’t going to bed, so why should I?”

  “What are you, like two years old?” asked Matt. “Alec told you to go to bed.” Turning to Cruz, he asked, “Is she always like this?”

  “Pretty much,” says Cruz. “Not so cute all the time, is it?”

  “I am starting to see why you spanked her in the Oval Office,” admitted Matt. “It would have been pretty hard for me to not redden her ass, too.”

  “Hey!” Her voice rose no matter how hard she tried to stop it. “You told him about that?”

  “I didn’t know it was a secret,” dismissed Cruz. “The White House press corps was about fifty feet away. Matt knows I play around with kink, and he knows that we’re in a relationship. Now, make me tell you one more time to go to bed if you want to see how this ends badly.”

  “But it’s lonely up there,” she whined, moving to a relatively safe spot about ten feet away from them and a few steps closer to the bathroom with its securely locked door. “And scary all by myself.”

  The brothers exchanged an unreadable glance, but apparently Matt’s questioning expression meant something to Cruz, who just shrugged. “She’s got a third person on her acceptable list,” said Cruz, “but we haven’t done anything public, yet. It’s an interesting idea, though. It would keep her from being bored.”

  “Wait,” she said in a panic, fighting the overwhelming warning bells that screamed at her to run away and lock the door. Holding out her hands to stop whatever was going on, she added, “That conversation was ages ago, and far away from here. That’s not the same thing as right now and that wasn’t talking about somebody I actually knew.”

  “That conversation was three days ago,” corrected Cruz. “And did you think we’d find a safe play partner in some random stranger at the grocery store? I don’t know what kind of stores you hang out in, but I’ve never had that experience.”

  “Be seri
ous,” she insisted. “None of this is funny.”

  “Oh, I think he’s serious,” said Matt, crooking his finger with a nonverbal instruction for her to get closer. “And nobody is laughing. Come here, little girl. Take off your pants. Alec can join us later.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she said nervously, backing a little further away. “I can’t have sex with both of you. I’ve never even imagined that.”

  “Sure you have,” said Matt, “but chasing you is going to piss me off, and I guarantee that you’re not going to like that.” Moving way too quickly for a big guy, he backed her into the wall, his arms forming a cage on either side of her to trap her in place. Standing close enough for her to feel the warmth from his overly large frame, he stared with no hint of a smile. “Play with me, and let Alec read his book for a little while. He doesn’t mind. We’ve shared naughty little subs on all sorts of levels. Besides, BDSM doesn’t have to include sex.”

  “But what’s the point?” she asked, stalling for time. “I mean, if you don’t have sex, what’s the point of BDSM?”

  “The dominant and the submissive roles are pretty powerful in their own right,” said Matt absently, running his finger along her cheek. “A lot of clubs don’t even allow sex.”

  “But what’s the point?” she repeated, sucking in her breath as his chest rubbed against her breasts, the forbidden tingling shooting directly to her clit and causing her to take deep, lung-filling breaths.

  “A good dom can get a sub off without their cock,” said Matt, “but I admit that it’s more fun for me to fuck my little subs., so if you’re okay with that, so am I.”

  Too fast. Too fast. Too fast. She ducked under his arm to run to the kitchen, continuing to speak over her shoulder. “So, the point is, like, BDSM is nothing that can’t be accomplished with a high-quality vibrator?” Her tone was probably inappropriate, but she’d long since lost track of what appropriate looked like.

  “When a sub is being bratty,” said Cruz, absently looking up from his book, “we all know what she wants. And I don’t hear her safe word, so go ahead and get started, Matt. I like a little pink on her bottom.”

  “What kind of limits does she have?” Matt directed his question to Cruz, covering the distance to where she cowered in the corner. “I don’t want to cross any lines.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Cruz, sending her an evil wink, “but I had her purring with a little hot wax back in Delaware. She’s a nice little pain kitten.”

  “I get hard just thinking about a sub purring,” said Matt. His firm grasp burned deeply into her skin and no amount of wiggling ceded his hold.

  “No, I’m not,” she denied, vehemently shaking her head. “And I can’t purr. See...” She faked a miserable excuse for a cat to send them all away.

  “Well,” said Matt with a chuckle. “You’ve given me a challenge then, haven’t you, little sub. Take off your sweats, or I’ll take them off for you.”

  She rested a hand on the waistband, but with no panties underneath, she couldn’t bring herself to obey. Matt slipped his palm down the front, tangling the gray cotton around her thighs and delivering a stinging spank on her naked ass that rose her to her toes. “Ow,” she squealed. “That hurts.”

  “That’s good,” he said calmly. “Now bend over the chair, and don’t move. I love exploring a new sub.”

  She chewed nervously on her lower lip, staring between Cruz and Matt. She wanted this. She really wanted this, but surrendering her control to a relative stranger was so counterintuitive to her preconceived ideas of propriety, that societal norms had no chance to survive. A spanking from Matt with Cruz standing a few feet away would lead to an endless world of possibilities in their kinky relationship. Cruz had put his book down, his eyes bright with the knowledge that she’d obey or take his consequences. And Matt was ideal. She trusted him.

  There were no more excuses other than her personal fears, which ironically seemed to increase her need. With a nod, she leaned over the upholstered arm, steeling herself for what was to come. He rubbed her still sensitive ass, but another man’s touch with Cruz so close, so approving of the whole erotic scene, caused her to jump disproportionally. “Hush, baby girl,” mumbled Matt. “You need to settle down a little.”

  His spanking started with a lot more sting than she’d anticipated, carrying a relentless heat that settled someplace between the sensual spanking Cruz had delivered back in Delaware and the punishment that she’d gotten in Maryland. There was no time to fully adjust to the bite, each swat fell a little harder than the previous, coating her ass with a sensitive heat until she’d stopped counting, but when he took her to the end of her comfort zone, the fire finally defeated her. She slid off the arm of the couch to evade him, causing them to chuckle like identical twins.

  Cruz moved from his seat to shift her back in place. “Now he needs to start over, little bit, only this time, I’ll help you be a good girl.”

  His strong arms grasped her shoulders and back so that his brother could continue. The two unique touches blended slowly to one, sparking a compliance that she hadn’t expected. Despite her snarky, sassy, real-life demeanor, all she wanted to do was to please them, to give them what they demanded so they would grant her the orgasm through their games and toys.

  Her over-sensitized bottom, however, didn’t agree with the decision to comply, and Cruz had to hold her tightly to keep her on the couch while Matt continued to swat her ass. “Stop, please,” she cried. “I’ll be good. I won’t be sassy. I promise.”

  By the time Matt was finished, she was breathing hard, but her eyes had tightly closed in a subconscious effort to keep the two men united as one. The burn lingered across her bottom, but the slow morphing of pain to heat kept her across the arm of the couch while unidentifiable, inquisitive fingers explored her wet reaction to their discipline, tickling her clit until she slid her legs further apart and buried her face in the couch with a mortified whimper.

  “She could use that vibrator about now,” said Matt with a chuckle, “but we don’t have one. Seems a shame to let her stay like this. What do you say we move her to the bed and have some fun? Your lead?”

  She knew that she should protest, but her faith in Alejandro Cruz was so strong that she had no tools to challenge him. He carried her to the bed, speaking softly. “You’ve got this, little bit. Trust in your dom to call the scene, and he’ll always take care of you.” Resting her head against his chest, she connected to the relationship they’d built. He was everything to her, and the power of that commitment superseded their fun and games.

  Together, they removed her tangled sweats and thin t-shirt. Settled into soft sheets and feathery pillows, she risked opening her eyes to discover that they’d taken off their shirts, exposing identical, brawny muscles to match their dark, trusting eyes, but it was their differences that reduced her breathing to shallow gasps. Matt’s calming grin, his hands exploring her nudity and tweaking her nipples with a painful pinch, and Cruz’s silent approval, sliding his finger along her wetness until he teased her inner thighs, his cock pushing hard at the confines of his jeans.

  To her salacious pleasure, both men finished stripping in front of her, their combined nakedness taunting her resolve to be still. Their shafts stood at full erection, smooth and velvety hard at the same time with a dribble of wet anticipation already at the tip. The slightest wonderful sensations built as she realized that they would do to her what they wanted, the fear, no, the anticipation rising, two sets of hands and two sets of demands. Cruz moved to her side, and she ran her hands along the familiar ridges of his muscles, immersing herself in his unique scent while Matt slid behind her, holding her against his chest and pinning her arms and legs to defeat her attempts to escape

  Cruz began his familiar, unflinching attacks on her breasts, pulling and tugging along her nipples before scraping his teeth across their sensitivity. When he was satisfied, he switched to the role of restrainer, moving her against his chest and pulling her
arms behind her back to allow Matt to play with her thatch, pulling gently and tickling her mons until he found her wetness, sliding his middle finger up and down her channel and circling her clit to relay the sensations throughout her core. When he added a finger deep into her emptiness, the relief was so welcome that she ground her cunt against his hand to drive him deeper, not caring what kind of whorish move it was.

  The two men covered every part of her body, the skin to skin contact creating a titillation that felt so right, so fully wonderful, that she thought she’d never come down from the high. Turning her back to face him, Cruz entered her first, his cock pushing at her wetness until the invasion delivered an intense burst of indescribable ecstasy. Wet with her arousal, he slowly slid in and out of her vagina, wrapping all of them in her own musky scent.

  She’d started to beg for more, nonsense words that made little sense when she replayed them in her mind, but she tensed when Matt’s cock prodded at her tiny asshole, her place of enjoyable shame. Cruz’s erection still moved in and out of her vagina while firm hands forced her butt cheeks apart. Their hold on her small frame was too tight to pull away, no matter how hard she tried. Well-stretched from Cruz’s constant attention, her ass protested as the unfamiliar, well-lubricated cock entered her, pushing against defiant muscles and intruding into her most private space, slowly and deliberately, until she took all of him. Matt groaned, “She’s so fucking tight.”

  Confined between them, she was unable to reciprocate their attentions and remained their well-loved toy. Their shafts continued to move at different rates; Matt, slowly with methodical purpose, and Cruz with more rigor, his need hungrier and more demanding. Panting, pulsing, her hips rocked to meet a rhythm defined by her greed, a tempo someplace between Matt’s steady pace and Cruz’s hard fucking. The building ache was so perfect, so wonderful, that she never wanted it to end, and she fought the orgasm as long as she could.