by Joey W. Hill
He grasped her wrist again for a closer inspection. No, he hadn’t broken it, but he’d bruised the hell out of it. Getting her to move it up and down made her wince, her fingers twitching.
“There go my plans to win you a hedgehog,” she said. “I was going to impress you with my marksmanship.”
“Have you ever handled a gun?”
“Yes. Gideon took me to the gun range a couple times. I haven’t practiced a bunch, but I know how to use one.”
“Christ.”
Wolf imagined the fortitude it must have required for the former vampire hunter to take her to the shooting range. He expected Gideon had to suppress then the feeling Wolf had now, an irrational desire to reach back in time and pluck something so lethal out of her hands almost the second she picked it up.
Women aren’t nearly as helpless as you want to think we are.
Yes, definitely annoying.
Ella frowned at him, almost an echo of Anwyn’s aggrieved expression. “You guys always seem to think I need protection. I know I get into trouble a lot, but I get out of it, too, so I don't know why you feel you need to protect me.”
“Because you're precious, and precious things should be protected. You being not helpless—in fact, you being as strong and amazing as you are—that makes it worse. Because no matter how strong they are, precious things are vulnerable to the bad things in the world. They attract too damn much attention from them.”
He’d said the first thing that came to his mind, something he didn’t usually do, and she was staring at him like she had no idea what to say to that. Then her lips curved in a tremulous way and her eyes became soft. “Thank you,” she said. “But we were talking about you. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am.” He was. He was holding her now, and sitting up straight, and not caught in a snare of the past where it felt like a noose had tightened around his throat. He’d fought off a Charlie who’d tried that, a little stringy guy who’d surprised him when he was clearing a house. The guy had slipped out of a vegetable bin of all things, and jumped him from behind. He had to give it to the little bastard, because though Wolf had been twice his size and weight, the Charlie had known the fragility of a windpipe. He’d damn near garroted Wolf.
“How did you know?” he asked her.
“Everything about you says former military,” she said. “When I did your massage, the kind of scar tissue you have, the way you acted about it, I put it together. Plus, you looked at me just now like I was someone else, which told me you’d gone somewhere in your head, somewhere in the past. A painful memory, which can trigger other painful memories, especially when a shooting gallery lets loose that close by.”
She gazed up at him. “You spun toward it like you thought you were on a battlefield. You wanted to protect me, shield me from harm.”
“I did. I’m glad it was a memory, and not the real thing. I’d never want to see you actually in the middle of something like that.” He cradled her, let her abused arm rest against her middle.
“Do you want to leave?”
He shook his head. “I was enjoying myself. If you give me a minute, I can enjoy myself again. It was just a flash, that was all. And I am going to win you something. Let’s just do something other than the shooting gallery, okay?”
She smiled up at him, focused on him and only him. Tonight, she wore ocean blue colors on her irises. “They had the hedgehogs over at the ring toss, too. And these huge, huge bears. But I want the little hedgehog. They say the ring toss is a total scam, though. Almost no one ever wins it. That’s why they put the biggest prizes there, knowing no one will get them.”
“Is that so? We’ll see about that.” He grunted and rose to his feet, still holding her. Though he let her sneakered feet touch the ground, he gripped her hips, keeping her close. Her mouth was there, so he might as well indulge.
Time slowed.
He’d kissed her before, but while holding all the control, not letting her in, not seeing her as who she was. For some reason, when he brought his mouth to hers this time, he stopped when he made contact and held there. He waited to see what she was going to do.
She started soft, slowly, then with seductive promise. She picked up that he wanted her to prove something to him, to show him how much she wanted her Master.
She knew how to arouse with her velvet lips, heated tongue, the clever movements of her cinnamon-scented mouth, but just like when the skirt rippled over her mostly bare ass, it wasn’t calculated skill. She simply gave everything to it, such that he literally felt it all the way to his toes.
He’d been a teenager when he’d had his first kiss, and that was different, a miasma of hormones. It had been nice, but there’d been other later kisses that were better, when he and the woman in question had known one another more deeply. As a result, he’d dismissed “the magic of the first kiss” stuff as romantic nonsense. Now he realized he might have to re-evaluate that.
The first kiss where the souls met one another? That was a true magic.
He tasted, dove, tongue teasing hers, so Ella leaned into him, both arms around his neck, body stretched up. It made it easy and almost a damn requirement that he run his hands up and down that luscious terrain. Nip of waist, outer swell of breast, to her shoulders and slim throat, and back down again, fingers overlapping her hips to rest on the swell of her backside, his thumbs on her hip bones. He’d never been so glad to have the reach that big hands afforded him.
“When we get somewhere private tonight,” he growled against her lips, “I’m going to be so deep inside you that you’ll cry for mercy.”
Her eyes were so wide and deep, he felt an odd wave of vertigo, like leaning over the ledge of a tall building. When she spoke, the whisper resounded in his mind, in his cock. And even deeper places he didn’t want to think about.
“Then I hope you’re not in a merciful mood.”
He took her to the ring toss. As she’d predicted, the carny didn’t look the least bit worried about losing the trio of near life-sized stuffed bears dangling over his head. A beef-jerky strip of a man in his twenties, he dubbed himself BadBob as he strutted back and forth. “Two big old large Bs, if you get my meaning,” he said with a wicked grin. He had stringy, longish hair Wolf expected teenage girls would find dreamy.
BadBob gestured with nicotine-stained fingers at Ella. “Three rings for five dollars. Give it a try. Some of the best prizes at the carnival, right here…”
Ella opened her mouth, probably to say something about wanting only one of the little square-shaped hedgehogs. They lined the top edge of the booth opening like furry molars. Wolf placed a hand on her shoulder, thumb caressing the base of her throat, a Master’s touch that drew her attention and stopped whatever she’d been about to say. Giving her an approving look, he pulled fifteen out of his wallet and handed it over to the man. “I’ll be doing nine,” he said. “You’re about to lose those three bears. But if you quit the crude jokes to my girl, you’ll keep your teeth.”
The carny blinked at him, a sneer lifting his lips, but he wisely said nothing further.
Until Wolf landed each toss precisely around three bottle necks. Vampire reflexes and coordination had never felt like such a perk. Ella’s widened eyes and delighted smile made him want to puff out his chest like a rooster.
“Fucking hell. How’d you do that?” the carny demanded.
“I practice a lot at home.” Wolf shot him a look. “Want to see me do it again?”
He did do it again. Twice. Ella danced on the balls of her feet and applauded. Her abundance of curves bounced in a way that made him glad she hadn’t done it while he was tossing the rings. He might have sent them ricocheting into space orbit. His third round had attracted a scattering of onlookers, who cheered as the last ring landed neatly on the neck of a bottle.
As the grumbling carny picked up his hook and started to pull down the trio of giant bears, Wolf caught Ella’s wistful look toward the little hedgehogs. It was gone in a flash, and she was
nothing but beaming smiles and exclamations of pride. She almost made him chuckle as she executed her dance in and out of the onlookers, high-fiving a couple teenage girls. “Yep, that’s my Mas—man.”
She caught herself. When she glanced his way, flustered, he shot her a grin—yes, totally wolfish—and stretched out a hand.
She came to him immediately, ebulliently tossing her arms around his neck so he could lift her off her feet and give her a good squeeze. When he put her down, her arms slipped under his and she held him, her cheek on his chest as he kept one arm firmly wrapped over her back, hand spread on her hip, telling her that was where he wanted her.
“Your prizes, little girl.”
When she’d jumped into his arms, she’d had eyes only for him, another thing that made him feel ridiculously pleased, but now he directed her attention to the three bears. They were almost as tall as she was, lined up in front of the ring toss stall.
“Oh, wow. Um, since I don’t need three, is it okay if I…”
“Give all three away. To whoever you want.”
Her shining eyes flitted up to his, to see if he meant it. “That’s an order, Ella.”
“Right now?”
“Whenever you want. If who you want to get one isn’t here, we’ll take it to them later.”
She bit her lip, her mind reviewing the possibilities, then she shrugged. “Spontaneous feels like the best way to go.”
She seized one of the furry mammals and bounded away, waving her hand at a mother and daughter pair, the daughter about ten years old. Just the right age to want to have a giant bear in her room.
Wolf left her to it and approached the counter and a now-sullen BadBob. He shook his head. “No way, dude. Don’t know how you did it, but I don’t have any other big ones. You’re going to run me out of business.”
“How about you give me one of the small hedgehogs and we’ll consider it even? I won’t even toss a ring.” He pulled out an additional five. “I’ll just give you the price of a ticket.”
“Done,” the male said, visibly relieved.
Wolf pointed to the hedgehog he’d seen her gaze light upon, then took it and turned away from the booth, not wanting to deprive himself of another second of watching Ella be Ella.
Her second giveaway went to a kid in a wheelchair. When she placed the bear in his arms and lap, the kid disappeared entirely, except for his two hands, clutching the brown fur with the fervor of new ownership. She offered the last one to another little boy, who reached for it with outstretched hands. He wore an Iron-Man T-shirt, and his wide smile was wreathed with a purple sticky ring from his cotton candy. She touched his hair, said something to his father, and then skipped over to Wolf, where he leaned against a sweet gum tree that likely provided good shade to BadBob during the daylight hours.
“You’ve made three kids really happy,” she told him.
“How about you?”
She beamed at him. “Are you kidding? That was so much fun.”
“So I guess you don’t need this.” He brought the hedgehog out from behind his back.
She blinked and then took it from his hand with both of hers, almost as if she expected it to be fragile. Or disappear. “You won me a hedgehog. Just like I wanted.”
“Of course.”
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly serious and maybe even a little misty. “Thank you.”
He touched her chin. “What is it, Ella?”
She shook her head, but he merely tightened his grip. “Tell me.”
“Making my Master…a Master happy…it makes me happy. Really happy. But when you notice what makes me happy…I’m not talking about sex. I don’t know, it does weird things to me inside.”
He expected she knew exactly what “weird” meant, but was doing her best to keep it within the limits he had set. Never mind that the carnival was not within the walls of Atlantis. Ella was good at knowing what her Master needed to call boundaries, even if he was smashing the hell out of them all by himself.
She hugged the stuffed creature to her cheek, exclaiming at its softness, and extended it to let Wolf feel it as well. He cupped her hand instead, stroking the back of her knuckles, preferring the plush give of her silky skin.
She moved into his touch, looking up at him with an open, searching look that told him she would give him everything. And everything wasn’t just a night of pleasure. There was so much more to her. So damn much more.
“Master?” she whispered. He had the world’s best poker face, but Ella had a way of looking deeper, seeing more. The other Doms at Atlantis had mentioned that. A warning he knew damn well he should have heeded. But he hadn’t believed it. “Do you need to be inside me?” she asked.
“Yeah. I want that. And I want to take it all, Ella. But tomorrow, I can’t be that for you. It’s a moment, so you can say no. You understand?”
A fleeting look of sorrow, sharp as a spike, crossed her face, then it was gone. As fast as the hedgehog look. But it was the equally quick but no less sharp expression of resignation that cut him deep. She was used to the “you’re my right now, not Miss Right” speech, which made him no different from the others she’d pleased, cared for so generously, and been left behind by.
The only difference was, he’d won her a hedgehog.
The look was gone, buried somewhere deep as she met his gaze. “I understand. I want whatever you can give me, Master. Truly. Don’t hold back. Right now is a hell of a lot better than never.”
The use of the rougher language reminded him she was a woman. One who, by her own admission, had taken care of herself for a long time. She might wish for more, but she wasn’t pretending or covering. She wanted him, every bit as much as he wanted her, and wouldn’t let a moment of regret affect how either of them acted upon that desire.
Her voice was throaty, eyes yearning, and suddenly he wanted her so damn much he was afraid he’d get no further than the truck before he’d take her. But he wanted to do so much more than that.
He supposed everyone had the songs of their youth burned into their brains, ready to be called forth whenever strong feelings resurrected them. He remembered lying on the nose of a Jeep, taking a few minutes respite in the relative safety of the base before they’d be sent out in the jungle again. The radio had been playing “Angel of the Morning” by Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts. Gazing into Ella’s face, he saw the spirit of the song reflected there, as strong and brutally as the heat of the sun he’d felt that day.
If the morning brought regrets, that was okay. It was what they wanted now. He wouldn’t deny her…or himself.
“Time to go,” he said.
Chapter Ten
He didn’t take her to his place. Too intimate, too familiar. He wasn’t going to be that unkind. Instead, he took her back to Atlantis. He used his key card to enter through the back door, which allowed them to reach the hall of private rooms without encountering anyone who might engage them in chitchat. He’d sent the booking for the private room he wanted through his phone, charging it as a credit against his next session fee. Anwyn likely wouldn’t have charged him for it, since it was a weeknight and the private rooms were only half full, but he wanted to pay his way tonight. Take care of Ella with no shortcuts.
The room he’d chosen had a canopy bed with a frame sturdy enough to permit rope suspension. A Master could tie up his sub, stretch out beneath her and enjoy looking at his live mobile, play with her to his heart’s content.
A nice feature, but that wasn’t his intent tonight. He liked the bed because it was big enough for someone his size to have plenty of maneuvering room.
After he closed the door securely behind them, he moved her in front of him and combed his fingers through her hair, spreading it over her shoulders. As he toyed with the silver threaded braid, passing his touch over that turquoise streak, her lips parted, eyes half closing. She swayed into his touch, giving herself to it in a way he liked. He saw how much she enjoyed him stroking her. At length, he lifted the hem o
f her shirt but didn’t remove it, revealing the lacy turquoise-colored bra beneath that cradled ripe curves. As he caressed them, a little sigh escaped her moist lips.
“You do nothing I don’t tell you to do. Speak only when spoken to.”
She nodded, her blue eyes opening to fasten on his face. “Take out the contacts. Leave your clothes the way they are.”
She moved to obey, and he stayed where he was, watching. He’d pushed the knit skirt lower on her hips when he’d held her by the waist, his hands beneath the cloth so he could feel bare flesh, the edge of her thong. The movement of her hips was accentuated by the adjustment. Her shirt, gathered high under her arms, revealed the curves of her waist. Though as she moved, one side of the shirt tumbled to a creased fold high above her hip.
She’d brought her small purse in with them and left it on a table. She went to that, withdrawing a lens case. After she used drops to lubricate her eyes, she removed the lenses, tucked them away. Then she turned to face him again, her eyes reflecting the light in the room even more vibrantly. Her true eye color was light brown, close to hazel, but now they made him think of the lighter colored beach sand that became much darker and more opaque, the closer one drew toward the surf.
“Extraordinary,” he said.
He stretched out a hand and she came to him in that way she had. Quickening her pace, showing her eagerness not just to please, but to be closer. He clasped her fingers briefly before scooping her up, lifting her onto the bed. It had a dark green coverlet under which he knew was a pad, so the mattress was never damaged by the intense behavior that happened here. At the end of a session, the pad was replaced, the coverlet sanitized in the clean light fragrance that permeated all the club rooms. This time, though, he might want to keep that blanket, take it home, rub himself against Ella’s aroused scent like a dog.
Or a wolf.
She gazed up at him, trusting. He fixed the cuff chained to the bedpost to her unbruised wrist. Then he moved down and did both her ankles, taking up the slack on the chains so her legs were in the air, spread to shoulder width. They quivered as he opened her to him. His gaze slid down over the turquoise bra he’d revealed by pushing her shirt all the way up again. Then down to the skirt gathered at her thighs, the mound of her cunt barely contained by the satiny fabric of the thong.
