Salvation

by Jane Henry

“Not yet, sir.” I pause and stifle a yawn. Adrenaline’s fueling me now, but I don’t want to lie to him. “Well, maybe a little, yeah.”

  The door to his room swings open and he welcomes me inside first. My heart races when the sound of the door clicks shut, but I don’t have any time to think about that, because as soon as the door shuts, I’m pinned up against it, and he yanks one knee up and wraps it around him. The touch of his hand at my throat makes me shiver, I can breathe but barely. I take in a shuddering breath while his eyes bore into me.

  “Mine,” he says, before leaning in to kiss me. I squeeze my knee against his hip, my pussy flush up against him, and when he brushes his lips against mine, he swallows my moan. I’m melting, liquid flesh and bones undone when I’m around him. A throb of arousal thrums between my legs, and I grind my hips against him. My skin prickles with warmth and heat, my pulse racing with excitement and anticipation. Flames flicker along my skin when he releases my mouth and takes my lip between his teeth, biting, claiming. Fingertips dig into my ass, so hard I know he’s claiming ownership.

  I need this. I crave this. If he doesn’t make love to me, I’ll lose my fucking mind.

  “You’ll dress appropriately,” he tells me in my ear.

  “How—ohhh,” I moan as he slides his tongue along my collarbone and grazes it with his teeth. “How does one dress appropriately here?”

  “I’ll buy you clothes,” he says, before he takes my ear lobe between his teeth.

  “I have clothes,” I moan.

  “Not anymore,” he responds. I shiver when his fingers tickle between my thighs, so close but not close enough. Rocking my pelvis does no good, as he slaps my ass good and hard for trying to make him touch me.

  “Babygirl,” he growls. “When I punish you, I want you bared. Strip.”

  I like that. Babygirl. Yeah, I like that a lot.

  Letting me go, he crosses his arms and stands, feet planted, waiting for me to obey. This I can get into.

  When I knew him before, our moments together were often stolen and hurried. Hushed conversations. Whispered promises. Intimate moments in the back of his car, behind locked doors, hidden and desperate.

  Now, we have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, but revel in each other.

  I stand in front of him in the tiny skirt and top that I really did think was appropriate for here, holding his gaze with mine. The light hits the silver at his temples, and it makes my heart throb. His eyes, blue flecked with gray, so stern and piercing, look at me with a tenderness that makes a lump rise in my throat. I want to look away, but I couldn’t if I tried, held in that gaze. But when I slide the zipper down my hip, his eyes move downward, and I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallows, the only indication he’s fighting for self-control. The fabric’s so tight, I have to forcibly push my skirt down, baring my naked ass and full hips.

  If I ever doubted he was attracted to my figure, there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind now. The air in the room’s so electric, my own breath comes in short, ragged gasps, and my fingers shake when I reach for the hem of my top. I close my eyes and inhale. It’s got a built-in shelf bra, so once that’s off, I’m bare to him and I’m definitely not used to that yet.

  I take my time, lifting the top so slowly my hands shake, wanting to tease him with slow, deliberate moves, but I can’t control this now if I tried.

  “Jesus,” he whispers, a prayer and plea, “you’re a fucking goddess.”

  I shake my head. God, I’m not. I eat too many French fries and I love chocolate chip cookies and I don’t work out enough. My boobs are nice enough but the rest of me’s just a tad too jiggly.

  “Don’t you dare,” he rasps. “You contradict a damn word about how gorgeous you are, and your ass feels my belt.”

  I close my eyes and let myself relish the heat of his threat. I squeal when I feel him right next to me, his hands on my shirt impatient and eager. I’m divested of my clothing in record time and lifted straight up off the floor. He tosses me, naked and squealing, over his shoulder, and marches to the bed, sitting heavily before he pulls me down and topples me right over his knee.

  “You were taking too long,” he says. “I lost my patience.”

  “You never were a patient man,” I respond. “Ow!” While I’m still flailing over his knee, his hand crashes down on the fullest part of my ass. I squirm and try to protect myself but with the ease of a master craftsman, he grabs my wrist and pins it to my lower back.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he says, and now he’s spanking me in earnest. This time, he’s only using his palm. God, it’s better than the day before, and my heart sings. This. His hand against my naked skin hurts so good. I moan, and squirm. I love that when I fight him he doesn’t cave but just calmly restrains me and carries on. I could safeword. But hell, why would I?

  “I’ll dress you in fucking burkas if I need to,” he says, spanking me over and over again. “You ever wear something like that again, I’ll punish you right where you stand, in front of everyone, then I’ll take you back privately and spank you all over again.” My ass is flaming hot, and on the surface, I want this to stop, but somehow, deep down inside, I know I’m not ready for him to stop.

  “Okay,” I tell him. “Yes, sir, I promise. Burkas. Skirts. Capes. Hoods. All the coverage. I promise.”

  He laughs and spanks me again, and again, then runs his hand along my stinging ass, rough skin gliding over my bruised flesh.

  “Whatever you say, sir,” I manage to say, but my thighs are wet, my lady parts throb, and there’s an emptiness inside me only he can fill. He massages out the sting, a tenderness only the man who inflicted this pain could deliver. My breasts swell and my belly dips, a tightness of desperate need making me whimper. Maybe he mistakes that whimper for pain, because the next minute I’m swept up in his arms and tucked against his chest.

  “You’ll behave yourself,” he whispers. “Won’t you, babygirl?”

  “Yes,” I nod, so wrapped up in longing and need my voice is a choked whisper.

  “Good girl,” he rasps. “Chandra. Baby. I need you.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” I groan. He’s grinning and growling, and something’s caught in my throat as a tremor travels through me. He lays me on the bed and spreads me out, positioning my arms above my head and spreading my legs, with a firm tenderness that makes me melt. He wants to fuck me, and hard, but this reunion is deserving of more than a hard fuck. This is a resurrection that was meant to be. A joining of heart and soul in a way that words can’t capture.

  When his mouth meets mine, I sigh and melt in boneless surrender, wrapping my arms around him so I can anchor myself to him. I close my eyes and welcome the inky darkness, the intimacy of his lips and tongue meeting mine, shooting spikes of electricity through my limbs and between my legs.

  He quotes, “You should be kissed and often by someone who knows how.”

  The reference to one of my favorite love stories of all times is perfect. He’s perfect. The Rhett to my Scarlet, but our love story ends together.

  My mind conjures up the lines that speak truth, that feed my soul, but I’m too choked up to say them. I feel them, though.

  There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

  This.

  This.

  Us.

  When he moves his lips to my collarbone and kisses me there, my eyes fly open. I want to see him ravish my body. His broad shoulders shadow me, all muscles and strength and power, his hands raking over my body like he’s a blind man, like he needs to memorize every hollow and curve of my body. Grinding between my legs, he nudges them further apart.

  “I want you in me,” I plead. He groans in my ear. If I could crawl into his skin and meld with him I would, and this is the next best thing. I don’t want anything between us. I whisper a hurried promise that I’m on birth control, and it’s all he needs.

  “Easy, baby,” he says. “We have all night. And the night after that, and the night
after that.”

  I close my eyes because my heart is full, and he hasn’t even made love to me yet. I’m filled to bursting and we’ve only just begun.

  “We do this together,” he says, nudging at my entrance.

  I nod. “Together.”

  He slides into me with a groan, and my heart rate spikes. I’m lost to this, to us, riding waves of pleasure as he thrusts with an almost savage claiming. We don’t need words, our sweat-slicked bodies melding as one in surrender and forgiveness and unity. I love him. God, I love him, more than I should, more than is healthy, but emotion overrides intellect and I’m lost to him.

  “I love you,” I whisper in a tortured, garbled jumble of words and longing.

  “I love you,” he whispers back with another firm thrust. He rocks his hips and I arch into him, needing harder, more, longer. Time fades and my vision blurs as we speak the universal language of love and surrender. He’s holding on, watching me, and when my head falls back, and my climax claims me, he lets himself go. We climax together, and I don’t know which of us is groaning and which of us is panting. We’re all tangled limbs and shattered breaths and pounding hearts.

  Rolling over onto his side, still in me, still throbbing and hot and united, he pulls me onto his chest.

  “I love you. All of you. Who you were, who you are, and who you’re meant to be.”

  “And I love you,” I tell him. There are things I need to tell him, and now’s the moment, when we’re bared like this.

  “I… need to tell you something,” I say. Though he’s silent, his arms tighten, and he tenses. But I’m safe, and there’s nothing I can say he can’t handle. If I don’t tell him now, I’ll lose my nerve.

  “There was a baby.” I don’t expect the sudden tears to spring to my eyes like this. I thought my emotions were already wrung out, but I was wrong. I can’t speak beyond that first sentence. My throat closes, a lump so big I can’t go on.

  “A baby, Chandra?”

  With monumental effort, I steady my voice and tell him. I have to. “After we broke up. I found out I was pregnant.” He tightens beneath me, but he doesn’t respond. He just holds me. “I didn’t test, because we were going through so much. You with the church and me with my family and both of us with our hometown. I knew it in my heart but didn’t want to confirm it. I finally took the test, and before I could come up with a plan to tell you—and I promise you, I was going to tell you—I…” I’m crying now and he’s silent, absorbing my pain and making it easier to bear.

  He holds me impossibly tighter, his voice pained. “Baby. Oh, Chandra.”

  “I lost it,” I say, sniffling on his chest, my nose all runny. It feels good, though, to finally tell him, so I don’t stop. “It was painful and sudden and one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through.”

  “I could have helped you.”

  I don’t respond, because I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to make this better. I’m not even sure I have to.

  Minutes pass in silence. He needs to process this.

  “It was too soon to know if it was a boy or a girl. After the pain passed, I was glad. I know you, and I knew then that if we’d had a baby you’d have felt obligated to raise that child with me. But you couldn’t do that then. I couldn’t, either. And then I felt guilty that I was glad I didn’t carry that baby to term. Like it was my fault.”

  “No, honey. Don’t think that way. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. There was no easy answer to that. God, I’m sorry, Chandra. I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too. The thought of losing my only tie to you? I wanted to die. For days and weeks, I prayed that I would die. I mourned losing you. Us. But I let you go because it was best for us.”

  He kisses my forehead tenderly and fiercely. “Baby, I felt the same. But that’s in the past now, Chandra. The judgment. The mistakes. The baby we lost. Now you’re mine, and I’m not ever letting you go.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Axle

  I sit on the padded bench at the little shop I’ve taken her to. I have no idea where to buy women’s clothes, but I asked around at the club, and Beatrice and Diana and Marla all told me this was the place to go to find affordable, beautiful clothes, so here we are.

  Ever since that night at the club when she told me everything, I can’t let her out of my sight. I hate the thought that she bore that pain without me, the pain we should have borne together, and I’m determined to never let her experience anything like that alone again. Ever.

  Our jobs keep us busy and I’ve let her get away with wearing a few of the outfits she already owned. It’s almost a game, and one I fucking love to play. She texts me her outfit of the day and I approve or disapprove. It’s a pretty simple benchmark: if she’s showing cleavage or too many curves, that outfit goes in the donate pile. One morning she got a wild hair and texted me a picture of her wearing a too-short, skimpy silver dress that showed so much cleavage it looked like little more than a negligee. I knew she was probably intentionally being a brat, but I took her straight across my knee for even owning something like that.

  She loves it, though. I keep her on a tight leash. She has rules and I keep her accountable. I give her as much freedom as she needs but the control she craves. And I love watching her thrive under my dominance. She gets to bed on time, and no longer subsists on Diet Coke and peanut butter crackers. She tells me her word count on her books has skyrocketed, and I’m the one responsible.

  It isn’t true, though. It isn’t me. It isn’t her. It’s us.

  And now we’re here, picking out what will be her wardrobe, approved by me.

  “This is a bit high on the controlling spectrum,” she says to me, but the way her eyes light up and her cheeks pinken with excitement, I know she loves it.

  “Your point?” I get up from the bench and head with her into the shopping plaza to the stores the girls told me about.

  “Some people would say you were a control freak,” she says, but now she’s giggling.

  “Still not getting your point,” I tell her.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what to do,” she says, sticking her tongue out at me. Shopping mall be damned, I give her a good swat to the rear and point to the shop.

  “And maybe you don’t want to end up tipped over my knee in a shopping mall.”

  I watch her mouth fall open adorably, and my cock throbs. God, what I wouldn’t give to redden her ass right here and now, just to show I could.

  “You wouldn’t,” she whispers, but I can feel her arousal from here. I can practically smell it on her.

  Leaning in, I wrap my fingers around the back of her neck and give her a gentle but firm squeeze. “Try me, little girl. Go ahead. Want to see how far you can push me?”

  She bites her lip. “Actually, I think I’m good.”

  “Good girl,” I approve. “Let’s get you some clothes.”

  It takes more patience than I have, but I push myself to get through this. I don’t know how women can stand this. She’s picky, but I’m pickier, and I like pushing her limits. She comes out in a gorgeous purple dress the girls call “eggplant” which makes me roll my eyes. Why can’t they just say purple? But this dress makes her skin glow and her eyes look brighter. I love it, but I need to test her.

  “Mmm,” I say to the saleslady standing by the door. “It’s beautiful, but let’s see it in red.”

  “This is way too expensive,” she argues.

  I shake my head at her warningly. “Let me be the judge of that. Now go try on the red.”

  Chandra’s lips thin and she clenches her jaw, like she’s trying to hold herself from snapping at me. She doesn’t really want to, though. The saleslady is looking at me like I’m a throwback from some sexist TV show, but I don’t give a shit.

  “Go,” I tell her, flicking a finger toward the dressing room. When she’s in there, I hear someone say something I haven’t heard in years.

  “Father Noah?”

  God, no. My stomach cle
nches before I even see her, and when I look at Veronica Vanderkilt I want to snatch Chandra up and leave this place.

  I keep my cool with a curt nod. “Veronica. I’m not Father anymore.”

  Veronica’s a tall, thin, filthy rich woman who made my life and Chandra’s a living hell when our scandal hit. She ruled the community with her wealth and power, and when our relationship came to light, she let it be known loud and clear that I needed to be driven out of the church. She stopped at nothing. News reporters. Interviews. Petitions to have my name sullied until the day I died. It’s a cruel twist of fate she’s here now. For some reason, she doesn’t look surprised at all to see me.

  Her lips curl. “Oh, that’s right. They laicized you, didn’t they?”

  “They did,” I tell her through clenched teeth. “Though it was my own choice.”

  “Was it?” She tips her head to the side, shooting venom from that gaze. “You had many choices, did you?”

  Ignoring her, I take out my phone and shoot Chandra a text.

  Stay in that changing room until I tell you. But the phone buzzes in my pocket and I swear to myself. Fuck. I forgot I was holding her phone for her while she changed.

  I get to my feet. “I hope you’re doing well, Veronica,” I lie, stepping toward the changing room.

  The saleslady widens her eyes and shakes her head. “You can’t come in here, sir. This is women only.”

  “You work on commission…” my voice trails as I look at her name tag, “Daphne?”

  She blinks. “Yes, sir, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “I’m buying every damn pair of shoes and outfit she’s tried on in the ‘keep’ pile, opening her up an account here, and outfitting her with a few pieces of jewelry and that monthly subscription thing you keep bringing up.”

  Daphne’s eyes widen. “Oh. My.”

  “Axle?” Chandra steps out of the dressing room, and I swear to God she’s a vision. My mouth goes dry when I look at her in the red dress, and I make up my mind. I slam the door and slide the lock in place.

  “Sir?” she whispers, a pink flush coloring her cheeks.