by Maren Smith
"Any time you're feeling frisky enough, take a chance," he dared, sending tingling waves dancing into the tips of her breasts. Her toes curled in the sand. "I'm sure I'll make it memorable, regardless of which you pick."
"There's no dungeon here," she reminded. She knew better than to take him up on that dare, but teasing him felt delightfully sinful and thrilling.
"You think I need a dungeon to take care of you?"
"You don't have anything, not a single 'tool of the trade', so to speak."
"You think I need one?" he repeated, his tone as soft and seductive as it was dangerous.
Her hugging grip on her knees did nothing to stop the tiny tickles of moisture from slipping down between the lips of her sex. "You never go anywhere without your whip." She indicated the braided leather coil hooked to his hip. "Obviously, you need at least one. Or your belt; that makes two. If you didn't have either, you'd be practically toothless."
His breathy chuckle reverberated through all the sensual parts of her. Stabbing the end of the spear into the sand, he propped the lizard over the open flames. When he stood, her nipples tightened even more. When he unhooked his whip from his hip, so did her buttocks. Her thighs felt so tense now she could feel the strain in her muscles, and her heart danced. He tossed the whip into the lean-to shelter he'd built for the night. She loved it when he looked at her like this: head slightly cocked, eyes narrowed, mouth smiling. His hands rested loose at his sides, two fingers twiddled back and forth as he picked through his options.
"Fine," he finally decided. "Lift your skirt. All the way to your waist. No." He stopped her from standing with a snap of his fingers. "I didn't tell you to get up. I told you to lift your skirt."
Easing back in the sand, Maddy let go of her legs. Heat that had little to do with the campfire lit her face. Would there ever be a time when she would not feel embarrassed about exposing herself to him? She honestly didn't know. Her fingers fumbled as she gathered her skirts, baring her legs by inches until she had no other choice but to drag the yards of material up over her knees. She hugged it to her stomach, wads of silver fabric pressed tight against all the nervous butterflies taking flight inside her.
"Spread your legs."
She shifted them apart.
"Wider."
Her face burned, sizzling in time with the meat roasting on its makeshift spit. She shifted her feet as far as her hips would allow.
His dark eyes stayed on her face for a several long minutes before, tipping his head, he let his gaze wander down to drink her in. "No panties," he noted. "I know I gave them back to you."
"I've got them in my pocket," she admitted.
"Saving time?" He chuckled. "Good girl. Lean back."
Bracing her weight on her arms, Maddy did.
"Open your pussy."
Every nervous butterfly in her belly seized upon that command.
"What?" she asked, half afraid she might have misheard. That hot flush burning at her face melted, sliding straight down to tease and torment her now pulsing sex.
"You heard me. Open. I want to see every glistening fold, splayed apart by your own fingers."
"Why?"
"Do I need a reason?" he countered. "Are you mine, or aren't you?"
Her pussy contracted, that sharp convulsion sending tight little shocks straight to her clit. What did he mean—for the night? Rippling aftershocks ripped through her, zinging through every firing nerve, all of them begging just to be touched by him. Or perhaps he meant for the duration of their stay at the resort together. Her breath caught in the back of her throat, choking her before she did something embarrassing, like cry out, 'Yes! God, yes!'
Did he mean beyond that? Maddy trembled. "I… I don't understand."
It was all she could think of to say and even then, she could barely make the words come out. Her lips trembled. So did her breath.
The burning intensity of his stare became impossible for her to hold, and yet she couldn't make herself look away. "Are you…" he stalked her around the fire in slow, measured steps, "or are you not mine?"
"Tonight?" Her voice cracked.
"Yes."
Was that relief or disappointment clamping down on her heart, squeezing in so tight that she was sure it was about to stop right there in her chest?
"And tomorrow," he continued, closing the space with another deliberate step. "And the day after that. And the day after that."
"And the day after that?" she whispered, her mind void of every thought but the obvious: The day she was asking for clarification on was the day she was scheduled to be back on a plane, headed for home.
"Yes," he agreed, turning whatever it was clamping down on her heart into stark panic. Maybe he wasn't counting the days right. She didn't know how badly she ought to hope for that to be true, but it didn't matter. What he said next sent her heart soaring high into full-on panic. "And every day after that until this is done."
He took that last step, the one that brought him right to the tips of her tightly curled toes. Although he hadn't given her permission to rise, Maddy dropped her dress and jumped up. "This? Wh-what do you mean, this?"
She tried to retreat, but he moved faster. His fingers hooked into her bodice, burying themselves in her cleavage as he pulled her back to him. Taking her hand, he pressed her palm flush up against the undeniable arousal bulging out the front of his trousers. "I want you, and I don't want anybody. I've never hungered so fucking hard for a woman the way I do for you. Nothing I do appeases it. Every kiss I steal demands another. Every taste, every touch whets my appetite until all I can think about is when I'll be with you next. You've got me on my knees, woman, and I don't fucking kneel, either. I'm not used to this, so you'll just have to forgive me if I'm doing it wrong."
His smile was gone. Maddy searched his face but she could find no hint of it. No hint of the teasing she was sure this had to be. "Y-you don't know me."
"I know enough."
"You don't know anything!"
"I know what matters."
Shaking her head, she tried to step away, but he pulled her back again. This time with an authority that would brook no further escapes. Sliding his hand into her bodice, he latched onto her left nipple. It became the tether by which he both punished and pulled her closer still.
"I may not know his name, but I know the scars he's left on you. I've got scars, too. Someday I'll bare them to you."
He tweaked, the pain alternating with a pleasure so starkly profound that she could feel the pull of it all the way down into her very core. Her knees tried to give out beneath her. She caught herself, but oh, how right the thought of being on her knees in front of him made her feel. She shook her head again. "I-I-I don't live in Ohio."
"I don't live in California," he countered. "Small potatoes."
"Long distance relationships don't work."
"We'll figure it out. It doesn't have to be impossible if we don't want it to be." Rolling her nipple between his fingers, his other arm snaked around her waist. The pulse between her legs grew harder and harder to ignore. She'd never been so scared and yet so close to orgasm at the same time, and they both still had their clothes on.
Catching his wrist, she twisted free of the punishing pleasure and ducked out of his embrace. She fled around the fire, needing all the distance she could get between them just so she could think again.
"This is just a vacation fling," she said, but she honestly didn't know which of them needed the most convincing. "A one-night stand, that's all."
"I've made a life out of one-night stands," Dominick growled. "I know the difference."
He started toward her but Maddy threw up her hands, trying frantically to stay him. It didn't work. He just kept coming, forcing her to continue backing away. Stumbling over the iguana spit, she nearly fell. Catching one wildly flailing arm, he jerked her back and she caught herself against his chest. The wild beating of his heart was right beneath her palms.
"Tell me you don't feel something fo
r me," Dominick dared. At this angle, with his back to the fire, his face was cast more into shadow than light. She couldn't see his eyes, just the black hollows that engulfed them. But she could imagine them, and the deep frowning line of his mouth. She knew this was one look she ought to be glad she couldn't see. "Tell me you don't spend every moment out of my company wishing you were back in it. Tell me just the thought of my touch doesn't turn you on." She tried to push away, but he seized her arms and yanked her close again, growling, "Tell me you're not wet right now."
"It's a very good one-night stand," was all she could say, because there was no part of her that didn't want to make all this feel… right. She did feel something for him; she just wasn't sure what. She did think of him every moment they were apart, and oh, but the things his touch did to her. But she also knew none of that could possibly matter. A courtship of only a few days did not a lasting relationship make. Virgil had taught her that, and four years later, the lesson still stung.
Funny though, how—with her trembling hands pressed above Dominick's strong beating heart, and the heat of his body burning into her hotter than the blaze of the fire, and his smell on every indrawn breath—funny how, for the first time since her divorce, the sting of Virgil's lesson didn't hurt quite like it used to.
His thumbs caressing her arms even as he eased his grip, Dominick changed tactics. "Tell me why this can't be more."
A puff of exhaling breath was all Maddy could manage, at first. How did one go about explaining why the sky wasn't green? Or why some touches burned, while others were so forgettable. Or why the heart could sometimes fall so damned hard when the head knew better than to let it.
"If you want me to let you go," he insisted, "give me a reason that matters."
She puffed again and tried to turn away, but he wouldn't let her. "How?" she countered, desperately. "We are so mismatched, how can you not see that people like you don't settle down with people like me?"
Those frowning lines around his mouth deepened. "People like me," he echoed flatly.
"Yes!"
"Reclusive dungeon monitors who don't deal well with idiots or change?"
She tsked. "No, that's not what I—"
"Hard-asses who would rather cultivate a lifetime of unchanging routine so they don't have to deal with the day-to-day boredom and loneliness of one superficial fuck—much less relationship—after another, after another, ad nauseum unto infinity? See, I actually have been thinking about this a lot these last few days."
"Dominick." Pained, she recoiled as far as he would let her go. "It's not you," she insisted. "Why can't you see that?"
"Exactly what should I be seeing?"
"You're beautiful!" she cried, exasperated. "Anyone with eyes can see how beautiful you are! You're every woman's dream. Handsome and funny and fun to be with. People take one look at me and…"
She caught her breath, shut her mouth, and tried to look away so he couldn't see how awful the truth really was. For the first time, he let go of her arms. Gripping her chin, he forced her eyes back to his. "And what?" he demanded, a tic of angry muscle jumping along the perfect line of his bearded jaw. Seeing it made her own anger rise.
"And see a fat, old woman who doesn't know the first thing about how to be attractive. To anyone. I can't put on makeup, or dress up pretty, or… or…" She cast about, but nothing she saw in the sand, the surf or the surrounding night stood up to help her make her point. She rolled her lips, forcing the trembling to stop before it could start. She blinked hard, but the tears still came. "I don't know how to keep someone like you happy, but what I do know is how much it's going to kill me when you finally figure out how wrong I am. And I can't do that again. I-I can't."
Dominick popped his neck and rolled his tight shoulders.
"I am a pity fuck, at best," Maddy whispered, seeing that tic of hard muscle jump again and again along his gritting jaw. The fingers of the one hand that still gripped her arm drummed against her flesh as she said, "I know that, and I'm okay with it. I am. You'll never know how grateful—"
"Grateful," he rumbled.
"I am for the wonderful time you've given me, but we both know it can't last."
"Do we?" he said flatly.
Her minute explosion of temper having long since faded into sadness, she looked up at him and nodded.
"You done?" he finally asked, his fingers on her jaw light, although those gripping her arm drummed again. "Because if you're going to dig yourself any deeper, you'll want to do it now before I have my say on the matter. Because you will never get off this lightly again, I guarantee it."
His tone carried such a dark ring of finality when he said that, but then, she'd always known this had no choice but to end. She braced herself against the inevitability of his loss, but it was insidious how the pain of it crept in along all the raw edges of her anyway. "I don't have anything left to say."
"Fine," he breathed. She couldn't see him well, he was so far into shadow, but it almost sounded like seething. "Do you want to use your safeword?"
"For what?" The loss gave way to the tiniest spark of startlement. Of all the things she expected him to say—useless arguments, listed reasons for why she might be wrong—the existence of safewords was so far out of her mind that at first she couldn't picture how it might be relevant. "Why would I?"
"Fine." He nodded once. "That's good, really. For the first time in my life, I honestly don't know if I'd accept it if you did."
Puzzled, she only had time enough to open her mouth, but she never got the chance to ask what he meant. One minute they were standing face to face and in the next, he'd dragged her out of the reach of firelight into the dark towards the jungle. Within steps, the shadow of a driftwood log rose up to block their path. She started to step over it but he sat on it instead and, in a single strong yank, toppled her clumsily down across his lap.
Hers was the most unladylike 'woof' of expelled breath when her stomach hit his thighs, but there was no time even to process her situation before his arm hooked her waist and his hand on her ass suddenly heaved her up and over, centering her into a position as unmistakable as it was shocking.
"W-wait!" She floundered, grabbing onto both the log and his knee. His arm across the small of her back refused to let her up.
"Not a chance." He threw sandy yards of skirt up over her back, dropping clumping granules into her hair and across her shoulders and neck. "Pity fuck?" he spat, and with an explosion of sound and stinging, the flat of his hand found her right bottom cheek.
Maddy lurched over his knee, her eyes and mouth both rounding at the unexpected hurt. How his hand could be worse than his belt, she didn't know, but it only reaffirmed just how badly she wanted never to be on the receiving end of a real spanking again.
"This is what I think of your pity fuck." His hand came crashing down a second time, and then a third, and suddenly Maddy found she could move again. She threw a hand back, but he grabbed her wrist before she could thwart his next swat and pinned it out of his way. "This is what I think of your gratitude!"
She thrashed and kicked, fighting to twist her hips or roll off his knee, or get her other hand thrust back between them far enough to grab and stay his arm. "Dominick! Ow, wait! Stop!"
Her safeword never once crossed her mind, and he didn't stop. Instead, he tightened his hold on her and in a snap of his legs, scissored hers in a way that confined her struggles until all she had left was an ineffective worm-like wriggle, frantic tosses of her head, and the scrambling drum of her feet in the sand. He, on the other hand, intensified the paddling. His hand came down again and again, harder and faster.
"This is what I think of old! Fat!" Her bottom was blazing, a mottle of pulsating pain long before he turned his attention to the backs of her thighs. She only thought she knew what pain was. Those first fiery swats to the sensitive line where her bottom and legs adjoined were an education in agony she could happily go all the rest of her life without ever experiencing again.
"
Dominick! Stop! S-stop!"
He did. Suddenly, mercifully. In a single motion, he both released her and dumped her off his lap. Scrambling to her knees in the sand, Maddy grabbed her burning ass, gasping and rubbing furiously to put out the unquenchable fire in what felt like deeply wounded flesh. Everything stopped, however, when he seized her by the hair, wrapping his fist in the long tresses and pulling her right up to his face.
Maddy froze. Her eyes huge, she stared at him. As far as they were from the campfire, just enough light reached them for her to discern not just his features but now his eyes. What she saw both shocked and awed her. He was calm. To have spanked her like that, to have scolded her the way he had, she would have thought he'd be livid. And yet, despite the tightness with which he grit his teeth, sending that leap of irritation up the hard line of his jaw, what few flickers of anger she could see in no way matched the pain chewing her up from behind. His hand when he pointed at her did not shake like that of a man who'd just lost his temper; his voice when he spoke barely trembled.
"Tell me you're in love with someone else," he commanded. "Tell me you don't feel anything for me or that you think you never will. I can accept that. But I don't—and I won't—accept old, or fat, or gratitude, and I sure as hell won't accept 'pity fuck'! You ever say that to me again and I'll bust your ass; you won't sit for a year! Now, is that one hundred percent clear to you?"
Her eyes huge, Maddy nodded as best she could considering his grip in her hair. She opened her mouth; 'I'm sorry' right there on the tip of her tongue, ready to come spilling awkwardly out, but for the huge shadow of movement that suddenly detached itself from the night directly behind him. Her heart leapt into her throat and, instead of apologies, Maddy screamed.
She tried to grab at Dominick, but he snapped around, shoving her back behind him and fists at the ready just as the crisp flick of a Bic lighter cut the night and a tiny flame lit up Emil's familiar features.
"Sorry," he said, without the slightest hint of apology. "It must be hard to hear thirty people crawling the island and calling for you over the rigorous walloping sounds of a well-earned spanking."
