Cuffed

by Angel Payne

  His only verbal answer was another long moan. But visually he gave her much more to go on. His breaths changed from full and relaxed to choppy and harsh. His thighs clenched. His erection sprang higher, its swollen, silken head adorned by milky-white drops that broadcast exactly what movie played in his mind. She had a feeling it had nothing to do with laser blasters or carbonite freezes. Thank God.

  “Rayna. Damn! Oh honey…”

  She pressed her fingers into his legs, responding to the ache in his voice with the care of her touch. “Sshhh. I’m here and I’m going to make it better.”

  As she gave him the vow, she moved up and over him, dropping reverent kisses up the staff that now pulsed with dark bronze and red hues. His skin tightened beneath her lips. His thighs hardened. His body quivered, emanating potency and power that surrounded her, rolled through her, made her giddy from the high of getting to harness it with the ministrations of her mouth.

  As she got to the shiny mushroom at his tip, she circled her tongue, savoring the tangy essence of his precome. Z let out a stunned snort.

  “Mmmphh! Huh? What the—” He choked and lifted his head. His gaze shot down to meet hers in conscious astonishment. “Holy fuck,” he uttered. “If I’m still dreaming, someone pass the Ambien.”

  She let her gaze warm as she pulled his wide, throbbing length into her mouth. He was delicious, a heady combination of salt, spice, and musk that bathed her tongue and filled her senses. She wanted to fill herself with him. Drown in his taste. Succumb to his heat. Give herself completely for his pleasure.

  Beneath her tongue, his thick veins throbbed and his piercing danced. Zeke let out a harsh oath as she toyed with the balls at the ends of the curved steel, directly stimulating the chambers beneath that continued to swell from her exploration. She ran a hand over the contracted ridges of his abdomen. Felt him heave from harsh, hard breaths. Rejoiced in the cataclysm she stirred with every touch, lick, and stroke.

  “You’re playing with fire, Ray-bird. Do you know that?”

  She hummed around his cock before letting the sound morph into a languorous, “Mmmhmmm.”

  She heard him swallow hard as she lowered over his thick stick of flesh. With a sudden yank he pulled her off, though he let her toy with his tip as he growled, “Let me be clear. I don’t let myself ‘get blow jobs,’ honey. Keep this up, and I’m going to fuck that hot, wet heaven of your mouth. It’ll be a full team assault. No mercy, no softness.” As if to emphasize his point, he grabbed the sides of her jaw, one side in each hand, digging his fingers into her cheekbones. “You have ten seconds to decide.”

  He practically snarled the words in his heavy lust. An equally charged silence gripped the next ten seconds, where the only thing that changed was the slow, smiling kiss she lowered to his swollen, wet cock. She knew she shouldn’t be enjoying what that did to his gaze. The way it narrowed with dangerous intent… The fire he’d warned her about now a live flare framed by his charcoal lashes.

  His lips parted. For a moment, she thought he was about to smile at her in return.

  Wrong assumption.

  “Time’s up.”

  Really wrong assumption.

  Gone was his shuddering I-woke-up-to-a-blowjob tone. Master Zeke was back in the house—more accurately, in every inch of the body that rose into a full sitting position, legs braced in a massive V, dragging her to rest right at its crux. That was surely her cue to continue, so Rayna lowered her head to continue her ministrations to his cock, but she was stopped by his powerful fingers beneath her chin, forcing her to look at him again.

  Her throat closed on a mesmerized choke. He was unrelenting darkness, hardness, intensity, brutality. He was breathtaking.

  As she drank in his masculine beauty, her nipples and her clit hardened in tormenting tandem. In some crazy recess of her mind, she made a note to seriously suggest the gladiator gig as his first civilian job after the teams.

  “Your safe word is ‘red,’” he finally said. “‘Red,’ not ‘Kier.’ I don’t want you sparing a single fucking thought on that dickwad right now.”

  She felt her eyes go wide. Just as fast, she let them fall. Though her body was coursing with arousal and excitement like Crazy Taxi at level two hundred, her mind instantly downshifted and left the driver’s seat altogether. Zeke was driving, and she was beyond joyful to let him. Her trust was his. Her surrender was his. Every inch of her body was his to command, to use, to dominate.

  She nodded and rasped, “Yes, Sir. I understand. My safe word is ‘red.’”

  “Outstanding.”

  He gave her the word as fact, not endorsement. At the same time, he skated his hand from her chin to her nape. With his other hand, he anchored the top of her head by sinking his fingers into her hair from the forehead back. In both places, he dug into her scalp with circles of brutal possession, branding irons that scorched all the way inside her brain.

  Rayna gasped and let her eyes slide shut. This didn’t feel physically good. But she wanted it this way. No…she needed it this way. With every cinch of his bondage and grip of his captivity, Zeke replaced her nightmares with pleasure, her shame with survival. He showed her that the crucible could be good. Really, really good…

  “Open your mouth.” Again, his voice was low and nearly emotionless. He lowered her head until she felt his penis pushing at her lips again. “Relax your jaw. Breathe through your nose.”

  The next second, he was inside her. All the way inside. Though Rayna obeyed his directions to the letter, she could feel him pounding at her gag reflex with the fullness of his length. She concentrated on letting him get deeper into her throat. His vow had been spot-on accurate. He turned her head into a receptacle for his lust, shoving her down over and over onto his huge, hard pole. The pace was relentless. His cock was enormous. Her jaw hurt. Her eyes teared.

  Her spirit soared.

  “You like this, honey?” he said with rough tension. “Yeah, I think you do. Your mouth is so perfect for fucking, Ray-bird. So soft and wet and slick. Bet you love how hard and huge you’ve gotten me.” He shoved her down and held her there, letting her feel his head pulsating at the back of her throat. “Bet it’s made you hard, too. I want you to use your fingers and check. Stroke that erect clit for me. You’re going to touch it until you climax for me—and as you do, you’re going to swallow every drop of my come in that sweet, perfect mouth of yours.”

  She sighed in grateful acquiescence, though the man could’ve asked her to walk naked through the mall right now and she’d comply without question. The moment her hand cupped her mound, her fingers skimming over the silver bar that had such a different meaning even a week ago, a startled moan shot up her throat. She knew she was turned on, but from the second her fingers hit that moist, quivering ball of nerves, her sex clenched and her pussy turned to fire. She was ready to crash and burn right now.

  “Don’t.” Zeke’s charge pounded into her senses, another unnerving reminder of how he could read her more clearly than a CNN news crawl. “Hold it in, honey. Your orgasm belongs to me as completely as your mouth.”

  She whined as submissively as she could, trying to tell him she understood. The sound made him grunt in approval, though it earned her no mercy from the pace of his fucking. Harder, faster, deeper he pounded. His fingers were claws at her scalp. His cock was everywhere in her mouth. His hoarse, commanding breaths consumed the air.

  “Now. Feel it all, honey. Take it all from me. Now!”

  The climax hit her deep. Her sex convulsed and flared, dying and reborn in the same blissful, beautiful second. At the same time, Z pumped his seed into her with a roar of glory and a shuddering thrust. Everything went dark and then blinding white. Her equilibrium swam, yet she’d never felt more clear. She was a damn phoenix from ashes. She was destroyed yet overjoyed. She was—

  The sobs hit her as fast as the comprehension did.

  Zeke pulled out the second her shoulders started shaking. As soon as her mouth was empty, she erupted
with high cries of astonishment and amazement. She drenched his chest as he hauled her up into his lap in a swift sweep, wrapping her in the lap blanket as she began to shiver. He didn’t say a word. His hold was complete yet gentle, as possessive as it was ten minutes ago, absorbing every shaking sob and pitiful blubber.

  When she finally collapsed her head against his shoulder, Zeke spoke. His voice was as soft as the caresses he gave her shoulder with the back of his hand. “You want to talk about it?”

  She felt like punching him—before telling him to stop reading every need she had before she knew it existed. Instead, she curled her knees up and burrowed close as fresh tears plagued her eyes.

  “I’m…a submissive.”

  The confession was as terrifying as she thought it would be. This wasn’t like admitting she didn’t like shellfish or only flossed every other day or liked masturbating in the shower. This was a huge damn door being opened in her soul, never to be closed again. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to find the close button again. Yet praying she never would.

  Zeke turned his hand over and closed it around the top of her arm. “Yeah,” he murmured, “you sure as fuck are.”

  She held her breath at that and wished she didn’t know the reason why. More ominously, she wished that moment wasn’t the one in which she’d predict exactly what he’d say.

  “I can’t be your Dom, Ray-bird.”

  His embrace suddenly felt like bricks. The same ones that crashed on top of her heart.

  She rose, clutching the blanket with her. Confusion declared mutiny on her logic. Pain hit the override lever on her brain—and the thousands of things it told her about why Zeke was trying to speak his truth in as diplomatic a manner as he could.

  Gazing at him now, gloriously naked and freshly satisfied by her, didn’t put her in the mood for diplomacy.

  “Is that so?” She flashed a grim smile while tilting her head. “All right, then. Can you explain what you’ve been doing for the last three days, if not being my Dom?”

  His face, full of firm resolve, didn’t change as he rose. “The last three days have been incredible, but they’ve been a dream. This isn’t reality. You know it as well as I do, Ray-bird. We can’t stay up on this mountain forever, and we sure as hell can’t throw it on a trailer and drag it back to Tacoma.”

  The bricks in her heart started pounding together, pulverizing everything as they went. She spun from him. “Why not?” She hated the pitiful pitch in her voice. She hated him even more for causing it. You rescued me from the dead. How hard can it be to move a damn mountain?

  His long sigh weighted the air. “Because you’ll hate me even more than you do right now. Not tomorrow, probably not next week, but if we even attempt this thing long-term, I’ll fuck it up. I’ll fuck you up. It won’t be pretty, and—”

  “Pretty?” She whirled back around. “Seriously? You think I want pretty, Zeke?” She advanced and stabbed a finger into his chest. “You think I even remember what pretty is after what King did to me and what Mua is still trying to do to me?”

  He wrapped her hand inside both his own. “I think you deserve a man, a Master, who’s going to give you everything your heart desires and everything your soul needs.” Before he spoke again, he dropped a soft kiss onto her knuckles. “I can’t be that man, honey.”

  He pushed back from her with a violent growl. “I fucking hate saying this to you. I hate being the one standing here and telling you that I’ve tried already, okay? I tried the whole goddamn D/s dream on, and I burned it to shreds. Badly. I’m not going to do it again. I fucking refuse to send you up in flames.” Her chest roiled as their stares locked. His eyes, usually adoring her or laughing with her or desiring her, were now filled with nothing but ashen sorrow. “Not you, Rayna. Not. You.”

  “Damn it,” she rasped. “Do you think we’re that flammable, Z? Do you think I am?”

  That put his jaw on full lockdown. He swallowed hard. “Sit down.”

  “What?”

  He pointed at the bed. “There. Now. Sit.”

  She really, really wanted to defy him. The twisted torment on his face canceled every viable reason to do so. Gathering the blanket tighter to her chest, she lowered to the edge of the bed.

  Z braced his hands to his hips and sucked in a deep breath.

  “Her name was Cherie,” he finally said. “She was a hell of a lot like you, Ray-bird. Beautiful. Kind. She was a vet’s assistant… She always had a dog or two around that she’d saved from euthanasia the night before. We met at a kink party down in Portland. After a year, I figured…maybe things could be good. I gave her a lifestyle name. Treasure. I had a collar made for her, inlaid with rubies. She moved up here for me.” He took a determined step back in front of her. “You getting the picture now? We were unshakable, Rayna.” A sad smile moved across his lips. “We were flameproof.”

  She threaded her fingers into his and gently pulled. Once he sat beside her, she took in every inch of his beautiful, formidable face before forcing out her question. “What happened?”

  He pulled her grip out of his, digit by digit. With unwavering purpose, he flattened them all against his chest. “We didn’t leave all the ugliness behind us in the city, bird. A shit ton of it came up with us. It’s right here, beating in what’s left of this heart. It’s bloody and it’s crappy and it doesn’t get better, because that’s what happens when your soul is sliced open at the age of eight, watching them bring home your dad in pieces from Somalia.”

  Her breath clutched. Somalia, roughly twenty years ago… Shit, no.

  “Mogadishu?” she whispered.

  His lips twisted. “Ding, ding, ding. Give the girl a golden trophy. The glaring military mistake that everyone up top wanted to sweep under the rug, including the families who had no husbands or fathers anymore. They tried some great parting gifts on us all, of course. I got to keep Dad’s medals. Mom got a great gift out of the deal, too. A newfound craving for vodka.”

  She moved her fingers to his neck and squeezed, trying to show him how sharply his disclosure moved her. “Oh, Zeke. Oh, yuck.”

  “That’s not where my vocabulary was going, but sure, yuck will do.” He left her and paced to the window. His steps deepened his confession in their tight restraint. “After a year, she decided she was actually quite fond of that little perk. She wasn’t home a lot, but it didn’t matter. When she was home, she wasn’t the person I knew as my mom.

  “On my ninth birthday, I had a delicious dinner of Spam on saltine crackers followed by a friendly visit from Child Protective Services. Mom had decided to go to bingo night and took her own ‘beverages’ to the party. They decided that foster care was the better route for me—but the trouble was, I’d had a preview of what that foster shit did to a kid. His name was Kier Montague, and he’d beat the crap out of a couple of first graders the day before. And as we both know, he ended up on the streets anyway. I decided to cut to the chase. I’d already packed a bag for the contingency. Birth certificate, some cash, a couple of bags of Skittles, an easy shimmy out the bathroom window, and I was gone.”

  “Just like that?” She frowned. “Didn’t you ever try to go back, to see if your mom—”

  “I went back every night for a year.” He slammed a fist to the window frame. His silhouette looked like a furious Michelangelo nude cut and pasted against an Ansel Adams slide. “I scrubbed the house from top to bottom, wanting it to be perfect for her when she decided she wanted to come home and be a family again.”

  Rayna dropped both hands to her stomach and clenched them. She hated what she said next, especially because she sensed it was the truth. “But she didn’t.”

  Zeke shrugged. “I don’t know. The city put the house up for sale, citing abandonment by the owner. After the sign went up, they locked it up like the goddamn White House.” He turned and stared at her with finality. “I was on my own.”

  He turned back. Her stare fell to the ink across his lower abdomen with new understanding. “That’
s what your tattoos mean,” she murmured. “Those are tear drops.”

  “One for every year between the day I left and the day I enlisted.”

  Rayna swallowed hard. Her chin started to tremble. The bricks had stopped trying to macerate her heart. They were a pile of useless chunks now, shoved into the corner next to her soul so she could finally see through the dust—at Z’s pile, too.

  “And you’ve been gone ever since.” It was a revelation, not an accusation, though Z’s glower told her otherwise. “You really haven’t stopped running, Zeke, have you? Because the only time you tried, you couldn’t deal with what it made you feel about that woman. You couldn’t deal with feeling for a woman at all because of the last one you ever felt anything for.”

  He didn’t reply until he’d crossed back over to the dresser, not sparing her a single glance in the movement. “I’m fine with feelings, bird. It’s commitment I’ve got issues with, remember?”

  A messy laugh sputtered off her lips. She raised a finger high. “Taxi? You got room for one party of seriously confused?”

  He pulled out a pair of sweats with ARMY printed down the leg and jammed his legs into them. “I’m going to let that pass because you’re angry.”

  “How about answering to it because I’m right?”

  He wheeled back toward her. His stance was menacing, his hair wild as he dragged his hand through the unruly waves. “You calling me an unfeeling bastard, Rayna? I have news for you. I feel just fine, goddamnit. I have eleven guys who depend on me to have feelings and act on them when necessary. Their lives and mine depend on it.”

  She didn’t blink as she returned his glare with a slow nod. “I know,” she said. And she did. In the revelations he’d given her, she was able to connect more back to his finality about pushing her away now. More than she wanted to. More than her heart might be able to handle.

  “Thank fuck for the day job, huh, Z?” she went on. “No wonder you’re really good at it. Makes a nice little paint-by-numbers for the emotions. Take loyalty and brush it here. Anger is best dabbed there, there, and there. Fear? It belongs right there. Joy waits to get put there. Perfect and neat. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes home in pieces in a casket. Nobody goes to bingo night and never comes home again.”