Chasing Chelsea (Masters of the Castle)

by Maren Smith

  “Hello, Red.” Kade grinned, little more than a flash of white teeth in the dark.

  “Go away!” she hissed, and even slapped at him but missed by a mile. Her attempt jostled the bushes, making the branches and leaves rustle loudly.

  “Ah-ah,” he cautioned, his voice barely above a whisper. “You’re going to bring them right to you and then what will you do?”

  She had absolutely no idea. Give in was the first wild urge to bounce around inside her, but that was just too wild. Too frivolous and exciting and…and naughty; the kind of thing that fit in beautifully with a place like this and yet which was completely unlike her. She’d never been “wild” before. She’d never been naughty. Her heart was a thundering storm in her chest. She’d never done anything like this. The exhilaration warring inside her began to feel perilously close to panic.

  “Here they come,” Kade whispered, nodding for her to look behind her. Far down the wall, maybe twenty yards away, the bushes rustled as the vegetation was carefully searched.

  “We’re going to find you, beautiful,” one of the twins sang.

  “We’re also going to spank you raw,” the other added, and a different section of brush along the Castle wall parted now too. They’d split up, but they were both searching their way toward her. They were going to find her. She didn’t have a chance.

  Dread and anticipation mingled, making her lightheaded. Chelsea rose slightly on her haunches, trying to see past Kade, through the branches and leaves and the dark, obscuring night to where the light on the alcove steps haloed the only door.

  “You’ll never make it.” Kade tsked.

  She had already come to that conclusion.

  Another searching rustle—not twenty, but eighteen yards behind her now, and quickly closing the distance.

  “I could call them to you.” Kade’s smile grew, turning the shadows of his lean face positively demonic. “Or would you like to, let’s say, come to other arrangements?”

  Another rustle; fifteen yards now. She could hear the snap of branches as one brother, no longer content with parting the brush, stepped through them into the narrow line of space between the plants and the rough stone wall.

  “Can you see her?”

  “Not yet.”

  Their voices drifted closer.

  Oh, this was such a bad—terrible, delicious—idea. She looked to Kade.

  “Tick tock, Red,” he mused. “Tick tock.”

  She was going to regret this and she knew it, and yet reaching for Kade somehow added to her excitement and quelled the panic—backwards of what it ought to be.

  “Help me,” she begged, clutching at his vest. The leather felt as warm as his skin, and it smelled so good. It brought that old adage about striking bargains with the devil right to the forefront of her mind. Then he touched her, his warm hands finding her thighs in the darkness and sending that thrill of excitement soaring. His fingers slid down to grip her knees and she actually closed her eyes at how right it felt for his hands to be on her, but she only had a second to enjoy that touch before he yanked, pulling her legs right out from under her.

  Squatting, Chelsea only fell a few inches, landing with a bump on her bottom. “What—”

  He pushed her flat on her back in the soft dirt, crawling on top of her. Her involuntary gasp became a yelp when he grabbed her minuscule slave dress and ripped it right off her. It tore as if that were its function, coming apart at every seam. What happened to it after that, she had no idea, because that was when Kade lay down heavy and hot on top of her, tucking himself like a lover between her startled legs, positioning his hips to hers and guiding her ankles to wrap back around him.

  “Passion, Red,” he whispered, and then he kissed her.

  As panicked as she had been just seconds before, Chelsea was now stunned. She couldn’t move. She lay in the cool dirt and leaves, burning in her belly, her breasts, everywhere his body touched hers, positively scalding where his naked flesh came into contact with her skin. She didn’t kiss him back, but she couldn’t bring herself to push him off either. She lay frozen with shock and indecision, and consumed by the most overwhelming need to open her mouth and see if she couldn’t tempt him in.

  She heard the clink of his belt buckle and Kade rose slightly. She felt his impatient shoves and jerks and then he was lying on top of her again, only now it was his bare hips that she felt hugged between her thighs. And more, now she could feel…it—thick, hard, stretched already to its full length and scorchingly hot where it pressed across her pubis and nudged at her belly. Her tight, clenching belly, filled to overflowing with an eagerness that felt like living things rolling and tumbling inside her. She shivered with every breath she tried to take, but that only brought their bodies millimeters more into fully fleshed contact with one another.

  “Trust me,” Kade murmured against her lips. She could feel his smile. She could taste his dark laughter, and then he was kissing her again. The big, bad wolf… She melted.

  His hand cupped her naked breast. His thumb traced and rolled across the tip of her standing nipple as his hips began to move, slow undulating motions that humped and bumped against her. The swollen head of that burning cock rubbed and pushed at her mons, just north of where she ached to feel him the most. It was an age-old dance, and it made her whole body come bursting to life.

  Her back arched without her wanting it to, pushing her willing breast right up into his hand. Her legs hugged him, her ankles digging into hard, hot flesh—his buttocks, his naked buttocks—she trembled, but not because she was afraid. No part of her was afraid now, or panicked, or reluctant. She was all eagerness, shivery titillation that didn’t know how to interpret what he was doing as anything other than simply wonderful.

  Chelsea was not a virgin—few made it to the ripe old age of twenty-four these days with their virginity still intact—but nothing Charlie Robertson had done in those late night college study sessions had prepared her for this. Charlie Robertson had kissed her; Kade nibbled and teased and overwhelmed until, with a sigh, she opened her mouth and he swept in like a storm. Charlie Robertson had touched her as if she were a treasure, priceless and fragile; abandoning her breast, Kade shoved his hands down under her body and seized her hips, gripping her ass as if he owned it. He kneaded, squeezed, pulled her buttocks apart as if he were trying to open her right up for him, and then slapped, his hand clapping the side of her hip just hard enough to sting.

  His fingers shifted, shoving deeper under her, following the curve of her backside until he found the hot, wet entrance of her. Her whole body leapt at the electric shock of that moment when he shoved into her, first one finger and then another, one from each hand, both invading deep, as deep as he could go.

  Her gasp was filled with the taste and breath of him, and he laughed, feeding that dark chuckle into her an instant before his fingers pulled. He really was spreading her open now, filling the air all around them with the mortifyingly slick and unmistakable sound of her desire. She could hear slapping too, the loud cup of empty air captured between their hips each time he mock thrust against her. The motions were growing, strengthening, a heady rush of impacts that fooled her body into thinking he really was inside her. Not his fingers now, but his cock. A flood of moisture flooded from her, coating his fingers and turning that slapping sound wet.

  She wanted him in her—her ankles locked behind him, digging into the muscular swells of his pumping buttocks. She wanted to know what it felt like to be owned by thrusts this commanding—she arched, lifting her hips in an effort not just to match his motions but to impale herself upon the cock that seemed content only to rub and glide in the slickness quickly spreading up her belly. She wanted his strength slamming home so deep and fierce inside her that he couldn’t help but touch all the parts of her that no one else could reach—she moaned, a sound so guttural and raw that it froze them both.

  At least, she thought it froze them because suddenly Kade stopped. She whimpered, pulling at him, needing him to
keep going. With only the faintest light from the Castle infiltrating this deep in the bushes, she couldn’t truly see the need on Kade’s shadow-masked face as he looked down at her, but she could feel it. She could feel the trembling strength in his arms as he fought himself not to become unleashed. She could feel the raggedness in his breaths as he forced himself to stay calm and in control.

  The stillness seemed to stretch for hours before he looked away from her, cocking his head to one side and said, “Do you mind, or is privacy too much to ask?”

  Someone laughed—Travis or Trevor, she had no idea. The sound dowsed her like frigid water. She’d forgotten about the brothers.

  “In this place?” one countered. “You’re kidding, right?”

  They both laughed now. The bushes directly overhead rustled as the shadows she hadn’t realized were looming over them retreated.

  “Was that her?” one brother asked the other.

  “Yeah, that was her.”

  Travis and Trevor walked away, leaving Chelsea trembling in the dirt under the weight of Kade’s burning body. Her senses were spinning, dancing, distorting everything except the way his fingers still felt inside her, stretching her open and pressing deep. The solidness and strength of him lying on top of her, and the knowledge that he had done exactly what he’d promised, made this all so surreal. Her belly and breasts were throbbing. The ache was almost physically painful.

  Kade looked down at her again, utterly motionless until with a sudden heave, he reared back onto his knees, yanking her up with him. His hands captured her bottom, keeping her pressed tight against him. This change in position altered the lay of their hips, and his cock dropped out from between them. She could feel it now, the nudging head poised along the heated wetness of her folds.

  “Say yes, Red,” he said, his voice as deep and soft as a growl. “Say yes.”

  He was gorgeous personified. He was strong and dark and he wanted her at least as much as her body wanted him. His hands kneaded the round flesh of her ass. All she could think was how good it would feel to finally have him inside her.

  “Be mine, Red. Just for tonight.”

  ‘Yes’ vaulted right to the tip of her lips. She almost said it, moaned it—it was right there, consent burning at her tongue the way his cock was burning, there, at the heated apex of her thighs where desire had centralized into one churning mass of pulsing blood and weeping arousal.

  “Chelsea,” he said, her name spoken so husky and low making her shiver. His fingers moved up her back, coming into her long hair, dragging her head back while his lips drifted down along the arching curve of her exposed throat. “Beth,” he whispered.

  Her eyes snapped open. Every burning place where he was touching her suddenly doused from fire to a completely different shocking extreme.

  “D-don’t!” she gasped, so embarrassingly breathless that she couldn’t stop panting. She squirmed, struggling to get her hands in between them, pushing enough space between them to dislodge his lips from her skin. That made it easier to think, but not by much. “Don’t call me that!”

  “What?” he asked thickly, seeming to have difficulty himself getting his thoughts back under control. “Don’t call you what, your name?”

  ‘That’s not my name,’ Chelsea almost blurted. Somehow, she got her watery legs back under her instead. She shoved off him, crashing into the stone wall before she caught her balance. Kade grabbed after her, perhaps only to keep her from falling, but she jerked even further away. He made no further move to stop her, and she grabbed up the dirty white rag her slave’s costume had become and dashed from the bushes.

  She ran for the well-lit door at the top of that second-floor set of stairs. Blushing furiously, she didn’t look at anyone—not the woman in the stocks, nor the shadows of all those men around her. Need still pulsed raw and unfulfilled inside her. She swallowed it back and just ran.

  She was up the stairs with the door latch in her hand when she heard Kade call out behind her, the fires of lust and the ice of rejection mingling in every nuance of his voice, “You taste like heaven, Red. Just like fucking heaven.”

  Almost in tears, after that, Chelsea didn’t stop running until she had reached the safety of her assigned room in the R-wing. She slammed the hydraulic door behind her, forcing the air springs to close as fast as she could make them go before she collapsed, breathless and shaking, and horribly embarrassed because she was still holding her ripped clothes instead of wearing them. How many people had seen her mad-dash run of shame from the alcove? She had a stitch in her side that refused to be rubbed out no matter how she mashed and massaged it. Worse, now that she was safe—Ha!—there was no stopping the bubbling mix of laughter and tears that came ripping its way out of her too-tight throat. The bitterness of it hurt.

  She slapped the light switch on, needing to banish back the darkness, but the phantom sensation of Kade’s wandering hands continued to possess her, squeezing and kneading, single digits from each hand still pushing to sink in deeper inside her.

  She sobbed out another hard laugh, the sound falling to desperation before cutting abruptly to shocked silence when she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were wide and wild looking. There was dirt on her face and her shoulders and leaves in the mussed tangles of her strawberry hair. She still clutched the tattered cloth of her costume as if it could somehow save her from the memory of how powerfully arousing it had been when he’d ripped it off her. How good it had felt with his naked cock rubbing hot against her belly. She could still feel the phantom of that too, every wanton pulse of her sex reliving the sensation of his undulating thrusts.

  Chelsea bent, tearing her gaze from her own devastated reflection to grab between her traitorous legs. She squeezed, fighting to banish the need, but it wasn’t working and her fingers came away flecked with dirt and grass and shining as wet as wet could be.

  You taste like heaven, Red.

  She looked at her shaking hands until tears made her fingers blur. Dropping her costume on the floor, she ran into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. Turning the water on just as hot as she could stand it, she punished every inch of herself, scrubbing hard, forcing her skin to accept the scouring sensation of soap and washcloth over his phantom fingers. She fixed on the tiles, unable to close her eyes without seeing him or the way he’d looked at her. She kept hearing the rasp of his breaths echoed in the fall of all those steaming drops raining down around her feet.

  There were bondage rings embedded in the shower tiles.

  Chelsea turned her back on them, closing her mind before it could summon up fantasies of being held immobile for another’s pleasure. Kade’s pleasure. And just like that, her fingers on her own body turned into his all over again.

  “Stop it,” she hissed, but her nerves were still singing, still demanding, and so finely keyed that each falling drop of water felt as if it were a flicking, tickling tongue gliding over her shoulders, dripping from the tips of her small breasts, sliding down her body, buttocks, thighs, even behind the sensitive backs of her knees—a hundred tiny kisses that followed her curves all the way down into the bottom of the tub.

  Turning abruptly, she grabbed the detachable showerhead off the wall and faced the tiles. One quick twist of the setting turned the gentle spray into a fiercely thumping pulse. Catching her breath, she hooked her fingers in one of the bondage rings and closed her eyes. Pressing her forehead against the cool ceramic, she pressed the showerhead into place and let herself go. She let her moans flow free. She let her hips buck up into the pulse and when her orgasm hit, hard under the full intensity of the brutal spray, she refused to move the showerhead or ease the pressure. She made herself ride that wave until pleasure turned too raw to be mistaken as such anymore.

  Her moans became wails, cried out against the uncaring tiles, but she did not stop. She could barely breathe without shouting, but she came again, harder than before, every muscle locking down. It hurt, the way instinctively she knew Kade
would have made it hurt. He would have turned her pleasure into knives, and he would have made her feel each and every one of them over and over again. Because he was dangerous.

  This whole place was dangerous.

  Her hands and knees shook. Her clit throbbed in wounded protest. And still, Chelsea continued the self-imposed punishment, inflicting wound after heart-stopping, earth-shattering wound, until the heat of the water cooled and exhaustion dropped her to her knees in the bottom of the tub…and her body sang.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had so many masters pulled off the floor at any one time before,” Sam said, falling into step with Kade practically from the moment Kade stepped out of his apartment and closed the door behind him.

  Already in a bad mood and not ready for company, Kade didn’t bother faking a smile. He simply checked to make sure the automatic lock had engaged. “I guess we’ll find out how well-oiled this fuck-machine really is.”

  They both headed down the long third-floor hall toward the stairs.

  “You’re in a sour mood.” Stubbornly determined not to take the hint, Sam kept pace with him. “What’s the matter? You’re not upset because we brought the twins to last night’s stress relief, are you? Come on. She’s Selena’s friend. Weddings are bad enough without the added drama of a Kade-induced sub-frenzy. Or worse, sub-drop. Even you have to admit, the twins would have kept it light and entertaining. They would have pulled out the stops to show her a good time.”

  Kade smiled, but it was thin and crooked, and it never quite touched his eyes. “For all the good it did them.”

  “Yeah, I heard she gave them the slip. I would have thought that pond far enough back to make escape damn near impossible. Apparently she made it all the way to the stockyard and into the arms of some…” Sam stopped, mid-word and mid-step, and Kade’s smile thinned even more. “Son of a bitch. That was you, wasn’t it? How the hell do you do that?”