Agony/Ecstasy: Original Stories of Agonizing Pleasure/Exquisite Pain

by Litte, Jane

  “Kiss me.”

  The wildness glinted bright and hot in her eyes then disappeared as she bent her head. He smoothed his palm along the side of her jaw, cupped it, stroked her cheek with his thumb. There was nothing more intimate than mouth-to-mouth contact, the shifting, sliding pressure of lips, the mingled breaths, the soft words and pleas tasted as much as heard.

  She looked at him then, really looked at him. He had no idea what she saw. She was Marin Bryant and Miss Banks and a conduit for Terpsichore, the goddess of dance, but he was Colson Fleming IV and Fleming from prep school and Captain Fleming to his fellow Marines and then Fleming again when he joined Cooper Bensonhurst as a trader. He had no idea what she saw in his eyes, but he prayed it was something like You can own me and I can own you if you just let down those goddamn walls.

  “I don’t like being vulnerable,” she said finally.

  No fucking doubt. “You’re vulnerable every time we meet,” he said, encircling one wrist with his fingers.

  “I’m not,” she whispered.

  He lifted that wrist to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the inside. “Ten inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier, remember?” he said, then grasped the other.

  “You wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, but he was kissing that wrist as she said it, then nibbling at the tendons under the skin.

  Her eyes were closed, her voice low and distracted as the words tumbled into the air. As they dissipated into the room she opened her eyes and looked at him, the battle between wants and fears playing out in every line of her body.

  With her he could be wholly himself. He wanted to offer her the same freedom.

  “I won’t hurt you in any way,” he said. “Trust me, Marin.”

  He knew what he was asking her to do. For someone who experienced life deeply and had the talent to translate it into an intense, physical art, wild emotion felt dangerous. Threatening. Marin used the discipline of dance and their meetings to channel her strongest, wildest emotions—lust, anger, desire, love, need—into all-encompassing, explosive release. She’d never kissed him, never let him kiss her, and he wanted her mouth on his more than he’d ever wanted anything else in his entire life. Not for himself, so he could “claim her,” although no lie, he would do that.

  He wanted this for her. He wanted to give her the complete freedom to experience and show everything, no fear, no boundaries, no restraints, no roles. Just him and Marin.

  She had to want to do this. He could strategize and maneuver, make her come a dozen different ways and times, but he couldn’t make a kiss meaningful unless she offered it to him.

  When she lifted her eyes to his, it was his turn to freeze. Everything lashed deep down in her soul was glinting in her green eyes, turning them a stormy sea green. He braced himself, waiting for her to come to him. Then she rose just enough to bring her face level with his, tilted forward, and brushed her lips across his.

  He’d asked for one kiss, and one kiss only, but she didn’t pull away. Instead her breath eased from her in a shuddering little sigh that soothed the sparks popping under the skin of his mouth. Delicate and sure, she stroked her tongue along his lower lip, then paused, as if evaluating the taste of him.

  Barely daring to breathe, he stayed silent and still. A moment later she gave him another kiss, this one with more pressure, her mouth open against his, then her tongue dipped into his mouth. The faintest trace of coppery blood dissipated with the kiss. The instant when her tongue stroked over his, when the floodgates opened and she let everything she felt flow through her, into him, the brilliant, nuclear heat of the sun shot through his veins.

  He cupped the back of her head with one hand and wrapped his other arm around her waist, pulling her naked body to his. He’d never felt so alive, not under machine-gun fire, not under the daily stress on the trading floor, not in Lady Matilda’s shadowy boudoir with Miss Banks. There was adrenaline, and there was Marin, mouth open under his, tongue to tongue, trading gasps.

  More.

  She might have said it, he might have imagined it, but they both felt it. Breathing hard, he backed off the bed and shoved his jeans down, then grabbed a condom from his nightstand. He sheathed himself by touch because he couldn’t take his eyes off her, sitting back on her heels in the middle of his bed all pale skin and white blond hair, transformed into a white-hot column of flame.

  He crawled back to the middle of the bed, pushed her on her back, and moved between her legs. Braced just above her, her nipples brushing his chest with each inhale, his cock nestled just inside her wet, swollen folds, he looked down into her stormy green eyes and said, “Kiss me. Don’t stop until I’m inside you.”

  She gave a high-pitched groan, then gripped his nape with one hand and brought his mouth to hers. He felt his pulse pound as she kissed him like she couldn’t get enough, licking and nipping at his lips and tongue. Sweat broke out on his back as he slid in, inch by excruciatingly hot, tight inch, until he was as deep inside her as he could get, hip to hip, chest to chest, and finally, his mouth on hers. Limitless energy unleashed, she writhed under him, but he withdrew as slowly as he’d slid in, paused for a deep, thorough kiss, then eased forward again.

  Again. Again. Again and again and he was going to go out of his mind, because she was surely going out of hers. Trapped between his body and the mattress, she writhed under him, strong enough to make him work to hold her down as everything she felt animated her body. He held her down and fucked her slow and steady until that wild, restless energy coalesced into pure need. On his next deep, gliding stroke she lifted her hips to meet his, her sheath clamped around his cock, her mouth open under his. A high-pitched, shuddering noise he’d never heard her make slipped from her mouth. She shoved at his chest but he didn’t move for her.

  “God, Cole,” she gasped against his mouth. “You’re cruel!”

  Given their history, the irony of that particular statement made him laugh. “You love it,” he growled, political correctness and everything he’d learned about being a gentleman long gone.

  He braced his elbows above her shoulders to keep her in position and put the full power of his hips into the next thrust. Her eyes slammed shut as she arched hard and cried out. Christ, it felt so good, hot and slick and so right to be inside Marin, naked and sweating and striving together.

  “Look at me,” he said, and paused until she did.

  The open vulnerability in her eyes had his heart battering his breastbone and his throat locked too tight to breathe. He could see how hard it was for her to be vulnerable like this, like the conduit of human emotion she became on stage, exposed for everyone to see, for him to see. But she did it, let the emotion he sparked in her flare through her eyes as she clung to him, fingers digging into his shoulders. Each plunging thrust forced a gasp from her. The pink flush of sex was high in her cheekbones, in her exposed throat.

  “Don’t stop.”

  The words were almost inaudible, a soft pleading unlike anything he’d heard from her before. He didn’t stop. He kept up his relentlessly steady pace, felt her fly apart under him. Slick contractions gripped his cock as he thrust through the spasms and absorbed her helpless cries with his skin. Balanced on the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain, he hung there, chest heaving, sweat dripping to plunk on her collarbone as she eased back into the mattress. She opened her eyes, and the yearning in the green depths gripped his throat.

  “Please come,” she said again in that soft, female voice. “I want to feel that.”

  He slid in, back out, in again to the depths of her body, felt her legs curl around his calves as she trembled in response. She looked down between their bodies, watching him plunge into her. He fought to keep his eyes open as sensation pulled him into the rip current.

  One hand gripped his hip; the other pressed at the small of his back. “Yes,” she whispered. “Cole, yes. Let go.”

  That was all it took. Orgasm hit him like running full tilt into a brick wall. He buried his face in her hair, spasm af
ter spasm wracking him, and felt the world go black around him.

  Hearing returned first, Marin’s quick breaths into his neck. Vision. His forearm, the white sheets, her sweat-dampened hair, her ear. He’d slumped over her. He lifted some of his weight back to his arms and tried to remember how to breathe. Once he had that mastered again he got up and went into the bathroom to remove the condom.

  When he came back into the bedroom Marin was gone.

  Her jeans and sweater still lay in a heap on the floor, but his shirt was missing. He pulled on his shorts and strode barefoot down the hall, past the dining room, the library, the home theater, the three other bedrooms, the eat-in kitchen, into the living room overlooking Fifth Avenue.

  She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, instead standing in a semi-darkness that made her white-blond hair glow like moonlight. Dressed in his shirt, she was looking out the floor-to-ceiling living room windows at the Central Park West skyline, rising in the distance over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The angle of the ambient light shadowed her profile. He stopped just behind her and laid both palms flat on the glass on either side of her head, almost but not quite touching her, restating his opening position but not taking liberties.

  The whoosh and rush of a bus’s air brakes reverberated below them. “I heard Wall Street bonuses were down,” she said.

  There was always money to be made if you worked your ass off, so he could have bought the apartment in any of the last several years, but he told her the truth. “I inherited it. My great-grandfather built the building. I grew up one floor down.”

  Revealing that little detail to a woman was usually like throwing chum in the water, but she tilted her head in curiosity, nothing more. She studied his reflection in the glass, then her oblique gaze shifted back to the small figures in the glass-enclosed Sackler Wing. “You gave this up for the Marine Corps barracks?”

  The last time they met was the first time they’d talked in anything other than a formal, scripted way. She’d guessed he was NYPD or FBI, which surprised him until he learned she was a dancer. Marin studied movement like he studied markets and commodities. She’d probably read his history in his body while he was still enamored with Miss Banks.

  He waited until she looked at him again, then nodded. “Six years. Two tours in Afghanistan.”

  “You are one surprise after another,” she said, her focus shifting back to the skyline.

  “And you were expecting a scene like all the others,” he said.

  Again, he waited for their eyes to meet. When they did, she nodded.

  He thought about her silk and pearl-clad alter ego Miss Banks, about Marin Bryant, Principal Dancer, about the passionate, sexual, adventurous woman no less under his skin than when they’d begun. She wouldn’t be easy, but he liked difficult things. “I got the feeling boring you would be the cardinal sin.”

  “You are many things, Cole, but you’re not boring,” she said.

  At that something in him eased. The glass reflected her swollen mouth, flushed cheeks, the banked fire in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, a statement, like so many facets of their relationship, that could be taken many different ways.

  “I’m glad to be here,” she said. “But does being here mean the end of Miss Banks?”

  He shrugged, striving for casual. “Only if you want her to end. I don’t.”

  A provocative smile curved her lips. “You like her.”

  “I more than like her,” he said. “So, Marin Bryant . . . is this the only thing that turns you on?”

  She laughed, the sound real, from deep in her torso, and utterly delighted. Then she stepped back and relaxed against him. He braced himself to take her weight and gave in to impulse, wrapping an arm around her waist. The remnant of her laughter became a small, satisfied sound, almost a purr. Marin, tamed.

  “Hardly,” she said. “What do you have in mind next?”

  Everything. He had everything in mind, but there was no rush. “Find out.”

  Want to know what happens when Miss

  Banks comes out to play? Flip to “Transfixed”

  in the Agony side of this volume . . .

  After doing time at Fortune 500 companies on both coasts, Anne Calhoun found herself living in a flyover state. The glamour of cube farm jobs in HR and IT had worn off, so she gave up meetings to take Joseph Campbell’s advice and follow her bliss: writing romance. Her first novel, Liberating Lacey, won the 2010 EPIC Award for Best Contemporary Erotic Romance. Her next release, What She Needs, was chosen by Smart Bitch Sarah for the Sizzling Book Club.

  Anne lives in the Midwest with her husband, son, and a rescue dog named Kate. She holds a BA in English and History, and an MA in American Studies. Visit her website at annecalhoun.com.

  RESCUE ME

  MELJEAN BROOK

  8:35 P.M.

  As soon as Jenny heard Brandon Shaw shut the door, leaving her alone in the cabin’s one stifling room, she relaxed the muscles in her arms. The binding around her wrists didn’t loosen.

  Dammit. She’d read about that trick years ago, in a Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden mystery, and had clenched her muscles when Shaw tied her hands behind her back. But apparently it only worked for blond teenage sleuths escaping their ropes—not an ordinary brunette wrestling against a nylon cable tie.

  All right, so she wouldn’t be wriggling her hands free. But she had a little time before Shaw returned with his knives, before he sliced her up like he had those other ordinary brunettes.

  The details of those murders crowded into her head, leaving just enough room for panic. Her breath shortened, sawing roughly through her lungs, filling her with the cloyingly festive fragrance coming from the two candles burning on the table. Big jars of spiced apple, the red wax melted halfway down the glass sides. It smelled like Christmas in here, Christmas in July—and Jenny wanted to believe this was all a joke, wanted to believe that middle-school science teacher Brandon Shaw was just pulling a fast one over on the mechanic he’d met two weeks ago when he’d brought his car into her shop for repairs. Hell, she’d even appreciated him for not making a joke about lube jobs, the one that most men thought was so damn funny. He’d seemed like a decent sort of guy, but Jenny couldn’t think so now—and she couldn’t hang on to the hope that this was all a twisted joke. She’d spent too many weekends in her brother’s garage, helping him restore that old Thunderbird. More often than not, Tom’s friend and partner on the Bend police force, Ian Grayson, joined them in the garage, bringing along a six-pack and substantial amounts of elbow grease. Eventually, the two detectives would begin discussing recent cases . . . and lately, the conversation had always turned toward the string of brunettes found along the Cascade Lakes byway. Beneath the Thunderbird’s chassis, Jenny had overheard details that the police hadn’t released to the press, details that a middle-school teacher couldn’t have known—that the women had all been found in their underwear, with red satin ribbons fastened around their necks.

  Jenny wore a similar ribbon now. Though it was tied loosely in a bow, the satin felt tighter than the bindings at her wrists and seemed to constrict with her every breath. When Shaw returned, he would strangle her with it.

  When he returned . . . and she’d fixed the transmission of the piece-of-shit car that would bring him here. That motherfucker.

  On a surge of anger, she yanked against the cable ties. Nylon bit into her wrists, but she yanked again. And again.

  That wasn’t working. Heart pounding, Jenny stopped yanking and simply pulled, straining against the ties, hoping that the cable tie would give or that the chair’s back would crack. Neither did. Terror seeped through her anger and took over, though she’d been sure she’d already felt the worst of her fear when Shaw had stripped her down to her serviceable cotton bra and briefs, when he’d shoved her into his trunk and began the hour-long drive out of the city. By the time he’d dragged her into the darkened cabin and secured her to the old spindleback chair, she’d felt
almost calm—but that calm was gone now, and she yanked again, because it didn’t matter that her wrists bled or that the sides of the chair had tenderized her forearms. It didn’t matter whether the chair broke or her bones did, because if she didn’t get out now then she wouldn’t ever get out.

  But it hurt. Oh, God, how it hurt. Hot tears joined the sweat on her face, but her sobs were smothered by the gag Shaw had made from a pair of her stockings, wadding up one and shoving the ball of silk into her mouth, stretching its mate between her lips and tying it behind her head. She tried to scream and almost choked when the wad hit the back of her tongue. Her stomach heaved.

  Oh, hell no.

  Jenny stopped struggling and forced herself to breathe slowly through her nose, waiting until the bile in her throat receded. She was not going to drown in her own puke. Though that fate was better than what Brandon Shaw had in store for her, she was not going out this way, panicking her way to death. And she was not going to die in a dirty little cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere, choking on sobs and snot.

  And she was definitely not dying in her granny panties.

  The police would find her first. Ian would find her. He and her brother weren’t on the team tasked to find the serial killer; if they had been, Tom wouldn’t have taken time off for a vacation, and Jenny would have been eating dinner at her brother’s house that night instead of being attacked by Brandon Shaw in her kitchen.

  But Ian would check his voice mail, where she’d been leaving him a message about a delay in Tom’s return flight—a message that had been cut off halfway through by her scream. And although her phone had skidded across the kitchen tile when Shaw had jumped her, she didn’t think the call had been disconnected. Ian might have heard her shout Shaw’s name.

  How long before he checked his voice mail? Not too long. He never let it go for too long.

  Ian just had to be faster than Shaw—who’d returned to the city, he’d said, for something special. Jenny didn’t want to know what that meant. The important thing was: it would take Shaw an hour to return home. Hopefully, Ian and the Bend police force would be waiting for him.