Fracture (Blood & Roses #2)

by Callie Hart

  “No.”

  He stops, looks up at me, leans forward and says, “Do we really need to go through this again? You reap what you sow, Sloane. It’s time for you to learn how to behave.” He raises his eyebrows in a challenge. I know he means business now. He gave me a small amount of power and I abused it. And now I have to suffer the consequences. And yet, deep down, I think I’ve been waiting for this to happen. And…wanting it to. I ease back up onto the bed as cautiously as possible. Zeth nods once and finishes opening the bag.

  “Spread your legs,” he tells me. I’m almost wishing for the dark of our first encounter again as I do what I’m told. Zeth has a look of revenge about him as he climbs up over my body. “I’m not gonna tie you up this time, Sloane. But you should know, you move one hand, try to fight me off, do anything that involves your teeth and my dick, and you’re gonna pay for it. Understand?”

  I nod my head, wondering what he has in mind. And then I see the small, narrow, tweezer-like instrument in his hand. “What the hell is that?”

  Zeth grips hold of the device with a level of pleasure that has me squirming on my back, suddenly regretting complying so easily. “This is what you get for being bad,” he informs me.

  I quiver as he runs his hands down the insides of my legs, stooping down to lick at the sensitive skin just before my pussy. He grazes lips and tongue across my hot skin, licking again and again, but it’s all teasing. Nowhere near where I need him to lick me. I’m beginning to feel frustrated, angling my hips up to him, opening myself to him, when I feel the cool metal against my pussy. My body quakes with sudden nerves, but Zeth grasps hold of my hip in his free hand, sending a penetrating look of warning up my body. “Remember. Fight it and you’ll regret it.”

  The metal instrument in his hand turns out to be a clamp. I know this because he affixes it swiftly to the swollen bundle of nerves at my very center, causing me to yelp out in shock. He flicks it with his index finger and a relay of sharp pleasure mixed with pain volts around my body.

  “Zeth!” My cry is one of surprise and pleading. “Oh my God, don’t do that again.”

  He does do it again, wearing a frankly malicious look of glee on his face. My legs spasm, wanting to curl upward to protect me—I can’t help it—and he shakes his head in mock disapproval. It’s perfectly fucking clear that he knew I’d react, and was, in fact, counting on it.

  “Oh, dear,” he breathes. “Looks like you’re gonna get punished now.” He grips hold of the clamp in his hand and a charge of intense sensation smashes into me as I try and move away from him. I instantly still, realizing that if I move, the clamp gets tugged. With one arm, Zeth scoops me up from the bed underneath my stomach and turns to sit, pulling me into his lap. I instinctively wrap my arms around his neck to maintain my balance. His face is an inch away from mine, the heated skin of his chest burning into me, and the hardness of his erection prodding into me when he says, “You want the belt or my hand?”

  “What?”

  He gives me a look that tells me not to bother with any theatrics. “Belt or hand, Sloane? Your choice.” He reaches between my legs, fingers finding the place where the metal meets my clit. He rubs softly, massaging the connection, gifting me with more pleasure than pain this time. He smirks wickedly when he lifts his fingers up for me to see that they’re slick with the evidence that I’m not hating this as much as I’m pretending. Not for the first time, he slips his fingers into his mouth and sucks them clean, his breathing fast and labored.

  “Make up your mind or I’ll choose for you,” he advises through his rough voice.

  “Hand,” I whisper. “Use your hand.” Maybe if he punishes me with that then he’ll go a little easier on me, I reason. It will hurt him, too. In the blink of an eye he spins me over on his lap so I’m facing the floor, bent over his knees, my butt sticking up in the air. He seems to like that very much; his hand cups my ass cheek, squeezing and stroking across the smooth skin.

  “Perfect,” he informs me. He takes hold of the clamp’s handles between my legs and gives it a gentle tug. More of a suggestion of what can be done than anything else. Fire pools in my belly, teasing a low moan out of my throat. It feels…it feels amazing. And scary. And painful. And so many other things all at once that I can’t bend my mind around the sensations flooding through me.

  But then everything goes blank as his hand comes down on my bare buttocks with a resounding crack! I’ve never really understood the term seeing stars until this moment. This moment when Zeth lays his huge, powerful hand to the tender skin of my bottom and means it. Yes, it must sting his hand, too, but that doesn’t stop him. He gives me four more painful slaps, each time holding his breath. I’m too stunned to move, or even react at first. He tempers the tingling sting by sliding his fingers between my legs and running them up and down my pussy, stroking over my clit and easing them farther back, so that my wetness saturates my ass as well. He kneads me slowly, whispering encouragement.

  “There’s my brave girl. Such a brave girl. Are you going to be good now? Have you learned your lesson?”

  The whole act is humiliating. I’m on the brink of tears, but also so ferociously desperate for him that I can barely stop myself from pivoting around and launching at him. I make a rasping sound at the back of my throat and Zeth lifts me in his arms and places me back down on the bed.

  “That was five,” he says, like the pain may have addled my ability to count. “Next time it’ll be ten. You ready?”

  I swallow, still not sure how the hell to react. And then I nod. Zeth strokes a hand down the inside of my leg in a soothing motion, almost apologetically. “Good girl.” He bends down and nestles in between my legs, propping himself up on one elbow as he ducks his head down and finally sweeps his warm, almost unbearably hot tongue between my pussy lips, pausing to tease the tip of it over my hypersensitive clit. A juddering roll of pleasure powers upward from my legs, settling on my chest, making my nipples ache.

  “Ahh!”

  Zeth hums his approval into me as he carries on, working his tongue over my center. I gasp when he gently flicks the clamp again, but this time it’s changed. There’s no real pain now, or there is but it’s so delicious and intoxicating when combined with his mouth that it heightens the feeling to something I’ve never experienced before. I feel drunk from it.

  I lift my hands from the bed where I’ve been clutching hold of the sheets, but it’s not to try and stop him. It’s to dig my fingers into the back of his neck and urge him closer. Zeth responds in kind by nipping at my clit with his teeth.

  “Fair turnaround,” he growls, and then sets back to work. My back arches up off the bed, my mouth gasping open as I try to fight past the intensity of the feeling. I can’t. It’s so hard to decide if I’m bowed in pleasure or agony—they feel like the same thing right now. But when Zeth slides his fingers into my pussy, pumping them slowly in an out, it becomes very clear. Pleasure. This is what true pleasure feels like. It’s not just the softness of a kiss. It’s not just the delicate touch of hands on breasts and tongues on skin. It’s the bite of pain, the threat of danger, the risk taken in dancing with the devil. I come hard against Zeth’s mouth. He leans into it, growling and sucking and licking as I scream out my release, hands locked on my hips, pulling me into his face.

  “Fuck, Zeth! Stop! Please stop!”

  His back hitches as he laughs, still teasing me with his tongue. My legs scrabble against the bed, desperately trying to escape the intense post-orgasm rushes. He gets up after that, raising one eyebrow at me.

  “I’m gonna take it off and then I’m gonna fuck you. Are you going to be polite?”

  Polite? I’m half fucking dead. I can barely move at all as he undoes the clamp, planting a single kiss between my legs. “And yes,” he tells me. “Your lips are only allowed on my dick. But mine are allowed on these lips, at least.”

  My body feels like a lead weight as he sits back a moment to inspect my languid state. He seems pretty pleased with hims
elf. With his cock in his hand again, he shifts up the bed and gently brushes himself against my lips. I can’t help it—I want to taste him. To feel him fill me in every way possible, even in my mouth. I let my tongue play over the firm hardness of him, groaning a little at the clean taste of him. He doesn’t touch me.

  We’re back to where we started, except this time I don’t bite. I lick and suck and stroke and just when I feel him about to come, I stop.

  “That’s not polite,” Zeth breathlessly informs me.

  I give him a half-smile. “I thought you said you were gonna fuck me?” It’s a challenge laid down by me now. Make me come again. Make me scream.

  Zeth’s full lips curve upward. “You asked for it,” he says. He throws me back down onto the bed and roughly pushes my legs apart, growling again in the same animalistic way he did before when he took me back in Seattle. He delivers on his promise to make me scream. He buries himself into me over and over again, pushing as far inside me as he can, as though being hip deep just isn’t enough. I press my fingernails into his butt as he thrusts, drawing him closer, not sure how I can get any more connected with him either but still frantic to do it all the same.

  We come together. His body locks up—muscles straining, eyes on fire, hands digging into my hips as he slams me to him one final time. “Fuck!” He roars this as though it’s his dying word and he wants the world to hear it, and then he slumps forward over my body.

  We lie, panting, trying to catch our breath for a few moments. It feels very strange; with him on top of me, my arms still around his body, it almost feels like I’m cradling him. I think I’m imagining it at first but I break out in goose bumps when I realize that the slow up and down draw of Zeth’s index finger over my hipbone isn’t just a careless, involuntary reaction. He’s actually stroking my skin, so softly it feels like a whisper. My heart begins to pound inside my chest all over again. What the hell? What the hell is this? I slowly, hesitantly lift my arm from his back to gently trace my fingertips across the nape of his neck. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t even breathe. His own hand goes still, but I carry on, seeing how far this can go. I venture upward, teasing my fingers through his cropped hair and then downward again, tracing the lines of his muscular back, across his shoulder blades.

  His hot breath skims across my naked breasts. “You’re confusing me.” He whispers so softly that I wonder for a second if I imagined it. I doubt very much that I was supposed to hear those words. What was it he said to me the day he dropped Lacey off? You can trust me. You gave yourself to me back at my apartment; I’ve never done it before, but I gave myself in return. I may not have wanted to, Sloane, but I didn’t have a choice. That means we belong to each other now. I’ve tried endlessly not to overthink those words, but now…

  Is he just as confused by us as I am?

  This is supposed to be just sex. Really hardcore, dominating sex. Right? That’s all I am to him. And yet, with him lying here on my chest, it—

  Thud, thud, thud!

  The door practically bows off its hinges with the explosive force of the hammering from the other side. Zeth vaults off the bed, running his hands back through his hair, clearing his throat. The moment evaporates instantly, vanishes in the blink of an eye. He doesn’t look at me.

  “What?” he yells. He paces, leonine, naked and incredible, still scrubbing his hands over his face and head, like he’s frantically trying to wake himself up.

  “Julio wants you out front,” a heavily accented voice announces through the wood. “Now.”

  “Yeah.” He paces a moment longer and then nods his head, finally looking at me. “Well, then. I guess it’s time to convince a Mexican mob boss that you’re a hooker now, huh?”

  And there we have it. He’s not confused. Not confused at all. He’s never lied to me. Not once. He’s never fed me a flowery line about how he’s going to take care of me and treat me right; that I’m going to be his only girl, or that he feels anything remotely even halfway to affection for me. And I know from my past dealings with him what that means. If he doesn’t want to lie, he just won’t say anything at all, just like when I asked him about his seedy employment history. Don’t respond, don’t say anything about it and it goes away.

  Zeth Mayfair doesn’t see me as someone to fall in love with. Right now he needs to see me as a hooker in order to get us out of this jam, and he needs everyone else to see me that way, too.

  Well, you know what, buddy? I say to myself, smiling grimly over the use of that nickname. You want a fucking hooker? I’ll give you a fucking hooker.

  As we walk down the corridors to meet with Julio, I’m actually not all that worried about the fat, Mexican fucker. I’m not thinking about what’ll happen to us if Sloane messes this up. I’m not thinking about what will happen when Alexis spots her sister here, in this dark, dreadful place, and gives us both away.

  I’m only thinking one thing:

  She came to find me.

  She was attacked. She defended herself. Saved Lacey. Drove for two days, and then did something completely baffling—she ran toward me. She should have run in the opposite direction, but she didn’t. She ran straight for me like I’m her goddamn savior. Like I’m capable of fixing everything. Like I’m capable of protecting her. Like I’m whole enough to help fill in the broken, fractured pieces of her, too. And then she went and held me in her arms like that. Fuck. And just for a terrifying, awful second there…

  I shake my head, trying not to think it. But it’s an undeniable and dangerous thought, and won’t be ignored.

  Just for a second there…it felt like she might be capable of gluing me back together, too.

  The next book in the Deviant series, Burn, is tentatively scheduled to come out on the 12th of May 2014. This date is subject to change, however. If you want to be notified as soon as Burn is released, you can join my newsletter by clicking this link.

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  About the Author

  Callie Hart is a bagel eating, coffee drinking, romance addict. She can recite lines from the Notebook by heart. She lives on a ridiculously high floor in a way-too expensive building with her fiancé and their pet goldfish, Neptune. Fracture is the second instalment in her Blood and Roses series. The next instalment, Burn, will be released in May 2014.

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright

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  Callie

  Next in the Series

  About the Author

  Tell me your favorite bit!

 

 

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