His unexpected apology threw her off a bit, although it didn’t assuage any of her fears.
When she got out there, she saw that there were two of them, but they sounded like many more, somehow. Perhaps it was the way they were riding hell bent for leather, practically standing in their saddles as they pulled up. They each cradled a rifle as she pointed hers at them, encouraging them to stop a good distance away.
“We’re looking for a fugitive. He’s a big, tall man, black hair and perhaps a beard by now, goes by the name of Micajah.”
“Is that his first or last name?”
“First. Last name of Lincoln. Have you seen anyone?”
“No, Sir, I haven’t. I’m not very hospitable, and if he’d have come near, I would have done my best to discourage him.”
“You’re very remote out here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Is it just you?”
“My husband’s off hunting. I expect him home any time now.”
They gave her a look much like he had when she’d said that line.
“Do you mind if we come in and take a look around?” the bigger, older one of them asked, pushing his hat back on his head.
“Are you two lawmen?”
They looked at each other before the smaller of them answered, and she knew they weren’t. “Of a sort.”
In other words, no.
“Are you of a sort that has badges?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Well, then I guess you have the answer to your question, don’t you? If you were Rangers, you’d be required to carry your badges, and as far as I know, they’re the only law in this territory.” She had no idea if that was true, but it apparently sounded good enough to discourage them.
They exchanged glances again, and then they each tipped their hats and said politely, “Ma’am,” as they rode off.
She stayed outside until she could no longer see them riding off, then went to the barn and did her evening chores before going back in to where he was quite likely going to truss her up again.
And hopefully not do what he’d just done to her again. If she’d had any sense she would have tested his resolve and said something to those two men, tipped them off somehow, but she knew that doing so would only put their lives at risk. He’d been entirely too clever in telling her that it wasn’t her own life that was on the line if she mentioned anything, but rather theirs, knowing already that she didn’t put much value on her own because she’d already betrayed her hand to him.
She slowly, reluctantly opened the door and he was lying on the bed as if he hadn’t moved a muscle.
“They rode away.”
“I heard. They’ll be back.”
She frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Because they’re hired guns. They won’t stop until I’m dead.”
When she realized her jaw was hanging open, she snapped it shut. “But what did you do to deserve that?”
“I’m too smart for my own good and too dumb to do anything about it,” he said cryptically.
Rachel was surprised when he rose to his feet, wobbling a bit, and she stepped towards him as if to help him automatically when he started for the door and ended up just reaching for the pail instead. He chuckled at himself a bit. “I was trying to get to the outhouse to save you from having to do this for me,” he said when he was done, but she did it anyway, running to the outhouse them coming right back. He was stubborn enough that he was still standing when she got back, barring the door behind her once she was in. By then, he looked as if he might fall to the floor at any minute as he leaned back against it with a heavy thud and she well remembered just how hard it had been to get him into the bed in the first place. She wasn’t at all eager to repeat the experience.
“Come back to bed with me,” he ordered, lurching towards it himself.
“No, I have to see to the animals.”
Apparently he wasn’t that exhausted or incapacitated, because his back straightened as he turned and he assumed his full height, making Rachel swallow hard as he looked down at her in a deliberately intimidating manner that was overkill. Just his size was enough to make her feel like a mouse facing a lion. His hand rested on the butt of the gun that was sticking out of his pants. “I wasn’t asking. I can’t watch you or go outside with those men around so it will have to wait. Put the rifle back and come to bed.”
He stood there, waiting for her to comply.
Rachel’s eyebrow rose, her tone accusatory, as if she thought he’d lied about his name. “Which one of us, Mr. Micajah Lincoln, do you think can stand the longest?”
“I told you that Cage was a nickname.”
She was unprepared for just how quickly he could still move, and found herself not only dragged along behind him by his death grip on her wrist, but then he landed almost bonelessly on the edge of the beg and pulled her down—not onto his lap or even onto the bed, but over his lap, tugging her skirt up practically before she was all the way down.
“And I didn’t have to stand very long at all.”
But Rachel wasn’t bound and she also wasn’t going to stand for being spanked again by this man, so she did everything in her power, which turned out to be not very much, to get away from him. He kept her firmly in place, rucking her dress up practically to her armpits while yanking her bloomers down to her ankles and off onto the floor in the next second, leaving the entirety of her naked bottom beneath his heated gaze.
The vicious palm of his hand that came cracking down onto her exposed flesh felt like the wrath of God. “When I tell you to do something, you do it, Rachel. This is not a democracy. I expect you to obey me, because if you don’t, this is what you’re going to get, every time.”
He continued to swat and smack her, landing searing swat after swat on a behind that was barely beginning to recover from last night’s punishment. His hand landed every single time over the remaining bruises from when his belt had roasted her ‘til she screamed, and she was very nearly there now again with just his hand because of it.
“And if you give me trouble while I’m spanking you, you know there’s a whole ‘nother level I can take it to, if you need it—and perhaps you do, more often than not.”
He paused and Rachel was terrified that he was going to reach for his belt buckle, so she gave a tremendous push and managed to almost lurch herself off his lap. But he saw what she was attempting and wasn’t able to grab her arm but rather her dress, which ripped off her, leaving her in a naked heap on the floor at his feet. A pitifully sobbing heap, at that.
“My dress! You’ve ruined my it!”
She didn’t even seem to pay any attention to him. Cage let the material go and she caught it before it hit the ground, holding it to her as if it was the most important thing she owned.
He shook his head. She was practically hysterical. “It’s just a dress,” he said, not thinking about what it might mean to her.
Rachel sat up on her knees, gorgeously, breathtakingly naked, and simply gaped at him, not saying anything, not even really crying, but sniffling and choking a bit, still clutching what was left of the dress to her.
If he were whole, he would long since have leaned down to lift her into his arms. As it was, he had to stand, which wasn’t easy, lean down and grasp her arms just above the elbows to encourage her to get up. By the time he was able to stretch out—utterly exhausted on the bed not only from all his efforts, but also from the terror her visitors had inspired—she was back where he always put her.
As much as Cage knew they needed to leave this place as soon as possible, he figured they had at least a day or so before they came back. They’d probably watch the place for a while, as he would do if he were in their place, to see if her fabled husband returned. And he needed that time to heal as much as he could before he set out again—this time plus one.
Not really caring any longer what he did to her, Rachel voluntarily put her arms above her head, waiting for him to bind her again.
Cage did so, but her easy acquiescence made him very suspicious. He did make sure that the gun was well away from her, should she somehow get free. He didn’t like her frame of mind right now at all.
Not that his body was taking any notice whatsoever. It wanted more of her—much more of her, and the sooner the better.
She hadn’t even bothered to turn onto her side away from him, but he turned on his to face her, leaning his head on his hand and reaching out to tug the comforter over her when he noticed that her nipples were peaked and there was gooseflesh on her arms. “You should tell me if you’re cold or hot. I’ll adjust the covers,” he chided.
Rachel continued to stare straight up at the ceiling, as if it held the answers to the meaning of life.
Cage found himself entirely unable to stop from tipping her face towards his for a soft kiss.
Her mind screamed, “No!” angrily, but her body had begun to hunger for him again as soon as the last round had ended last night, she was thoroughly ashamed to realize, and the fact that he was being gentle with her almost made it worse.
No, it definitely made it worse.
If he had hurt her in that horrible way—like her supposed husband had—she could have hated him through and through. But he had been even crueler than that disgusting old man—he’d forced her to pleasure, even as he took her virginity. At least she had known exactly what to expect from Mr. H., and therefore exactly where the blame had lain for all of it—squarely on his frail, pale shoulders.
But Cage had done something no other man in her life had ever even attempted to do to her, and he had succeeded at it in spades: he’d turned her own body against her, creating an ally within her own realm that was damned near impossible to fight. Even now, when she surmised that he wanted more of the same, her body was quite eager to give it to him—even though there was definitely some residual soreness between her legs, where he undoubtedly expected to access again, to say nothing of the way the swollen skin of her poor beleaguered behind felt, and was undoubtedly going to feel as he pressed her into the bed again.
That wasn’t, however, the first thing he did. Instead, he reached up and massaged her arms, which had gotten a bit achy and tired last night while sleeping. Then he dragged his fingertips down over the sensitive, vulnerable insides of each arm, raising gooseflesh again but for a very different reason. His fingertips delved into her hair and massaged her scalp, then down over her face, exploring her slowly and thoroughly, even stopping to kiss the tears as they began to drip out of the corners of her eyes.
He kissed her as she would have imagined a lover to, with passion and hunger, making certain to coax her tongue out to play with his. He licked her lips, sipping at them, then nibbled down each jaw line to just barely bite at the spot where it ended. He razed each earlobe with the edges of his teeth, and then licked up and down the slender column of her neck until his lips hit her collarbone. Those knowing hands massaged as much of her shoulders as they could get to, then down her sides, avoiding her breasts entirely until he had kissed each rib on either side, then licked his way up her sternum.
When he straddled her with not a little difficulty in assuming the position, he took a breast in each big hand, squeezing and massaging somewhat less than gently, not that she minded—although she really, really did. But in this, in the way that he could awaken her and expertly draw out her physical side, she knew she would lose every time—even if she wasn’t bound.
Cage knew about the war that was raging within her—but the only one he cared about right now was the one he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to win. There was no way she could hide her responses to him; she was too innocent, and he loved it. It went well beyond how she tried—unsuccessfully—to modulate her breathing, tried to swallow back the gasps and anguished cries of pleasure—things he knew to look for that she would have no knowledge of or control over and he wasn’t going to enlighten her about.
He had seen how tightly peaked her nipples had been yesterday and had known that it was because of the awareness of them that he had brought to her, and now as he grasped her breasts, pressing them up even further into the air and into his waiting mouth, he could feel his cock rise as his lips caught them and began to suckle hard.
Her unchecked groan served to spur him on as he treated her other nipple the same way, tugging it into that warm wet cavern and pressing it hard against the roof of his mouth, then gently razing it with the edges of his teeth before releasing it. She began to arch unconsciously but then remembered she wasn’t supposed to like what he was doing to her and sank quickly back down onto the mattress.
Then he surprised her by moving off her and turning her onto her side, facing away from him, the way she might have positioned herself. She felt him moving around a bit, and when he pressed himself up against her again, she knew he was naked.
Rachel could feel the extent of his desire—the portion of him that he had put inside her last night—pressing against her sore bottom. Part of her wanted to try to wiggle away from it, but the other part—the surprisingly stronger one—didn’t even want to acknowledge either her own discomfort or the existence of that insistent part of him. Her mind wanted her body to completely ignore him, and it was outraged and incensed when she didn’t—when she absolutely couldn’t make it happen
Cage himself was ignoring the knock-him-to-his-knees pain in his side in favor of having her again. Parts of him overruled everywhere else in his body at times, and this was definitely one of them.
Her still quite warm bottom pressed back against him and he almost succumbed to the urge to take her right then and there, but managed to clamp down on his own desires in favor of the challenge of stirring hers. His hands came up to take possession of those beautiful breasts again. Teasing and tugging at her nipples, he listened closely for the point at which her passions overrode her better thoughts.
One hand slipped down her front and Rachel knew exactly where he was heading. She did her best to try to keep her thighs tightly together, but there was little she could do against his sheer strength. Cage easily pulled one leg away from the other and back over his, where he pinned it easily as he reached forward to boldly cup that which he coveted most. His fingers worked themselves between those puffy lips with a casual familiarity that she both resented and reveled in, and she tried to prepare herself, tried to steel herself against his intimate touch, but, as if he had known exactly what she was going to do to resist him, he simply held her for a very long time as he lifted the heavy curtain of her hair and kissed the back of her neck. When she shuddered and his chest puffed out with satisfaction, he continued down that elegant line to lick and suck his way across her delicate shoulders as his free hand continued to tease and torture her breasts, first capturing one nipple then the other between his thumb and middle finger, then using his index finger to drag across or tap the very tip, over and over until she positively squealed with it.
And when he did, finally, begin to move the fingers that were resting over the heat and heart of her, they didn’t immediately touch her anywhere that was blatantly itching for his attentions, but rather they wandered down the outside of her outer lips. He noted the differences in textures from where she had a certain amount of surprisingly soft hair to where there was none but tender skin. Then he moved his hand back up to the very top of her mound, tracing the arc there at the inner top of her lips, brushing his fingertips over her mons, and then separating those pliant folds to plow down her groove. He kept her lips wide apart as his fingers flowed down over her to the point on her body that was still a bit achy from its use yesterday, but the condition of her bottom easily overrode it as her chief complaint—although she had a feeling that those discomforts were going to be entirely blotted out momentarily.
Chapter Six
As his fingers hovered over her entrance, she felt his question disturb the hair near her ear. “Are you sore?”
It surprised her that he would even ask, and she considered lying and saying t
hat she was in horrible pain, but then she figured he’d know she was lying because she’d not shown any sign of it while she was up and about, and he would have been alert to that kind of thing from her, she thought.
Although, perhaps she was reading too much into it.
“Some.” It was the absolute truth.
“I’ll be more gentle this time,” he promised.
Not, “I won’t do anything to you,” or “I’ll release your hands and bow out of your life without ruining it any more than I already have,” but “I’ll try to hurt you less this time than before.”
But to be fair, her body reminded her, it hadn’t been exclusively painful. Some of it had been terrifyingly wonderful.
Rachel didn’t want to think about that right now, thought, while she was already incredibly mad at him. It was kind of funny, though, that her ripped dress was what had gotten her good and angry at him—not any of the other stuff he’d done to her, really. Just an old, long since out of fashion, terribly worn scrap of material.
His fingers didn’t enter her much, merely dipping into her as he breathed, “You’re wetter than you were last night. That’s a good thing.”
She didn’t know why that was good and she didn’t much care. She felt detached and tried to encourage it, hoping it might keep her from making a fool of herself again while he molested her. She didn’t feel much of anything except sore, front and back, and completely and totally angry, through and through. There wasn’t room in her to feel anything but that.
But then those slick fingers began to drag over that area of her body that was so blasted sensitive to him that it startled her every time he touched her there, and this time was no different, despite her supposed imperviousness to whatever it was that he was going to do to her. She couldn’t ignore that. She just … couldn’t. Her body simply wouldn’t allow it.
And neither would he.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know she was angry at him, and that she was doing her level best to ignore him. But he was pretty sure he had a remedy for that. His fingers attacked her clit mercilessly, rubbing and flicking it, using the entire pad of his middle finger, which more than dominated the intended area, to swirl every bit of her, pressing slightly, demandingly, flicking the tips of both index and middle fingers sideways over her until he got what he wanted out of her.
Caged Page 6
