Caged

by Carolyn Faulkner

  When he returned, he was wearing the shirt and he gave her the dress.

  “You stole these!” she accused.

  “You would prefer to ride around with a half naked man, wearing his shirt to cover your one and only dress that’s torn nearly to shreds?”

  Her face became even more pinched than it had been before and she made no move whatsoever to don the dress.

  “Put it on.”

  Cage reached up and tugged her down to stand—a bit unsteadily—before him. When she hesitated, he reached over and pulled his much too big shirt over her head easily, tucking it into his saddlebag.

  As she stood there, unsuccessfully trying to shield herself from his avid gaze as her dress gaped at every possible fold and rend, he grabbed her arm and turned her to stand sideways before him, bringing his palm down on her cringing behind. “Do as I say, or I’ll strip you right here, right now and take my belt to you.”

  Sobbing softly even after he let her go, Rachel reluctantly put on the dress, which fit her reasonably well and was in much better condition than the one she was foolishly trying to cling to.

  Cage snapped up the old, torn one and put it in his saddle bag, too, then he moved her to his horse, putting her up first, high on the saddle, then swinging up behind her to kick his heels into his horse’s flanks while keeping a tight hold on the other one’s reins.

  “This is uncomfortable—why can’t I ride my own horse?” She was bumped obscenely against him with every movement the horse made, and she could clearly feel his excitement pressed against the bottom that he had already cruelly told her he was going to punish this evening, making her have to dread the event the rest of the day.

  He didn’t answer her.

  They made surprisingly good time, although that was mostly because he was practically running the horses into the ground.

  They were headed east, she knew, and that only added to how unsettled she felt. He kept them well into the outskirts of any town, keeping them in the woods for the most part, avoiding even the less traveled roads in favor of maintaining as much anonymity and keeping as much cover as they could.

  That first night, he wouldn’t even allow them to have a campfire. They ate the meager rations she had wisely rescued from her larder, supplemented by a few nuts and berries he was able to scrounge before it got too dark.

  But he didn’t let either their primitive conditions or the lack of light deter him from doing exactly what he’d said he was going to do to her. It was a cloudless night and there was nearly a full moon, more than enough ambient light to set her butt afire for disobeying him—and in a situation that could easily have cost her her life.

  She was exhausted, and he knew it, but that wasn’t going to earn her any leniency, either. He was at least that tired or more so, because he was still healing, and bouncing along on that horse wasn’t his idea of a restful recovery.

  When they’d finished with their dinner, such as it was, she reached into the gunny sack and produced a sheet and her coverlet, putting the sheet down over the ground and getting under the coverlet for warmth, fully clothed.

  Cage checked the horses one more time, wishing he had grain to feed them, considering what he’d put them through all day, but it wasn’t to be for another few days, at least. He figured that was about how long it was going to take to get them closer to civilization, closer to his father and safety.

  Then he took off his boots, put his gun where he could easily get to it, near his head and tucked himself under the coverlet with her.

  Rachel didn’t even bother to acknowledge him and Cage didn’t allow that to bother him in the least. And when she expected him to pull her over onto her back, he instead pushed her onto her tummy.

  “What do you think you are doing?” she asked sounding every bit as indignant as some grand dame.

  “You know exactly what I’m doing, Rachel,” he responded calmly. “What did I tell you I was going to do because you disobeyed me yet again this morning?”

  Rachel was silent on the matter, fully expecting that he was going to begin to spank her, her body already tensed in anticipation.

  But instead, Cage’s hand reached not to smack soundly down onto her bottom, but rather to burrow down between her legs, forcing them to admit his presence as he slipped his hand into the open slit in the fabric and right up into her, two fingers claiming her rudely, abruptly, not stopping until he could feel the end of her as she gasped and clawed at the sheet beneath her, desperately trying to get away from him until his other hand came down on her lower back to keep her pinned in place for his lewd explorations.

  She wasn’t dripping, but she was definitely wet. He slid into her with relative ease, although Cage wasn’t at all sure that she would have put it that way. She was so slick and hot and tight that his cock raged against the confines of his pants—it knew its home, knew how crazy she could make him, and he very nearly gave into that urge.

  But instead, he removed his fingers and brought them up to her clit, tugging her hips back so that she was on her knees with her bottom in the air, a deeply humiliating position that inspired Rachel to try again to get away from him. Cage had come prepared, though, and he didn’t hesitate one moment to find and secure first one then the other of her naughty hands, and once he’d done that, he’d murmured in the quiet, almost regretfully, “If you keep trying to escape me it’ll be the belt for you from now on.”

  He ignored her roar of impotent rage as his fingers continued to brush insistently over that trembling peak. “What did I say I would do to you because of your misbehavior this morning, Rachel? Tell me.”

  She opened her mouth to do so—desperately wanting him to stop touching her like this, to stop making her feel like this, but all that came out was a mortifying groan that had her practically sobbing at the end—not from the pleasure he was bringing her but from the mortification.

  Ten hard, crisp swats fell onto her unprotected rear end, making her yelp loudly with each one, wiggling her bottom furiously in a futile attempt to avoid the swats, not that she was successful in the least.

  Then those fingers, the wet fingers that had left damp impressions on her behind, returned to that spot between her legs to torture her even further by not only flicking and pinching her, but also patting her there quite forcefully, almost swatting her.

  “Oh–Ohh, no! Stop! Please!”

  “Answer me, Rachel.” Cage was relentless and unbending.

  “You said you were going to spank me for not being quiet while they were there,” she practically hissed at him, expecting that that was going to halt the torture he was putting her through.

  But she was wrong. Very, very wrong.

  “And what do you call me, Rachel?”

  She keened softly at that, at being required to call him a term of deference that she distinctly didn’t feel he’d earned in any way, saying nothing.

  So the spanking began again, only this time each swat was delivered much harder, such that she was crying before he’d barely connected with her already well-heated flesh three times.

  “Sir! Sir! Sir!” she yelled, and yet he continued to punish her, bringing that open palmed hand down again and again, covering every inch of her bottom multiple times, until there was no iota of unseared territory left.

  “Say the entire thing again,” he ordered when he finally ceased.

  Between choking sobs, she barely got out, “You–you said I’d be spanked tonight be–because I wasn’t quiet, S–Sir.”

  He might have stopped spanking—for the moment—but his hand hadn’t left the territory it had been chastising. It continued to rub over skin that it had just singed badly, making Rachel add deep moans to her heartfelt sobs. “Yes, you disobeyed me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rachel agreed, correcting herself quickly, “Yes, Sir.”

  “And now you have to be punished.”

  She had no idea what he had in his hand. It wasn’t his belt because she hadn’t heard the buckle click as he to
ok it off. It was something that she learned very quickly, however, was just as bad, if not worse.

  It was a switch that he had cut when he’d been scrounging close to their camp for wood. She was so busy being petulant and ignoring him as much as possible that she hadn’t even noticed when he’d reached up and cut the thin, green length from the willow tree.

  Now Cage brought the doubled over, makeshift whip down, slicing two thin, abominably stinging lines down on that beautiful behind of hers. He didn’t stop until the switch was broken and bent just a bit up from where his grip was, and, even in the dim moonlight, he could see the raised evidence of her punishment in stark relief on her bottom, the undoubtedly painful trails overlapping and crisscrossing over every inch of her. The switch was so flexible, so malleable that he knew from her yelps that it had also occasionally dipped down into the usually well-protected area of her tender cleft.

  Rachel was beside herself. She didn’t know what to do to try to cope or comfort herself. She couldn’t run like she wanted to—he would catch her within a few steps and then she would have consigned herself unnecessarily to further punishments only with the belt.

  As much as she wanted to take her right then and there, to snug her well-punished bottom tight against him as he drove into her, his curiosity overrode that desire for a moment and he let his fingers return to the part of her they had laid claim to before he’d switched her good.

  And what he found made him smile so brightly his teeth shown in the dark. She was wet—much wetter than when he’d made his last foray down there to wet the tips of his fingers just prior to reaching for the switch.

  He had no doubt that the punishment he had meted out had hurt her. She was crying real tears, sobbing, chuffing, still sometimes having to drag big breaths of air into her lungs as she wept.

  But here was the evidence that although she might not have liked it, the rest of her did.

  A lot.

  He filed that very interesting tidbit of information about her away for another time and moved to kneel behind her, arranging his legs between hers so that she had no hope of closing them, and also so that she was spread before him whether she wanted to be or not, still on her knees, her head down on the sheet, wrists conveniently out of the way at the small of her back.

  His cock was twitching and itching to get inside her, and he wasn’t of much of mind to deny it. Rachel, who was so wrapped up in her own misery that she barely even knew he was there, nonetheless rose to attention the moment he pressed himself into her. Cage chuckled a bit when he abruptly found her back pressed to his front, but when she would have jackknifed back down, he held her up with a big hand on her tummy.

  “No, stay here,” he whispered into her ear. “Then I can play with your titties while I fuck you.”

  And he did, hefting each generous globe—for someone who was so skinny everywhere else, her proportions were still quite generous where it counted, her breasts and her behind were nicely rounded—and working her nipples roughly as she did her best to avoid him, but there wasn’t much she could do.

  And, with her hands tied behind her back, she was forced to arch it and press herself into his palms, even though his fingers were much less gentle than they had been—and she liked it. She hated it, but she liked how he was handling her—the slight rough edge to it. She might have thought that it would remind her of the way Mr. H. had handled her, but it didn’t, for some reason, perhaps because, unlike him, discomfort wasn’t the only thing that Cage required of her.

  Of course it wasn’t just her nipples he was teasing. One hand reached down to cup her womanhood, a big finger slipping over that greedy, throbbing bit, teasing, flicking a bit, rubbing some, then, with his other hand holding her open, he swatted her sharply once and she squealed, trying unsuccessfully to bring her legs together, to give herself any kind of protection at all against that happening again.

  “No, Cage–”

  “Who?” he asked, smacking her most private, sensitive part even harder this time.

  “No, please, Si–Sir!”

  Another flat fingered smack landed directly atop her clit.

  He slid himself all the way out of her then drove himself back in as he peppered her little nub with sharp smacks that had her almost howling, until his hand clamped over her mouth. “Just like this morning, you have to be quiet, Rachel.”

  Cage nearly came right then when she responded almost submissively, “Yes, Sir.”

  “Good girl,” he praised, rubbing fingers over the area they had just insulted as he continued to fuck her hard. “I want you to cum for me, Rachel.”

  “What?”

  He’d forgotten she didn’t know the term. “That pleasure you feel, building within you until it breaks open inside you in the most amazing way? That’s called having an orgasm, or cumming. I want you to cum, Rachel. Cum on my fingers like a good girl.”

  “Ohh, but–no–please!”

  “Yes. I can do this to you any time I like—I can bring you to this very easily, you know, just as easily as I can mark your ass with my belt or a switch or my hand. And I shall do both to you whenever I feel the urge, I promise you.” His whisper turned almost sinister as he hissed in her ear, “Because I know you like it.”

  He turned her head so that he could kiss her, one hand groping a breast, rudely pinching her nipple while the other worried her clit mercilessly, all while he was taking her hard, pistoning himself into her, holding her captive as she was being fucked and pleasured, her sore bottom pressed against his lower belly.

  She was very close, and she tried to squirm and writhe away from it, but he held her fast. “Cum, Rachel. Cum hard for me—”

  And she did. She had no control over it, over her body or herself—he had it all, and he was smart enough to put his hand over her mouth as she did so, because she screamed behind it while he continued to have his way with her, not letting up, not easing his fingers off but molesting her through her first orgasm and right on into her second, then just before he emptied himself within her, her third powerful, mind numbing culmination that had her collapsing back against him, and him collapsing back onto their makeshift bed.

  As much as he didn’t want to, Cage stirred relatively quickly, wanting to see to her comfort as much as was possible, gathering them both back under the coverlet where they belonged, turning her onto her side facing away from him, which seemed to be her preferred sleeping position and cuddling up behind her.

  “That should help you get to sleep quickly—to say nothing of all the excitement of the day,” he whispered.

  “Would you untie me, please, Sir?” she asked, and he was hard pressed to deny such a beautifully put request.

  He had debated about whether or not he would do that as they’d been settling down, and he thought he’d settled on the idea of leaving her bound—just in case she got a hair brained idea about escaping.

  But he vacillated about it when she asked so sweetly, and did end up untying her, warning almost casually, “You realize that I’ll make sure you won’t sit down for a month if you run.”

  Rachel threw pertly over her shoulder, “That presupposes that you’re going to catch me.”

  As much as he enjoyed her sass, to a certain extent, and definitely more than the cold silence she had adopted before, he could not allow himself to be amused by her banter. Gritting his teeth, he rolled her into his arms and held her uncomfortably tightly against him. “There are bad, bad men after me, Rachel, and none of them would hesitate to kill you if they found you with me. I told you before that they won’t want witnesses, and I wasn’t kidding. Your safest place to be is with me.”

  She snorted. “You think I feel safe with you when you punish and fuck me at will? I think I’ll take the danger, thank you.”

  Cage knew the truth of what she was saying, but he didn’t much like hearing it said out loud, and especially in those words.

  “Where, exactly, are we going?”

  “New Orleans and my father. His comp
any—our company—is headquartered there.”

  “Who’s after you? Or are they after him, too?”

  “Oh, they’re after him, yes, but he has security around him. I wasn’t smart enough to do that, of course. They get in the way.”

  She had to admit she was very curious about his background. “So why is everyone after you?”

  He chuckled. “It’s not everyone, exactly, although the man who’s sending them has unlimited funds, so it must seem it.” Cage sighed. He supposed it couldn’t do any harm to tell her. She was already pretty much involved.

  “My father is an inventor.” He was so involved in what he was saying that he didn’t notice how she perked up at that statement. “He came up with a much more efficient method of drilling for oil that will be easier and much quicker, with much less loss when it strikes and even fewer errors in locating it, which will save everyone involved a lot of money.

  “And the man who is after me is our rival, who stole the prototype from me as I was bringing it to the oil fields to be tested, and I, of course, stole it back, during which I was most unfortunately shot.”

  Rachel frowned. “You weren’t carrying anything when you arrived at my place. And I don’t think you were when we left, either. So where is it?”

  Cage smiled at her curiosity. “You’re asking so many questions—I’m going to start to think that you’re working for the other side.”

  She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question. “Do you mind one more?”

  “No, I suppose not, but then I want us to get some sleep.”

  “Who is this rival you speak of?”

  Cage shrugged. He guessed there wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t know the man’s name. “Arthur. Arthur Quinlan.”

  He was so tired that he again missed the way Rachel stiffened in his arms at the name. He fell asleep almost immediately, but despite the day’s activities, it took Rachel quite a bit of time to follow him.