I could afford to employ Grimm as my bodyguard for years, and I decided I’d do so until I was sure Mister Black was never returning. What I needed was a whole SWAT team, but I had to be practical. At least Grimm had figured out some of what had happened.
I even thought through the what-ifs of having someone track down Mister Black. Possible? Maybe. Then what? Have him killed too? That idea disconcerted me. It would make me worse than them. If I didn’t keep some of my morals, tread a path I believed in, where was I? Reuben would’ve won.
I wouldn’t have killed him. There might be other ways to ensure he stayed away. When I was ready, I’d do something more...when having to think about stopping Mister B didn’t make me nauseous.
Two months went by. It was a pity my desires for Grimm had not rekindled. I’d become resigned to us being only friends, though I knew he still hoped for more.
*****
One morning, sitting on rocks at a bay near Bowen, just south of Townsville, I faced up to the truth.
“I’ll go get us some coffees.” Grimm slid off the big slab of rock we’d chosen to sit on to view the sea.
“Sure.” I poked my sunglasses higher on my nose and watched him head off up the beach. Once I’d have watched his butt. Now, it left me cold. I could see how perfect his physique was but it was like admiring the beauty of a sculpture.
Seagulls flew past to land, pattering their feet on the sea-washed sand. The wind was cool. Only a few strollers were out this early but no one was swimming. It wasn’t quite stinger season, but jellyfish appeared in the water early some seasons, I’d been told. A toddler went face first into the sand and his mother rushed to pick him up and cuddle him, while brushing sand off his face. Cute family goings-on that made me smile.
I might swim anyway. Life was way too short to be safe every, single day. It was the one good thing that bastard, Reuben, had taught me.
But Grimm... I could deal with the lack of a sexual relationship with him. The truth? The whole truth? The relentless feeling that my life had become a landscape of nothing remarkable made me sad. Like most people, I needed meaning; instead I had a palmful of ashes.
I was rich and free and irredeemably lost.
With Grimm off buying coffee, I could cry stupid tears onto my red bikini and not worry about embarrassing myself.
Surf, sun, and sobbing. I heaved out a sigh. I’d get over this day. I always did.
Then something interrupted my pity party. A sensation I hadn’t felt for a long while. A mesmer was nearby.
Mister Black.
Shit, shit, shit.
I dragged my panic down a level.
Grimm was far enough away that I worried. I’d have to leave my sunglasses behind but I hopped off my rock, waded deep into the water, and struck out to swim parallel to the beach. I needed distance and Grimm was further along this beach, up near the mobile barista van.
Lucky I could swim like a fish.
I waded out a hundred yards farther along and slogged my way up the sand, dripping water and getting sandy feet. The towels were in the car. If I missed Grimm... I couldn’t see him anywhere on the path he’d have to take to get to my previous spot. I made it to the road and found the barista van gone and Grimm was...
I turned in a circle. Only our car, the silver-gray Range Rover, and a few others in the parking bays. Where was he?
The urge hit me like an avalanche as a car drove up and stopped.
Get in.
I hesitated enough that I recognized that familiar, etched line-of-resistance. I mustn’t do this.
My lips felt slack, my head was filled with nothing of consequence, but I stalled a second, then it was two, and I nearly took a step backward. There was a reward for resisting and it was getting to stay being me. Going backward made my muscles strain as if I walked in cement. My legs locked up and I gasped. My head would burst soon. My resolve collapsed and I took a step toward the car, then another, more, until I found myself entering the car through the now-open door.
It was cool and dark inside. I cast my gaze downward because I didn’t want to see him.
“That was interesting. Were you running away? You’re lucky I didn’t make you strip off before you got in.”
I knew the voice.
Fuck, I whispered. Or had I only said that in my mind?
“It’s been a long time but yes, you made me think of that as soon as I saw you – fucking you. Wearing that red bikini should be a crime. Look at me.”
I looked.
Mister Black sat beside me in a casual, dark shirt and, of all things, shorts. He’d always been so formal. The dark waves of his hair and olive hue of his skin reminded me of his Greek or Italian origins. If I had to be a slave of any man, at least he looked the part of a Greek god. The crinkles around his eyes hinted at kindliness. What a pity they lied.
I caught a glimpse of another man in the driver’s seat. My focus slipped from him as if on ice. The car was rolling along a road at a fair speed. I should be alarmed, but I wasn’t. But I knew I should be. The logic bothered me. How did I... What did I...
“Stop thinking.”
He’d slid beside me, closer than before and now he leaned in. Daring his wrath, I turned away. I could still say no, a little. I just needed to get a grip, to find the cracks. The warmth of his breath on my neck warned me a moment before, then he bit my ear lobe, sending a delicious frisson of excitement down my spine to my pussy.
With his hand on the side of my jaw, he pushed my head toward him. His mouth was inches from mine and I couldn’t help sinking the world of his dark eyes.
“Stop avoiding me. I’m here. You’re here, and you’re not leaving this time. Until I say.”
He smiled a taunting smile because he knew he had me, no doubt, and knew I’d seen it too. A foregone conclusion, today, but tomorrow and tomorrow, and the day after? I could learn to push back. Then I wondered what he would be like to kiss. It would only take the smallest movement for me to bite his lip. Would he sink his tongue into my mouth?
“Spread your legs. I need to see your...” His smile widened.
I swallowed, caught in his web, aching for more.
“Cunt.”
“Bastard,” I whispered. Yet no matter how much I protested to myself, I slowly spread my legs. Stop. Don’t. I resisted, almost whining at the effort but keeping it to merely gritting my teeth. I didn’t want him to hear me.
The sea water and sand on the back of my thighs made the seat cover rasp lightly over my skin.
“Did you swear at me?” The devil was in his eyes.
“Yes,” I spat out.
“Hmmm. I like that.”
And that, of course, was what made him different from Reuben.
Conflicted by my emotions and thoughts, breathing through parted lips, I watched him put his hand down and slip it beneath the crotch of my red bikini pants, and then...fuck oh fuck...he pushed into me. I knew with precision every new place where his finger touched as he delved inside, and every movement of the walls of my cunt.
“There?” He squeezed in another inch.
Defying the laws of physics, I liquefied. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck.” My spine arching, I let my head flop back, then I sighed the sigh of a woman transported into nirvana. I realized, to my dismay, I’d been waiting a long time to feel his hands on me again.
“Like that?”
I eyed Mister Black, smug asshole, caught between lying because I feared admitting the truth and a compulsion to tell him. In the last overwhelming seconds, I’d lost the awareness for how much he was making me and how much I wanted it. Then he revolved his finger, slow as molasses, pressing on exquisite places. Moisture welled from me. My eyelids fluttered lower and despite striving to stay silent, I groaned.
“You need to say it. Say it then I’ll make you suck on my cock while I make you come.”
What? I didn’t want that. He could go –
The sound of a zip made me open my eyes completely. He pulled out his erection an
d let it stand proud, watching me as I watched his hands and his cock. Was that an incentive? How could it be?
Then I looked some more. God, yes, it was.
I hated admitting this. It was a weakness, a flaw in me. I didn’t need him.
But my mouth hung open as I stared at his cock. Certainly I ground my pelvis toward his fingers as he stepped up the pace and fucked me with them. I widened my thighs and he stopped moving.
Distraught, I stared down at his hand where it disappeared into my bikini bottoms, then reluctantly, I looked to him. The fucker was waiting, knowing he had me, had me figured out and his hand up inside me.
Was he making me say this? I doubted it. This was me, just me. The man had something I needed so damn badly. My pussy clamped in on his fingers and I found I was panting, my breasts going up and down like crazy.
“Damn you.” Then I cleared my throat, swallowed, and took the step off into the dangerous unknown. “Yes. Fuck you. I like it.”
“Do you want to suck my cock while I make you come?” Still inside me, his hand revolved and his thumb glanced across my pussy, conjuring minuscule flurries of arousal and making my thighs tense, before his thumb came to rest on my clit... and stayed there. The mere pressure evoked nice things.
My eyes rolled up and I climbed another rung toward nirvana. My legs shook as he brushed light circles over the top of my clit – the touch of a man who knew the inside of my mind as much as the inner workings of my body. I awakened to a new realization. This was why Grimm didn’t affect me. I would never know pleasure without a man like Mister Black, a mesmer.
Sad and mortally humiliating, but I was here with him, here, now. Why not appreciate it? I squirmed, struggling with my shameful thoughts.
“More,” I whispered, almost gagging. “Please?”
Nothing. Clearly he was still waiting.
Suck his cock? Frowning, I bit my lip hard to stop myself speaking again. Was this like Reuben? No. Not at all.
His thumb moved.
Lust rippled from my mind to my peaking nipples then all the way down to my toes, making me resonate with desire. It was a promise of something extraordinary no one else could gift. After a final, shuddering groan, I succumbed to the inevitable.
“Yes. Please. Please, please.” His eyebrow twitched upward. “Please. Let me suck your cock while I come.”
“Good.”
Then he pushed my head down to his lap with enough force to say he was making me but not enough for me to be sure. My lips met the head of his cock and engulfed it, slipping over him, even as he began finger fucking me in earnest. I could hear the sounds of my arousal in time with the thrust of his fingers and the slick sounds of my tongue and lips sucking up and down on his shaft, even some spluttering when I went too far. With his hand in my hair he directed the sexual act like the drummer of a rock band with mad skills of synchronization.
When his cock was nearly throat deep, arousal burst over me, shaking me and plunging me into a savage climax where the world disintegrated. With my mind checked out, I was unsure which end of me had cock inside it and which had fingers. I bucked and wrapped my thighs around whatever was down there, not wanting to lose the parts of him inside me.
He extracted his cock from my mouth then let me stay there on his lap, my shoulders heaving as I sucked in much-needed air. He hadn’t come, and he simply stroked the side of my face and waited for me to reclaim myself.
“I’m going to mark you next,” he murmured. “Sweet girl. It may not alter how you see me but I like to mark my acquired women. Plus, I think you need it.” He made me turn my head and I licked my lips and faced him. “I know I do.”
I blinked slowly, gathering ideas. Why should I need his mark? “I don’t think so.”
“Shhh. It’s not your choice, this time.”
As if it had been before? I wondered at that. How much of what I’d let him do was just me? He was fucking with my mind by using his power sparingly, like an artist with watercolors using too much water. Where was the color? Was I seeing what wasn’t there?
By the time we pulled up outside a tattoo shop in town, Ink Anarchy, with shoppers bustling past the car windows, he’d given me a pair of white drawstring shorts to wear, a loose blue T-shirt, and an instruction to obey. I couldn’t defy him no matter how I tried.
I was locked into this.
The tattooist didn’t notice a thing as the transaction played out. Money changed hands, sketches were agreed on. From the words said, Mister Black had arranged this previously. He’d been that confident he’d have me now.
Dismay crawled in. Did I truly have so little choice? Was this his first step in making me his weapon?
I climbed onto the table and lay there, stomach-down, with my face in a convenient face-shaped hole. Whatever the tattooist or the driver looked like, I had little clue. They might be Martians for all I’d retained of their appearance. The man could control who and where I looked.
How did I stop this? Sex from now on, if I wanted pleasure, would be through Mister Black or not at all. Or perhaps another mesmer? But could any of them ever be better than this? I sensed that in some ways, he cared for me, but only as much as a man with a new pet might care.
It wasn’t enough for me. I needed love. I think Grimm had that in him – love. If I’d still been normal, maybe with him I could’ve found love. A tear or two slipped down my face, dripped to the tiles below.
The buzz and incessant bite of the needle distracted me from my thoughts of love, escape, and sex, but I knew. I was as much a prisoner of Mister Black as I had been of Reuben.
When completed the tattoo was to be shown to me in a mirror. Mister Black sat me on his lap, smoothed away and gathered my hair at the nape. My skin was red at the edges, angrier than I could be in this moment due to how tightly he held me in check. At the periphery of my vision, I noticed the highly tattooed tattooist looking amused. No doubt few of his customers sat on the laps of their men while checking the artwork.
“Very pretty.” Mister Black’s voice soothed me, settling into my flesh like a swig of rich whiskey going down my throat. Under my bottom, I felt the swell of his erection. “Look at it, Zorie.
I looked properly this time and saw the mark – a black raven etched into my neck. It was small but pretty, standing side-on and eyeing me back, impudent as most ravens are. I half expected it to flare its wings and fly away.
“I like it,” I said, my voice husky. True.
“Of course you do. You like it because it makes you mine.”
Debatable but I said nothing more, and I wondered idly when he would put that large cock under my thighs into me. When not under my control, my mind wandered in the stupidest ways.
We drove away, our party of three. I had no chain about my neck or ankle but Mister Black didn’t need that.
Now marked indisputably with his raven, I lay with my head rocking on his shoulder while he played with my hair, my ass, my breasts, and whispered soft, admiring phrases about how much he liked having me with him and how brave I had been.
At the very back of my mind, I wept at the falseness. Pretty words. Empty ones. My bravery had cost me. I’d needed a man helping me kill Reuben not cheering me on from a distance.
Even so, his hands stirred me. By the time we slowed, the crotch of the bikini bottoms was soaked and I had my fingers clenched in his shirt while I whispered moans at his every touch.
“We’re here. Sit up.”
We approached a quaint farmhouse cross rentable upmarket manor a few miles outside of the small town. The sign at the gate that opened onto a road that led up a small slope to the house, said RENT ME. The house was a pristine white with a corrugated iron roof, a perfect green lawn surrounding it, and in the next heartbeat I knew the reins on me had loosened.
I’d bet a million he’d arranged this place weeks ago also. When did I get to be a step ahead of his plans? It seemed fair to hope.
When.
The reins were loose...
> Should I run? Should I crack open the door and run? With my hand on the door handle, I heard Mister Black tsk.
“No, you’re coming inside with us, Zorie. I give you full autonomy and you instantly think to escape? I need to do more than mark you with a raven.”
Us?
He was right though. The raven hadn’t changed me... It comforted me to know I could rebel at the drop of a hat, on the spin of a coin. Just give me that moment. If only his commands didn’t hold me until he deliberately reversed or lessened them. I still hadn’t been able to speak to Grimm, or anyone else, about mesmers and Reuben had died.
I followed Mister Black up the shallow timber steps and into a hallway, down deeper into the house, then all the way through to a huge bedroom at the back of the house. A wide, curtain-framed window looked out over a vista of fields and grassland.
The king-sized bed was covered by a quilt as big as the fields out there. Lemon yellow daisies and a white background that was glaring and clean.
Mister Black eyed the bed. “What a pity we’re going to get it dirty. Take off your shorts and T-shirt.”
I slipped them off and felt the driver behind me take them from my fingers. He hadn’t spoken at all that I recalled. Whoever he was, whatever he was being paid, I imagined he was enjoying watching this otherwise Mister Black would never have employed him.
I expected an instruction to remove my bikini next but instead he gestured at the bed. “Lie down on your back, with your ass at the edge and your feet on the floor.”
I walked over and did so. I lay on the bed obediently, feeling the bed dip as the driver sat above me. Watching, as always. Dirty man.
His steps quiet on the floor rug, Mister Black stepped in until he towered over me.
“Open your legs, inch the bottoms down so I can see your pussy, and play with yourself. I want you ready for me to fuck you.”
Intense words but the grip of his command was light. I swayed, caught in a backwash of maybe yes, maybe no.
Wicked Ways (Dark Hearts Book 1) Page 18
