by Kery, Beth
Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Beth Kery, recipient of the All About Romance Reader Poll for Best Erotica
“One of the sexiest, most erotic love stories that I have read in a long time.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“A sleek, sexy thrill ride.”
—Jo Davis
“One of the best erotic romances I’ve ever read.”
—All About Romance
“Nearly singed my eyebrows.”
—Dear Author
“Fabulous, sizzling hot . . . You’ll be addicted.”
—Julie James, New York Times bestselling author
“Action and sex and plenty of spins and twists.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“Intoxicating and exhilarating.”
—Fresh Fiction
“The heat between Kery’s main characters is molten.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Some of the sexiest love scenes I have read this year.”
—Romance Junkies
“Scorching hot! I was held spellbound.”
—Wild on Books
“Nuclear-grade hot.”
—USA Today
Because You Are Mine series
BECAUSE YOU ARE MINE (ALSO AVAILABLE IN SERIAL FORMAT)
WHEN I’M WITH YOU (ALSO AVAILABLE IN SERIAL FORMAT)
BECAUSE WE BELONG
Titles by Beth Kery
WICKED BURN
DARING TIME
SWEET RESTRAINT
PARADISE RULES
RELEASE
EXPLOSIVE
One Night of Passion series
ADDICTED TO YOU (WRITING AS BETHANY KANE)
EXPOSED TO YOU
One Night of Passion Specials
BOUND TO YOU
CAPTURED BY YOU
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2013 by Beth Kery.
Excerpt from Since I Saw You copyright © 2013 by Beth Kery.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61528-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kery, Beth.
Because we belong / Beth Kery.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-425-26612-0
I. Title.
PS3611.E79B45 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013017133
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / November 2013
Cover photograph of Pearl Necklace © Tammy Hanratti / Corbis.
Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Praise
Also by Beth Kery
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Special Excerpt from Since I Saw You
About the Author
My heartfelt thanks go out to Leis Pederson for her patience, guidance, and support as we traveled along this new territory together. Mahlet, as always, I appreciate your honest, constructive feedback. A special note of gratitude and admiration to the Berkley art department for the elegant, sensual covers for the Because You Are Mine series. And as always, my deepest gratitude to my husband. You are my rock.
Prologue
Francesca walked out of the dressing room carrying a blouse, jeans, and underwear, pausing when she saw Ian enter the suite. Her fiancé met her gaze, somber as a judge, and locked the door. A smile pulled at her lips.
“I was about to shower,” she said.
His eyebrows went up, his bland expression conveying wry disbelief. You’re doing no such thing, she could just imagine him thinking. Francesca chuckled. She knew what he intended every time he locked that door. His actions would have made her smile—not to mention her heart begin to pound faster—at any time, but today, it made her uncommonly happy. He’d been so preoccupied and worried about his mother’s health, tortured that he’d made a wrong decision in regard to her medication and care, convinced there was something else he should be doing but wasn’t. The care and protection of his mother had been ground deeply into his very bones since he was a child too young to be forced to consider such matters. He couldn’t escape the heavy responsibility as a man. Sadly, Helen Noble was making little-to-no improvements. Ian had been making frequent trips to London, crowding his already packed work schedule.
“Lucien and Elise are coming for dinner. We don’t have time,” Francesca reminded him.
He walked toward her. She wondered how long it would last—that shiver of anticipation she experienced—every time she saw that hungry gleam in his blue eyes and that predatory stalk. They’d been together now for over half a year, and her excitement had only grown. His recent preoccupation and worry only made that need to join with him sharper and more imperative.
“I called Lucien and asked them to come an hour later,” he said calmly as he removed the garments from her hands and set them on an upholstered chair.
“And Mrs. Hanson? She’s busy making roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
“She’s turning down the temperature in the oven. I told her I needed a nap.”
She studied him as he came toward her again. His “lie” to Mrs. Hanson, the housekeeper, was a true one. He looked as arrestingly handsome as usual, wearing a white-and-blue-striped dress shirt open at the collar and dark blue trousers—casual wear, for Ian—but the months of worry over Helen Noble had taken their toll. His facial muscles were drawn tight from tension and there were shadows beneath his eyes. He swore he hadn’t lost weight, and his clothes hung on his tall, fit frame as appealingly as ever, but Mrs. Hanson and Francesca agreed that he looked thinner. He’d been trying to diminish his anguish through his already rigorous exercise routines, the result being a leaner, harder
. . . impossibly more intense man. She reached up and touched his jaw as his arms encircled her waist.
“Maybe you really should rest. It would do you good,” she said as he pulled her against him. A jolt of arousal awakened her body at the sensation of his masculine contours fitting against her so perfectly.
“It would do me much, much more good to watch your beautiful face while you’re tied up and helpless,” he said quietly before he leaned down and kissed her.
She opened her heavy eyelids a moment later, drugged by his potent kiss and the sensation of his body hardening against her.
“Helpless against what?” she murmured next to his plucking lips.
“Helpless to resist me.”
“But I . . . don’t . . . want to . . . resist you. You know . . . that,” she managed between kisses, her body melting against him as he leaned over her, demanding every existing modicum of her attention. He lifted his head and his hand slid down her arm. He grasped her hand and led her toward the bed.
“The ropes will just reassure me,” he replied.
“Ropes?” Francesca asked, dazed. He’d used cuffs to bind her during foreplay and sex, and padded restraints and whatever else he might improvise with on the spur of the moment, including his own hands. But ropes?
“Don’t worry,” he said once he’d led her to the edge of the bed and encouraged her to sit. He leaned down and nibbled at her lips fleetingly . . . but convincingly, Francesca decided. “The ropes are made of silk. Do you think I’d ever put anything next to your beautiful skin that would mar it?” he asked near her ear a moment later, his low, rough voice causing goose bumps to rise along her nape.
She just stared up at him, enraptured by his small Ian-smile.
* * *
Less than ten minutes later, she lay completely nude horizontally at the foot of the large, luxurious four-poster bed, her hips at the corner and her torso along the bottom edge. She’d watched in amazement and growing arousal as Ian had meticulously—and knowingly—bound her wrists to her calves in an elaborate, precise design of black silk rope twists and knots. She lay on her back, her knees bent toward her chest, her thighs spread wide. He’d instructed her initially to hold her calves, the pressure of her gripping hands pressing her folded legs into her body. Then he’d begun to bind her, forearms to calves and then calves to thighs.
She was trussed up good and tight, although she was not uncomfortable. Unless the erratic pounding of her heart and the mounting need for friction on her exposed, naked sex counted as discomfort.
She watched Ian anxiously as he returned from the room at the right side of the suite, their private sanctuary—the room that was typically kept locked and contained all manner of instruments for bondage, punishment, and pleasure.
“What have you gotten from your room to torture me with?” she asked teasingly, her head twisted to see what he held in his hands. She saw little, however, with his body blocking what he set on the top of a bureau. He turned toward her, still completely dressed. Her nipples prickled beneath his hot stare as he examined her, as ever his gaze striking her as cool and assessing and blazingly possessive at once.
“My room?” he repeated as he came toward her. Her clit twanged in conditioned excitement when she saw the small pot of cream he held in his hand. It was the clitoral stimulant that he always rubbed on her when he was doing something new to her . . . something challenging. Francesca had dubbed it a “wicked cream” because it was known to make her want in ways she’d never before imagined. It was known to make her beg.
“Yes. Who else would the room belong to?” she asked distractedly.
“You, of course,” he said, holding her stare and untwisting the cap of the cream. She watched his every move with tight concentration as he dipped a thick finger into the little pot, a dull ache mounting in her by the second.
“You are the only one who has a key,” she said as he withdrew his finger and a dollop of white cream. He placed a knee on the trunk at the foot of the bed and leaned over her supine, bound form. “Therefore it is yours.”
“I control the room, yes,” he said, reaching. She lifted her head off the mattress, holding her breath as he neared her spread pussy, her mouth watering uncontrollably, her nipples tightening into almost painfully hard points. He’d conditioned her body so exquisitely. “But the room exists for your pleasure,” he continued. She gasped, and her head fell back as he knowingly massaged the cool cream between her labia and onto her clit. “Therefore, it is fair to say it is both of our domain, wouldn’t you say?” he growled softly as he rubbed.
“Oh . . . yes,” she moaned. Already the cream warmed beneath the hard, agitating ridge of his forefinger. Soon, very soon, it would make the nerves tingle and burn. It would make it so that she did just about anything to climax. Despite her growing arousal, what Ian meant was not lost on her.
Before they’d met, that room had been for Ian alone, the ecstasy he gave other women a mere by-product of his personal pleasurable aims. He still was the master of that room, but for him to say the room was theirs was special, and she was touched.
He straightened and stood, screwing the lid on the pot as he looked down at her with a hooded gaze, his expression hot but also vaguely frustrated.
“Why do you look at me like that?” Francesca whispered.
His nostrils flared slightly and he turned away. “I was thinking there is nothing more beautiful than you on the face of the earth,” he replied, his back still turned to her. “And that . . .”
“What?” she prompted when he faded off as he picked up some items on the bureau.
He turned and walked toward her, and for once she was so preoccupied by his intensity and what he was telling her, she didn’t immediately try to ascertain what was in his hand or determine what he planned to do to her, like she normally would.
“Ian?”
“I wish I could . . .” He paused, his gaze once again trailing over her from face to bound legs and arms. “Keep you with me always,” he said after a moment. He came toward her.
“I am with you always,” she said. Sensing his dark mood, however, she strained to lighten the moment. “Just try to get rid of me, and you’ll discover how hard it is to escape.”
He gave her a swift smile. “It would be an utter impossibility for me to escape you.” She opened her mouth to continue the conversation—she sensed it was important—but he sidetracked her by setting the items he carried on the bed and reaching between her thighs. He rubbed her clit with a quick, expert touch. She gasped. She’d always wondered at the fact that he touched her even more knowingly than she touched herself, as if he were inside her head and could feel what she did.
“Is the cream starting to work?” he murmured.
“You know it is,” she accused between gritted teeth. He met her eyes and she felt his smile all the way in the pit of her stomach. God, she loved him so much. Sometimes she worried he didn’t realize how much . . .
“I’m going to put something into your ass,” he said quietly, still rubbing her clitoris.
“Okay,” she said, sensing the pointedness of his comment, but not the significance. He didn’t use plugs on her all the time, but it was certainly one aspect of their sex play with which she was familiar. He must have noticed her slight confusion, because he pulled his hand away—making her whimper in protest at his absence—and reached for something on the bed.
“This,” he said, holding up a four-inch plug with a base. It wasn’t that different than ones he’d used on her before, with one exception. The base and the plug itself were completely transparent.
“Is it all right?” he prompted.
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation, even though she blushed.
Something leapt into his blue eyes . . . something she cherished. He quickly lubricated the clear plug. He watched her face as he carefully inserted it. She moaned softly a
nd bit her lip. The stimulation of her anus seemed to make the clit cream go into full action. She tingled and burned. He pressed until the base came into contact with her skin. She felt beads of sweat pop onto her upper lip.
She jumped when Ian abruptly shoved the heavy wooden trunk away from the foot of the bed and leaned down over her. The tip of his tongue flicked over the top of her lip, gathering her sweat, before he kissed her with barely restrained passion.
“I have never loved anything or anyone the way I do you,” he said gruffly when he sealed their kiss.
“I love you, too,” she whispered feelingly. A shudder of pleasure went through her as his fingertips found their way beneath her bent knee and he began to finesse a nipple. He put his hand on her shin, gently pushing her knee toward the other one, exposing her breast. His dark head lowered. She stared up blindly at the elaborate crystal chandelier over the bed as he kissed the nipple with warm, firm lips before he took it into his mouth and sucked, sometimes gently . . . sometimes not. Her ass muscles tightened reflexively around the plug and her clit pinched in achy pleasure. By the time he lifted his head, both of her nipples stood at attention, reddened and hard. He gave the left nipple one last gentle pinch. She whimpered in mounting pleasure and he released her.
“Have I ever told you that you have the most beautiful breasts in existence?”
“Once or ten thousand times,” she replied.
“They deserve even greater praise.”
The air between her spread thighs seemed to lick at the moisture gathering there. She watched, her breath coming erratically, as he straightened. Her heart lurched in excitement when he began to unbuckle his belt. When he’d lowered the zipper, he reached into his white boxer briefs and removed his cock, releasing the long, thick, veined shaft so that the base fell against the waistband of the briefs. His penis bobbed before settling, the heavy, swollen head causing it to fall at a slightly downward angle as it protruded from his body. Her mouth watered instinctively. Her pussy became even damper. The sight of his cock had once both intimidated and aroused her. After months of making love with Ian, however, only excitement remained.
