by Dani Dundee
“I know. My first and only sub died three years ago, which left me crushed, and I wanted to be ready for this, and ready for you, but the closer and closer our date for spanking debauchery got, I started second-guessing myself. But, I was so damn stupid to bail on you. Clearly, I am ready. I want you. I’ve wanted you for weeks now.”
All our filthy conversations rushed to mind and I smiled. “Good, ’cause I’ve wanted you too.”
He nestled beside me and untied my wrists, and slowly kissed the back of each hand with a soft grip on my fingers. “Next time, I will thrash your ass exactly as you want and crave, okay?”
“Fantastic. I really look forward to that. Sir.”
When he spread out on his back, I climbed on top of him in a straddle, lay down, and tucked my head against his chest. We stayed like that for several minutes, with him caressing me like I was already his treasure even though we’d just met.
He stroked my hair and kissed my crown. “Mmm. Intertwined naked flesh. The best thing in the world.”
“I agree. I’m so glad we finally and actually connected in the flesh.”
“Me too, AngelKiss.”
“This was so much fun.” Bryce, my Sir, kissed me again, this time like eagles soaring, higher and higher, and, once he was perked up again, we found and took another stairway to heavenly bliss that got much more rocky and rough. And I loved it! It was more animalistic and raw than our last fuck, so we were winded and sweaty when we collapsed on the bed.
To cap off and celebrate our fiery, explosive orgasms, he made good on his texted promise to give me the sore, red ass of my fantasies, which was every bit as deliciously painful and stress-relieving as I dreamed.
This time, he spanked and belted me so hard, I had to jam my screams into a pillow.
I got to fall asleep in his kingly bed on my stomach, sniveling from the stunning torrent and release of emotions, clutching my well-spanked, sore bottom with a big smile on my face and affection blooming in my heart.
I felt like my blood had truly been imprinted with the essence of tiger.
I felt transformed, awakened, cherished … so brand new.
For the first time ever, I felt … divine.
* * *
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Daizie Draper is a happily married sex fiend, who loves to write naughty stories that mix the sweetness of chocolate with the bite of leather. She likes sensuality, kink, fruit, impressionistic art, spanking and beauty. She hates big bugs, freedom crushers, injustice, artificial orange and onions. Along with 27 other people in the world, she has never read Fifty Shades of Grey.
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Table of Contents
Red Hot Candy
Table of Contents
The Things I Never Said by Jo Raven
Perfectly Equipped by Lacey Silks
Billionaires in Disguise: Rae, Kidnapped by Blair Babylon
A Fan-TAB-Ulous Night by Olivia Rigal
Take it Easy by Daisy Prescott
Before Flesh by Sky Corgan
Scorched into Submission by Daizie Draper
Pandora's Box by Sarah M. Cradit
Braving Love by SJ Mayer
Always Enough by Molly McLain
Mine In Dreams by Olivia Hardin
Like Home by Mira Bailee
Unshakeable by JC Valentine
Yearning to Yield by Pavarti K Tyler
First-Class Scoundrel by Liv Morris
Mated in Bearfield by Jacqueline Sweet
Le Moulin by JC Andrijeski
Jesse's Girl by Alison Foster
Dude by Gillian Cherry
Biker Billionaire's Bitch by Layla Wilcox
Swaying Fate by Irma Geddon
Gender Studies 101 by Dani Dundee
Disclaimers and Copyright Notices
PANDORA’S BOX
by Sarah M. Cradit
PANDORA’S BOX
by Sarah M. Cradit
PANDORA’S BOX © Sarah M. Cradit 2015
A peculiar heart meets its mate.
Fate, though, has other plans.
CHAPTER ONE - JASPER
Jasper straightened his tweed jacket, moving through the halls of Brother Martin High School with the joyous ease of someone who knows exactly where they’re headed and can’t wait to get there.
Inside the worn leather bag, draped artfully over one shoulder, was a letter. The very one he and Esther had been waiting to receive for months. Her own letter came weeks ago, leaving them questioning whether his application would be accepted as well. With a sad sigh, she’d declared their efforts at an impasse, believing if the news was good, they’d have heard by now. They would make the journey together, or not at all.
Jasper envisioned her pale face taking on a shock of excited color as he leisurely revealed the scintillating contents of the delayed missive.
Esther Prejean was the love of his life. The soft, warm center of his curious heart. And soon—very soon—they would begin their lives together as anthropologists of the occult.
The first time he saw Esther, freshman year, she was a cape of golden hair, leaning over a hand-bound leather copy of The Necronomicon, carefully inserting a rainbow’s assortment of sticky-notes for later reference.
Once a week, all the private schools in New Orleans brought students together at the Brother Martin school library to give them research time for their studies. Judging from the jacket draped over her chair, he deduced she was from McGehee.
When girls from Louise McGehee, in the Lower Garden District, came to study, they rarely gave the Brother Martin boys the time of day. The Sacred Heart girls were usually more laid back.
Not that Jasper had much of a positive impact on girls from any school, with his elbow patches, tweed pants, and penchant for quoting from centuries-old literature.
“H.P. Lovecraft studies? Quite an unusual assignment,” Jasper declared, standing over her with a blend of inquisitiveness, high intrigue, and inexplicable fear.
“This is not for an assignment,” her smoky voice, shockingly mature for a girl her age, retorted back without even a slight glance his direction.
He straightened his lapel, a gesture his classmates often rankled him for. Don’t be such an old man, Jasper! He dared not wear any of his favorite vibrant cravats. “I don’t recall ever seeing you here before.”
With a resigned sigh, she closed the book. Her silken hair fell away from her face as she looked up, and gazing back at him was the most exquisite creature he’d ever beheld. Her almond-shaped amber eyes were painted up at the corners, giving her a distinctive feline appearance. The shocking shade of red coating her lips was the kind one is used to seeing on pinup girls.
“We’re from Baton Rouge,” she explained; the way she accentuated the words made it evident she believed where she came from to be far sup
erior to where she ended up. She blinked twice, sizing him up. “That jacket is groovy.”
“It’s my father’s,” he confessed, not adding he’d taken the jacket from a pile intended for Goodwill. “Nice shirt.”
The blonde bombshell glanced at her Souxsie & the Banshees tee, intentionally shredded at one shoulder, and shrugged. “I’m Esther. Prejean… of Prejean Textiles.”
“Jasper Broussard. Of the Deschanel dynasty.”
Esther wrinkled her nose with a snicker. “Dynasty, huh? Yeah, I know who you are. My father says the Broussards made their money by selling off all their land inheritance to oil companies. That they aren’t fit to share blood with the Deschanels, let alone a dinner table.”
“Sure, and?” Jasper nodded at the tome sitting on top of her knees, just past the hem of her very short skirt. “Where’d you get that, anyway?”
Esther smiled. “I stole it.”
“Sure you did.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“How would a girl like you even know about the vast pantheon of a genius like Lovecraft?”
Esther tucked the book into her beaded sack. “Maybe the kind who has studied the entire Cthulu Mythos forward and backward, in four languages, since she was seven?”
Jasper reflexively straightened his posture, beyond even his usual careful deportment. “I have a signed first edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
Esther stood, looping her bag over the crook of her elbow. “We should be friends, Jasper Broussard.”
We should get married, Jasper thought to himself, as his heart leapt forward with a light, merry skip.
Esther had a curious and complicated relationship with authority. She couldn't bear to be told what to do, by anyone, but sought out approval as if it was vital to her emotional survival.
When her father declared Jasper an inappropriate boyfriend for someone of her breeding (despite Jasper’s constant reminder he hailed from the most venerable family in the state of Louisiana, ahem), she immediately acquiesced, thus her rebellion existed solely outside of his knowledge.
Through Esther’s clever manipulations, they made a game of sneaking around, managing to keep the secret of their relationship hidden through the end of their senior year. Taking their occult research to the New Orleans Library, they used code to communicate from across the room, meeting between the Travel and Business aisles to discuss their findings, and lament the unfairness of their situation.
Their shared dream was to open a museum of the occult; a place where true enthusiasts of the supernatural could come and browse legitimate relics with actual merit, and not merely the smoke and mirrors found in most New Orleans tourist establishments. They’d corresponded with their idol, a Dr. Archimedes in Paris, who, inspired by their energies, offered to sell them a number of artifacts at cost, to help them get started.
Picture it, Jasper! A place where our passions could be taken seriously! There’s no better city for this than ours, yet you won’t find anything like what we’re proposing anywhere here.
Esther’s romantic notions made Jasper dizzy with love. For her, and for what they could accomplish, together, if only they could spend time unfettered by the fear of her father discovering they’d gone against his wishes.
Esther insisted Jasper was her boyfriend, though Jasper’s definition of the word included more than covert operations conducted in complete subterfuge. It also didn’t involve watching her date the insipid white-collar playboys her father approved of. He’d never even held her delicate hand in his!
“Maybe next weekend we can sneak away,” she’d promise each time the subject came up, a vow that traveled over the space of years and yet somehow never dulled his hope.
On her eighteenth birthday—a mere month after his—he presented her with a gift, in the form of an opportunity: join him for a week in Paris over spring break. An adult now, she could make her own decisions. If she chose to come with him, he would give her the world. His world, and everything within their potential to create as a combined force.
In the secret pocket of his heart, the place where his doubts lived, he didn’t believe she’d come.
But she did.
Dr. Archibald Archimedes was not at all what Jasper pictured. Instead of a mad scientist, with tufts of white hair pointing haphazardly, and questionable social and hygienic standards, he was a young man fresh out of his PhD program. Handsome, too, based on Esther’s reaction. Abashedly, he’d explained the former Dr. Archibald Archimedes Sr., his father, had died unexpectedly sometime after their last correspondence. “I intend to keep his promises,” the young doctor vowed. “Everything he offered you, I offer still.”
“Our very own patron!” Esther declared as she fell back on the lush bed in their hotel, sprawling over the golden duvet. Outside their balcony, the Eiffel Tower stood watch over the young lovers.
“Do you love me, Esther?” Jasper asked, dropping to one knee. He’d imagined the slow, deliberate move many times in his mind, his debonair charm sweeping her off her feet. Instead, his palms were drenched in sweat and his heart raced off the charts.
He expected her usual, noncommittal response, so when she sat up and slid to the edge of the bed, taking his face in her soft hands, he audibly gasped. “I do love you. I saved myself for you.”
Tilting his head upward to face her, he was relieved to discover nothing playful or teasing in her expression. Esther Prejean had expressed her love for him, finally, and he knew the words reflected the contents of her heart.
“We’ll come back here after we graduate, Esther, and I’ll make an honest woman of you.”
“The Sorbonne,” she decided. “The University of Paris. They have a program made for us. If we do this, we have to do it right.”
They spent the next week writing Lovecraftian-inspired verses and discovering what it meant to surrender to another. Plans turned to promises. Love to something beyond their youthful definition.
“Was I worth the wait?” Esther asked him on their last evening in the City of Love, as her wide, amber eyes gazed back from the goose-down pillow.
“You’ll always be worth the wait, Esther.”
“Call me Pandora,” she purred, stretching her arms before her, twirling them in the air. “I don’t want to be Esther anymore. I never liked her much.”
Jasper cared not about the angry father awaiting them back in New Orleans. He would move the heavens for Esther Prejean. Would cross through Dante’s seven circles of hell to find her. He’d not once, not ever, met someone who embraced his unconventional eccentricities and his strange, twisted heart. Someone he could appreciate in equal measure.
With a skip in his step, Jasper made his way toward the library, to show her his prize: his acceptance letter, finally, to The Sorbonne.
***
CHAPTER TWO – PANDORA
When Pandora Prejean, formerly Esther Prejean, learned she was pregnant, her very first thought was, What will my father say?
Of course, she knew the answer. That was the problem.
When she’d accepted Jasper’s invitation to Paris, the gesture was more symbolic than even he knew. She’d strung him along for years, praying he’d still be there when she found her spine and learned to be satisfied with not pleasing everyone. Her father would survive her falling in love with someone he didn’t approve of. The world wouldn’t cease its rotation.
Upon their return to New Orleans, Pandora had even mustered a burst of courage to tell her father of her love for Jasper, convincing herself it didn’t matter that he’d turned and left the room before she finished explaining herself.
Jasper was her heart. All the rest was interference.
Pandora managed to prevent her inevitable groveling, her usual fare of begging her dad’s forgiveness when his silence grew unbearable. Esther would have, but Pandora was a strong, confident woman with a bright future ahead of her.
Not the future a daughter of Francis Prejean was expected to pursue, of course, but his
pretentions had held her back long enough.
In the end, this was her driving motivation behind her regretful decision to turn to Cassius Broussard, instead of her own father, when she learned of the child growing within her.
Prejean Textiles pre-dated the Civil War, and enjoyed partnerships with over two hundred companies in Louisiana alone. The enterprise started with the hard work of Pandora’s third great-grandfather, Alistair Prejean, a man who, to hear her father tell it, should be held in equal reverence to Jesus Christ Himself.
In contrast, the Broussards inherited their fortune from their Deschanel cousins (a dynasty, Jasper had said, and that wasn’t far off in the minds of the peerage), then promptly sold all of the acquired land to interested oil parties. The same companies now responsible for their disappearing Gulf coastlines.
The difference between the two families was lost on Pandora. Capitalists were capitalists.
Cassius Broussard was peculiar, but not in the same way his son was. Intellectually gifted, though not as traditional as most of his generation, and prone to more direct language than many were comfortable receiving.
Of course, Pandora didn’t know this going into her visit. Her relationship with Jasper was conducted outside the purview of both their families, and so she’d never had the pleasure—if one could call it that—of meeting his father.
In a moment she’d reflect on the rest of her life, Cassius opened their discussion not by way of a customary greeting, but with, “You come to me carrying a grandchild, and expect my support?”
