by Zara Cox
“I said you would be mine until the yacht reaches its final destination. Do you remember?” he demands softly.
I swallow. “Yes, sir.”
Smack.
The sting flames pure fire through my veins, spreading pleasure to my cunt, and tears to my eyes. I eat my moan and shudder through the pain.
“I distinctly remember using the word completely without exception. Did I not?”
“Yes, sir.”
Smack.
“As an intelligent woman, did you think that meant I would be okay with other men hitting on you?”
I tremble at the naked fury in his voice. “N–no, sir.”
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
The harder hits tell me that this is what enrages him most. My skin’s on fire and tears pour down my face. My left knee buckles and smashes against the vanity.
“If you think of us as parasites, then so be it. But we will be parasites with no distance between us, in the bedroom or out of it. Do you understand?”
He’s changing the terms of our agreement. “No, sir.”
“No, you don’t understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s simple, kitten. You’ll be mine in and out of the bedroom, completely, or this is over.”
I want a fuck load of things I can’t have. Our initial agreement set boundaries that I could see, if not totally control. Agreeing to this would wade me deeper into bat shit craziness of oceanic proportions. His gaze holds mine, fierce and demanding. I feel the clock to my demise counting down.
“What’s it to be, kitten?”
“Yes, sir.”
Smack. I flinch. A hand slams repeatedly against the toilet door, followed by a demand in muffled Spanish.
“Will you forget again?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Do you want me fuck you now?”
Every fiber in my body jumps at the low-rasped demand. “Yes, please, sir,” I answer with a ferocity that speaks to my unbridled craving.
He drops his belt and pets my welted and flaming skin gently with one hand, while the other slides around my thigh to slip between my legs.
“Ah, my brave kitten.” His voice drips with thick satisfaction. “So wet, and fierce and so fucking gorgeous.” He leans over me and aligns his rough cheek against mine. “Are you ready for your reward?”
My whole body trembles. “Yes, sir. Please, sir. Now.”
He slams into me, the force of his possession mashing both my knees against the vanity. The hand in my hair moves to cup one breast. He yanks on the nipple as he pistons, hard and fast and devastating.
Within a dozen thrusts, I’m cresting toward the edge. I cry out, and he stops.
“No! Oh, God...please, sir.”
I’m ready to commit murder when he pulls out of me, but he yanks me about and sets my ass on top of the vanity. The cool surfaces soothes my ass, but the action of pulling myself forward and parting my thighs wide to receive him, is tough on my ravaged skin. Yet I’ll endure that, and worse, just to feel Mason deep inside me.
I gasp when he lifts me clean off the vanity and impales me on his cock.
I throw my arms around his neck, ready to die with happiness. “Yes! Thank you, sir.”
“Jesus. You fucking destroy me,” he growls against my ear as he plunges me up and down on his steely erection.
“I’m coming. Oh, I’m coming!” A hazy thought that I should be quiet fleets through my head, but it melts under the furnace of release surging through me.
“Do it, baby. Come with me,” he commands, before he takes my mouth in a searing kiss.
I let go and let him catch me when my body loses all effort to remain upright. I lay my head on his chest and absorb the sound of his pounding heart.
We’re still shuddering and twitching in each other’s arms when three loud bloops from my phone announce incoming emails. I flinch and try to hide the premonition of doom that skates over my skin, but I fail miserably as I’m plunged into icy shockwaves teeming with dread and fear.
Mason’s finger slides under my chin and tugs my head up. He scrutinizes my faces for several intense heartbeats before he turns to where the phone is lit up a macabre Christmas ornament.
“What’s going on, kitten?” he asks, his voice once again deceptively soft.
I shake my head, doubting my ability to form words just yet. Or ever.
“We’re going to leave here right now and return to the yacht,” he says with another slow, mind-bending kiss. His voice is almost conversational, but I’m not fooled by the steel framing his tone. “Once we’re there, you’re going to explain to me why you jump and look like your worst nightmare comes to life each time your email pings.”
Chapter 23
Keely
I’m not going to tell him. Of course I’m not.
If anyone deserves to know what happened to me six years ago, what shaped my life, it should be Bethany. Maybe she doesn’t know it, but while she’s been leaning on me through the shit in her life, I’ve been leaning on her. Her needing me has saved me more times than I can ever tell her. Because while I’d concentrated on her, helping her get over the super-douche ex who left her for another man, and the tribulations of dealing with Zach Savage’s life before he met her, I’ve efficiently distanced myself from dealing with my own shit. Now she’s found her rock-steady happy, she’s more than strong enough to deal with whatever issues I bring to her.
So, by rights, she deserves first spot at my confession table.
But the moment we walk into Mason’s suite, the weight of burden is suddenly too much to bear. I want relief from that weight. I want to ball it up and dump it, even if it’s into a near stranger’s lap. He might judge me, most likely condemn me. But I’ll be selfishly lighter, less of a festering wound.
“Keely?”
His tone is a cattle prod that demands a reaction. I lay my clutch down, minus my phone, which he has in his pocket, and turn. I raise my hand to push back my hair, and I smell him on me. He’s imprinted on me as indelibly as the welts I can feel on my ass. He’ll fade with time, just like the marks on my skin. But for now, he’s a reality I can’t ignore.
And I don’t want to.
“You want me to tell you something I’ve never told another human being, not even the people who brought me into this world. Why?”
He watches me as he shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it slowly over the back of the sofa. “Because you’ve given me control over you, and you wouldn’t have unless a part you trusts me not to hurt you or use anything you say against you.”
The naked, raw truth in that staggers me for a moment. “And I am right? Can I trust you?”
“To a point. We don’t know each other well enough to demand unquestioning trust. We have it where it matters most, but you probably don’t want to lose sight of the fact that a bastard lives beneath this skin. Trust me with what you need to unburden, and I promise I’ll think long and hard before I let it influence our interaction any more than it’s doing right now.”
My mouth gapes for a moment, before I recover from that. “Can I have a second to think about that?”
He smiles and strides to where I’m standing. He cups my jaw and tilts my head up until I look into his eyes. “No. We promised each other the truth, Keely. I’ll never waver from that even if it’s not what you want to hear.”
“What if what I tell you isn’t what you want to hear?”
His thumbs brush my cheek, as hazel gold eyes probe mine, and I glimpse a wasteland of weary regret in his gaze before he blinks it away.
“Firstly, I’ve seen and done things that gives me very little right to judge what other people do. Secondly, and this is very important, so listen closely,” he pauses to suck my lower lip into his mouth. His tongue rolls over it, once, twice, before he releases me. The tingle he starts radiates throughout my body, and I lean closer to him. “I’ve never been surer in my life that nothing you tell me will diminish my need to fuck this stu
nning body, for as long and as often as it’s available to me. And Keely...?”
“Yes?” I expel the word in a hushed whisper.
“The sooner you get to telling me, the sooner I can get to fucking you. I’ve been dying to take that ass again since you made me turn it raw and pink back at the club. The longer you make me wait, the harder I’ll take you.” He steps back, catches my hand and leads me to the sofa. “So, shall we get to it?”
Shall we get to it?
Five small words that lay between my protective fortress and the wrecking ball poised to bring it down.
My breath shudders out, and I decide that I’ll start with the skinny version instead of the whole bloated, worm-infested carrion.
He sits and pats his lap. My ass still stings from my earlier punishment, so I crawl onto him with my knees on either side of his lean hips. His hands immediately settle on my waist, and he holds me in place. It’s a perfect position for fucking, especially with me being minus panties and the fragrance of my come wafting up between us.
His nostrils flare and his eyes darken as he breathes in deep. The atmosphere becomes charged, but I know there will be no fucking until words are said and naked, ravaged souls—mine at least—are bared.
He captures my wrists and runs his mouth over my knuckles as he stares at me. “Let’s start with the emails. Who’s sending them, and why?” he asks.
“I don’t know who’s sending them. But I know why. I’m...I think the end game is blackmail.”
He freezes for a moment, then presses his mouth against my skin one last time before he lowers my hands to his chest.
“The end game...”
“Yes.”
“How long has been going on?”
“A few weeks.”
This thumbs massage my hip bones, and I melt into his touch. “And why would anyone want to blackmail you?” he asks softly.
“I don’t know.”
He stares at me, and this time I don’t resent his silence. My answer demands elaboration, and I give it.
“What I mean is, I haven’t done anything worth being blackmailed over.” My mind screams at the un-wholeness of that answer, but I smother the rant. “Unless you call being at the wrong place at the wrong time a crime.”
My words are flippant, nothing like the barbed wires of resistance digging into my soul as memories I only allow to roam free in the dark apocalypse of my mind, break free into the light of day.
“Where and when was this?” Mason asks.
Reality drowns me.
I’m doing this. I’m really doing this.
I take a deep and useless breath as my gaze clouds and I’m back in that cold, horrid underground suite of rooms.
Ice drenches me until I can’t feel the tips of my fingers. Maybe I react to the cold, or maybe I just look frozen. Peripherally, I feel Mason take my hands in his and warm them with his breath.
“Six years ago, I went to a party, hosted by someone I believed to be my friend. I had no idea what sort of party it was. I was young and wanted to fit in, and everyone was talking about the party to end all parties. I charmed my way into an invitation and on the day, I was driven from my campus at UCLA to a house somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. I have no idea whose house it was. I was taken to a part of the house named east wing on Friday night. I woke up in hospital on Monday morning.”
Mason may have tensed. Or he may have sprouted a halo and turned into Angel Gabriel. I don’t know because I’m sucked violently into the past.
Chapter 24
Keely
Six Years Ago
“Omigod! Leo, what the fuck is going on? Why is that girl screaming?”
I’m still holding my stinging cheek from the virtual slap from the TV bimbo. I look around, certain that if I search hard enough, I’ll find the remote to turn this acid trip off.
Another scream rips through the room, this time from behind a black curtain positioned in a different section of the room. A flap opens as someone goes in and I catch a glimpse of another girl. This one is suspended from ropes tied to the ceiling. But there’s a floodlight set up on a tripod over there too, showing her naked and severely contorted body, and the avid audience staring up at her.
My hammering heart climbs into my throat, and my hand falls uselessly to my side. As a teenager in a sex-centric world, I’ve on occasion thought of what an experience in a sex club would be like. Even as a nineteen year-old virgin, I know this isn’t it.
Morbid curiosity dampens my fear for a moment, and I stare at my surroundings.
In total, I count eight floodlights illuminating squared off areas the size of my living room back home. Besides the floodlights, there are no other lights. It doesn’t stop my gaze from probing the dark, trying to make sense of what I’m witnessing.
It registers that Leo hasn’t responded and I start to turn.
Suddenly my TV bimbo has gotten stronger and is yanking me by the arm down the dark middle of this amphitheater of fuck knows what to fuck knows where.
I start to fight, then realize it isn’t my virtual nemesis, but Leo’s hand shackling me. He’s dragging me along faster than my unfamiliar stiletto-shod gait can keep up. I stumble and nearly trip, but I catch myself at the last minute and try to reverse my forward momentum into my first circle of hell.
“Leo, let go of my hand, please.” I try to pry him off me, but he’s strong. Way stronger than me. He has to be in order to do all but the most dangerous of his own action stunts during film shoots.
“I’m sorry, Keely,” is all he says.
“What do you mean, you’re sorry? Sorry for what?” My voice is high-pitched with pure panic as we pass yet another curtained off square. Someone in moaning, and it’s not the type of moan that proclaims pleasure.
It’s the type of moans that says: you’re hurting me. I don’t like it, but I’m at a point where I know I can do fuck all about it.
The rise of excited voices in that section also tells me there’s an audience lapping up whatever is being done to the individual beneath the spotlight.
“Please, Leo. You were right, I shouldn’t have come. It’s not too late. I...I can leave. Just let me go and I’ll forget this ever happen. I won’t tell anyone. You have my word.” My words tumble over each other, and my heart tears it’s moors and plunges into my stomach when I see where we’re headed.
My eyesight has adjusted enough in the semi-darkness to see a last, unlit area at the back of the cavernous room. I can also pick out the dark, eager figures crowded around the parted curtain. They turn as Leo drags me forward.
“No!” I mean to roar the word like a fucking lioness, but it emerges as a whimper unworthy of a cockroach.
The ominous sound of a switch being thrown drenches the single chair in the middle of the room in blinding light. I see the black ropes snacking from the back of the chair and I spend a hot, insane little second wondering why they’re not white like the others. Am I not worthy? Or am I worthy beyond my own comprehension?
The pause button on my nightmare releases and a scream kamikazes into my throat. Before I can let it rip, Leo’s hand slams over my mouth.
“Whatever you do, Keely, don’t scream. This will be over much quicker if you just go with the flow.”
I lose all feeling in my knees, and my body drops like a stone. Leo catches me easily by the waist, and his other hand cups the back of my head and shoves me through the gap in the curtain. When I’m directly beneath the light, he releases me.
One calm part of me helpfully steps forward and offers flashes of my young life in a shockingly brief, but totally Oscar-worthy clip. I’m sure I hear ghostly applause as the other part stares at Leo, mummified in fear and shock.
“Why are you doing this?”
His head drops for several seconds, and I see that regret from earlier flash over his face. But he lifts his head and all I get is a blank, beautiful canvas.
“Take your clothes off, Keely.”
“Fuck you,” I say
. The feeble power in my voice bolsters me a little. “Fuck you! Fuck you! FUCK YOU!”
“Dammit, Dorian. This again?”
I jerk at the bored, disembodied drawl. The murmurs from behind the curtain stop, and that scares me even more than anything that’s gone on so far.
“That’s fucking strike two. You know what happens should you commit a third fowl,” continues the voice.
Dorian/Leo shakes his head. “She wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“Did you not invite her?” the voice queries.
“Yes, I did, but—”
“And what do the rules say, Dorian?”
His jaw clenches tight for a minute, and terror slashes across my every nerve. “One for all. Free for all.”
“Prepare your guest, Dorian. If you can’t calm her down, help will be provided. But remember, that’ll be a third count against you.”
The voice shuts off and a feed that sounds like a radio’s echo sounds through the room before the voices rise again.
Leo raises his head and I see determination in his eyes. I shake my head as he advances toward me.
“No! God, please, no! Leo, stop this. You don’t have to do this.”
He reaches me and grabs my arms. “Dammit, Keely. Shut the fuck up!”
I fight with renewed strength. Whatever he’s planning to do to me, I don’t intend to make it easy for him.
“You weak, fucking pathetic asshole! Why did I think you were even worthy of one second of my time?” I snarl, my voice shaky with terror.
“That was your mistake, not mine.” His fingers dig into me as he hauls me toward the chair.
I kick and scratch and spit. Some blows connect. Some hurt me more than they hurt him. My knee catches a sharp corner of the chair and it doesn’t move. I realize it’s bolted to the floor and fight harder. Leo’s shirt rips beneath my frantic effort to escape my reality. The stench of blood and fear gags me as I’m thrown into the chair.
That’s when my screams finally step up to the plate and put in the performance of a lifetime.
I’m hoarse by the time the first rope snakes around my calf.
