by Nia Farrell
Gunnar finished his water, replaced the cap, and tapped the empty bottle against his palm. “Is that why you agreed to do the scene with her? You think she can handle it better with you there?”
Breanna sighed and brushed some sand from the blanket. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “At the time, it seemed—I just—I thought it made sense. She’s already done so much and I’ve done nothing. I had done nothing,” she corrected, still amazed by how quickly things were changing. “Until last week, I focused on school. Getting my degree. Finding a job and making things work.”
She dared to meet Gunnar’s gaze. The wolf was back. She knew better than to tempt it, but she couldn’t help herself.
“I want this to work,” she told him, reaching to put a hand on his knee, the ocean breeze carrying the scent of sunshine, musk, and clean male sweat. “Tell me I’m not wrong, to want….”
Steely muscles tensed beneath her fingers, and Breanna slid her gaze down, from the blue lightning of his eyes, past lips that had tasted her, sweeping down the perfect contours of his chest. His hard brown nipples were knotted despite the heat. His cycling shorts did nothing to hide the effect she was having on him.
He put his hand over hers when she began to slide it up his thigh. “Careful, pet,” he growled. “That’s playing with fire. You won’t like burning until Wednesday. I won’t allow you a release before then.”
“I understand,” she said softly, her voice grown husky, “but I can give you one…if you’ll let me….”
He shuttered his gaze, but not before she saw the heat lightning that flashed in his eyes. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“I know,” she whispered. “You came to check on me. To make sure I was okay. To see if I needed anything. And now,” she said, “it’s my turn. To make sure you’re okay. You don’t have to leave here like this.”
God, she was tempting.
Gunnar watched Breanna nervously reach for the rising tide cresting in his shorts. He didn’t argue, didn’t stop her from touching him. He sucked a harsh breath between his teeth when she tried to wrap her fingers around his tumescent length and couldn’t.
“Pet,” he grated, “you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Then teach me,” she said, tentatively feeling his erection with one hand and carefully cupping his scrotum with the other. “I want to please you. Tell me what you like. Show me what you need.”
Fuck. Fuck. Dammit, Marcus.
He shouldn’t. She shouldn’t.
“Gunnar…”
It was his name that did it, the way she said it, wrapping her tongue around the “r,” giving it the perfect ending.
“Fingers, Breanna. Just your fingers. I want to save that mouth for Wednesday. When I shove my cock into it, there’ll be no doubt it’s the first time you’ve tasted me. You’re going to wrap your lips around it and tease it with your tongue and take it down your throat, and you’re going to swallow every drop when I come in it.”
He peeled off his shorts and she saw him for the first time. His uncircumcised penis was thick and long, with a rich purple head and extra skin like silken folds over his rock-hard shaft. He doubted that she’d ever seen a natural man.
“Just the way God made me,” he told her. “Use your hands like you did before—one on my cock, one underneath, on my stones.”
Stones? Ah, as in getting his rocks off. Breanna smiled when she made the connection, mentally and physically.
“Yes. Yes, that’s right,” he murmured. “Just like that.”
Breanna stroked him with her hand, paying special attention to the rim of the head, spreading the pre-cum that beaded the tip, and teasing the sensitive spots at the base of his shaft and under the head, fondling his heavy twinned sac. She was attentive, listening to his directions, noticing his breath, feeling his hips press, then buck against her hand, his thrusts quickening as he drew closer and closer to his climax. “I’m going to come,” he warned her, his face fierce. Two strokes later, he did, semen shooting on his abs and spurting onto his belly.
“Was that okay?” she asked, her fingers still holding his cock and fondling his testes.
Gunnar threaded his hands in her hair and lifted her face. Angling his head, he bent down and brushed his lips against hers, leaving her hungry for more.
“Yes, pet,” he murmured. “But now I’m dirty. Since you got me this way, you can clean me. Lose those clothes. We’re going for a swim.”
“It’s too cold,” she objected as he rose and tugged her to her feet. “There’s a gallon of water in my car for emergencies. I can get it for you. At least it will be nice and warm.”
“Your car? Canto 4?”
“You noticed my plates.”
“And your tires.” He frowned, clearly disapproving. “You need new ones, Breanna.”
“I know, but my paycheck only stretches so far. “Next month,” she told him. “My right front wheel bearing is fixed now, and my plates are good until next year.”
He grunted. “Okay, tell me about Canto 4.”
Breanna grinned. “Blame Rowena’s English major. It’s from Dante’s Inferno. The fourth circle of hell, where the cool pagans go. You’d feel right at home, Northman.”
“Northman?”
Before Breanna’s eyes, Gunnar shifted into full Dom mode. “Off with your clothes, wench, and get in that water now, or it will be ten swats on your bare bottom.”
She knew better than to argue and hastened to appease him. “Yes, Milord.” She pulled off her tank top and shed her Capri pants but stopped short of her mismatched underwear.
“That’s ten,” he growled.
“But—”
“Twenty,” he snapped. “I said clothes. Unless I say otherwise, that means all of them.”
The thought of being naked with Gunnar was enough to flood Breanna’s cheeks with heat. She chose to slip off her panties first. (Some part of her figured he’d already seen that, and she wanted to save the rest for last.) She reached behind her and undid her hooks, then reached for her straps and slid them off her shoulders, letting her bra drop to the ground, exposing her breasts. Gunnar palmed one, flexed his fingers, felt its weight, then pinched her nipple and twisted it.
She gasped as a bolt of pleasure/pain went straight to her womb and felt the cream that her body made despite her mind’s feeble protest. She knew what would not happen, knew that he would not take her, not here, not now. Today was for him. It was his turn to leave satisfied, and hers to be left wanting.
Gunnar centered her blanket in the shade of the umbrella. Reseating himself on the pillow, he stretched out his legs, dug his heels into the sand below, and ordered her to lie across his lap. Knowing he was left-handed, she approached him from that side, knelt, and positioned herself for his pleasure and her punishment. Her breasts hung free against the outside of his right thigh, and her hands were clasped as she braced herself on her elbows.
“Tell me again. What is your safe word?” he asked, placing his right hand across the small of her back and pressing her weight onto him.
“Sanctuary,” she whispered, hoping she did not have to seek it.
“Good. When you fail to follow instructions, expect to be punished. Today will be easy. I could take you back to the house and down to my dungeon, but I know you teach tonight and I’d be too tempted to keep you there. You will receive your spanking and you will keep count. Twenty strokes. You will not be allowed to enter subspace. You will find neither bliss nor release. You may cry. You will cry,” he told her. “You may wriggle in my lap if you need to move, but you will not try to avoid my hand. Remember what I told you when we talked about your flogging? Resistance—and tension—means more pain. Accept your punishment, and relax, and your body will take the blows with the least amount of discomfort. When I am done, you will apologize. We will go into the water, and you will bathe me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Milord.” Breanna remembered their talk. Somehow she knew that relaxing would be easier said
than done.
“If at any time, it gets to be too much, use your safe word and I will stop. But we will still go into the water and finish this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Milord.”
“Góðr.”
Gunnar felt the curves of her buttocks and the backs of her thighs like a man at a deviant’s buffet, deciding what to hit first. He started off slowly, warming up her flesh with increasingly heavier strokes, alternating sides, rubbing her heated skin after each blow, making certain that she kept count, which became harder and harder as the spanking went on. Her eyes watered, then came the tears, rolling down her cheeks and dripping onto the blanket. Her pussy, already creamy before he started, was sopping wet by the time they reached twenty. Her bottom had gone from milky white to pink to red.
Gunnar grabbed her tube of sunscreen, squeezed some on each buttock, and massaged it in, kneading the soreness as if it could ease some of her pain. “Stand,” he ordered, and continued to apply sunscreen from her face to her toes, leaving nothing except between her legs untouched. “Can you walk?” he asked. When she hesitated, he picked her up in his arms and carried her into the surf, ignoring her gasp at the chill when he went in up to his waist and set her on her feet.
He was semi-hard even before she started washing him, scooping water in her hands and sluicing his front, washing away the remnants of his ejaculation. She clenched her jaw to quiet her chattering teeth, until she’d grown more used to the water temperature and realized how good it actually felt on her behind.
Seeking to increase her master’s pleasure, she freed her hair and dried his chest, rubbing it across his pecs, where his brown paps were drawn into hard, tight knots. She moved lower, drying the six pack of his abs, the perfect indentation of muscle on each side that disappeared into the water as the tip of his penis rose above it. She wrapped her fingers about his erection and pushed her hand down to the base before sliding back to fondle the engorged purple head. His cock was beautiful, like the rest of him, and after the play with her hair, it didn’t take long for him to erupt a second time. This time he shot across her breasts, marking her with cum that jetted out in bursts, until he had emptied the last of himself onto her chest.
Gunnar bent down, swept back her hair on one side, and whispered in her ear. “Now swim.”
That’s all he’d wanted earlier, when her failure to follow instructions had earned her a spanking. She swam for him, diving into an oncoming wave and sluicing through with a dolphin kick. Butterfly stroke, side stroke, back stroke, breast stroke. She did cardiovascular training and kept her lungs in shape to sing. She wouldn’t be surprised if she could hold her breath longer than Gunnar. She swam out as far as she could on one breath, then went a bit further, before diving beneath the waves and heading back to him. She surfaced, smiling, until she saw the look of sheer panic on Gunnar’s face, the distress in his eyes, the flash of relief followed by unexpected fury.
He grabbed her shoulders hard enough to leave bruises. “Don’t ever do that,” he grated. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Milord.” She didn’t, but she told him what she thought he needed to hear. “I’m sorry, Gunnar. Forgive me. I should have asked permission. I was wrong. Wrong. Please, what can I do to make it up to you?”
He looked like a broken man. She desperately wanted to fix him. He needed to feel in control again, and there was only one way that she knew how to do it.
“Gunnar,” she breathed. “Master, take me to your dungeon.”
For a long moment, he said nothing, just looked at her, through her, until she was certain he wasn’t seeing her at all but some awful specter of the past. What had happened, to make him freak like that? A Viking Dom was one thing. He was edging toward Berserker.
“Gunnar,” she said softly, watching him slowly but surely come back to her. “Gunnar, please,” she begged him. “Rowena can lead the class tonight. It’ll be okay. If you won’t take me home, then talk to me, at least. Help me understand. Please—I can’t fix this if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
He became aware of his punishing grip and loosened it, rubbing where he’d grabbed her. “Let’s go,” he said. She didn’t ask questions. It didn’t matter where they went, as long as it was together.
He stopped in the shade of her beach umbrella. Shoving the cushion to one side and lowering himself cross legged onto it, he directed her to sit on the blanket beside him and put her head on his lap. Her hair spilled over his thigh and down her back. He began to stroke it, softly, gently. With each caress, she felt his tension melting away. Finally, he released a huge, cleansing breath that ruffled the top of her head.
“Six years ago, I found the ship I’d been looking for. She’d gone down with her treasure intact, but the wreckage was scattered across the ocean floor. You can imagine how long it took, finding the ship, mapping the debris field, recovering the cargo. Conditions were brutal, and I refused to let Inge come. I left her at home—where she’d be safe—and went out to find treasure, not realizing I’d left it behind me.
“She was driving home late one night from her parents. It had been storming. She waited, and left when the rain let up. A mile from home, she hit a patch of standing water and hydroplaned,” he said. The grief in his voice was terrible. “She went off the road, ended up in a ditch, upside down. She drowned. When you went into the water and didn’t surface….”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to the hair-dusted muscle of his thigh and rubbing her face against it. “It won’t happen again. I would never hurt you.”
“I know,” he said, and fell silent, rather than make a promise that he could not keep.
Chapter Seven
Gunnar would hurt her. Of course, he would hurt her. She’d never been with a man. To have him put that enormous cock of his anywhere below the waist was going to involve a degree of pain.
Trying not to thing about it, Breanna welcomed the distraction of her classes. After administering Tuesday morning’s finals, she went home, intending to spend the rest of the day in bed, grading papers with a penis-sized plug up her ass. Rowena said nothing, just smiled and fixed the two of them lunch and casually asked to borrow the car.
She was up to something. Usually when Breanna got that feeling, it was accompanied by huge red flags, or the image of an orange barrel with a diamond shaped sign warning rough roads ahead. Oddly, neither of those things happened. Maybe because it was their birthday tomorrow and Rowena finally had a job that paid enough, she could afford to buy a present this year.
She came home with a new set of tires. Brand new, top-of-the-line tires, not the retreads Breanna normally bought. It was so not Rowena, to spend that kind of money, let alone buy something so practical.
It was, however, something that Gunnar would do.
Rowena broke, of course, spilling every last bean while Breanna pretended to be upset. Gunnar had gone behind her back and bought her tires, and he’d roped Rowena into helping him. She should be pissed at the two of them. Or at least, take umbrage at their scheming, but, dammit, how could she, when it was the sweetest, most thoughtful thing a man had ever done for her in her entire life?
She could love a man like that.
She did love a man like that.
Breanna felt her throat tighten, felt the sting of tears in her eyes, heard a chorus of voices singing hallelujahs in her head and in her heart. Dear God, how had that happened? She couldn’t love him. Could she? She’d felt a connection since the night he’d tipped her. They’d signed a contract, which really, on paper, was nothing more than an exchange of services. He’d give her his attention, she’d give him her virginity. She had told herself to expect nothing more.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, she’d fallen for him. She’d given him her heart, and he didn’t even know it.
Breanna welcomed the distraction of the butt plug. It kept her grounded enough to grade papers, at least, until Rowena knocked on her door in the late afternoon.
“Sti
ll pissed?” she asked, knowing Breanna wasn’t. It might be a twin thing, but it was rare that one couldn’t sense how the other was feeling. Empathy was one thing. Understanding? Well, that depended. Rowena didn’t always confide in her. Sometimes she just…closed up. Shut down. When she got in one of her darker moods, Breanna would only be left guessing at the cause.
She looked at her twin, expectant, hopeful. Not a cloud on Rowena’s horizon.
Or hers.
“No,” she admitted, “but I am hungry, and I need a break. What say we try out those new tires and go somewhere for dinner?”
Because it was their birthday eve, they decided to treat themselves at their favorite local sushi bar. Breanna refused to eat raw fish, but they made great teriyaki and miso soup. Both sisters enjoyed jasmine tea with their individual selections.
In her dreams that night, dinner became an allegory for the next night’s scene. Two sisters, different tastes, each one finding pleasure with the choices that she made. For her, there was only Gunnar. No matter what happened, if he held himself apart—for whatever reason—and never loved her again, she would always have one night to remember.
Sir Piers had insisted on sending a resort limousine for them, more for returning safely home, since no one knew what levels of altered consciousness they might achieve or how long it would take them to come back from subspace. On the ride to Replay, Breanna did breathing exercises to quiet the butterflies in her stomach. She’d never been this nervous. The only time close was the night they were to play for the Roman orgy, before Sir Piers had introduced them to the “Nubians” assigned to see that they stayed perfectly safe.
Safe. She felt far from it. She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of a cliff, and it was only a matter of time before she slipped and fell. Every tick of the clock brought her closer to it. Tonight, she was supposed to play a nun ravished by a Viking. She must pretend to fear the man she loved, the only man she trusted to end her innocence, who’d given her pleasure and denied himself time and again. She’d never be convincing to an audience if she let her true feelings show.
