Instead of fretting over my looks, I agonized over what Adrian would say next. What he would tell me to do… How excruciatingly pleasurable it would feel… And whether I could stand it.
The distance in his voice had faded with the loss of physical distance between us. “Touch your body for me, Miss Bloom. Excite yourself.” My hands twitched and started to come up from my sides, but I balked and flushed hot with nerves again, hesitating awkwardly until Adrian’s gaze met mine. “Start with your breasts. Hold them. Play with your nipples.”
Seeing him staring at my chest then made the rosy nubs peak instantly, made them twitch and throb. I pinched them to control the sensation, their pulsing ache mirrored by the small bundle of nerves between my legs, and he lightly purred out his approval.
“Yes, keep doing that. And spread your feet. One hand between your legs.”
Though everything inside me trembled and wound tight, I obeyed. My cheeks burned as badly as if someone had turned on a space heater and aimed it directly at my face.
“Now to our terms,” Adrian said.
Now
to our terms? This amounted to duress, for certain, but I also reasoned that it was par for the course. Duress was going to be the standard for as long as I was with Adrian Knight.
“I would assume you have had no formal training as a submissive despite your…” He paused for a deep, lingering breath. “Obvious submissive nature.” His glance found mine again, and a hint of a smile played along one corner of his mouth. “That’s of no consequence to me. I’ll train you the way I want you trained. Inside this villa, you will remain naked and always available to me. You will see to and submit to my every need. In the resort, you’ll be…” His lips curled into a smirk, his eyes taking on a harsher gleam of something like…irony, perhaps. “You’ll be my
girlfriend
, so far as anyone else needs to know.”
Why didn’t I object when he said this? Was I too caught up in the subtle, sensual humiliation of playing with myself in front of this man, one hand cupping my own sex as my finger traced my bare, moist cleft? Or was his suggestion just so damn close to what I’d had with Penn—the girlfriend in public, the woman he held down and fucked hard in the bedroom? And all of it just…role-playing, when it came right down to it.
Adrian’s free hand had strayed down to rest on the fly of his tuxedo pants. He did not rub the mounting ridge there, only strummed his thumb lightly over the tip of the increasingly impressive bulge. “I will take care of everything else,” Adrian told me. “You will lack for nothing, and I will provide a generous stipend for every month you remain in my service.”
My hands stilled, tensed, no longer playing against my skin. Instead, I was covering—protecting—myself. “No,” I said flatly and waited for Knight to focus on my face. “No
stipend
. I’m not a whore. I’m not here for your money,
Mr
. Knight.”
I didn’t flinch or rear back when Adrian shot to his feet. He grabbed my wrists and yanked my hands away from my pussy and my flushed breasts, reinforcing the vulnerability of my nakedness.
Disapproval, perhaps even anger, narrowed those beautiful eyes. “Then what
are
you here for, Miss Bloom?” he demanded.
When my mouth worked soundlessly around a response I did not wish to voice, he hauled me up against his tall body and held my arms bent awkwardly high on my back. Muscles that were still tender from the day before burned sharply enough to make me wince, but the pain dulled quickly, inundated by more pressing and pleasant sensations. The citrus and champagne of his cologne had faded overnight, and the spice of rum and the natural musk of his skin had taken over. My mouth watered at his scent. The smooth, firm flesh of Adrian’s chest sealed itself against my tingling breasts as his body curved over and around mine. He bent his knees for leverage and ground the pronounced ridge of his erection against me, parting the lips of my sex and putting sudden pressure on my clitoris.
“This?” he asked.
I held my breath to keep from panting, but that didn’t make my response any more forthcoming. It seemed the subtle coolness of the morning had dissipated in the last few seconds, and pinpricks of sweat broke out along my hairline. This was the foremost reason I was here with Adrian Knight. No one else had ever enflamed this level of desire in me—and based on so little, hardly more than his looks and his voice, at turns seductive and stern.
Holding both my wrists in one hand, Adrian threaded the other into my hair and pulled my head back, making the nape of my neck throb with dull pain-pleasure, making me arch and slide myself against his hard-on until a moan burst from the well of my chest.
“This?” he persisted. He didn’t wait for an answer this time, just closed his lips over the bow of my panting mouth and took me with his tongue. So like that first kiss in the sauna, he filled my mouth with the taste of his, with his heat, with the unhurried but insistent feeling of penetration and possession.
When Adrian drew his mouth back from mine, the familiar glaze of desire shone in his eyes, and his quickened breath sped the rise and fall of his chest against my body. “Ah, yes,” he sighed haltingly against my lips. “You’re here to find out if you have a wild side.” My own words from last night. I recoiled a fraction of an inch from him, searching his expression, surprised he remembered what I’d said.
The hand in my hair left a tingling trail of heat under my ear and along one side of my jaw as he shifted to hold my face firmly upturned to his. “We’re going to find out,” he promised, then smirked. “Three months, is it?”
Was that a bitter note to his voice?
“Onto the bed, Miss Bloom. Face down and with your hands above your head.”
When Adrian finished his command by releasing me, I wavered against him, suddenly bereft of his strength and support. I moved to obey him instantly but almost drunkenly, turning and finding my balance for each step with care. The lightheadedness from the hormones permeating every cell of my body was stronger than common intoxication. I felt like I floated over to the bed, grasping at the floor with my toes as though I’d otherwise drift away. Stretched out, I found the bedding under me sink-down soft and thick, and my nipples and the shaved lips of my sex tingled and tickled as I slid against the material.
Adrian’s voice seemed almost disembodied, as though it came from just inside my ear as he whispered, “Spread your legs. Always. You must always make yourself available to me… Wet… And ready…”
Fingertips gingerly traced a downward trail from my nape to the base of my spine, and I arched and twisted to search over my shoulder. I wanted to see Knight’s expression.
A firm hand pressed my head down, my cheek against the bed, and held it there. “Stay still, Miss Bloom. I expect you to control yourself if you don’t want me to tie you down. Keep your arms above your head. Yes, like that, wrists crossed. Imagine…” He let go of my head and shifted his weight, leaning over me, one hand beside each of my shoulders and his groin pressed enticingly to my hip. My eyes sank closed in dreamy anticipation. “Imagine I’ve cuffed you with thick, stainless steel manacles, cold against your wrists. More around your ankles to hold you spread open for me. A matching collar around your neck to keep you from moving your head. I don’t want you to pull away or resist no matter what I do to you.”
My eyes came open at that statement, and I found Adrian leaning low, arching over me to study the look on my face.
“Do you trust me enough to do that, Chloe?”
Hell, no. I bit back that response and burrowed my face down deeper into the bedding. This wasn’t about trust—not unless it was the certainty that I could trust Adrian Knight not to be trusted.
That was what made him so perfect for my lesson in lust without love, the fact that I could count on him being enough like Penn to possess me, use me, push me while I maintained the defensive detachment of knowing nothing real would ever develop between us. Any tenderness he might have shown would just be the prudent maintenance of a submissive in danger of the emotional drop that followed hard domination. Any physical closeness would have been a simple expression of possession, expected of men who approached people as play things, property, pawns. No, I didn’t trust him, and that was a good thing.
A sudden sharp smack along one cheek of my bare ass brought my face up from the bed.
Adrian pushed it down again. “Stay still,” he cautioned again, “but remember to answer me when I speak to you. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” I muttered, my words and quickened breathing muffled by the bedding.
“Yes, sir,” he corrected me.
I repeated him, my chest swelling with panic and adrenaline, my pussy slick with need. Taking care to keep my wrists crossed, I dug my nails into the pillow above me as Adrian slapped my buttocks twice more—sharp, light smacks that didn’t really hurt but certainly stung. Then one hand held my hips down while the other laid a carefully placed slap on my already aching cleft. When I bucked and squealed, Adrian put a knee down on my lower back. Even without using much of his weight at all, he pinned me utterly helpless.
“Two more for moving, Miss Bloom,” he warned me. “Are you prepared?”
My head was spinning with alarm, confusion, sudden hunger for Adrian to simply
take
me. It was even worse than the dark, gnawing desire I’d felt when Penn had dominated me. The hot flush of naughty, pleasurable shame across my cheeks and down my neck. My heartbeat pounding in my ears. The sense that I could actually feel the blood coursing through my veins, rising up to the skin wherever Adrian spanked me.
It had been like this at first with Penn, though not as strong. The forbidden pleasure had been irresistible, even knowing we were changing our relationship forever. The lure of wanting what I had known I shouldn’t want. Of letting someone else be in control, take care of all the important details, make all the decisions.
Adrian applied a little more weight to the base of my spine. “Are you prepared, Miss Bloom?”
“Yes, sir,” I chirped, my voice embarrassingly high and tight. I answered the two quick slaps along my defenseless sex with muffled groans I could only suppress my biting down on a mouthful of bedding. My cleft was burning and tingling like thousands of little stings now.
“Good,” Adrian sighed afterward, his own voice growing ragged and deeper than usual. His fingers gently soothed the offended skin with light, circular caresses that only served to make the burning sensation worse—and better. “I know it’s not easy,” he purred, and his fingers curled until I felt his nails lightly scratching and teasing my enflamed skin. “The humiliation of taking a spanking in exchange for the liberating rush of surrender. But it’s harder still to just lie there and let it happen, isn’t it? Not allowed to
do
anything. Having to just take it, experience it,
be
it…”
My heart throbbed between his words. They were the metronome, and my pulse played to the timing they set.
He spanked me again, this time applying eight or ten sharp strikes against each cheek. I couldn’t buck up to meet him, twist away, grind myself against the bed as I so badly needed to—not without breaking his rule that I wasn’t allowed to move. Gripping the pillow for all I was worth, I panted through the spanking. As brief as it was, it left my whole body twitching as though every nerve ending danced with electricity.
Two long fingers sank smoothly into my slit, and I keened openly, unable to keep myself from rolling my head back and forth. “You
are
excited,” Adrian rasped against my ear, his soft lips teasing the curve, filling it with hot breath. “And very, very ready.”
I took the risk of being considered disobedient when I so slightly nodded my agreement.
A light chuckle warmed my neck and sent a shiver down my back. “I don’t think three months is going to be long enough, my dear Miss Bloom. All the things I want to do to you… All the ways I want to feel you… That will take at least six months. Are we open to renegotiation?” His fingertips grazed my G-spot, retreated, then did it again.
Bastard. “No, sir,” I bit out even as I ground against his fingers, stretching back, flexing and straining.
“No?” he asked, sounding almost—
almost
—amused, before he abruptly removed his fingers from inside me and flipped me over onto my back.
I had a split second to wonder if he was serious about changing our arrangement or just wanted to play with me, push me, test me. Then his mouth was on mine, his hands sliding along my arms as he stretched out against me, his groin pressed flush to my aching sex. Adrian’s tongue dipped shallowly into my mouth, mirroring the way his erection nudged my pussy open, penetrating me as much as his pants would allow. It was a slow kiss, a slow
grind
, until my sanity was about to break like a fraying thread. Was I desperate enough to beg for his cock? To work myself off shamelessly against him? To promise him six months instead of three?
Before I found out, Adrian lifted his head, licked his saliva-wet lips, and smiled devilishly down at me. “I guess I’ll have to make do with three months then,” he panted lightly. “But that is surely going to be hard on you, because I still plan on enjoying six months’ worth of use…and abuse, Miss Bloom.”
The man knew just what to say to make me wonder if I wanted to give him what…what I didn’t want to give him.
“But first…” Adrian released me abruptly, rolling away from me. Despite his heavy breath, despite his obvious erection, he visibly withdrew. Sitting up on the edge of the bed, running his hands through his ruffled hair, he said, “Draw a bath for yourself while I have breakfast and your belongings brought over from the resort.”
And that easily, he drew a line between us, kissing and challenging me sexually one moment and dismissing me the next. I had angered him, I thought as I sat up and turned awkwardly in the direction of his nod, glimpsing the bathroom through a door standing ajar in the corner of the room. It was an odd feeling of unease, already displeasing him, a deep distress only made more acute by the state of arousal he’d left me to suffer unanswered.