When the look in Luiz’s eye turned from vehement to flirtatious, I cut Gabriel short and strode across the camp to reclaim Chloe. It didn’t matter that the boy had no chance of impressing her. No one played with what was mine, even if I only had it on loan, so to speak. I was just funny that way.
“Luiz,” I said in greeting as I came up on them. Using that familiar hold on Chloe’s elbow that tended to make her shiver, I drew her close and put her behind my shoulder. The skin of her arm was distractingly smooth, but I kept my eye on Luiz. I knew I’d made my point when the teen glared at me, though that was a common expression when he faced me. “The raised beds look like they’re…” A god awful mess. “Coming along. Not an easy job with simple hand tools, I’m sure.”
The boy thrust the handle of his shovel toward me. “Why don’t you try it? See what it’s like to work in the dirt and the heat.” His accent was still thick, but I noted his English was getting much better. Both Gabriel and Manuela made him practice with them constantly, something else for which he blamed me.
I shook my head and put no effort into hiding my smile. “The point is to find a way to implement biointensive gardening in as small a footprint as possible with simple tools and limited labor.”
Luiz tugged down the brim of his hat, then tipped his head back slightly to regard me, his chin set in challenge. “I think you just want to work me to death.”
Coming up on the other side of me, Gabriel snickered. “I couldn’t be that lucky.”
“Our deal,” I reminded Luiz, “said you would get time off for university in Natal, but after your grades last term…”
The teen rolled his eyes and cursed under his breath and the brim of his hat. “I was doing fine in Geology.”
“And nothing else.”
Chloe stiffened against me as my exchange with Luiz entered what would surely be embarrassing territory for the lad. She was not entirely comfortable with the way the menfolk poked at one another, I suspected. “Geology?” she interjected. “Is that your major?”
Luiz’s head came up reluctantly, and he broke his pout enough to tell her, “No. Not yet, anyway. I’m still deciding. Maybe Geology. Maybe Architecture and Urbanism. Or Civil Engineering.”
Having heard this before, I was always impressed with the boy’s interest in understanding the natural and built worlds, both nature and cities, how people’s surroundings affected their behavior. He couldn’t take a complement from me, though, and I suspected I was worth more as a villain he used to push himself. He’d succeed despite me, and I was fine with that. It had worked well enough for me, putting myself through prep school and university in the States to get away from my family. I still remembered the look of pride in Manuela’s damp eyes when Luiz had gotten accepted into the university in Natal.
“Engineering,” Gabriel declared and raised his arms to clap his hands. “Very good, but there’s a lot of math involved in that. How about we figure out how many hours it’s going to take one boy to rebuild eight raised garden beds, each a meter square, if he spends half his time complaining?”
This got a strangled giggle out of Chloe despite her obvious attempt to steer the conversation toward less contentious territory. She recovered by pulling away from me and offering her hand to the boy.
“It was very nice to meet you, Luiz. I’m looking forward to seeing how this garden turns out with all your work.” The lad was so smitten, I noticed, that he didn’t even have a snarky comeback for the foreman.
Then she turned to the project manager, who straightened his posture when he realized her attention was on him. Ah, but the way we men acted when a gracious woman smiled at us.
“A pleasure to meet you, as well, Mr…”
“Silva,” he said, and took her hand with a gentlemanly propriety that I wouldn’t have expected of the man who rarely interacted with anyone outside the context of the eco park—he was a worse workaholic than I’d ever been. “Gabriel Silva. And you are?”
I resisted the urge to introduce her simply as mine. “Chloe is staying at the resort as my guest for a while.” The arch of my brow and a sidelong glance said yes,
that
kind of guest. They could eat their hearts out. From the way Gabriel and Luiz stood and watched us go, the two men leaning together and whispering despite their dislike for one another, I knew that was exactly what they were doing.
In the cart, on the way back to the villa, Chloe bombarded me with questions about the eco park project. How much of the island would I include in the park? What kind of dwellings was I intending to build? Would the materials be local? How would the project address gray water?
The trip was a struggle between my mind and body. My ego reveled in the opportunity to pitch my vision to someone new, someone who cared about this kind of project and knew the terminology, the challenges, the potential payoffs. But the more Chloe engaged my most passionate interest, the more she enflamed a different kind of passionate appetite. We pulled to a stop before the villa and strode in through the front door talking kilometers and cubits, and by the living room I had her by the hair, sensuously lapping the taste of honey from her mouth and hardening at the increasingly familiar scent of exotic flowers, amber, and arousal that I knew I would forever after associate with Chloe Bloom.
“Naked, now,” I demanded. “And to the bedroom.”
She wiggled out of her dress and ballet flats with an urgency that matched my own, fanning the devious little idea smoldering in the back of my mind. I thought I saw cracks forming in Chloe’s defenses, a softness produced by small confidences and shared pains, unguarded desire showing around the edges. As I followed her down the hall, she hurried ahead, glancing once over her shoulder at me before rushing beyond my reach.
I found her standing at the foot of the bed, and I held up a cautioning finger. “Stay right there, Miss Bloom. No running.”
Her pupils dilated instantly, her breath catching. Her gaze was almost palpable on my back as I crossed the room to an old wooden travel chest, the kind bound with metal bands and rivets. Quite intentionally, I kept what I had taken from the chest hidden behind my leg as I returned to her.
“Pull your hair up.” Chloe tilted her head at me, idling a moment, then gathered up the lot of her wavy brown locks and held them twisted at her nape. With her neck bared, I fastened the thick leather collar buckle by buckle—three in all—around her throat, watching her pulse fluttering erratically under her pale skin all the while. I made it a snug fit, not enough to choke her but just shy of it and far too tight for her to ignore even in the daze of passion.
“Have I…” she started to ask, her voice unsteady. “Have I done something wrong?”
“Far from it, Chloe.” I circled the collar with my hands, careful not to squeeze when she was already so panicky, and trailed soft kisses against one clammy cheek. “You’ve done everything I’ve asked, kept the villa exactly as I’ve instructed. This is a reward.”
“R-reward?” she rasped. Her chest rose and fell in jerky, uneven breaths that suggested immanent hyperventilation. Yes, I realized, the collar had been a good choice.
I nodded. “M-hm. Remember how hard it was that first day in the villa, when I made you stretch out and stay still while I spanked you? This time, I won’t make you do all the work. You won’t be able to move.”
“Not ab—?” she started, but I put my thumb against her lips to stem the flow of doubts and questions.
“On the bed, Miss Bloom. On your back with your arms above your head and your legs spread.”
I took my time gathering more necessities from the chest, knowing Chloe was stretched out so nervous and vulnerable, knowing she watched my every movement and expression.
“Breathe through it,” I told her, though she didn’t understand at first and held her breath as I started using fleece-lined leather cuffs with thick metal buckles and rings, attached to leather bands tied to key points on the bedframe, to secure her spread eagle to my bed. She had stiffened and looked close to passing out before, as I tied her second wrist above her head, she finally started panting furiously. The way she swallowed hard, over and over, told me the collar was having the desired affect—making her feel trapped, subdued, defenseless.
My fingers fumbled once as I bound her ankles, when I noted her smooth slit flushing with arousal, a hint of glistening wetness seeping from her tender cleft. My groin throbbed so hard I felt it in the balls of my feet, the palms of my hands, the top of my head. It wasn’t just the prospect of feeling myself inside her warm sheath again but of seeing, hearing, feeling…feasting on her hyper-arousal. On the rush of adrenaline so thick and heady I could taste it. On the dread warring with increasingly mindless frenzy against the exquisite anticipation, all so obvious on her pretty face.
I wanted Chloe’s every thought and fear and desire laid out naked before me,
for
me. I wanted to see her break, undone in the face of her own shame and reluctance, elevated in her moment of liberation when all she cared about was the bliss of drowning in the physical pleasure I
inflicted
on her. Far too poetic of me to think of it this way, I knew, but there was nothing lyrical or romantic in the aching swell I felt at the crotch of my pants and the restless twitch of my fingers.
She gasped and whimpered under her breath when I left her alone on the bed again and returned to the chest. I stood over it and paused to strip myself naked as well. My cock jutted up sharply, painfully as soon as I freed it, my smooth-trimmed balls swollen and heavy. Sometimes it only took looking at Chloe to get this reaction from my body, watching her lick hot chocolate from her lips or the way her long curls fell over her bare breasts. I could tell myself all I liked that dominating and claiming my Miss Bloom was all about revenge against Penn Ellison for what he’d taken from me that last year in college, or about my curiosity over the kind of woman I wouldn’t normally have on my arm, or simply about my compulsion to obtain anything I did not already have. My body’s reaction to her said something different, something about a very specific taste for this brown-eyed beauty.
It was with a smirk at my own tendency toward showmanship and occasional vulgar displays of wealth that I returned to the bed holding a sleek, shiny wand that instantly drew Chloe’s gaze. Turning it on with the dial at the end produced no sound at all, but the vibration from the toy was so powerful that I felt it right to the bone all the way up my arm. She jerked and strained, unable to pull away, as I trailed the vibrator along her inner thigh. And what a sight, the smooth wand of medical grade stainless steel covered in 24-carat gold sliding against her skin, tracing the muscles that twitched and flexed at the faintest touch from the rounded phallus.
She keened, her voice winding higher and higher, tighter and tighter, but didn’t speak, didn’t plead.
“You want to say something, Miss Bloom?” I asked as I moved to kneel beside one of her hips. Still, she said nothing, glancing at me only momentarily before her gaze returned to the vibrator as I ran it up the crease of her thigh and groin, up over her mons well away from her clitoris, and down the opposite thigh. She didn’t seem to breathe so much as her solar plexus and abs just flexed and released, flexed and released, quickly and violently. The thought that I was going to be inside her in a few moments, that I’d feel her body straining against mine, made my stomach tighten and my jaw twitch. I caught myself grinding my teeth in concentration as I watched the head of the vibrator send ripples through Chloe’s tensed muscles, thighs to abs to arms as I brought the toy up along the very slight arch of her restrained body to circle around and around one of her nipples.
“No,” she mewed. Changing the vibrator to her other nipple brought an, “Oh god.” I saw a tremor ripple through her tensed limbs, so close to what happened whenever she approached a hard climax. The way she jerked so futilely against the collar, in particular, told me she wanted to toss her head and let the haze of passion bear her safely out of the immediacy of the moment. The tightness of the leather as it squeezed her throat prevented not only movement but retreat into other sensations.
“You want to use your safe word, Chloe?” I asked, though I would have bet every pence I’d ever had or ever would have that she didn’t. Giovanni. That was the word she had chosen. She did not say it now, only panted and shook her head no almost imperceptibly.
I straddled her hips, laying my erect cock along her lower stomach, feeling wholly pleased with myself when she ground against me as best she could—and that was very little. Leaning in close, I breathed on the same rigid nub I tormented with the vibrator, my tongue darting out to lick and flick the nipple in concert with the ministrations of the golden toy. God, she tasted of honey body balm with the barest hint of salty sweat. I had to taste her again, had to suck and nuzzle and draw strong and steady on her nipple as her breath shuddered out of her beneath me.
She stiffened further—though I wouldn’t have thought that possible—so close to coming, and that wouldn’t do. I regretfully lifted my face from the full swell of her smooth breast and played the vibrator along her cheek and her trembling bottom lip instead. I doubted she consciously thought about her urge to lick the tip of the wand, but the sight of her little pink tongue curving along the rounded phallus made me swear aloud. I didn’t think she even heard me, her eyes glassy, face flushed.
Shifting to one side, I looked down to position the vibrator carefully along her cleft—but not yet touching her. I only let it enter her about an inch, at the very moment my mouth took hers. She cried out against my lips, sucking my tongue deep into her mouth. And every moment, she was shaking, vibrating as certainly and as powerfully as the wand. I knew I could count on her feeling the pulsation all through her lower body, up through the flexed and locked muscles of her abs and down her thighs and calves to her curled toes.
Dragging my tongue from her mouth, I breathed against her lips. “You know I control you completely now, don’t you? I can do anything. Use you any way I want. Inflict any agony or bliss upon you. Say it.”