Ink Me (5 page)

“Aidan, baby? Aidan?” Summer’s voice came to him as if
through a wall of cotton. He could feel her fingertips feathering across his
jaw, but he just couldn’t seem to open his eyes. He didn’t want to leave this
fuzzy, gray place where he floated, adrift in complete sexual, sensual
contentment.

“Aidan? Please, open your eyes. You’re scaring me.”

He lay still, struggling not to smile, not to move a muscle
on his face. It might be the devil in him, but he was enjoying her anxiety. She
might have given him one of the best orgasms of his life, but she had certainly
made him suffer for it first.

“Aidan! Aidan, please, answer me!” she shouted, seconds
before the side of his face began to burn from the force of her hand landing on
his relaxed flesh.

“Ouch,” he said, opening his eyes and wishing he could rub
his cheek. “What the hell did you slap me for?”

“I thought you might have had a heart attack or something,
you jerk,” she said, slapping him again, this time on his roped chest.

“And that’s how you show your concern for my poor, failing
heart? Remind me never to keel over when you’re around, woman.”

“You did that on purpose.”

“I did, but you deserved it.”

“You scared me half to death.”

“You sexed me half to death,” he said with a grin, then
sobered as he saw uncertainty tighten her features. “I loved it, babe. You were
amazing. You made me come so hard I think I had an out of body experience.”

“Really?” she asked, her smile timid, shy, the complete
opposite of the character she had been playing.

“Really,” he said, wondering if it was possible for him to
love her anymore than he did at this moment. “I can’t wait for another five
years with you.”

“Me either. I love you, Aidan, so much.”

“So…you want to untie me, maybe go get a bite to eat?”

“You want to get a bite to eat? When we still have all these
hours of uninterrupted fucking stretched out in front of us?” she asked,
raising a dubious eyebrow as she slid off his softening shaft and rolled onto
the bed beside him.

“A man’s got to eat,” he said, trying to shrug but unable to
move those particular muscles while he was still trussed up like a Christmas
turkey. The evening had been amazing so far, but he
was
a little hungry,
past ready to be set free of this crazy set of knots, and not at all sure he
was up to having more sex tonight.

God help him, Aidan never thought he’d be a one hit wonder
type of guy, was usually up for at least two or three sessions a night, but
right now he felt completely spent. She had really sexed the sex out of him, or
at least the ability to get erect anytime in the near future.

“That’s true. A man does have to eat, so does a woman for
that matter.”

“Summer, what are you doing? Where are you going?” he asked,
trying to keep the slight note of panic out of his voice. He didn’t like the
sound of what she’d said or that particular look in her eye as she rolled off
the bed.

“I’m just trying to fulfill your wishes,” she said, a
teasing note in her voice.

“I don’t have any wishes,” Aidan grumbled, ready to order
her to untie him when she suddenly appeared in front of him again with a bowl
of fresh cut fruit in her hands. Shit, he was a suspicious jerk. She had just
been getting him a snack from the fridge.

“So, you’re going to…hand feed me?” he asked as she crawled
back onto the bed. “Or do I get to be untied and feed myself?”

“Neither answer A nor answer B,” she said, propping a few
pillows onto the opposite side of the futon and then lying back.

“Okay, then what’s answer…”

He couldn’t for the life of him remember what he was going
to say. All he could do was watch, open-mouthed as Summer spread her legs wide
and plucked a strawberry from the bowl. She took the fruit to her mouth and
swept her small, pink tongue across it once, twice, then trailed it down the
front of her body, down to where her clit still poked proudly out of her slick
folds.

“The cold feels so nice, doesn’t it?” she asked as she
softly rubbed her clit with little circular movements of the berry. Her lips
parted and her nipples tightened and when she let a little moan escape from her
throat, Aidan felt his cock, incredibly, start to thicken.

“What have you done to me?” he asked, his erection getting
still longer and harder as she dropped the fruit a little lower and pressed it
inside her pussy. Her breath hissed in through her teeth as she penetrated
herself and Aidan’s mouth began to water.

“No, honey, the question is, what are you going to do to me?”

Seconds later, Aidan was on his stomach, between her legs,
feasting on what was, without a doubt, the fucking tastiest strawberry he’d
ever eaten. Summer writhed above him, already ready with a piece of pineapple
and his cock was so hard it was as if his first orgasm had been nothing more
than a beautiful dream.

“Roll over, Aidan, I want to see what you taste like with a
raspberry smeared on the head of your cock.” She moaned as he cheerfully
obeyed.

Who knew abandoning control could be so very pleasurable?
But then, if every bondage experience ended in a sixty-nine session with the
love of his life, Aidan figured he could get into the scene in a big way. A
really big way.

“I’m going to come, babe. Fuck, I’m going to come.”

“Come, I want to swallow you,” she panted before her lips
closed around him once again and she sucked him so deep into her throat he was
nearly fully encased in her heat.

Aidan cried out as he found his release, spending himself
between her lips, his ecstasy complete when she bucked into his mouth, pressing
her clit against his teeth and joining him on the edge of bliss.

Summer’s eyes flew open and she bolted into a seated
position, swiping one hand across her damp cheek. She’d been drooling, dead
asleep and drooling on Aidan’s still-roped chest.

“Ouch.” She winced. It hurt to even touch the skin on that
side of her face.

Hemp rope—good for tying up your lover, bad for using as a
pillow. Of course, she never would have believed she would be able to go to
asleep. She’d only fallen on Aidan’s chest to rest, to take a few deep breaths
to recover from her fourth or fifth orgasm of the night. Or maybe it was the
sixth, after a certain point she had lost track.

Summer smiled and indulged in a long, luxurious stretch. It
had been too long since she lost track of how many times she’d come, way too
long. But she and Aidan had made up for a lot of lost time tonight. He’d been
amazing, letting her take the lead completely for the first time in their
eight-year relationship. There had been a lot of buildup to this night in her
mind, a lot of anticipation, but it had been even better than she had imagined,
so good she wouldn’t believe their lovemaking had been real if he weren’t still
lying beside her, fully tied.

Her heart did a little flip as she drank him in. He looked
so peaceful lying there, lips slightly parted and face completely relaxed, but
she doubted his position could be that comfortable. He’d been tied for several
hours and no matter how well made the knots, his arms were probably starting to
go to sleep.

“Aidan, wake—”

A shuffling sound from the other room made Summer’s words
die on her lips and a prickle of unease run down her spine. She’d never been in
the studio when it was so quiet and all buildings made settling noises, but
that didn’t sounded like any groaning wood she’d ever heard. It sounded like
footsteps, the footsteps of someone who was trying to be quiet, but not quite
succeeding.

Summer took a deep breath and held it, straining to hear
better, to block out the drone of the ice machine and refrigerator, to ignore
the faint sounds of traffic that drifted in from the highway nearby. She closed
her eyes and counted, promising herself she’d wake Aidan and whisper her
suspicions into his ear if she heard another sound in the next ten seconds.

One, two, three, four, five, six—

Shit, there it was again. This time, there was no doubt she
was hearing footsteps. The shuffling had been accompanied by the dull click of
a heel on the hardwood floor of the main studio room. Next came a hissing sound
that reminded her of the way her mother shushed her and Aidan every time they
let a cuss word slip at the house.

Somebody was shushing someone else in her studio. That meant
not one intruder, but two. At least two and maybe more.

“Aidan, wake up, wake up,” she hissed into his ear, doing
her best to roll him over onto his side using brute strength. She had to get
him untied and in possession of his weapon. Not to mention it might be nice for
them both to have some clothes on in case this wasn’t an intruder but one of
her employees.

If Robbie were using his key to sneak into
Ink Me
after hours, she was going to have his head on a platter. He’d asked twice if
it would be okay to crash on the futon on nights when he had to work his second
job early in the a.m., but she’d said no both times. She liked Robbie, but she’d
learned the hard way that you couldn’t give an inch with your staff or they’d
take a mile. Besides, she paid him enough that he could get his own apartment
in town. He didn’t have to keep living with his brother somewhere out in the
middle of the goddamn desert.

“Aidan, wake up!” she hissed again. He was too heavy for her
to move without his cooperation and she couldn’t reach the knots unless he
rolled over.

“What’s up?” he asked in a full-volume, rather sleepy,
voice. God, the man had been a cop, couldn’t he take a hint with the
whispering? At least he responded to her urging and rolled onto his side
without asking any questions.

“There’s someone in the studio, I heard footsteps,” she
said, starting to tug at the knots that bound him.

“Are you sure?” he asked in a quiet voice, his eyes
immediately sharp and alert.

“Pretty damn sure,” she said, getting a little frantic as
the rope refused to give.

Damn it, they were certainly a lot harder to untie than they
had been to knot up in the first place. Her stupid, fake, fuck-me nails didn’t
help anything either. Summer vowed to get the things removed tomorrow. They’d
already served their purpose and as a person who made a living with her hands,
she really couldn’t afford to have her motor skills impaired.

“Forget the knots, go get my gun.”

“No way, I’m not leaving you tied up and I’d probably just—”

“Summer, go get the goddamn gun. We might not have time to—”

“There! I got the first one, now just let me—”

“You know how to use the weapon. Quit being stubborn and go
get it before—”

Just then, the door to the staff room swung open. Summer
screamed before she even had time to look to see who was there, she couldn’t
seem to help herself. If it was Robbie, he’d just caught her and Aidan, naked,
playing kinky with Shibari rope, and she would die of shame. If it was an
intruder, he or she had just caught her and Aidan, naked, playing kinky with
Shibari rope, and they probably wanted to empty the safe or steal all her tools
or something worse and she and Aidan might really die of things more painful
than shame.

Either way, the situation at the moment was not looking very
good.

“Well, well. Kelly, honey, looks like we’ve got company.”

“Jake, I’m sorry, I didn’t think she’d be here, I didn’t—”

“You never think, but don’t you worry. These two don’t look
like they’ll be hard to handle. Hell, one of them’s already tied up and ready
to go.” The man’s voice was deeper than anything Summer had ever heard in real
life. He sounded like one of those movie announcers who specialize in horror
previews and looked scary enough to be the wielder of a chainsaw in some
massacre film.

He wasn’t particularly tall, or bulky, or physically
imposing, but what he lacked in size he more than made up for in pure menace.
His dark, greasy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his
neck, clearing revealing his ruined face. Or partially ruined face. One side of
Jake was fairly average-looking, thirty-something, hard-living biker dude, the
other side was a mass of scar tissue. It looked as if something acidic had
eaten away at the skin, leaving only ripples of ruined flesh behind. The area
around his right eye was particularly hard hit, the sagging tissue revealing
far more of a living person’s eye socket than Summer ever wanted to see. Or a
dead person’s eye socket for that matter.

Don’t think about dead people, don’t think about death,
period. You and Aidan are going to be okay. Just give them whatever they want
and—

“Get a good look girl, I ain’t shy,” Jake said. Summer’s
eyes immediately dropped to the ground. What had she been thinking? You didn’t
make eye contact with a man like that, you hauled ass out of his presence as
quickly as possible. Too bad Aidan was still bound, they were both naked and
neither of them in much of a position to haul ass.

“Listen, I don’t know what you came back for, Kelly, but you’ve
already been reported to the police—”

“Shut up, homo. You don’t talk unless I say you can talk and
you never talk to my woman,” Jake barked.

“I’m hardly a homo, man. I’m in bed with my—”

“You talk again, homo, and I’ll shoot your butt-fucking dick
off,” Jake said. The click as he armed his weapon and pointed it at Aidan was
the loudest sound Summer had ever heard. Her breath caught in her throat and
she prayed with everything in her that Aidan would keep quiet. Sure, it hardly
made sense to call a man caught naked with a woman a homosexual, but you didn’t
argue semantics with a man like Jake, especially when he had a gun aimed at
your groin.

She shot Aidan a pleading look, but he wasn’t looking at
her, he was looking at Jake with an expression on his face that clearly
conveyed his disdain. Shit, he was going to talk, he was going to be a stubborn
son of a bitch and get shot. He took a deep breath, obviously preparing to
speak, but Summer beat him to it.

If he wouldn’t do his best to keep himself in one piece, she
would do it for him.

“Please, I told Kelly when she was here before that I would
give her whatever she wanted,” Summer said, deliberately letting her voice
waver. Men felt less threatened by a woman and even less threatened by a weak,
emotional woman on the verge of tears. “That offer still stands. I’ll give you
all the money in the safe and I won’t—”

“See, I told you she had a lot of money, baby. Didn’t I tell
you that?”

“Shut up, Kelly. You’re still on thin ice with me,” Jake
shouted, actually turning the gun on her as he spoke. Kelly whimpered and
covered her mouth, her bloodshot eyes wide and terrified.

The man would turn a gun on his own girlfriend and not bat
an eye. That didn’t bode well for either Summer or Aidan making it out of here
in one piece. Frantically, Summer’s mind raced, searching for a way to distract
Jake and Kelly long enough for her to reach Aidan’s gun. It was still sitting
neatly on top of Aidan’s clothes on the floor at the end of the bed. It had
been covered with a few pillows earlier in the evening, so no one would be able
to see what she was reaching for until it was too late.

And then what? You’re going to draw down on him and shoot
to kill? You don’t have the skill to shoot the weapon out of his hand before he
gets a shot off at you or Aidan. Are you really ready to kill another person,
even a person like Jake? Isn’t that why you tried to untie Aidan in the first
place, because you don’t think you have what it takes to use a gun on anything
but a target?

“Don’t move, bitch,” Jake said, swinging the gun back in
Summer’s direction.

“I was just going to get my robe,” Summer said, exaggerating
the sob that rose naturally in her throat.

Keep him off guard, keep him thinking that she was a
terrified little woman who he had no reason to fear. Then she’d get the gun and
put a few bullets in his chest. She suddenly knew, without a doubt, that she
would kill both of the people in front of her if they gave her no choice. She
and Aidan had a hell of a lot to live for and she wasn’t going to fail him or
their family by being too weak to kill for the right to that life.

“You don’t need a robe, girl. You can tattoo naked as well
as you can with clothes on,” Jake said, stepping further into the room, his
eyes settling on Summer’s bare breasts.

She shivered under the force of his gaze, her skin feeling
as if it would crawl off her body, but refused to cover herself with her arms.
The man was looking at her like a meal to be eaten, not with anything she
recognized as lust and her gut told her he would be more excited by her fear
than the sight of her naked body. Besides, if Kelly was his type, the man liked
big, buxom women, not tiny things with boyish figures. Summer had never thought
she’d be grateful for her barely there breasts, but at the moment she thanked
god for them.

“Jake, baby, couldn’t we just get the money and go? If they’ve
really called the cops—”

“They didn’t call no cops.”

“There’s an APB out on Kelly right now. I used to be on the
force and you can be damn sure every cop in this state is looking for—”

“I said no talking, homo. I guess you want to get shot.”

“Please, baby, don’t shoot him. If you fire the gun somebody’s
going to hear and then we’ll get caught for sure. I don’t want to go to prison
somewhere and never get to see you again,” Kelly said, her words coming out in
a breathless rush.

Summer silently thanked Kelly. For a second there, it had
looked like Jake was really going to pull the trigger, but now he hesitated.

“Nobody would hear if some dumb bitch hadn’t lost my
silencer,” Jake said, shrugging off the hand Kelly had put on his arm.

“I’m sorry. He shot the gun out of my hand. I swear to god.
You think I’m lying about how
this
happened?” Kelly held up her right
hand. Summer gasped before she could help herself. Kelly’s hand was covered in
blood and her thumb not much more than a bloody stump. Surely Aidan would have
told her if the officers had found part of a thumb on her studio floor.

“The rest of your hand is already on ice down at the
station,” Aidan said. “If you hurry, the med team might even be able to
reattach it for you before it’s too late.”

So much for trusting
him
to give her all the facts.
Summer knew she should have stayed with Aidan and the officers after she gave
her statement. Disgusting or not, she would have liked to have known there had
been a body part on her floor. Not to mention exactly where that body part had
landed so she could scrub down the wood a few thousand times.

“You’ll never be able to fight that kind of forensic
evidence, Kelly,” Aidan continued. “The best thing you could do is turn
yourself in.”

“Shut up, homo! Nobody’s turning anybody in.”

“They’re going to catch her eventually. It would be better
if they could see the state she’s in. It might help her case.”

“My case? I don’t want to have a case. Fuck, baby. You said
we’d never get caught, you said that—”

“Shut up. He’s just fucking with your head.”

“Listen, Kelly, it’s obvious you’re on something tonight.
That can go a long way to getting you a good deal and it’ll be even better if
you voluntarily turn yourself in. Just go down to the station—”

“Nobody’s going anywhere!” Jake screamed.

“Please, Aidan—” Summer began, but he cut her off before she
could finish.

“Let them run a blood test, Kelly, to show exactly what you’re
on and how much of it you’ve—”