Puppet On A String (15 page)

      
“That I am. Now do you mind if I fuck you?”

      
“No, sir.”

      
“And should I be easy, girl?”

      
“No, no,” she shook her head, “don’t be easy on me, Padraig. Don’t.”

      
“Good then.”

 
     
He rose up off the couch and picked her up in his arms, kissing her all the way to the bedroom where he deposited her atop the damask sheets. She watched from the bed as he stripped off his clothes to reveal the gleaming muscles of his torso. His slim hips cradled the base of his jutting spear – the object of her desire.

      
She wanted to taste his essence on her tongue, to lavishly serve him as she did so many men. But he dove for her pussy first. Landing between her outstretched legs, he shoved himself inside her, then fell against the softness of her breasts. As he covered her mouth with another rash of kisses, his hips began to move.

      
What was meant to be tender and loving became raw and steamy and wild.
Shelby
’s rage was too close to the surface to rein in, and Padraig responded with a startling savagery, a fierceness she rarely saw in him when making love. Forces collided. They grabbed for each other, consumed by pent-up need. Then they rolled from side to side on the hotel bed, clutching, grasping, humping with an animal fervor, tearing away all pretense that her healing would require a gentle hand and careful touch. Neither came until he had her on her hands and knees with his hips behind hers and his cock poised at her ass. He abruptly thrust into her backdoor. A dark eroticism billowed from the verboten place of pleasure and she screamed: “Fuck me, Padraig, do it!” should he have been inclined to hesitate.

      
But there was no real hesitation in Padraig
Finnian
; any pause was just his sizing up his desires for her. For a moment, he relished the sweetness of her flesh, her malleable ass with its two soft orbs still bearing visible marks from her sufferings in the whorehouse.

      
“You doan need ta worry, lass, you’ll get what you want,” he said.

      
He plunged inside the tight space after slickening the entry with her juices.

      
They groaned while rocking against each other with the same steadily driving rhythms. They fucked until there was nothing to do but explode on each other, each offering up a string of profanity into the elegant air of the Viennese hotel. A sleazy dive would have been more appropriate for this kind of sex, and yet the irony of their surroundings might be something to laugh about some time later.

Chapter Ten

Because the elevator in the office building was broken,
Shelby
raced up three flights of stairs. She swept past the bewildered young secretary – not even bothering with a wry smirk of recognition seeing such a frail thing at that desk. Even when she barged into the office without knocking, she ignored the poor girl behind her shouting ineffectively, “You can’t go in there, miss!”

      
And there he was, sitting so proudly behind his desk, in control as always.

      
“You bastard! You worthless piece of swine. Clive Darcy you are the devil’s henchman!” She charged in his direction.

      
He might have been amused if there weren’t three men sitting with him discussing important matters with sensitive international repercussions.

      
“I’m sorry, Ms. Ryan, I don’t have time for you now,” he said.

      
“Oh, but you will take time for me, Clive,” she countered directly.

      
His voice got deeper, the sound of it memorably terse. “You’ll have to wait.”

      
“No, I will not wait,” she refused to budge, “and if they” she referred to the three stunned men in suits – “are not out of here in fifteen seconds they can hear what I have to say too.”
 

      
Darcy turned to his visitors. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said without missing a beat, “I think I need to take care of this right now. I’ll have Miss Jenner show you into the conference room. She’ll have some coffee and snacks available.” With an open arm, he showed them to the main office door and nodded to his secretary. The pretty blonde was shivering in fright, still recovering from the last two minutes.

      
“I’m sorry, sir,” she rushed on, obviously in fear of the man. “I didn’t know—”

      
“Please, Elaine, just show these gentlemen into the conference room,” he said kindly. “A few refreshments, if you will?”

      
“Yes, sir.”

      
With that handled, he turned back, closed his door and gazed into Shelby Ryan’s steaming eyes.

      
“I see you’re back safe and sound, but I can’t see that it gives you the right to barge in here unannounced.”

      
“Don’t talk about ‘rights’ to me, Clive. You had no right to send me on that trip. No right. None.”

      
“I’m sorry if it came down the way it did. But I couldn’t afford to tell you in advance.”

      
“You couldn’t afford to tell me! What kind of BS is that? You couldn’t tell me that you planned to have me arrested? Interrogate and shipped off to become the target of a ruthless sadist? You put my life at risk. I can’t believe you’d stoop this low.” Her eyes flared again. “You are the most detestable being on the planet.”

      
“Am I really?” he laughed, and sat back down behind his desk.

      
“I could have been killed!” She leaned over the desk, her attempts to remain cool having failed miserably.

      
“You’re being far too dramatic,
Shelby
. They wouldn’t have killed you. Your life was never at risk.” He was calm, as clipped in his tone as she expected him to be, and
maybe
just a little bit ruffled by what he saw before him. “Besides, we had you tracked every hour.”

      
“Oh, yes, the chip you planted in my shoulder. As if that would have kept me alive when Col. Jessup and his thugs started beating me. They were men without souls, they didn’t care whether I lived or died. And they certainly would have killed me if they believed for a second that I was planted in their operation to bust up their slave ring. Don’t tell me I was safe, Clive. You were not there.”

      
“Sorry. I still can’t see why you’re so steamed,” he dismissively rattled off, “you completed your mission; the nasty slave ring has been destroyed. My team in the area has been trying to shut them down for years. And you, you, Shelby Ryan managed to infiltrate their system and tear it up by the roots. You should be proud of what your little incarceration won for the free world.”

      
“Proud? Oh, damn you!” She fought back the tears. “You had me systematically tortured, fearing for my life, and I should be proud of enduring that?”

      
He sat back, a little bewildered. “Oh, c’mon now. You’re telling me that you didn’t even wager a guess as to what was happening? All that time, not a guess at all?”

      
She looked at him stunned. “No, Clive, I didn’t wager a guess,” she was as much bewildered as she was angry now. “I couldn’t fathom that you would do this to me. It might have crossed my mind, the disk and all that stuff about it, but it was all so vague. No, not until that chopper lifted me away from the brothel and my rescuer was telling me that I’d ‘done my part,’ did it cross my mind that you would place me in harm’s way, having no idea how your treacherous game would play out.” Weakened by the emotion, she stepped back, shaking her head, befuddled as ever, “There was no way you could control the outcome. What’s just as bad is thinking you had the right to use me without my consent.”

      
“You are more naïve than I figured,
Shelby
. You actually think that you were in control of your life, that I wouldn’t use you as I used you before? That you weren’t just one easy trip away from the
big
one? I’m finding that hard to believe.”

      
“I’ve always been naïve, Clive. What I wanted when I left you was a normal life. That’s all I wanted and you knew that.”

      
“So why didn’t you make a clean break? Why did you go to Greystoke month after month; why did you keep being my mule, letting me send you to foreign cities with those little packages?”

      
“You know why I went to Greystoke. And you know that I wanted nothing to do with his kind of sex games once it was over.”

      
“But still you couldn’t stop yourself. All those trips abroad…”

      
“Because I believed in what you were doing, Clive. And I trusted you when you said that they would bring me no harm. I trusted you. I did.” She stared at him wonderingly. “But maybe I am getting it now.” She nodded her head. “Yeah. Maybe now I understand the real reason…why you’ve been hanging on to
me
.”

      
“Oh? And what would that be?”

      
“After I ended our affair, you gave me to Greystoke to punish me, and when that wasn’t enough, you cooked up this scheme to get back at me, to remind me who I am. You never believed I could let it go, did you? That’s it, isn’t it? You knew what they’d do to me. You knew that I’d suffer blows that you couldn’t give me. And you wanted that. This has been your revenge, the ultimate payback.”

      
“Oh, my dear, you are stretching things now way out of proportion,” he almost laughed.

      
“I don’t think so.”

      
“Think what you want, but you survived to live another day. And look at you now, my sweet. You were exceptional. You were the only one who could have pulled this off. I knew I needed a bonafide masochist like you in that prison and that brothel. It’s too bad I couldn’t have pulled you out sooner, but some things can’t be helped. You don’t seemed to have suffered all that much.”

      
“That’s easy for you to say since I’m all in one piece. But let me go back to what I first said: you are a bastard, Clive Darcy. I hope I never lay eyes on you again.”

      
It was time to leave and she was moving toward the door, knowing that freedom was on the other side…

      
“So, what are you going to do now,
Shelby
?” he asked. His voice leapt out at her as it had so many times.

      
She froze a moment, turned around, and then without any further hesitation, she said: “First thing, I’m going to the company doctor and have the microchip removed so you can’t track me anymore. And the tattoo on my breast, I’ll have that removed too, so that my boyfriend won’t be freaked out every time he sees it.”

      
“Yes, well those are the easy things. But what are you going to do when those old desires start to leap up on you again and you have no sadist to turn to, hum? No man who will take you to those despicable places?”

      
“I don’t know, Clive. I lived without it for nearly three years, and did just fine. But I guess, if I really need it
that
bad, I’ll find another master.”

      
“Yes, I suppose the boyfriend won’t do,” he sneered. Something strangely mystifying about that particular sneer.

      
“What? What do you mean by that?”

      
“Nothing really. Just that your Padraig
Finnian
, isn’t it? He doesn’t seem to fit the class of man you’d be interested in.”

      
Class of man?
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to find a lover from your class of man. Consider this my formal resignation and my final farewell,
Clive. Mr. Darcy.
” She took a deep breath. “You really are an ass.”

      
He smiled, chuckling darkly, which made her hesitate for just a few unguarded seconds. “I may be an ass and a bastard and all the things you say. But you, Shelby, still belong to me.”

      
She looked at him calmly and shook her head, feeling nothing, not even the most meager flash of masochistic thrill. This was very good. “No, Clive. Not anymore.”

      
If she’d rehearsed her lines a little more thoroughly she might have found a few more invectives to fling on him in response to that accusation, but her simple response worked just fine. She’d finally cut the ties to Clive Darcy. After ten years of his control, it was time.

      
If he didn’t believe what she said, maybe her emotion would have left its indelible mark.
     
If her ‘vacation’ in
Vienna
had taught her anything, it was how to deal with truly villainous men, and Clive Darcy, her former owner really paled in comparison to men like Col. Jessup.

***

For several days after her return,
Shelby
stayed home, resting. She promised Padraig and Maureen that she would give herself some time before taking a shift at the coffeehouse. Padraig checked in on her in the evenings when he got off work. If he were tired, he’d give her a good night kiss and then go home. If he had a little more energy and she was willing, they made love.

      
However after a week with long hours at home alone,
Shelby
was getting antsy to resume her life.

      
“I need to work,” she argued with Maureen over the phone.

      
“
Geez
,
Shel
, after what you’ve been through, you can’t be…well…you can’t be…”