Handcuffed by Her Hero (10 page)

“I’d think twice
about saying it if I were you, girl.”

She bared her
teeth as she lifted her glare. He released the strings but continued batting at
them, taunting her, his eyes aglow. He knew exactly what he did to her with his
gorgeous arrogance, didn’t he? He was confident of every drop her pussy
released for him now, with his massive body in front of her and the clamps
pumping an agonizing elixir through her whole torso.

Through those
clenched teeth, she issued, “Wasn’t thinking of
saying
anything, Sir.”

His lips
quirked. “No?”

Unbelievably,
she summoned a smile. The endorphins from that, blended with the adrenalin from
the pain, curled a tendril of delirium through her brain. “Words aren’t the
only way to talk, Master.”

Z chuckled. “Very
nice point. They certainly aren’t.” Through foggy vision, she watched his hand
dip into his pocket again. “Which is why you won’t mind this at all, hmmm?”

Before she could
follow his movement, he showed her the “this” to which he referred. Luna grunted
in surprise as he fitted a hard silicone bit gag between her lips with expert
speed. He had the nerve to laugh softly again, the mirth lingering on his lips
as he cinched the buckles to hold the bit in place. When he finished, he slid
his fingers back to the sides of her face, tilting her up for his scrutiny.

He began
stroking her bottom lip with his thumbs. The motion clicked as
her
cue
to do something, right? But what was it? It was time for her to glower at him
again, right? Or stamp her cute sandaled feet at him? To pick something out from
the “bratty” column to drive a new thorn into his fur, so a bigger chunk of his
civility finally fell off and he—

Stared at her
exactly as he did now.

Ohhhh, hell.

As he swiped her
lip the second time, Z traced the seam between her teeth and the bit. That made
his snicker stop. When that happened, Luna pulled in a shaky breath. Zeke’s
smile faded. She was glad she’d filled her lungs, because when his lids lowered
and his irises went molten, air was officially added to her body’s No
Admittance list.

Stare at me like
that forever.

“Very nice, Luna.”

Forever and a
day.

His husky words
wove such magic into her body, she excused him using the nickname she loathed
so much. She needed to acknowledge him, but nothing stirred from her except a
soft moan from deep in her throat. For some reason, that made his lips rise
again. But this time, his smile didn’t tease. It was more like…

What? What
was
he thinking? Hell, she barely connected to what
she
was thinking.
All right,
that
was funny. What thoughts would those be, exactly? The
ones consisting of
nunh, he’s so beautiful,
or
gah touch me again,
gah, oh please, Master
?

He’d told her
they’d do this in his time. By his rules. It had been so easy to
Yes, Sir
him, without absorbing the truth into her soul. She believed him now. She
adored him for it now. She needed more of his Domination now. And could do
nothing to demand it.

Even when he
dropped his hands from her and disappeared.

She whimpered in
frustration. The ropes around her arms, once friends, were the sentinels that
prevented her from knowing where he’d gone or what he was doing. She dropped
her head, glaring at the dark, throbbing red nubs of her nipples, still bound
in his clamps. Her mind swam, still hostage to the spell of his control. Though
she could hear his steps and feel his presence, she craved his touch again.
Longed for his words. Needed the next sweep of power and blessing of pain he
had to wield.

She hated every
second of it.

She loved every
second of it.

As her mind
plunged deeper into her surrender, a deeper moan erupted from her throat. She
drooled a little past the gag. She tugged at the ropes, savoring every burn
they gave her skin.

Until Zeke
slammed against her spine again.

Her breath
rushed out as he splayed a hand to her stomach. His other hand trailed lower.
Two of his long fingers dipped into the valley of her buttocks. They stopped at
the rim of her tight back hole. Luna pulled in air through her nose as he slowly
pressed at the sensitive nerves.

At the same time,
he trailed his other hand into the layers of wet arousal between her legs. A
thousand sparks shot through her pussy, her thighs, to the ends of her toes.
“Ahhhh!” The cry came from her but sounded like the scream of another, a being
spun of pure sensation, created solely to be his special welcome-home toy. Oh
damn,
yes.
More of the world spun away. She forgot the dungeon, left the
world behind, even the awful memories of Saint Cecelia’s that had threatened
before. Right now belonged to Zeke: his touch, his hands, his
control…especially as he captured her most sensitive button beneath his fingers.

She released a
high, long keen.

“Good girl.” His
voice was dark as coal as he squeezed something cold into the opening of her
ass.
Hell.
The only smell she loved more than leather was leather mixed
with lube. As he worked the tapered tip of an anal plug against her entrance,
he ordered, “Be still now, subbie.”

Despite the
morass in which everything from her clit to her cranium now swam, she tried to
swing a glare backwards. Be still. Really? Sure, boss. She’d get on that as
soon as she got over the fact that first, his fingers were turning her pussy
into a not-so-small electrical storm, and second, he was preparing to invade
the tiniest cavity in her body with something—

That stretched
it far beyond comfort.

“Unnnnck!” The
syllable was a miserable fail at the
f
word. It did the trick all the
same, easing off the tempo on her body’s wild mega-mix of pain, frustration,
and nympho-level arousal. Her vagina, teased by two forces outside her control,
throbbed like a savannah without a tiger to rip through it. Yet Z twisted the
plug in deeper, stuffing her more full than she’d ever been back there, hurting
her so exquisitely, so erotically.  “Uhhhhnnnn!” She bucked against his grip,
feeling that he hadn’t gotten it in all the way, unsure if she could take the
rest.

“Girl, what part
of ‘be still’ did you not understand?”

Hell.

With heaving
lungs and trembling legs, she gave in to his command. And learned that her ass
could indeed take the rest.

“Aggghhh!”

Stars shimmered
behind her squeezed eyelids as he seated the plug completely. He pressed the
base to her ass cheeks with an approving grunt, letting his fingers linger
along her skin. “Perfect.”

His voice was
lower. Grittier. Mesmerizing as the lightning he continued to spread through
her sex, helping to gather the downpour over her savannah. Terrible torment.
Throbbing rapture. She wanted to burst so bad…

“Mmmmph.” The
pressure from the plug turned into a steady, beautiful burn. Everything was a
mad mix of pain and pleasure. In the black behind her closed eyes, she spiraled
higher into the storm. She was pulled by relentless winds, flying across the
veldt. She was lashed and helpless, at the mercy of the beast now driving her
on with a bamboo cane at her ass. His feral breaths ripped through her blood.
His guttural commands filled her head.

“Feel it all,
Luna.”

Another stinging
blow. Another scream from the depths of her soul.
Yes. Oh, yes!

“Take it all,
Luna.”

Another. Harder.
Sharper. Her penitence. Her deliverance.
Yes, Master. Anything you want to
give me.

“Shatter for me,
Luna.”

The bamboo came
down. His fingers pushed inside. The storm crashed. The climax claimed. She was
devoured.

Yet before the
pulses in her sex died away, his mouth was back at her ear. His breathing was
heavy, harsh, pure animal. It matched the next
whack
he rained on her,
going for the virgin flesh of her upper thighs this time. Relentless. Driving
her to another limit. Ramming her past it.

“
Now
you’ve
had your warm-up.”

Rayna didn’t want to be here.

Sally couldn’t have been thrilled
about it, either. But the therapist looked serene as the Dalai Lama in one of her
office’s big leather chairs, blond curly hair pulled up loose, Foo Fighters
sweatshirt pulled over faded jeans. From behind her trendy oversized glasses,
her eyes smiled.

That didn’t stop Rayna from
continuing to feel like a giant shit.

“It’s ten o’clock,” she muttered.

“We’ve established that,” Sally
answered gently.

“On a Saturday night.”

“That, too.”

She grimaced. “I can’t believe
you insisted on meeting like this.”

“I can’t believe you thought a
phone call would handle it.”

She tugged at a thread in the tan
T-shirt in her lap. Zeke’s T-shirt. He’d left it in her room this morning. Not
surprising, considering his commitment to his bat-out-of-hell flight from the
house. She hadn’t found it until she’d finished scrubbing the kitchen, scouring
the bathroom, and cleaning out the den closet, only to find she still wasn’t
tired enough for the TV lullaby that had saved her from returning to the
bedroom last night.

As if fate still had it in for
her, she’d walked into the bedroom—and found the damn shirt like it was a
homing beacon. To compound the mistake of picking it up, she’d smelled it. In
an instant, he’d filled her senses again. She was meeting his brilliant hazel
gaze. Exploring his burnished skin. Letting him fill her body. Letting him see
more of her soul.

Burning their friendship because
of her damn hormones.

 Twenty minutes after that, she’d
dialed Sally. Gotten desperate enough to call her therapist’s cell at eight
p.m. on a Saturday.

“I would’ve been fine,” she
murmured, “after a little bit. I just needed to talk and—”

“Rayna.”

“What? I wasn’t in total crisis,
okay?”

“
Rayna.
”

“I was in a little rough spot.”

“You were in tears.”

“It was a bump.”

“
A lot
of tears.”

“Okay, okay.” She started making
accordion folds in one of the T-shirt’s sleeves. Sally didn’t say anything for
a very long pause. Crap. The woman was watching her. Being watched was
intimidating. It meant she was a target. That any minute, three of King’s men
would swoop in, hold her down, spread her legs and—

This jewel isn’t
your shame. This diamond is a symbol of your miracle. It’s your true medal of
honor…

She forced down a shaking gulp.
Clung to the words, begging them to echo some more in her head, hating them
when they did. Her fingers hurt from gripping the beige cotton.
Shit.
She was stronger than this. He’d been the one to show her that. And he’d be the
first to tell her she had to do it without him, too…

“Ugh. I’m a mess.” She fidgeted,
considering a get-me-out-of-here moment of her own. “Look, I’m sorry I bothered
you, Sal. I’ll call one of my brothers. This isn’t fair to you. You’re
gorgeous. You must’ve had a date lined up or something—”

“Yep. A really good one.” Sally
chuckled. “He’s very adept at putting a movie on pause, keeping dinner warm and
understanding that when his woman is a shrink for MRW services, her hours
aren’t nine to five.”

“Sounds like a keeper.”

The woman’s face softened. Her
lips crinkled in that “I’ve got a delicious secret” way that only other women
understood. “We’ll see.”

Rayna nodded at Sally’s shirt.
“Does he like the Foo Fighters, too?”

The woman squared her shoulders.
“Are you going to play deflection until I call you on your shit?”

She shrugged. “You have to admit,
I’m good at it.”

Sally didn’t return the mirth.
She let a sizable pause go by before asking, “Who belongs to the shirt, Ray?”

She let her gaze fall again to
the beige lump in her lap. Tried to tuck in the spots where she’d dampened it
with her tears. This heartache was so ugly. And stupid. And useless. “You mean
who
belonged
to it.” She ran a finger along the worn collar. “Me,” she
finally said. “It belongs to me. He left it behind. Which means it’s officially
mine now, right?”

“Is that a good thing or a bad
thing?”

“It’s a
no
thing.”

As Sally’s brows ticked up, she back-pedaled
over her thou-protesteth-too-much answer. “It’s nothing, okay? It has to be.
It’s what I agreed to, all right? And the last time I checked, I was a grown-up
who knew the difference between strings-free sex and stalker-time
expectations.”

One side of Sally’s mouth kicked
up to join her brows. “So you slept with someone.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“Nothing. I think it’s wonderful.
You’re moving forward with life, getting on with what a normal twenty-seven
year-old woman should be—”

“It was Zeke.”

After ten seconds, she got ready
to repeat it. Maybe the bomb was so huge all Sally had gotten were the shock
waves and not the real words. The woman looked more Zen-perfect than ever, not
even lifting her pen to jot this in her ever-present session journal.

Finally, Sally stated, “So he got
back early from the deployment.”

Had the woman spoken like they
were just trading costume ideas for the Halloween bash next week?  “Uh…yeah.”

“Bet you were glad to see him.”

“Uh-huh. I was. And then I
slept
with him, Sal. Did you get
that
part?”

“Yep. Sure did.”

“And you’re not shocked?”

“I’m stunned that you thought I’d
be.”

She went silent while scrunching
one of the T-shirt’s sleeves into an accordion fold. Yay. The self-appointed
stupidity medal just got bumped from silver to gold.

“Now, let me guess,” Sally went
on. “You two agreed it would be a friendly little tension reliever, right? Just
a way to burn off some stress? But hindsight isn’t bearing that out?”

She let the fold fall apart along
with the edges of her composure. “Hindsight.” It fell out on a whisper. An
image engraved itself on her mind with not-so-nice severity. Z’s broad, bare,
shoulders as he’d made a beeline for her front door. “Sure. That’s a good way
of saying fucked up to shit, isn’t it?”

“That’s pretty harsh language.”

She looked up. Hell, here came
the tears, anyway. “It’s a harsh world.”

Getting her bitter side on didn’t
help things one bit. The ache in her throat got heavier. The loss in her heart
flooded deeper. Neither got better when she remembered the look Z stamped into
her before turning from her. His stare, full of so much regret and discomfort,
that she’d been certain of one thing. He’d likely been prepping it long before
their night of reckless sex.

Great. Out of all the Special
Forces studs in the world, she’d slept with the only one who dealt the goodbye
fuck
after
the deployment.

She erased the wetness from her
face in two furious sweeps. “Look,” she muttered, “I understand what happened.
I even understand why.” After her easy catch of Sally’s tissue box lob, she
went on, “I just don’t understand…all this.” She waved one of the white swipes.
“I have a lot of friends on the base. And some of them come with ‘equipment’ that’s
handy at times…”

Sally smirked. “Helps to know a
soldier with a good-sized…gun.”

She returned a watery laugh. “Yeah.
It does.” As if she were getting naked physically as well as emotionally, she
curled her knees to her chest. “But I’ve never had any problems putting them
all back into their compartments. What’s my problem now?”

Sally released a meaningful
breath. “Zeke’s a little too big for a compartment.”

Rayna snorted. “No shit.”

“I didn’t mean that literally.”

“Neither did I.”

After another silence passed,
filled mostly with her efforts to force the memories of Thursday night away,
she hurled the tissues to the floor but kept the T-shirt.

“I hate this,” she spat. “I hate
feeling like this. All right, I admit it. I was just part of his job for a
while. Maybe a part that lingered longer than most, but—” She rested her cheek
on her knee. “I told myself it wouldn’t be forever. I knew it wouldn’t be,
since the second we got out of that damn jungle. And nothing got any easier when
I found out he’s a Dom—”

She coughed to cover how she
chopped back the rest of the word.

“He’s a what?” Sally asked.

“A—a dog lover.” She averted her
eyes. “And you know how my back porch is a magnet for every stray cat in the
neighborhood.”

“Rayna.” Sally’s tone got layered
with concrete all of a sudden. The woman leaned forward. “You’re racing all
over the place with this.”

She raised her head and winced. “I’ve
noticed, thank you.”

Sally uncurled her legs. As she
came forward some more, she L-shaped her elbows atop her knees. “What do you
want here, sweetie?”

The ten million dollar question.
If only searching her heart for the answer made her feel that way. If only she
didn’t have to search her damn
heart
for the answer. When had Zeke come
to park his beautiful ass in so much of it? When should she have pushed herself
back from his massive shoulders and told herself that they wouldn’t be there
forever? That one day, she’d be looking at the horizon without him in it?

She should have known. She should
have seen.

She ducked her forehead back
against her knees. “I just want to go back three months.”

“You think that would give you
the answers?”

“No. It would prevent the
questions in the first place.”

“Because you’d make sure to keep
Zeke in his compartment this time. Is that it?”

The concrete was gone from
Sally’s voice. She didn’t need it. The question did a fine job of crushing
Rayna’s logic on its own. “Shit,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m just screwed.”

Maybe she’d been that way from
the beginning. Perhaps from the second the man had scooped her from the dirt in
that jungle, some chromosome had gone rogue and let in stupid expectations
through a back window of her psyche. That meant Zeke was more than right
yesterday, accusing her of turning him into Superman or worse when all he’d
been doing was his job.

Yeah. Screwed. That was her.

She lifted her head enough to
shoot another despairing stare at Sally. “Why did I pick now to be an idiot
about this crap?”

The therapist barely moved. “Why
do you think
now
has anything to do with it?”

She should have looked away once
more. She knew what Sally was getting at—and dreaded it. About three weeks ago,
during a session where Rayna had been more confused than usual about the
inability to disconnect from Z, an inquisitive look had crossed Sal’s face. Two
seconds later, she’d made a suggestion that first had Rayna giggling.

Hypnosis.

She hadn’t laughed for long.
Sally stated her case with serious intent. The therapy was doing wonders for
the guys who’d seen intense battle, and maybe a focus like that would help
Rayna feel more independent of her attachment to Zeke. Still, Rayna rolled her
eyes and accused Sally of simply wanting to see her dance like a duck or break
into a Beyoncé tune.

The subject hadn’t gotten dropped
for long. Sally had been persistent in her suggestions about the therapy. Like
now.

But there was a difference
tonight. Rayna was officially desperate enough to listen.

She straightened a little.
Released a weighted sigh. “You really think it’ll help, don’t you?”

Sally smiled softly. “I think
there might be something in your past that you don’t see now that might explain
why you’re in bondage to these feelings for Zeke.”

Bondage. Zeke. If the woman only knew
how perfectly she’d tapped that vein. “You mean, like something I’ve repressed?
But why?”

“Perhaps it’s too traumatic to
carry in your active consciousness,” Sally offered. “Or it happened so fast,
you’ve mentally filed it away as non-important.” She tilted her head in contemplation.
“Our minds are like a big sweater, woven with fibers of our experiences, present
and past. Sometimes the tiniest of threads can unravel a whole sleeve before we
see it.”

Rayna scooted her legs into a
crisscross. “You think I’m unraveling?”

Sally took a deep breath. “Not
yet.”

“Great,” she snorted. “So I’ve
still got half a sleeve left. Thanks for the assurance.”

The therapist got up, crossed to
her, and crouched. “I think you have a need to understand things, Rayna. To
understand yourself. And after you’ve done that, you need to fix it. Goes
hand-in-hand with your need to care for people. None of it is bad, sweetie.
It’s probably why you went into the medical field.” When Rayna huffed, Sal
grabbed her hand. “Answer me something. If you guys get a patient who isn’t
responding well to a medication, do you give them a sweet little ‘too bad, so
sad, maybe we can help you next time?’”