Out of Control (14 page)

“Monday and Thursday are my dog-walking days. Regina does the other days, but she has a class or something Monday and Thursday.” She shrugged. “It’s forty bucks more a week. Keeps me fed.”

“And then you went back to the studio?”

“I’ve been working on a pretty major piece, and I got the idea for another one on Sunday, so I worked late to sketch it out. And I have production line pieces—batches of vases, mostly—to make for the Summer Solstice Show. I needed to work on those today, and I just lost track of time. Although these vases are like the damn Christmas tree ornaments for the winter craft fairs. I get truly sick of them… Hey, that’s a thought. Maybe I should put some of my leftover ornaments from last winter out at the festival and call them suncatchers. I won’t make more, but anything I can sell is better…”

Jen’s enthusiasm bubbled out of her as she spoke. Her eyes brightened, her voice became more animated, and while Drake wasn’t one hundred percent sure what she was talking about, he enjoyed listening to her. She seemed so happy. But she was also babbling like she was high, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t. She was paler than usual, and dark circles contradicted the sparkle in her green eyes.

He gentled his touch, put two fingers softly on her lips. “Hush,” he whispered. “Take a deep breath.”

She looked startled but obeyed. One deep breath, held for a second, then left out with an “Oof.” She followed it with another for good measure. Drake couldn’t help watching her breasts rise and fall. He loved that small, pretty movement, especially since her nipples were tight and puckered under her T-shirt.

“When was the last time you slept, beautiful?”

She looked like she was counting back in her head, and judging from the way she raised one eyebrow and chuckled, the answer she reached startled her. “I took a nap at the studio today while the glass was coming to temperature.”

“In the studio?”

“We have a couch,” she said defensively. “And pillows. I’ve lived there for a week or so, when I was between apartments.” She grinned, her smile cockeyed from exhaustion. “Damn, I got a lot of work done then. Lived on coffee and chips and those gross 7-11 frozen burritos, but I did this one sculpture that sold to a collector in New York for a
lot
of money. I’ve never been able to duplicate those colors. I was so tired I forgot to write down the combination of minerals I used… I should show you a picture.”

He fought back a grin, then stopped fighting it. He loved her enthusiasm for her work, but right now, she sounded like an overtired little kid. “I’d like to see it, but maybe tomorrow. It’s time to get you to bed.”

She sat on his lap and snuggled against him. “I agree. Absolutely.” She wiggled her butt, grinding it against his cock in a way that made him want to forget his good intentions.

“I meant to sleep. You must be exhausted.”

She nibbled his neck. “I’ve had coffee. I’ll be fine.”

“You need sleep.”

“A
lot
of coffee. I do need sleep, but I’m wired. You’ll have to wear me out.” She slipped her hand inside the waistband of his pants. The way they were sitting, she couldn’t reach his cock, but her hand brushing his belly shattered his resolve. He groaned, pulled her into another deep, devouring kiss.

He should carry her up to her own bed under the stained glass window, tuck her in and turn out the light. That would be the responsible thing to do. But she was squirming and mewling into his mouth, and obviously wanted him as much as he wanted her. What the hell. If she passed out once he got her horizontal, they could at least enjoy some naked time together first.

Mind made up, he encouraged her off his lap, then smacked her on the ass. “My room,” he ordered, “before the caffeine wears off and you crash out on me.”

She scampered upstairs ahead of him. He watched the round, firm globes of her ass swaying as she moved and couldn’t resist spanking it a few more times, not hard, just enough to encourage her. Tease and arouse her.

Tease and arouse them both.

“Strip,” he ordered once they were in the room and he was sitting on the bed. It came out like a bark of command. Jen didn’t waste time trying to sexy it up but got naked as fast as she could. She had a bra on today, not a skimpy, lacy, sex-games bra, but a simple one that looked like it was cotton knit. It was cheery sunshine yellow, like her panties, but neither stayed on long enough for him to get a good look. Although he was gratified by the speed at which she obeyed, he was tempted to tell her to slow down and let him appreciate each step.

But he couldn’t complain that a beautiful woman was in a hurry to get naked for him.

Especially not when she stood before him glorious and bare, wearing nothing except the black rope anklet he’d made her the other night.

Almost forty-eight hours and a shower later, and Jen still had it on. He’d never told her not to take it off and had pretty much figured she would when they didn’t manage to see each other for so long. But seeing that narrow black band of his creation, stark against her skin, turned him on as much as the edgiest game of pain and pleasure, power and control, that he’d ever played.

This doesn’t feel like playing. This feels real. Like she left it on because wearing my mark seemed right.

Of course, she might have forgotten she was wearing it. After all, she’d neglected to sleep and probably to eat, let alone call him, because she was so caught up in her work. Easy to lose track of a bit of rope.

But he liked seeing it on her. Liked to imagine something more permanent in its place. It was way too soon to make any kind of long-term decision, but it wasn’t too soon to indulge in a daydream or six.

“You need a tracking device, woman,” he said, distracting himself from his fantasy. He meant to sound mock-gruff, but as he spoke, he realized he felt it for real. “I was worried about you.”

Jen crossed her hands in front of her breasts and glared at him. “You sound like my dad.”

“Well, I don’t want that.” He patted his lap. “Get over here. Let me prove I’m not your dad.” She gaped more when he reached into the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a leather tawse.

She started at the small, forked slapper and didn’t move. “I didn’t do anything wrong. At least I didn’t mean to. You didn’t give me rules yet. It’s not fair to punish me.”

He slapped the tawse on the bed. “One, this isn’t a punishment. You’ll know when you’re being punished, and it won’t be fun. Two, I still owe you fun consequences for being late to work the other night. Three—” He looked up at her and smiled as evilly as he could. “Whoever said I was fair?”

It’s not fair
, Jen mentally protested again. But at the same time, she remembered how Drake’s hand felt against her ass, how the pain transmuted to hot bliss. A flicker in her lower belly might have been fear or desire, was probably both.

Drake seemed upset with her, and she really didn’t get it. She didn’t get it and she didn’t like it and she felt like she ought to argue or at least ask pointed questions.

But the kisses in the kitchen felt like a reunion, as if they were longtime lovers who’d been apart for far longer than a day and a half. And damn, he looked good enough to eat: the gray eyes that studied her so intently, the broad shoulders, the corded muscles of his arms, the strong thighs bared by shorts. Good enough to eat. Certainly good enough to yield to.

The black-and-blue leather paddle intimidated her. It would sting differently than his hand. More concentrated. Less intimate. Definitely different. The cool yet organic feel of leather against her skin was a sensation she’d rarely experienced, and never since her early experiments with her roommate. She’d even feel the symbolic black and blue, though that, she knew, was just her overly developed awareness of color.

But at the same time, she wanted to experience it.

Drake slapped the viper-tongued paddle onto the bed again, and the sound jolted through her. Curiosity and lust got the better of nerves and resentment. She took one step forward, then another, and all but bolted the last couple to the bed.

She started to lie across his lap as he’d directed, but those muscular arms caught her, and he directed her to stand between his open legs. Drake pulled her into a deep kiss. His hands traveled down her back. She shivered at the trail they left behind on her naked skin, a trail no one could see that felt like sparkles in all the pinks and reds of Valentine hearts. He reached her buttocks, began to caress and knead.

It was soothing and sensual at the same time, deliciously sexy and yet tender too. And speaking of tender, she’d been sitting on a hard stool in the studio without noticing her butt was sore, but Drake seemed to know every spot that first spanking had left extrasensitive. It was just enough to help her flash back to that spanking, layering memories with sensation, adding to her arousal. All the time, they kissed as if they’d been apart for years and had just found each other again, fierce and devouring and full of need. She fancied she sensed anger in the kiss, a bright, acid green note against the richness of the need and the lust, but it was a kind of anger that made the lust and need more powerful, and it faded quickly as they kissed and caressed.

“Now lie down,” he whispered, guiding her down across his lap. His shorts had pushed up, baring more of his legs. His skin was hot, and she was acutely aware of its texture, of its sueded softness over his hard muscle, and of the hair on his thighs. “Cross your hands behind you.”

She guessed at the rope before she felt it binding her, wrist to opposite elbow. It was an oddly comforting position, if not precisely a comfortable one, as if she cradled herself. The rope was soft, thicker than what was around her ankle but thinner than what he’d used the other day. “There you go,” he said, “all secure,” and his voice was somehow both full of erotic menace and soothing.

Grounded by the rope and by the contact with Drake, Jen felt safe to drift in a silky scarlet haze. When Drake began to spank her, she didn’t even jump or yelp, just gave herself over to the new sensation, a sharp yellow counterpoint to the red, jarring, yet beautiful as an Ithaca autumn. She moved up and down with the blows, flinching away out of instinct, then pushing back for more. She was needy, dripping, yet too caught up in the moment to crave fucking, which she’d normally want when she was this aroused.

She wanted to experience this, dammit. Experience whatever it was Drake wanted to give her.

Even if it included anger, though she’d have to remember to ask him when they were calm again why he was annoyed in the first place.

If they were ever calm. Calm didn’t seem to happen when she and Drake were together, even though everything about the colors in Drake’s house, everything about the way he conducted his life, suggested he liked to surround himself with serenity to the point of austerity.

But he was anything but austere within his almost monastic bedroom. Here, he was fierce.

He brought his hand down against her ass again and again until her head swam with pain and pleasure, until everything was crimson and nothing—not her work, not Drake’s odd behavior, not the bills she should be juggling now that she’d gotten her paycheck from the bakery—mattered except the moment. Jen yelped and jumped and mewled with each blow, then begged for more. Her ass was burning, as was her pussy. Her nipples were hard and aching where they rubbed against the sheets. She smelled the dark muskiness of her desire rising in the warm room, balanced by the rich cinnamon-brown spice of Drake’s need and the hot sharpness of sweat, both his and hers.

Jen was quivering, on the edge of an orgasm or maybe taking off to another dimension, when Drake stopped spanking her, instead reaching between her open legs to tease her drenched cunt. The touch jolted through her like electricity, pushing her already incredible arousal one notch higher, but not pushing her over the edge. The slightest pressure on her clit would be enough to bring her off, but Drake seemed to be touching everywhere but her clit. “Please,” she begged. “I’m so close. Please.” He chuckled softly and kept up the teasing, taunting touch. “I need… Please let me come.” She tried to squirm so her clit and his exploring fingers would meet, but instead of obliging, Drake withdrew his fingers.

“Not until I’m ready—and I’m not ready.” His voice was blue-black, starless night. “My decision, Jen. And I’m inclined to make you wait, just like I was waiting for you to get home or at least hear from you.”

A flash of that acid green again, not anger exactly, but irritation, tempered with a warmer hint, maybe concern. His attitude reminded Jen a bit of her father when she straggled in late as a teenager, and it should have been annoying, but those colors were just flashes against the sexy darkness of his voice, against its whisky intonations, against the way his hard, muscled arms held her while he scolded, not like she was a prisoner, but like she was something fragile and precious that he was afraid to lose.

She shivered from the sheer intensity of his voice, of his touch. It made her ache to come even more than she had before, but in some way she couldn’t start to explain, it also eased the jagged edges of her need, made it endurable. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.” She was affirming what he’d said about not coming, but as she spoke, she realized she was affirming something bigger, something so new and fragile it could only be acknowledged during the rawness of a moment like this. If she was thinking clearly, she’d rationalize it away.