Darkest Love (8 page)

Could Annie be talking to people? To her colleagues? To the HELICOPTER PILOT?
Rain was getting extremely paranoid. It wasn't easy being gossiped about constantly.

Well, one thing's for sure; she would not have told anyone about her choking adventures
. Rain grinned cynically as he swept into the arrivals shed. That would protect him. Not a single woman he had ever gotten kinky with had spilled the details. And he was willing to bet no one ever would. That was a career killer for her—not for him.

There was a lot Rain didn't like about modern society, but he had learned to navigate it nonetheless. He knew what he could and couldn't get away with.

“Back for three weeks, Nelson. Is Annie Childs here yet?” The guy at the arrivals desk nodded. Rain smiled tightly and swept out, bags in hand. What had that mystery field trip of Annie's been all about?

She's gone to
New Caledonia, I bet,
Rain thought. Annie loved to examine the foliage, to compare it to Sivu's and to watch those amazing birds that could sharpen tools with their beaks.
Smart creatures.
The people in that area were intriguing, too. Sivu and New Caledonia presented an amazing comparative opportunity–Annie had probably been docked up in NC in recent months, or perhaps in Vanuatu, gathering data and looking for any similarities between those Melanesian peoples and the Kaamo. She would probably get a great paper out of it:
South Pacific Iconography Before and After White Settlement,
or something along those lines
.

He huffed and puffed in the humid Sivu air, which was heavy as a blanket.
Hot and heavy.
He would see Annie Childs soon enough, and ask her personally. Maybe she would share her notes about any tidbits she had uncovered.

* * * *

“I've been here the whole time,” Annie said, unscrewing her gin top with a
shrk shrk shrk
and taking a gulp. Rain couldn't believe his ears.

“In Sivu?”

She nodded. “I had to get away from New York. There were…a few things bothering me.”

Rain nodded. He had thought about that on the flight, between the pilot's questions about flings and faculty hotties.
I'm sorry Annie.

He kept his mouth shut
,
afraid that the words wouldn't come out right. Annie had an antenna for his coldness. And he had to admit, she was right; he was cold in some ways. Between her sensitivity and his icy personality there was not much room for a win. Not for the two of them as a couple.

She always said it; he was cold. There was something missing behind his eyes and in his touch.
You're like a machine,
she'd say, sobbing
. You're mechanical.

“Maybe I'm just a man,” he'd said once. He stood by that. What did she want, really? Rain watched Annie unscrew the gin bottle a second time and take another swig.

“I don't know what to say, Ann. Let's not start that.” He'd made a few attempts to calm her post–coital crises in the early days of sleeping with her. But he'd quickly given up.
If my words aren't good enough, I'll just stop offering them,
he had thought as she cried, for the dozenth time, saying she was confused about the sex, she wanted it and she agreed that it meant nothing, but she always felt so
used
afterwards.

That's not my fault
, Rain had thought–and still thought–defensively, though he kept it to himself.

We're a bad match,
Rain had decided quickly. After sex was the moment he felt the least emotional, the least needy. Caring words and gestures came slowly to Rain Mistern at the best of times. After sex—especially after brutal S & M sex—trying to summon them was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.

“Rain, I feel so horny tonight,” she hissed, stopping his heart. She was wearing a silky robe, surrounded by open journals and fragrant fern fronds gathered during her most recent walks. A few dry plant sprigs peeked out from between the pages of her notebook. Annie's father had been a keen amateur botanist, Rain knew, and her interest in the flora and birds of the South Pacific was as keen as her professional anthropological interest in the tribespeople. She was flushed from the heat and the first swirl of gin in her blood. Rain's heart sank as his dick started to grow. She would take him like a tigress then give him hell for weeks.

“Annie, you're tipsy. Are you sure?”

“I've only had these two,” she said, shooting him a steady glance as evidence.

Rain was mentally ordering his penis to slow down and stay calm—and marveling at the sexiness of her tanned, sweat-beaded face in the candlelight—when she took the next step for him.

With a hearty clank of the gin bottle on the table, Rain feared both for the oaken table and for Annie's hand if the bottle broke. But in seconds she was tearing at her robe.

“Hwoo.” Rain exhaled. The silk dropped off her shoulders to reveal a body toned from weeks of granite-cliff scaling and fern-gathering. The big breasts and lush hips were still there, connected by a little isthmus of a waist; not so much skinny as shapely, and beautifully textured by muscles she had not had before. Rain ran his eyes over the beginnings of a pretty six pack and the planes and crevices of a woman who was using her body, leaping and swimming and flinging her journals onto sand banks and singing and clapping with Kaamo children.

“You look
great
.” Rain watched her eyes flickering in the candlelight and after registering a final, begging throb of his cock—
Please, Rain?
Pleeeease
?—he surrendered.

“You're going to ruin me, Annie Childs.”

She was staring wordlessly, lips curled ever so slightly in a come-get-me snarl, eyes flashing like a wildcat's, her overflowing breasts just begging to be caressed and licked. Annie's blonde hair was huge, a lion-like mane textured to a gorgeous natural wave by the humidity and by river water, sea salt and dozens of daily drip-dries. Strands of Amazon-goddess hair clung to her sweaty face, and those beads of moisture took nothing away from her sexiness. They looked like pearls of life, jewels adorning this woman who was as lush as the tropics she had inhabited for the last few months.

The island had stamped itself on her, her skin tanned to a smooth caramel. Her hair and eyes wild. And the beads of sweat–a headpiece, slipped by nature itself on the forehead of this woman who was truly
living
. She was a goddess…

Rain gulped. “Annie I don't want to hurt you.”

She was walking towards him with that come-hither look she knew he loved, and a sashay of her hips that was part island-fitness, part conscious-attempt-to-drive-him-crazy.
Mission accomplished.
Rain felt his dick hardening to a level so extreme he twitched. The light caught Annie's eyes as she passed under the hut lantern. Those eyes flashed with lust and filled his mind with images of hot milk-chocolate drinks and sludgy mud and shiny hair and textured, patterned tree-bark.

He licked his lips. With every step her breasts bounced, their delicious watermelon-roundness emphasized. He noted the position of her nipples with pleasure. She was not wearing a bra, but they were high and mighty in her white tank.

Rain's tongue escaped from his mouth and ran over his bottom lip. Annie answered with a sound of her own–a soft
yeah.
That was seconded by Rain penis–
aye!

She wrapped her hands around his neck. Rain exhaled at the feeling of her nipples against his chest, tight and hard and eager. And her breasts! It was heavenly, all that fullness pushing into him, all those tasty handfuls of woman. Instinctively, he pulled back and smacked his lips around one of them, finding Annie's nipple through the fabric and stroking it with his tongue. He found the other breast with his hand and squeezed, taking as much as he could but barely managing half.

His dick made its presence felt with a third jump—

Rain, why are you leaving me out of this?
—and when Annie squeaked, he lost it, grabbing viciously for more breast with both hand and mouth. His head screamed
MORE!
His thighs tensed in preparation to thrust, to give it to her. His lips sucked the cotton with a wet slurp into his mouth. And his teeth bit too hard around the nipple that was still their prisoner. Annie's squeak turned into a scream.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Rain pulled back, nearly totaling a stool, using his quick feet and strong hamstrings to stay up.

Annie looked exhilarated, eyes flashing and body trembling after the quick assault. A circle of saliva and crescent of teeth marks surrounded her left nipple. It looked like a set of tire marks at the top of a hill. Her nipple was an obelisk–a monument at the top of Breast Hill.

Rain had worked that nipple to a fine point indeed.
It's about twice its usual size.

It was official–Rain needed this. Her lips, her breasts. The sweet space between her legs.

It was as if Annie could read his thoughts. She pulled the cotton tank over her head, revealing the orbs in all their glory. Rain exhaled happily. But before he could charge ahead, he closed his eyes, banishing the sight, so he could concentrate.

He spoke. “Annie, we'll do something different this time. We need to be careful. We need to get your emotions out during the sex. I cannot be trusted to be good to you afterwards.”

“And you can't be trusted with these before,” Annie deadpanned. Rain peeped through his eyelashes and saw to his relief that she was smiling, fingering the assaulted nipple.

“Let's have a chat first,” she said.

* * * *

Annie had been thinking about this for weeks. Months. She had thought about it between fern-hunts and trips to the Kaamo huts on the other side of the river. Whenever she wasn't obsessing about her discovery.

Actually, it was the massiveness of her discovery that had encouraged her to take this next step. It was time to move ahead.

“I want to do some humiliation play-acting,” she said to Rain.

She turned away, not wanting to see his face yet.
I want to make sure I get the words out right.

Play-acting?
Was that even what it was called? Annie wasn't sure. She hadn't googled anything or seen any films on the topic. She just knew she needed to explore this feeling.

Rain didn't respond. She turned to look at him. His eyes, which had flashed with such lust when he bit her breast, were calm.

That was what made him such a great lover.
The man is unshockable.

She pulled Rain onto the seat next to her and rose again abruptly, flinging his hand off her knee, to pour them both a drink. “Gin?”

Rain nodded, watching her as she swept to the table, removing her own glass with a
chink
from its upside-down position on the bottleneck. She was shuffling for Rain's glass in the cabinet when he spoke for the first time. She heard his voice through the barrier of the open cupboard door.

“You think it will make you come harder?” he said.

The words washed over Annie as her eyes darted around the bare cupboard—three shelves with only a few glasses and a bag of soy crackers. Her hand found a glass. She watched her fingers lock around it as Rain's words pierced her—
make you come harder?—
and she felt emotion surge into her stomach and chest.

Annie stared at her fingers on the snifter, knuckles tight and wrist tense. It was through choking–a lock of his fingers around Annie's neck–that Rain took
his
orgasms to the next level. They hid it from the world. It was their little secret, as private and hidden as her hand in this dark cupboard hollow. She gripped the glass tighter, waiting to hear if Rain spoke again. When he didn't, Annie pulled his vessel out with a scrape and closed the cupboard.

“I think it will.” She smiled, pouring his liquid with a
glunk glunk
, then hers. Rain took the glass and shot the gin back greedily, handsome in the pink evening light, arms delicious but pale in his short sleeved shirt. His tan had faded while he was in New York.

Annie bit her lip, trying to think of a way to describe what she needed. Every time she slept with Rain the excitement was heightened by her sense that she was giving something up, that they were dancing a dangerous dance.
I must be a filthy girl
, she thought.
Because nothing gets me hotter than the idea of being degraded.
It was playing on that knife's edge that was so hot. The way sleeping with Rain risked her career. The way colleagues looked at her askance, as if they'd heard something. But they never said a word.
Probably because he's too powerful.

And maybe, just maybe, because I am powerful, too.
Every time he humiliated her, it set up an icy new wall of resistance.
I will never do that again,
she would tell herself. Then when the wall collapsed and he hammered his way back in—brutally, instinctively—the orgasms just got hotter.

“I want to do some humiliation stuff,” she said. “I want to explore some of my complicated sexual feelings. It's nothing to do with you,” she added the last part quickly. “I mean, our sex life is hot.”

“Yeah.” Rain's
yeah
was casual, cruel and needy all at once. Something about it made her loins tingle. Annie stuffed it down, and went on.

“Our sex life is hot, and we've done a bit of kinky stuff already. I figure…” She winked, then shot her own gin back in one gulp, planting the glass back on the table. “I figure you're the guy.”

“Do I make you feel humiliated?”

Annie felt a lump rising up in her throat, but she was careful to swallow it. “That's how some men make me feel and I want to just embrace it. Explore it,” she said quietly. “It will make the orgasms really good. And…”

“And?”

“I might tap into something deeper. The reason why I do it. The reason why…”

“Why what?”

“The reason why I'm attracted to jerks like you.”