Read His Command: (Billionaire Bound: Part 1) A Dark New Adult Romance Online
Authors: Ella Slade
His Command: (Billionaire Bound: Part 1) A Dark New Adult Romance
His Command
(Billionaire Bound: Part 1)
By Ella Slade
Copyright 2015 Enamored Ink
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Her breath trembled as she writhed about on the bed, only able to hear the rustling of the dark silk sheets slipping against her bare skin. She had been blindfolded for a few minutes now, lying on her back, and somehow the silk scarves used to tie her wrists together beneath her were completely impossible to break free of. Bethany’s brown eyes were open beneath the dark fabric, but except for the slightest silhouette she wasn’t even sure was real against the outline of candlelight, she couldn’t see anything. Everything was reduced to sound, to touch, and somehow, despite how that scared a part of her, she felt like electricity was running through her veins.
“Ciaran?” she stammered uncertainly, trying to figure out where he was—where he had gone, since he had left her bound on his massive bed. A moment later, though, she was squeaking in alarm as her ankle was snatched off the bed in retribution for her speaking, and was tugged to the bedpost at the end. Another silk scarf wrapped around it, and it was barely seconds later that her other ankle was bound in the same way to the other side. She whimpered faintly, able to feel cool air tickling against her slit; Bethany tugged at her ankles a little bit, ineffectively.
“Shh, Beth…” His voice at last sounded over the silence of her struggles, and she shivered as she felt his large, smooth hand brush at her ankle bone before sliding upward, along the outside of her thigh, over her hip, her stomach, and then wrapping around one large breast. His thumb started to stir her nipple, and she gasped sharply. “You know better than to speak without permission…”
She bit her lip, and the bed shifted around her; he was kneeling between her spread thighs, but he was leaning over her prone body, and she felt silk being rubbed at her cheek before being pressed at her lips.
“Open your mouth.”
She obeyed him after a mere second of hesitation, and the gag was pressed between her teeth; Beth lifted her head slightly, and he tied it beneath her black curls.
“Good girl. Do you remember your lesson from last time?”
A blush scorched across her cheeks, but she nodded and started wiggling across the sheets. It took a few moments, but with her tied ankles pressing against the bars at the foot of the bed and her elbows helping her press upward, her hips were lifted up into the air, toward Ciaran. She shuddered and moaned faintly as his finger reached beneath her and followed the curve of her spine until his other hand lifted as well, and both grabbed handfuls of her ass and pressed her a bit higher. Beth shuddered, every inch of her tingling in the darkness as she offered herself up that way, knowing his face was inches from her damp, quivering slit.
His lips pressed a kiss against the inside of her thigh, and she could feel him smirking against her. One of his hands moved, and without warning he plunged two fingers into her, making her squeal into her gag.
“Good girl…”
“Wait, wait, WAIT!” Bethany cried out desperately, still trying to pull her keys out of the door to her apartment building as the bus pulled off the curb and took off down the street. Ignoring the way her sunglasses smashed on the pavement as she pulled the keys loose, she took off after the bus—although she didn’t get very far at all before she was certain the driver was out of earshot and she skidded to a halt, staring after it hopelessly. Great. As if she hadn’t already been late for work this morning. And the next bus wouldn’t be here for another half an hour. Bethany raked her hand through her black curls and turned back around to trudge to where her sunglasses lay broken on the ground. Reluctantly, she picked up the pieces and shoved them into her purse to be disposed of later before fishing around for her wallet and seeing how much cash she had.
Twenty bucks. Not enough for a cab. Fantastic. “Damnit,” she muttered to herself, turning away from her apartment building to start heading down the street, walking as quickly as she could without breaking into a run. Even then, the other people on the sidewalk gave her sideways glances, and she tucked her head down self-consciously as she tugged at the hem of her frilly purple t-shirt. It was a new shirt, but after one wash it had already shrunk down enough that it stretched way too tight across her breasts, giving her way more cleavage than she knew what to do with. As if her black trousers didn’t do little enough to slim down her hips.
It was almost twenty-five minutes before she finally saw her tiny bakery at the end of the street. She was already pretty much out of breath by this point, but she started to move even faster until, after a minute or so more, she could read the shop’s name—
Bethany’s Brownie Bakery.
She had just had the sign put up a few months ago, but as she got closer, she frowned to see that part of the shimmery gold paint on the cursive letters was starting to flake off. Well, it’d just have to stay that way for a while longer. She couldn’t afford to have it redone any time soon…
She frowned even deeper when she saw that, despite the fact that the shop was supposed to have opened a good twenty minutes prior, no one was waiting out front. Bethany sighed; she usually had at least a few people waiting for her to open. Business had gotten a little better since she had put in that cappuccino maker…
Doing her best to keep her breath even, she fished for her keys and unlocked the front door, glancing around inside. It was quiet, of course, and she turned to flip around the OPEN sign as she grabbed for the light switch. Her foot brushed a pile of mail that had been shoved through the slot in the door, and as the bell tingled when the door swung shut, she bent to pick it up.
For the moment, though, she put the mail on the counter by the register and ignored it, dropping off her purse in the back and bending over the sink to rinse off a bit of sweat from the trek uphill. It certainly got warm in the springtime in San Francisco; it was never this warm this time of the year in Wyoming…
Accomplishing that, she tied back her hair in a quick bun and moved to one of the refrigerators, pulling out a few plastic containers’ worth of premade sweets to be set out on display. She was glad she had done the sweeping and washed the dishes the night before, at least; not that she had planned to be so late today, but it would certainly set her back getting things baked. Hopefully that custom-order birthday cake would be done in time to be picked up at four…
This part of her day, at least, was well-oiled, and it didn’t take Bethany long to finish setting up the display sweets, arrange the chairs around the couple of tables she had, and turn on the cappuccino machine. She had time to whip up a quick batch of fresh brownies and put them in the oven before the bell chimed for the first time, and she went to greet her first customer of the day—although she nearly blanched when she saw an elderly woman who looked to be in her nineties.
“Good morning, ma’am, welcome to Bethany’s Brownie Bakery,” she greeted as cheerfully as she could manage, with a smile on her face as the woman peered at her from behind very thick glasses. “Is there anything I can help you find?”
“Yes, do you sell caramel candies?” the woman asked instantly, and Beth’s heart sank just a little bit.
“I do yes. They’re right over here. We have several different kinds—soft caramel, hard caramel, caramel crème…”
“Just the hard caramel. Can’t have anything chewy with my dentures.”
“Of course, help yourself.” She watched from behind the counter as the woman picked out five whole pieces of hard caramel candy. She shuffled her way to the cash register with a smile at the young baker.
“How much for this?”
“Two dollars and nineteen cents, ma’am,” Bethany told her, stifling a sigh of dismay. No, she couldn’t think that way. A sale was still a sale. It was better than nothing.
“Oh, excellent. Let’s see here…” The woman pulled out a large pocketbook and started counting out the total—in dimes. Bethany forced herself to smile through the three minutes of waiting before waving goodbye as she shuffled out of the store with another chime of her bell. Deflated, Bethany ran her fingers over her face.
As she slid the cash register shut, taking a deep breath with that meager sale accomplished, Bethany finally remembered her mail and started flipping through it. Most of it was just junk mail, ads from other businesses—including another, bigger bakery, she noted with chagrin—but she froze when she recognized the name of her landlord. Groaning inwardly, she opened it quickly and read through it. Oh, great. They had raised her rent. Again. She couldn’t afford $850 a month on this place, not when she was paying $600 for her apartment, and business had been awful lately… At this rate, she wouldn’t make it to her first summer, when things would actually start picking up, she was sure.
When Bethany had moved here from Wyoming eight months prior, she had been certain she’d be able to start up a bakery in San Francisco and do well. Her parents had argued against her moving here by herself, but she would have never gotten anywhere in Wyoming, not in the small town she had grown up in. Yes, everyone there knew her and loved her baked goods—especially her brownies—but…
everyone
knew her there. Practically since she had been an infant, everyone knew her, and everyone knew they could probably get her to give away a few things for free. She’d be doing no better there than she was here.
But she had found this cute little shop that had seemed like it was in a good place, already outfitted for a bakery so she wouldn’t have to do a lot of remodeling, and she had put all of her savings into a down payment so she could get it and move out here. Her parents had helped out a little bit upon seeing how adamant she was, but that support had long since been used up, and now she was the proud owner of this floundering little shop, and the only person she could get to work here was a young man who she was pretty sure was stoned half the time.
She couldn’t let her parents be right about this, though. It had been Bethany’s dream since she was little to open up her own bakery in a city—to someday, hopefully, be able to open her own chain. At the rate of this project, that was never going to happen… But, please, God, please, at least let her be able to keep this one store.
Beth was fairly certain there was flour everywhere on her, from her ass to the tip of her nose, but she tried to ignore that as she rolled out a batch of heart-shaped sugar cookies, pressing the cookie cutter into the sweet dough and putting the cookies on the baking sheet. The day had been just as slow as she had feared. A few people came in every once in a while, but the majority of them didn’t buy anything—they didn’t even sample anything. She had thrown herself into her baking to try and keep her frustration and uncertainty in check, but she wasn’t certain how long that was going to last at this rate. She had two weeks to come up with the money for the bank.
She brushed a curl out of her face, coating it with flour from her fingertips, when the bell over the door chimed again and she looked up. She didn’t dare get too hopeful, but, rubbing her hands on her apron and hoping she didn’t look like too much of a disaster, she hurried out to greet whoever had arrived. “Hi, welcome to Bethany’s Brownie Bakery, how can I—oh, hi, Kylie.”
The stick-thin blonde looked up at her greeting and grinned at her in amusement from where she was bent over the display by the register. “What, just because you know me, that means I don’t get your customary welcome? And goodness, Beth, you’re covered in flour!” She wrinkled her nose a little and brushed her hands over the delicate pale green silk shirt she was wearing, as though afraid that she had flour on herself.
“I’ve noticed, thank you. And when you never, ever buy anything when you come in here, no, you don’t get my customary greeting,” Bethany answered and stuck her tongue out at the other woman mildly.
“That’s because if I have one of your treats, I won’t be able to stop—and I’m not a baker, I don’t have an excuse!” she replied thoughtlessly, and Beth drew in a deep breath to ease away the sting of the comment. Kylie worked for the real estate office Beth had gone through to get her apartment. They had bonded a little bit, and upon hearing that Beth didn’t know anyone in San Francisco, Kylie had decided to become her new best friend. She had a tendency, however, not to notice how comments about Bethany’s weight bothered her.
“Right, well, maybe someone seeing you here will bring in some more
paying
customers, so what brings you in today?” She waved at her a moment and headed back to the kitchen to put her cookies in the oven before returning to the counter with a damp paper towel to wipe off some of the flour that clung to her.
“What, can’t I just come in to say hi and see how you’re doing once in a while?” Kylie complained.
“You haven’t yet.”
The other girl giggled and shrugged. “Fine, fine. But you’re right. So you know that guy I’ve been dating, Jonathan? Well, he and I were going to go to a concert this Friday, but he bailed on me and now I don’t have anyone to go with. Will you come instead?”
Beth wrinkled her nose a little. Concerts were not her scene. All that loud, deafening music and screaming fans—not to mention the ever-pervasive stench of alcohol and weed that seemed to define the San Francisco scene. Or at least the scene Kylie took her to. “I dunno, Kylie, I don’t have anything to wear to something like that,” she negated carefully, hoping the diplomatic answer would deter her.
She pouted, thinking. “Well… You and I will just have to go shopping! When do you get off work, we can go tonight,” she suggested enthusiastically.
“You know I don’t have the money to spend on any clothes right now. I’m barely scraping by as it is. And I just got another bill from the bank today, so I really can’t…”
“You really need to, like, take out some ads or something to put this place on the map,” Kylie noted thoughtfully.
“With what money?” Beth responded, exasperated. “If it’s not going toward my grocery list or utilities, it’s going into the store, but I have to pay for the building, buy baking supplies, keep the electricity and the gas on…” She took a deep breath and plopped down into one of the stools at a table.
Kylie, frowning, took a seat across from her. “Are you really struggling that much, Beth? I mean your stuff is divine, but if you’re already feeling the pressure after just a few months… are you really sure you should be getting into this sort of business?”
“It’s what I’ve always wanted,” she answered stubbornly. “I don’t want to just… give up!”
The other woman pursed her lips for a minute. “What you really need is an investor,” she decided after a long moment of thought, “someone who’s willing to put some money into your business so you can attract customers.”
Beth’s brows lifted. “And do you know where I can find such investors?”
Silent, thinking again, Kylie deflated. “No,” she admitted ruefully.
Before either of them could say anything else, though, the door rang with the accompaniment of several teenage guys wandering through it. Apparently, Beth noted, the awful fad of guys wearing their pants so low that everyone got an eyeful of their underwear had not passed yet. Ignoring that, she stood and offered a smile to them. “Hi, welcome to Bethany’s Brownie Bakery. Can I help you find anything?”
“Daayum, girl, you lookin’
fiine
in that skirt,” one of them blurted thoughtlessly—and Beth knew that the comment wasn’t directed at her as Kylie stood to move out of the way.
A perfectly plucked blonde eyebrow lifted at them skeptically. “Daayum, son, you lookin
duumb
with your pants around your ankles,” Kylie retorted seamlessly and turned away, flipping her hair as the teen’s friends ribbed him for getting shot down so quickly.
Beth smiled to herself a little bit, even as she swallowed her nervousness when the attention turned back to her as she stood behind the counter. She had never been very good with teenage boys. Even in her small town of Ranchester, Wyoming—with a grand total of less than a thousand people—teenage boys had always been one of the banes of her existence. But she might be able to make some money on them; teenage boys ate basically anything.
Their attention had turned to pointing out various treats on display, laughing about some inside joke or another. She noticed how they were looking at her caramel double-decker brownies. “Those brownies are our special today, three for five bucks,” she told them. “I can personally vouch for their excellence.” The boys were starting to crowd around the cash register, so that she couldn’t see who came in as the bell chimed again.