Lustfully Ever After (24 page)

A thunderous voice, unmistakably female, echoed over the cumulous hills:

The enveloping net of vines gave a final shudder and unceremoniously dumped Jackie onto the clouds. If she hadn’t been clutching her lover’s shoulders in sudden fear, she would have sprawled at his feet.

“What? Who?” Jackie craned her neck looking around frantically.

“The giantess,” her lover said. “You must go! She is hungry, and her favorite food is beautiful women.”

“You’re coming with me, right?” Jackie clutched his hand. She couldn’t help but stare over her shoulder as the creeping shadow covered her, blocking out the sun and nearly the sky itself. She peered toward the heart of the darkness, straining her eyes to see the face of her predator.

“I’ll keep her from following,” he promised, not quite meeting Jackie’s earnest, terrified gaze.

“No, no,” she tugged at his arm, trying to pull him toward the beanstalk. “I can’t leave you behind.”

“Look, Jackie,” he pulled her close, prying her hand from his arm and clutching her fingers in a bruising grasp. “If we both go, she’ll only shake us from the stalk. I can delay her. Who knows, with you earthside, she may go back to the castle.”

“Go!” He kissed her then, his warm sun mouth hard and urgent on hers. Jackie harbored no hope of escape for her lover. He would not kiss her so desperately, so much like saying good-bye, if he thought to ever see her again. “I’ll come for you.”

He thrust her away from him and ran into the depth of the giantess’s shadow.

I’ll wait for you,
she thought, unable to speak. Tears prickled her eyes and she blinked them frantically away.
Promise
.

Jackie threw herself onto the vine, climbing down with much less grace and more speed than she’d ascended. She wouldn’t let
his sacrifice be in vain. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she scrambled over the smooth vines, twisting and turning her body lower and lower.

Above her, the sounds of the giantess’s thundering footsteps faded. The booming, terrible voice stilled.

Jackie reached the ground.

With a groaning cry, the beanstalk shuddered all over and toppled slowly and gracelessly to the ground. Jackie stared horrified at the coils of vines, the leaves already curling up, the dying seed pods.

“No, oh no.”

Exhaustion, horror, grief, overwhelmed her. Jackie fell to her knees, lost all sense of the world among the green smell of withering plants.

“Miss?” A strong hand shook her shoulder a few times. “Miss, are you all right?”

“Of
course
I’m not,” Jackie pushed away from the unknown, keeping her eyes firmly closed. “Why would…”

“Did you hit your head?”

“Huh?”

Jackie opened her eyes. She peered around. Her hands were filthy, covered with smears of green and dirt. Most of her patio garden had been cleared and cleaned. Broken pots were neatly in boxes, the potting soil had been picked clean of debris and was heaped on the lawn, awaiting new flower beds.

“I think you fainted,” a musical voice scolded her. “It’s awfully warm out here for you to be working so hard.”

“Who are you?” Jackie turned, squinting up at the figure before her. He was standing directly in the warm summer sun and she could see nothing but shadow.

“I’m with Garden Variety. You called this morning, for some new plants? Mr. Andrews sent me to deliver them?”

“I did?” Jackie blinked.

“Yes, miss,” he got one hand under her elbow. “Here, let’s get you up.”

He pulled her to her feet and Jackie barely saw the crisp nursery uniform he wore, the breast pocket stitched neatly with green letters, “
Thorn G.”
She was more concerned with a pair of intensely familiar leaf-green eyes and a sensual, smiling mouth.

“They were very special runner beans,” Jackie murmured.

“I’ve always thought the magic lay with the gardener,” Thorn replied.

 

 

 

 

 

W
ant. Want want want.

It wasn’t fair, she told herself, to want for anything more. For one thing, she already had what she wanted. Her soldier had come home alive from Afghanistan, and he wasn’t going back. They had enough money, a decent house, and although she couldn’t dance professionally anymore, she loved being a choreographer.

Wanting…

For another thing, what she wanted was selfish. This wasn’t about her.

Her soldier had changed.

Always he had been steadfast, stern, and—once he’d gotten past the idea that women were to be handled like spun-glass ballerina figurines—a devoted but firm lover in the bedroom.

He had been the man she needed, to give her balance when she teetered, near to falling, to show her joy and ecstasy and fulfillment again.

In other words, her dream man.

But since her soldier had returned to her, her dreams had been uneasy, and he had been distant. She knew he loved her deeply still, but his emotions were secured away in a foot locker left behind and buried in the desert sands.

As if something deep had been injured when his leg had been, but as his leg healed, the deeper wound festered.

She didn’t know how to treat the wound, find the foot locker, bring her soldier truly, wholly home.

Since he would not initiate, she tried to set the stage. Like a choreographed ballet it would be, she thought, if only she could position the set pieces in the right places, the necessary props where they needed to be.

Silvery clamps that shone and glittered (she shivered, needing to have them adorn her small teacup breasts), pale pink ribbons (their bonds of choice), a pair of worn toe shoes (to effectively hobble her).

A wooden paddle, worn smooth to the touch. A pinwheel with nasty, witch-sharp teeth. Her favorite, the whip, coiled snakelike and wicked.

She knelt before him, a tutu around her waist and a blue spangled sash between her breasts, her hair wound up in an elaborate bun. She raised her wrists to him, where she’d wrapped the pink ribbons; they needed only to be tied together.

He shook his head.

“Please,” she said in a voice that shook with need.

He lifted her, unlooped the ribbons, slipped off the sash and tutu. His hands were gentle as he guided her to the bed, his leg not strong enough to support him if he picked her up. His tenderness brought tears to her eyes, but they were also tears of frustration.

He stripped then, except for the bandages he still wore
around his leg. She knew he didn’t need them anymore, had seen the puckered scars when he showered and didn’t know she watched. She also knew he needed to feel whole, needed to be whole for her, no matter how she insisted that no, he was just as strong and brave as he’d always been.

Come back to me,
she wanted to say, but the words always died on her selfish lips.

She rolled on her front, rose up, presenting herself for a spanking, but instead he planted a line of kisses along her spine, over her curves. His tongue flicked against her, into her, tasting her. Where once, though, he had devoured her, now he seemed more intent on her pleasure.

Another woman might have been grateful.

But when she wanted hard, he gave her soft; where she wanted rough, he gave her affection. She wanted passion, he gave her restraint. Although not the restraints she asked for…

Her limbs trembled. Want, need, desire. Please. Arousal built, but needed pain to peak, to give her the release she craved.

When he guided her down atop him, she pinched her own nipples as viciously as she could, and it helped, but not enough.

His hands pinning her wrists, an order from his lips (whether to come or to hold off), the touch of a needle or candle wax or wicked wheel: any of things would have broken through, broken the spell. Woken her half-slumbering desire into crisis and climax.

Instead, she curled around him, silent in the night, stifling tears. She felt as thin as paper, as if a strong gust of wind would snatch her heart up and blow it away, tumbling forever out of reach.

 

As tightly bound as his emotions were—locked away in that desert as untouchable as if they were in the Ice Queen’s palace
or the Troll King’s crypt—he was not unkind and not unaware that she was in distress. So she tried again to tell him what she desired most: that he punish her, and through punishment, reward her.

His jaw clenched tight, as tight as the iron grip of control he maintained on himself. That was what he feared losing, she knew.

She trusted, as she always had and ever would, that he wouldn’t.

Now her desire, fragrant and moist, pooled between her legs, legs that felt weak with lust. After so long, after so much arousal and denial, she would finally get what she needed.

She stood before him, eyes downcast even though this time he hadn’t ordered it, wrists crossed behind her back. Nipples hard, breath short, stomach fluttering. Clit aching.

He ran the length of the whip through his hands, and she didn’t dare raise her gaze to his face even for an instant. Not allowed, for one thing. For another, she wanted to see the lust in his eyes and feared she wouldn’t.

She turned away, gripped the post of the bed, waited.

The crack of the whip, like the crackshot of a gun. For an instant out of time, they both froze. Then the strike reached her, and she shrieked and shuddered in equal measure, pain and pleasure.

But still silence from him. She chanced a glance over her shoulder. He stood straight and unbending like a tin soldier, his expression as faraway and blank.

She whispered his name. And again, a tiny bit louder.

His eyes flickered.

It was okay, she told him. It was what she wanted. And we both, she assured him, have the control we need.

But he couldn’t. He shook his head, put down the whip.

She bit her lip to force the tears back, to stave off the disappointment.

Still, one thing prevailed, and that was her love for him. And in that instant, she thought, instead of herself, of him and the perilous journey he had taken.

She remembered what it had been like when the tendons in her knee snapped, and she questioned herself and who she was now that she no longer could dance. That was when they had met, and he had brought her back to herself with the snick of cuffs, the smack of a paddle, the denial and the sweet, sweet release.

Perhaps his voyage had been no different, once the goblin bullet came. The sensation of falling, of being swept away on a current in a paper boat disintegrating beneath you, of falling into cold black water and being eaten alive by something you couldn’t even see or feel.

And then, the prison walls splitting open, and sharp sudden bright light spilling through the crack. Into the wound. Healing.

She didn’t know how to be in control from the top; didn’t know how to take charge except from the bottom. The tables were turned, topsy-turvy, like tumbling out of a window.

But she would be steadfast. For him.

Not the whip, though. It took more mastery than she had, and she feared truly hurting him. Instead she reached for the paddle. He shook his head again, and she guessed that he expected her to hand it to him, a plea in her eyes. A request he again could not, would not grant.

His eyes widened, startled, when she snapped his name, putting every bit of strength she had into the command that he prepare himself.

He froze at attention. Had he not acquiesced, she would never have continued. So she calmed her shaking hands and
raised the paddle, and crashed it down on his firm ass once, twice, thrice. Three was a number that held power; surely it would break the spell?

But still he stood, ramrod stiff (even if his cock was also ramrod stiff, she saw; at least that was a good sign), unable to bow or bend, as if he were afraid that if he did, he’d break.

Or, as if he feared that if he opened himself to the heat of her, the heat of them, he would melt away to nothing.

The bloom of red on his cheeks and the purpling of his prick were the first colors she’d seen in him since he’d returned. Could this cut through the grey grief and sallow sorrow?

Seven was a number that held even more potency. She raised the magic as she raised the paddle, cast the spell as she struck him.

Now she was trembling, not from fear or insecurity, but from desire and dreams. She was wet, hungry, desperate for him and terrified he would turn away from her again.

But she had resolved to be steadfast, and so she showed not a tremor, betrayed herself with nary a quiver.

“At ease, soldier,” she told him. “At ease with me.”