Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) (13 page)

She broke first, asking, “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” he said, startling Sara when she heard the slight tremor in his voice. “No,” he said again, harder this time—snapped it really—anger swiftly rising up to replace the tremor she could find no trace of now. “No, I don’t want you to leave! What part of today or any of yesterday said I don’t want you?”

Every nerve in her body jumped when a storm of hard tromps suddenly brought him right to her. She froze, unable to pull away or stop her own rampant trembling
. He grabbed her shoulder and yanked her around.

“Look at me.
Look
at me! How many times do I have to say that, Sara?”

She stared up into his angry face, her eyes huge.

“Do you really think a few scars matter to me?” he demanded.

When he pulled her in closer, she shrank back, unable to keep from flinching when he cupped the side of her neck. The heat of his palm burned at the puckered twist of her ruined skin.

“Stop that, God damn it!” Swearing viciously, Jackson turned and stalked away, but only a handful of steps. Stabbing his fingers through his short black hair, he turned and came storming back so ferociously that she nearly tripped over the hearth in her haste to back away. She didn’t know why she was retreating. She wasn’t afraid of him, not really. Not even when he grabbed her by the throat and together they crashed into the wall.

“It was an accident, and it was three fucking years ago,” he growled, giving her a surprisingly gentle shake. “How fucking dare you let it define you.”

Sara gasped, but he had already shifted his grip, releasing her throat to hook his fingers in the lacings of her corset. He yanked, breaking laces and popping seams before brute strength finally ripped the stiff cloth open. He bared her chest and most of her round breasts, and finally managed to shove her top down around her waist. The heat of his hand found the worst of her old wounds, covering the mottled flesh of her side, his fingers splaying out across her ribs to encompass as much scar tissue as he could.

“I don’t care about this,” he told her, his angry face filling her eyes. It was all she could see. Hot as a brand, his hand moved down her side, touching all the places she wished she never had, starting at her shoulder and ending at her hip. “I don’t care about any of this. This is what I care about, damn it!” He tapped two fingers into her chest just
above her heart. “And about this!” He reached up to press those same two fingers against the center of her forehead, pressing in as if he could touch her brain. “And, God damn it, Sara, I care about this.”

She jumped when he backed up enough to grab her hand and shoved it down between them. He forced her fingers and palm to the growing bulge that filled the front of his pants. He wasn’t as hard as he could be, but at her touch that quickly changed. She tried to snatch her hand back, but he wouldn’t let her and she gasped, feeling the pulsing twitch as his growing cock rose to press against her palm.

Although his eyes still flashed, his tone was once more calm. “No. I
don’t
. Want you. To go.”

“Okay.” Shaken, she nodded wildly. “O-okay.”

He glared at her, as if trying to drill that truth into her by the fierceness of his gaze alone.  When at last he did move, he let go of her hand first and then backed up three slow steps. It wasn’t until that moment that she noticed what he must have brought in with him, but which now lay—an innocuous bundle of green—on the corner of the table by the door.

“Wh-What is that?” She knew very well what it was. No one grew up on the west coast without brushing up against that evil plant at least once. As a child, she’d been something of a slow learner, but eventually she did figure out how to keep well clear of that distinctive plant. In college, however, after reading someone’s online comparison between the effects of nettles and the lasting tenderness of a good spanking, she had…experimented. She’d been a slow learner then, too. Those experiments had got her through lonely bouts of sub-frenzy, her mid-terms
, and lasted right up until she discovered the Shadowbrook Den.

No, she was no novice to stinging nettles, but this…somehow this felt so much different. Darker. More threatening. Maybe she only felt that way because she knew exactly what it was going to feel like on her naked skin. Or maybe because of the way he reached for it, picking up that thick bundle of twelve or more stalks, all two feet in length and flush with leaves. The torn sleeves from her dress were wrapped around the base to protect his hand, making it look so birch-like that she shivered. She hugged herself, started to reach for her shoulder, but quickly thought better of it and put her hands back down.

“Have you ever had these used on you before?” he asked.

When she nodded, he did
, too. Just once. It wasn’t resignation she saw slipping through his eyes and darkening the intensity of his expression. It was determination.

“This is my house,” he told her. “When you are in my house, you are what?”

Naked.

Sara shivered again. She dropped her gaze, glancing once at the birch of nettles in his hand, and from there, to the floor at his feet. Pushing at her already disheveled costume, she quickly undressed, shoving everything already bunched around her waist down over her hips and legs to the floor. Funny, how stripping her corset off didn’t automatically make it any easier to breathe.

“Turn,” he told her.

She meekly put her back to him, clasping her hands tight before her, twisting and squeezing at her fingers until it hurt.

“Hands on your head.”

She obeyed, stiffening slightly when she felt the unexpected clasp of his hand on the back of her neck. He turned her physically away from the dark hearth and made her face the plain wooden dining table. The hard edge bit into her hips, but when he nudged her over, she bent. Lying flat on the cool surface, she turned her head to rest her cheek on the wood.

“Straighten your legs. Feet together.”

She obeyed, offering no hesitation and showing none of her building anxiety. Part of her felt like a tightly wound spring on the verge of snapping free; part of her felt weirdly relaxed, like coming home and slipping into a hot bath. Her nerves were buzzing, humming, strained. The muscles up the backs of her thighs eased and softened as the flesh of her bottom waited for the first strike.

“Hold this position and don’t break it,” Jackson warned as he took up his position behind her. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master Jackson.” Her voice barely trembled, but all the rest of her did
violently.

He didn’t make her wait very long before he lay the birch across her bottom. From the very first needling sting, it felt like it lasted forever. He only gave her a handful of whipping strokes, but the fragile stalks of his nettle birch began to disintegrate right away. Whipping turned into caressing, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Every part of that plant that touched her, stung. The fine hairs took her to task, an agony of pinpricks that built, sting upon sting upon sting, until those first warm tingles had spread out into an overall fiery hurt that had her fighting not to writhe and kick.

Sara grabbed onto the table as Jackson rolled the birch, constantly seeking out fresh leaves to replace those nettles quickly being used up. The punishment deepened, intensified; the hurt grew hundreds of thousands of needle-sharp teeth and became agony, sinking into all the surface of her bottom and down the backs of her thighs with a wicked fury unparalleled by anything she had ever done to herself in college. She bit the back of her hand.

“Spread your legs,” he ordered, when the mews she couldn’t quite stifle began to escalate into cries.

No, no no!

One handed, Sara gripped the table hard and snapped her legs apart, her toes digging into the rustic floorboards the way her fingernails dug into the soft flesh of her palm as she bit the back of her hand even harder. But nothing could keep back the scream that keened out through gritted teeth as, with feather-soft caresses, he dragged the nettles up the inner slope of first one thigh and then the other. Once again, he began to spank—not her bottom this time, but her exposed pussy, giving all the remaining hairs on those nettled stalks a whole new expanse of unmarred flesh to torment and sink their burning teeth into.

Hold this position, he had said. Do not break it. And oh, how Sara tried. She kept her legs straight and open, but she couldn’t hold them still. She managed not to let go of the table, but she could not stay lying down. Her cries turned to shouts, guttural and deep, and her arms stiffened. Her back arched. She threw back her head as the fire took on bonfire proportions that had her shrieking and begging, cringing to escape the birch…but not once did she ever ask him to stop. This was his choice, not hers. She begged because it hurt—in smarting, waspish detail, it hurt—and she could not stop the instinctive writhing of her body, no matter how hard she tried. She begged because the torment was too much for her not to say something. And she begged because, in this moment, this here and now, she was breaking—splintering and shattering, losing herself to some basic and primal thing kept buried deep inside her that he was determined to let out. That primal piece didn’t know how to do anything but beg.

It was Jackson who brought her to this place, who stripped her down and yet somehow elevated her up at the same time. Who broke her and yet freed her. Because in those painful moments as he flossed that stinging birch between her legs—grinding the nettles into every crack and crevice until the fragile stalks were broken, the leaves falling down between her feet in a tattered rain of greenery, the fine, stinging hairs all but exhausted, used up, diminished
-- that’s all she felt: wondrous, exhausted, heightened, diminished, wanted, wanton…

Free.

Jackson tossed the birch in the direction of the hearth, planted his hand between her shoulder blades and pushed her chest flat upon the table again. His knee bumped the inside of hers and she quickly spread her legs even wider, gasping once in accommodation when he moved into place behind her. When he grabbed her wrists, she shoved her arms back and helped him pin them. He bowed her backward and clawed a fistful of her hair, trapping that in the same hand with which he gripped her wrists.

She felt the short-motioned jerks of his body as he tore open the fastenings of his trousers
, and then he was inside her, shoving hard to bury himself in her stinging, burning flesh. This was punishing, too, but it was glorious. Her body yielded to him in the most delicious burst of soothing hurt. His hips slapped up against her wounded ass, scrubbing her belly and breasts into a tabletop polished smooth by countless encounters just like this one.

Rearing back, Jackson spanked her, slapping her bottom as he rode her and spurring the hornet-nest sting that saturated her into hotter and hotter bursts of sensitivity. Until she couldn’t stand to be touched and she couldn’t stand not to be touched, until she was howling the same word over and over again: “Please! Please!”

There was no feeling quite like the scrape of his teeth on her back, her shoulder, the side of her neck. He was biting her scars, catching and marking her, his territory—all his.

“Please!” she cried again, and his voice came back, the most delicious growl in her ear, “No. Coming is a privilege, and you haven’t earned it yet.”

His refusal instantly ratcheted her right to the very edge of disobedience. She locked her body, making herself his willing sheath, fighting all the while to keep back the waves of her pleasure while he rode her all the way to his. It felt electric, like tiny shocks of heaven as the vigor of his thrusts began to break down, becoming more erratic, harder and shallower.

“Fuck me, baby,” he both growled and groaned, burying the sound in the back of her hair just before the spasms took him.

She arched her hips, fighting to keep up the rhythm in what sparse few centimeters he allowed her to move, hoping to prolong his pleasure for as long as she was able and luxuriating in her own body’s quivering dismay when all his movements stopped. She was left perched on the wrong side of satisfied, with a clit swollen, throbbing and painfully aroused. The slick slide as his cock fell back out of her, sending a dripping stream of semen spilling down the inside of her thighs, was damn near excruciating. But she bore it, embraced it even, just like she embraced him, catching after his hand when he released her wrists and her hair to brace his weight against the table.

Panting, he stayed on top of her, heavy but in a good way, hard and hot against all the soft parts of her, his ragged breaths steaming the back of her neck. “Good girl,” he whispered and kissed her nape. “Good girl.”

She could have come on that small praise alone, if only it weren’t disallowed. Burrowing down in his arms, loving the feel of him all around her, Sara smiled.

* * * * *

Jackson had lost all perspective. He had none left. None. Whatsoever. Not where Sara was concerned.

He hadn’t meant to have sex with her. When he first started the punishment, he hadn’t even thought it would be possible. There wasn’t one damn thing he’d found erotic in what he’d done, but from the moment he’d taken her hand and put it on his cock, all intention turned inside out. He hadn’t wanted to react to her undulations or her breathy cries, which might have started out as discomfort but which had grown and changed and almost imperceptibly shifted into the wildly desperate, fuck-me sounds that had utterly brought him down. No, he hadn’t wanted to lose control of himself, but it had happened all the same.