All's Fair in Love and Mastery

by Sparrow Beckett

  “It’s too cold!” she complained, taking a handful of water and throwing it in his face, partially catching herself in the process.

  At least his body was warm.

  And muscled.

  And slick with the water between them.

  His arms had slid upward and were banded under her breasts as she wriggled to get away. Thankfully the frigid water disguised the real reason her nipples were hard. His breath was hot against her ear, and she could feel his cock stiffening against the small of her back, skin against skin. Heat pooled between her legs, spreading through her body, and the water suddenly wasn’t doing much to cool her down.

  “See? It’s not so bad,” he murmured, the rumble of his deep voice against her ear giving her shivers on top of her shivers.

  One of his arms let go of her, but then his hand slid upward to cup her breast. She whimpered, squirming back against him, desperate for more and afraid to say anything that might remind him he’d been doing his best not to touch her. He caught her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, gently squeezing the painfully tight bud, the black tattoos on his arm and hand stark against his white and freckled skin, the muscles and tendons moving just beneath.

  There should be porn for women—just male forearms, all tattooed and muscled and quiet power. She was going to be rich if she remembered this idea when they got back to civilization.

  Grant always touched her like he owned her.

  Like he’d owned her forever.

  Her mind buzzed in response, falling under his spell, making her wish she could just let go and let him take control of her permanently. It would be so easy to give in and let him have her.

  She melted against him, quivering, his mouth open and following the slope of her neck down to the spot between there and her shoulder, his breath hot, his teeth sinking into her skin. She screamed in pain, pleasure washing through her as her pussy fluttered in sympathy. Her cry echoed across the water, finally getting lost in the wind, sounding like a wounded animal’s last sound in the world.

  God, she wanted him—had wanted him for so long that everything he did was more, felt more, than it should.

  “My sweet, sweet Arabella,” he breathed in her ear, “why do you have to be so fucking stubborn?” He let her go, but tangled a hand in her wet hair, grabbing tight, and slid two fingers into her slackened mouth, using his grip to pull her back against him. She latched on and sucked, and he bit the back of her neck like he was marking her, his hips grinding his cock along the groove of her spine. “As soon as you let me put a collar around this delicate little throat, you can have anything you want from me.”

  He made it sound so simple, but it so wasn’t.

  Learning to trust a lover was one thing, but letting someone collar her—letting him become everything?

  No. Absolutely no.

  Fucking bastard!

  She turned her head, forcing his fingers from her mouth.

  “Moose.” Her safeword stopped him cold.

  “Fuck.” He groaned but let her go, and she waded back to the beach with a water-imposed slowness that maddened her.

  From the sounds coming from behind her, he was following, but at least he wasn’t trying to touch her. If he touched her again she didn’t know what he could get her to agree to. Her throat was thick and her eyes burned, and the last thing she wanted to do was have to turn around and look him in the face.

  She wasn’t sure if she was angrier at him, or at herself.

  What had happened with Nigel and Mia had ruined her. She’d tried—lord knew she had tried—but ever since then, every Dominant she’d spent time with had secretly been at an audition with her as the judge. Every little flaw, every little hesitation was proof they couldn’t be trusted. Anytime anyone got too close, and she found herself feeling happy, warning bells rang and she’d split.

  If the two people she’d loved most in the world could betray her, then how could anything be real?

  She walked partway down the beach, looking for the spot where she’d left her towel and flip-flops. Grant followed at a discreet distance, respectful yet present. She didn’t know what to say to him and it seemed like he didn’t know what to say to her either. They were going to have to figure it out, though, since they had no plans to leave for at least a more few days.

  Grant wanted to get a feel for the place, and so did she, but suddenly the island was feeling too small for the two of them. What on earth had she been thinking when she’d agreed to share a room with him?

  Guilt trailed her as closely as Grant himself.

  She was hurting him for no good reason. He was paying for someone else’s crimes against her and he didn’t even know it, but every time she opened her mouth to try to explain, the words wouldn’t come.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you like that.” He didn’t make an excuse for himself and she appreciated it.

  “No, you shouldn’t have. I know you didn’t convince me to come out here with you just to ambush me with a collar. You’re not that much of a dick.”

  “Even so, I won’t feel guilty about holding out hope for a relationship with you when I know you don’t feel guilty about wanting to use me.”

  She rounded on him, glaring. “I don’t see why you can’t just be happy with playing with my mind and body for a little while. Why do you need to own me? If you want a submissive I can think of at least fifteen women from the club who’d be ecstatically picking out wedding dresses if you so much as looked their way. Do you have some sort of fetish for unwilling women?” She’d meant to hurt him a little to put some distance between them, but one side of his mouth curved in a sad smile.

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer. I just want to know what he did to you to make you so sure you can’t trust anyone. I’d also appreciate it if you could jot down his name and address so I can pay him a quick visit.” Grant’s feral eyes glinted dangerously.

  “It’ll be hard to run your lodge from jail.”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “I’d be out soon enough, and it would be worth it.”

  For a long moment she couldn’t look away from his intense gaze, feeling like anything she said could be risky.

  “He didn’t abuse me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He visibly relaxed, as though that had been weighing on his mind, possibly for a long time.

  The truth was, what Nigel had done probably wasn’t even as much of a betrayal as what had happened to Will with Bethany. At least Dex hadn’t been put in a position where she was stuck raising someone else’s baby—not that Will seemed to resent raising Beau. Far from it.

  She slapped away another couple of mosquitoes.

  “I’m done pretending I’ll be happy with someone else, Arabella. I know I’m not the kind of guy people have serious feelings about, but I can get sex anytime I want.” He swallowed, and looked away. “I’d prefer if our relationship was more important to you than that. You’re my best friend and I don’t want to wreck that by being fuck buddies.”

  “So you’re saying you want me to stop trying to seduce you?” She sighed dramatically. “We’ve both booked off for a week and we’re going to be here, alone, half naked, and we’re not going to take advantage of that?”

  He frowned at her. “Exactly.”

  She gave him a long, lecherous once-over, not missing the way his cock twitched. He was still half hard, which was making it difficult to take his statement seriously.

  “Your body seems to like the idea of being friends with benefits just fine.”

  “I’m a man.”

  “Oh, I’m quite aware of that fact. It’s sort of hard to forget even when you’re clothed, but when you’re naked it’s sort of . . . in my face, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s only in your face because you’re so short. Any other woman would need Google
Earth to find it.”

  She snorted. It was always well-hung guys who had no problem making jokes about how small their dicks were.

  A low hum had been growing in the air and she finally turned in a circle looking for a boat or a small plane, wondering again how close they might be to another lodge or group of campers. Grant smacked a few mosquitoes away and turned with her, scanning the area. The sound seemed to be coming from every direction.

  Dex looked across the water again. No boat. Was it coming from the trees?

  “So do your trees sing, or do they just hum?”

  Grant frowned at the trees that lined the edge of the beach to their left. “Maybe they just don’t know the words.”

  As they watched, a black cloud rose and swept from the underbrush out over the water’s edge.

  “What the fuck is that?” Grant asked rhetorically, or at least she assumed it was rhetorical since there was no way she could possibly know. Whatever it was, she got the feeling it was bad.

  Dex backed away, grabbing at Grant’s arm and tugging.

  “Shit. Is that . . . mosquitoes?” His mouth dropped open in awe. At her urging, he distractedly backed one step, then another. The vanguard of the mosquitoes’ cloud had almost reached them before they both turned and ran like hell back up the path toward the lodge. In typical horror movie fashion, Dex lost first one flip-flop, then the other. She abandoned them without a second thought, figuring bugs wouldn’t be interested in cheap rubber from China.

  The gravel was sharp against her soles, but it spurred her to move faster as they were overtaken by the swarm. The wave of tiny black insects swept over them, chomping into exposed flesh like a hoard of ravenous zombies.

  By the time they reached the door, Dexter was swearing and slapping at herself. Grant swung the door open and slammed it closed behind them, then started smacking bugs off of her.

  She could almost imagine them trying to burrow under her skin, even though she knew mosquitoes didn’t do that. Maybe these were weird, mutant mosquitoes? Since Grant seemed focused on helping her first, she started swatting the ones on him. By the time the majority of their winged assailants were smooshed into their skin and hair, but they were both breathless and laughing.

  Aside from being itchy from the bug bites, her skin stung in several places where he’d slapped her harder than was probably truly necessary. She tried to tell herself to calm down, but the exhilaration had triggered feelings he probably didn’t want to inspire in her at the moment.

  He was grinning at her, his canine teeth almost seeming sharper than usual in his beautiful white smile. The man was pretty enough to be a vampire, and with his fair complexion he tanned about as well as one. He already had a sunburn, although not a terrible one at least.

  “I guess we can cancel the tours I was planning for my amazing humming trees.” He laughed, then grimaced as he plucked a mosquito carcass out of her eyebrow.

  “You told me they warned you about how bad the mosquitoes were in the spring, but there isn’t enough bug spray in the world for that.” She gestured toward the door. “I’d need a strainer just to breathe!”

  “Yeah, these aren’t like the ones that nibble on us when we go over to my brother’s place for barbecues.” Grant smiled ruefully. “Is it just me or did you get the impression they hadn’t seen a decent meal in a while?”

  “Maybe that explains why there are so many signs warning about moose running out onto the highway. They’re probably running for their goddamn lives. I’m surprised they haven’t gone extinct trying to live around here.”

  “Did you see how big those suckers were? The moose are probably running so they don’t get carried off to the Mosquito Queen’s lair.”

  Dex laughed. “She’s probably the size of the queens from the Alien movies. She just lies around with the venom dripping from her stinger, waiting for her minions to bring her victims.”

  “Hmm . . . Are we talking about Andromeda now? I have a feeling we changed subjects somewhere along the way.”

  “Andromeda is nowhere near big enough to play that role, but I imagine the attitude is similar.” She chuckled, thinking of how Andromeda was with her submissives. There was a reason she was rarely single. She was universally worshipped at the club. No one could even remember who’d started calling her Andromeda instead of Anne, but it had stuck so well it had spilled over into vanilla life.

  Dex flapped her towel, making sure she didn’t have any live mosquitoes lurking in its folds.

  “You’re covered in bug guts,” Grant observed, picking something she didn’t want to see out of her hair.

  “So are you.”

  “Shower time.” He strode through the lodge to the stairs and led the way up, apparently not shy about the fact that he’d left his clothes on the beach. Even a bit sandy and covered in dead bugs his ass was a sight to behold—especially when she followed it at eye level up to the lodge’s second floor.

  The carpet runner was soft under her feet, and she was grateful not to be running on gravel anymore. By the time they reached the master bedroom, most of her adrenaline had worn off and she was shivering at the droplets of frigid water that slipped their way down her back from her short hair.

  Grant headed straight for the bathroom and started the shower, then came back out to the bedroom.

  “You go first,” she offered. “You’ve been cold longer.”

  “That shower is huge. There’s no reason for one of us to wait.”

  “Um, I’m planning to shower naked to get all the sand off,” she pointed out, her tone laced with sass.

  For a guy who kept claiming he didn’t want to sleep with her, he really did keep putting himself in situations that didn’t leave a lot of room for distance or modesty.

  “You were almost naked in the lake. There’s no real difference.”

  Yeah, she could see how he wanted to keep things platonic. Of course he and Tarka must shower together all the time because that’s just what good friends did, right? As she walked past him she rolled her eyes, not missing the sly appreciative glance he gave her breasts. She could almost feel him checking out her ass as she led the way into the bathroom.

  Hell, if he and Tak did shower together she wanted to watch.

  She threw her beach towel onto an empty space on a rack, then stripped off her bathing suit bottoms, doing her best not to make it provocative. If things went too far in the shower he wasn’t going to get to blame her. She was going to behave herself up until the point that he didn’t.

  Since her toiletries were already in the bathroom, she stepped into the walk-in shower, enjoying the stone tile under her feet.

  She felt Grant’s presence behind her but didn’t turn to look at him. After testing the water and cranking it hotter she stepped under the spray, groaning with the pleasure of having hot water sluicing over her cold skin.

  She turned and tipped her head back, rinsing her hair.

  “I never did understand the attraction of sharing a shower with someone. Either you feel like you’re hogging the water, or you’re standing around cold and bored, waiting for your turn.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” he said, not sounding fine.

  Graciously, she stepped out of the hot water, secretly resenting having to give it up so fast. As she reached for her shampoo bottle, Grant stepped under the deluge.

  My, oh my.

  Between the stone and glass enclosure, the waterfall showerhead, and the too-pretty redhead with all the lovely muscles and the big pierced cock, Dex suddenly felt like she was in a super R-rated Irish Spring commercial.

  He opened his eyes and caught her staring at him, and his gaze grew hooded.

  “Forget how to shower?” he asked, amusement in his tone.

  She opened her mouth to say something about how he was distracting, but decided against it. If they were just goin
g to be friends she needed to stop flirting with him.

  He laughed softly, giving her a full-body shiver, and took the bottle of shampoo from her hands. After pouring some of the shampoo into his palm, he took a step closer and brought his hands up to her hair. He lathered her hair with slow, sensuous strokes, his fingers massaging her scalp and making her knees feel like water. At some point he turned her to put her back under the water and rinsed her hair for her—all of it more intimate than sex, somehow.

  Next, he opened her bodywash. Part of her mind was screaming at her to get out of the shower and go put clothes on. This wasn’t what he’d said he wanted just a half hour ago, but as he brought his soapy hands to her shoulders she couldn’t find the willpower to leave. He smoothed the soap over her skin, rubbing it onto her upper chest and back, skimming his hands back upward to circle her throat. His hands rested there gently for a long moment, and in spite of herself Dex’s eyes slid closed, as she basked in the feel of his quiet dominance.

  It had been so long since she’d let anyone far enough into her mind to fully dominate her. The last time she’d allowed it, it had been with this same man—and she’d bolted the next morning as though the bed had caught fire. As soon as subspace had cooled, subdrop had taken over, and she’d spent the next two days hiding in her bedroom eating Häagen-Dazs. He hadn’t done anything horrible or shocking—she was a little too experienced to be easily shocked—it was more that he’d managed to pry her wide open emotionally, even though she’d thought she was safe from that level of vulnerability. Knowing he’d managed to tap in to all that the very first time made her leery of going there with him again.

  If it hadn’t been Grant, he never would have gotten so far into her head. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone else. But because it was Grant it made everything horrible and complicated. If things between them blew up in her face she’d have no one left—not anyone she was so close to.

  He could be the best of both worlds if things worked out, or her biggest nightmare when things fell apart.

  Chapter Ten

  Arabella trembled under his hands. His dominance growled its way to the surface, determined to take her—to keep her. The way she responded to him was so real and raw, and he couldn’t seem to stop himself even though he’d just talked himself out of pushing her too far at the beach.