Fable of Happiness Book Two

by Pepper Winters

  It only made him more desperate. More manic. More dangerous.

  You can’t deny me, Gemma. I won’t allow you to.

  My rage smothered my guilt for hurting her. I’d housed her, fed her, clothed her. The least she could do was open for me.

  So...take her then.

  My headache returned as my cock swelled and my mind filled with thrusts and slapping skin. My balls tightened and I could already feel the euphoria of climaxing.

  But if I took her, she’d hate me. She’d do more than just ignore me for a week, she’d happily stab me in the back to run. And as much as I wasn’t afraid of death, I was afraid of being alone again. What if I was alone in death too? What if I returned to the purgatory I’d endured for the past eleven years—a ghost with nothing and no one?

  I shivered.

  Cloying fear drowned out my lust, leaving me knotted and frustrated and struggling to get hold of myself—to follow boundaries instead of being a monster.

  She continued to sleep beside me, unaware of how close she came to being taken against her permission. I drank her in, unable to tear my eyes off her nudity.

  Her nipples were flat and small, her skin turning slightly pink from the sun. The muscles she’d honed from a lifetime of climbing were stark with definition from the weight she’d lost. The darker blond hair between her legs glittered in the light, and for all my willpower of keeping my hands to myself, I couldn’t.

  It just wasn’t possible.

  I swallowed a groan.

  Christ, I want her.

  I could use her right here, right now. I could take her and wake her up as my cock sank inside her. I’d make it feel good for her. But...then our fight would begin anew. Our animosity would grow. Our hate would blot out the fledging friendship we could have.

  A few weeks ago, I would’ve gladly taken that trade.

  I would’ve been happy just having access to her body whenever I damn well wanted.

  But now...?

  Fuck now, I wanted more than just her body.

  I wanted what lurked behind her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking. I wanted the truth behind her lies of loathing me. I wanted to know her. To actually listen and allow memories to form. Memories I actually wanted to remember.

  I need to apologize.

  I pushed up, hovering over her on my elbow. My body cast a shadow on her, puckering her nipples as the shade made her skin react to the temperature difference.

  I could fix this and take the contact I needed.

  I’d strangled her by accident. I’d tell that to her face the moment she woke up, but for now...I had another way to apologize. The only way I knew how, really. The only talent I’d been taught.

  I’d been a slave to pleasure. Most of the time, that pleasure had been taken against my will, but occasionally, I’d be forced to grant it as if I willingly lusted for the guests who hurt me.

  I knew what turned women on; men as well, unfortunately. I knew how a tongue could be used to tease and torment. I knew how to bring someone to an orgasm, with or without their permission.

  It was the only true skill I had. And I could use it to show just how sorry I was—to somehow erase the distance that’d been growing between us. I could give her the release that I desperately wanted.

  Wasn’t that fair? Wasn’t that the kind thing to do? Denial of my own desires in order to take care of hers?

  Sex had once been my master and my nightmare, but thanks to her, it’d become my choice again. My decision to touch another, to crave another.

  And fuck, I craved her.

  Rolling closer, I ran my fingertip around her pebbled nipple.

  She flinched in her sleep but stayed in whatever dream she enjoyed. That was good. I could gift her pleasure, even if she never knew it was me.

  Cupping her breast, I massaged her gently, lowering my mouth to her sun-salty skin and licking her areola.

  She sucked in a breath, her head falling to one side.

  My heart bucked in my chest as I inched down her body, pressing light kisses along her ribs, running my tongue around her taut belly. With my decision made, I didn’t stop or second-guess. I worked my way down and down, settling between her legs as her mouth parted and she moaned in her sleep.

  Looking up the expanse of her stunning body, I almost gave in to the dark urges inside me. The hisses to take her like others had taken me. Not to care about her wants or needs because no one had taken care of mine.

  I wanted her so. Fucking. Bad.

  I needed to be inside her, not wedging my cock into the dirt.

  But I gritted my teeth and ignored it. I wanted to make this right between us more than I wanted to take her. If she accepted my apology, then she’d have no choice but to let me fuck her again. We would no longer be enemies.

  “Forgive me for hurting you.” My mouth settled over her pussy. I swiped with my tongue, finding her entrance and working my way back to her clit.

  Her legs trembled around my ears.

  Her hands tightened to fists in the grass.

  I licked her again, dipping inside her and tasting everything I’d been denied.

  “Let me apologize,” I murmured into her wetness. “Let me show you what I’ve learned from being a slave.”

  She moaned again as I plunged my tongue inside her, no longer soft or sedate. Her legs tried to snap together, catching me around the ears and adding a ringing to my already throbbing head.

  With my vision spinning, I closed my eyes and nipped at her clit. She was my anchor in the chaos inside my mind. She was the only thing I needed to get well again.

  “Gemma...” I licked her. I clutched her hips with my hands, splaying her wider. Her inner muscles clenched around my tongue.

  She was reactive. Pliable. I could make her come in a few seconds if I chose.

  Burying my nose against her clit, I prepared to shove her into an explosive release. But...I stopped.

  My tongue slipped from her body.

  I had the unbearable need to kiss her mouth instead.

  If I gave her a dream orgasm, who the hell would she see? What man from her past would give her bliss while I’d only brought her pain?

  No.

  No fucking way.

  If I was going to make her come, then she would know exactly who worshipped her. And she would be grateful. And she would moan my name as she came in my mouth, not someone else’s.

  I was done being used.

  I was done being nothing.

  Swooping up her body, I lay beside her in the grass and cupped her cheek.

  “Dream of me, you frustrating fool.”

  My mouth crushed hers.

  I kissed her hard.

  For a second, she froze beneath me. Her lips thinned. Her neck tensed to turn away. But then she sighed, she surrendered, she kissed me back.

  And that shattered the rest of my self-control.

  I rolled on top of her.

  My hips settled between hers, my cock frantic to plunge inside her.

  Her mouth opened wide, her tongue lashed mine. The delicious abandonment of a dirty, deep kiss was suddenly shattered as her eyes flew wide and a scream sliced through my faulty ears.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” She turned wild beneath me. Her legs scissored together, shoving me out of the cradle formed by her body. “Get off me!” Shoving me to the side, she scrambled to her ass and scurried backward, her hair full of grass seeds and late afternoon sunshine. “How dare you!” She wiped her mouth with a shaking hand. “How dare you!” Tripping to her feet, she didn’t seem to notice she was bare as she shoved a finger in my direction, hissing, “I was asleep, you bastard. You strangled me and now you try to rape me?! Argh, when will I learn? God! When will I accept that you truly are the biggest asshole alive!”

  “Stop yelling.”

  “I’ll yell as much as I damn well want!” She stomped around, pacing with a manic look on her face. “I can’t...I literally can’t understand it. You tried to fuck me�
��when I was sleeping no less, after I explicitly told you you’d never be welcome to any part of me again!” She threw her hands up. “Wow. I mean...why the hell am I surprised? You’d think I’d have accepted this by now. I mean, it’s not like you’ve been anything but a monster to me. Why do I keep expecting a sliver of good from you, huh? God, why haven’t I learned?”

  Her livid gaze fell to her ankle and the chain smugly linking us together again. And all her anger just fizzled into despair. She shrugged with a choked laugh. “And you’ve tethered me again. Of course, you have.”

  Our eyes locked, and her misery drove a pickax into my heart.

  With a despondent nod, she turned away. She gave me her back and her perfectly toned ass as she looked longingly at the cliff. At the escape she hadn’t taken. “I should’ve run. I should’ve ignored all my safety training and climbed naked and barefoot up that stupid cliff and taken my chances with the forest. I should’ve done something, anything, to be free of you.” She buried her face into her hands and screamed.

  It was muffled and morose, and I couldn’t fucking stand it.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” I spoke quietly and slowly, cursing my pounding head. I stayed where I was, sitting by the river, grimacing against the ringing in my ears. “It’s not what you think—”

  “Not what I think?” She spun and laughed icily. “It’s exactly what I think. Your cock was almost inside me!”

  “I was trying to apologize!” I glowered at her.

  “Apologize? Hah, I’ve never heard of rape being used as an apology tactic before!”

  “I was focusing on your pleasure. I was going to do whatever you wanted. I was going to be yours...to use however you wanted.”

  She stiffened, understanding what I’d offered her even though it cost most of her hate. “I didn’t ask you for anything. I didn’t want anything.”

  “And I didn’t want you to keep hating me for doing something I didn’t mean to do.”

  She bit her cheek, her eyes narrowing. “What are you saying?”

  I sighed, running a hand over my face before I looked back up at her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you...in the river.”

  Silence.

  Stagnant, pregnant silence.

  Slowly, she crossed her arms against her stomach, not bothering to cover herself up, either still too angry or too far removed from needing clothes at this point. “Why?”

  I frowned. “Why what?”

  “Why did you then? If it was an accident?”

  I shook my head, bracing against the memories swarming thanks to her question. The answer was there, waiting for me to open the door and allow the nasty recollection back into my comprehension.

  But that was the thing.

  I didn’t want to remember.

  I knew I’d recalled something sick. Something that a guest had done to me or some punishment that’d drawn my blood. The problem was, there was not a thing on this godforsaken earth that would make me willingly drag that memory back again and let it have free rein inside my head.

  No way.

  “Doesn’t matter.” I shifted on the ground, preparing to gather my balance and stand. “What does matter is I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  I pushed up, swaying a little as I locked my knees and stood tall. “No.”

  “If you want me to forgive you, you’ll tell me what you remembered.”

  I smiled thinly. “I guess my apology is moot then because I refuse to go back there.”

  She sighed heavily as if she was used to me deflecting, as if she knew me better than I knew myself. “Have you read The Cost of You? It’s a psychological text in the library. While you were unconscious, I read a lot. I skimmed every book I could that might help you.”

  It was my turn to cross my arms. “I have.” My cock still hadn’t deflated and the urge to snatch her around the waist and finish what I’d started hummed in my blood. “I’ve been here a lot longer than you, remember.”

  She nodded as if pleased I knew the book she was referring to. Frankly, it was text-heavy snooze-fest about patients who moaned about their problems. It was men with lots of doctorates and monikers to their names, professing their professional opinion on how to help people with trauma. There’d even been a workbook in the back to help the reader get over their own trauma, to see if the author’s method of treatment could work.

  I’d laughed when I’d found it. Was the book one of Storymaker’s inside jokes? Why else have a book on trauma in a house of slaves? However, curiosity got the better of me and I’d skimmed the questions.

  I’d promptly shoved it back on the shelf and never read it again.

  “If you read it, then you’ll know how dangerous it is to suppress things that frighten you.”

  “Frighten?” I sneered. “You saying I frighten you, even after I confessed to wanting to pleasure you over my own needs. I hardly think you should be afraid of me, more like grateful that I’ve acknowledged my mistake and wanted to make amends.”

  She held up her hand. “I’m not afraid of you. Well, not as much as I once was, at least. And we both know I wasn’t talking about me.” She stepped closer, the chain whispering through the grass. “I’m talking about you. You’ve suppressed so much you can’t even distinguish what’s real and what’s not anymore. You strangled me because you thought I was someone else. You had hallucinations and personality switches while recovering because your mind can no longer keep the past from the present. If you don’t permit yourself to remember, then—”

  “I’ll never willingly remember,” I snapped.

  She sighed again. “In that case, we both better come to terms with how this will end then.”

  I frowned. “How what will end?”

  Her chin tilted up, and a chill ran down my back. Naked and sun-painted, she looked otherworldly. She looked as if she had a crystal ball and wasn’t just giving hypotheticals but a horrifying future that would come true. “You’ll make another mistake.” She shuddered, rubbing her arms as if she’d scared herself with the weight of her premonition. “You’ll hurt me, even if you don’t mean to. You’ll kill me because you’ll see them and not me. And then, you’ll be alone again. It won’t be because I ran. It won’t be because I got up the courage to hurt you to earn my freedom. You’ll kill me and be the only one to blame for your loneliness.”

  I choked on my own spit. I fumbled for a refusal—something to prove how wrong she was. However, she merely turned her back on me again, grabbed her damp shirt from the top of my clothes, and shrugged it on.

  It didn’t matter that she had no skirt, boots, or underwear; the way she walked with her spine dead straight and her aura of righteousness made her look like a queen. An already dead queen as she walked away until the chain pulled tight between us, and she could go no farther.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WE WALKED BACK TO the house in silence.

  I’d waited—not that I had a choice with a damn chain around my ankle—while he pulled on his T-shirt and jeans, and the moment I felt slack between us, I moved.

  I marched in front of him, highly aware the shirt skimmed the bottom of my ass, leaving me exposed if I moved too quickly or the breeze caught me the wrong way. Heaven only knew where my boots and skirt had gone, most likely downstream and vanished into a cave somewhere. If Kas hadn’t had a flashback and made me panic, I would’ve thrown them safely on shore.

  Damn man.

  I shivered, my instincts prickling having him behind me. I couldn’t stop reliving the dream I’d had versus waking up with Kas almost inside me.

  I shuddered and not entirely with anger. I hated that he’d made me wet. That I still tingled with the need to release. I hated that my body had responded to him all while my mind wasn’t in control.

  But what really pissed me off was even in my dreams, he’d affected me. I’d shared a kiss with him back at my lovely little house. I’d seen mementos of a life together. I’d felt
so peaceful and content knowing he was mine and I was his and that we loved each other. Not that I’d known it was him until I saw his eyes, of course.

  Those tormented, shadowy eyes seemed to haunt my every breath.

  Something screamed up ahead, wrenching my attention up.

  What on earth—

  Kas increased his speed, cutting in front of me and wading through long grass to the trap he’d set as we’d headed toward the river. He moved with jerky steps as if our argument still irritated him, but he didn’t seem unstable, or not as bad as he had been. He was in control of his balance as he came to a stop by the trap and found a rabbit hurling itself against the bars.

  It screamed again. A god-awful sound that ripped through my heart.

  Without pausing, Kas shoved his hand into the trap, grabbed the rabbit by the neck, and snapped it.

  Silence.

  I turned away, slapping a hand over my mouth and fighting the urge not to be sick.

  “You should’ve looked away,” he muttered, resetting the trap and swinging the dead animal from his fist.

  “You didn’t exactly give me a chance.”

  “What did you think was going to happen?” His forehead furrowed, long hair tangled over his shoulders. “I didn’t trap it so I could release it with a free lunch, you know.”

  I swallowed hard and strode ahead, forcing myself not to look at the poor creature. Two seconds ago, it’d been alive. Now...it was gone.

  I wasn’t squeamish with most things, and I understood why he’d killed it. But...it still left a nasty taste in my mouth. I wondered if that was because I was so used to getting meat from the supermarket and being removed from the whole murder process that I was blind to the crueler ways of the world.

  That could be said for Kas, too.

  He’d felt cruelty. He’d lived it for years. We had nothing in common in that respect.

  Thanks to my charmed life, I found it difficult to sympathize with someone who’d been abused ever since his childhood. For all my attempts at understanding him, my upbringing demanded respect and decency. Our society had no gray areas for forgiveness if someone messed up. Empathy, it seemed, only went so far.