“Sorry, Andreas.” I gnawed my lip.
I was sorry. I hated messing with friends and I considered him one. I was also fucking scared at what I was about to do. My heart stomped a clumsy tango against my ribs.
This needed doing. Now it was time to go.
Getting down to the garage was simple. They didn’t even have the door locked that opened onto the stairs. I crept past the car. While still under the house and in shade, I peered out.
Outside frightened me. Open area. Past a stone fence was greenery and tall trees with chirruping insects and things making mysterious noises. The Daintree forest seemed a palpable, awe-inspiring presence. Another two story house stood inside the wall about fifty yards to the left. The gate was twenty yards ahead of me. Open that first, Andreas had said.
I looked down at my dress and could see my nipples perked up from the fear. Some super-secret spy person, I was. There’d be clothes in the four wheel drive, if Andreas had remembered. I went around to the passenger side door, undid the door as quietly as I could, and swung it open, praying I’d find clothes.
Thank god. He’d remembered. On the seat were silver-grey tights and a big white T-shirt that looked man-sized. They’d have to do. I slung the laptop into the foot space and put the keys on the seat. I dragged off my dress then, feeling terribly exposed, I hurried to pick up the clothes.
A man’s hand clamped across my throat as he kicked into the back of my knee with a booted foot. I collapsed on that leg. My scream cut off. Fear of discovery rocked my shocked brain. Stupid? Or not? Who was this if not Chris?
I slipped, clawing for a grip on the car while also scratching at the man’s hand. Was it Chris? It didn’t smell like him. Sweat, acrid old sweat. His hands stank of engine oil.
He spat out one word, “Down!” as he dragged and shoved at my neck and twisted his boot round my other leg so I half-fell, half sagged to one knee on the concrete beside the car. Not Chris. I didn’t know him. Grit scored my palm.
“Scrim?” I grunted out, venturing a name.
He kneeled on my back and ground my naked body into the dirt. Desperate, scared enough that inside my head was an incoherent scream of fuck, fuck, fuck, I scrabbled at the dirt with fracturing fingernails, pushing up with palms and, hopefully, legs.
Only his weight came down harder, heavier. The bone of his knee thrust, crashing into my spine. I coughed out air, sucked in more while wriggling. Then I opened my mouth, this time intending to scream full-bore, at sky-splitting volume, ’cause I didn’t know who this was, what he’d do, where he’d take me. Anyone, anyone was better.
At the top of my inhale, he ripped back my head with a scalp-burning grip in my hair.
Instead of screaming, I whimpered.
Oh god.
Silence, just silence. Except for his breathing and a whispering, whipping rasp of something he manipulated. A bird sang somewhere far away.
He released my hair. Rope jammed up between my teeth and wrenched tight into the corners of my mouth, stretching my lips across my teeth. My tongue struggled to find a place to go in my mouth as it poked at the spiky strands of raw rope.
Efficiently, with no hurry, he found both my hands, took them behind me, and tied them with more rope. Tight. Several times he weaved it through and about my wrists then he knotted it. Though he’d shifted his knee down, what must be his whole weight pressed on my lower back. Pain was everywhere. Dirt pricked at one cheek, from my face being squashed into the concrete. My lips felt like they would split. My back was on fire. My breasts and belly hurt where twigs and gravel were caught between me and the ground. Already the blood in my trapped hands pulsed and swelled.
“That’s better.” His words rasped like waves churning over loose rocks. Then he hauled me upright by my hair and the rope around my mouth. “Now you look like someone owns you.”
When he spun me and forced me back into the side of the car, I finally saw him.
Terror made him big as hell. Deep scars – one slashed down his cheek. Square face. Peppered stubble.
My eyes refused to close despite the smirk on his face and utter confidence in the way he leaned over me. With the hand holding my mouth rope, he propped himself on the 4WD. Slowly, he wound the rope in until it was taut and my head had to kink up to that side. Then he stood there, sedate, barely breathing hard, examining me.
Me, I was panting like I’d run a hundred yards, my chest heaving and drawing his gaze to it.
Fuck.
Naked, I was naked. At the small of my back, the cold metal of the car gave my nails something to claw. Overcome, I shut my eyes, mostly, eyelids quivering, unable to either look at him, or to lose sight of him completely.
It was one thing defying Chris – I knew him and his ways – it was another defying this man. Something about his rough handling of me, his casual violence, sent fear skittering through my veins. My downcast gaze spotted a knife sheath then an outline under his shirt, at his waist. A gun?
Sweat trickled down my spine. Cold snaked across my skin. Even the muscles of my face trembled.
“Pretty. What a pity I have to give you back.” His mouth twitched up at one corner then he leaned in and gave a big, slurping lick up my cheekbone to my eye. He stepped back. “Be bad again, girl, hey? Then I might get to fuck you.”
With his free hand, he fished a mobile phone from his jeans pocket and tapped in a number, put it to his ear while smiling at me.
“Hi, Chris. It’s Scrim. Got you a present. Your girlfriend tried to escape in your car.” He paused a few seconds. “No. Not joking. In the garage. Come to your front door and I’ll give her to you. No. I can wait. Three or four minutes? Sure.”
Then we waited.
He murmured small threats, all the while we waited, as if the words had been set loose now that he had me at his mercy.
“What’s your name, pretty one? Can’t talk? One day, I’ll find out. Maybe while I fuck you. You think your boys in there are rough, wait ’til you see what we get up to with the loaners before they get shipped out.”
What the hell was he talking about?
As though it were an afterthought, he pulled a long knife from the belt sheath. Slow as the coming of the night, he raised it toward my face. Light curled along the blade and the point, sharp as sin, rested an inch below my right eye. I strained to see it, as if by knowing it came for me, my eye could dodge out of the way. Useless. He had my head locked in place.
No single thing had ever frightened me as much as that knife point waiting…waiting for its owner to drive it forward and sink it into my eye.
It slid closer and I pushed with my toes, trying to climb up the car.
“That got your attention. Knives do that to girls, I find. You’d be surprised at where I can fit a blade, even a super-duper sharp one like this.”
His words ran through my head in nonsensical threads that never came together. I was scared enough to want to see Chris again. Maybe even Andreas. Poor Andreas. I wasn’t sure why I pitied him but I wanted to see someone sane again.
The tramp of people walking through the house above made him swivel then put away the knife.
I breathed again, in shuddering gasps.
When he reached into the 4WD and grabbed the laptop, my heart flip flopped. The laptop. Coincidence? Did he know…no, he couldn’t. He couldn’t know what that meant. Maybe they…Andreas, or Chris, maybe they’d just think I stole it. Maybe. I was so, so fucked, dead, stupid, ohmigod. They’d know. They would. I tried to keep breathing around the rope in my mouth but the oxygen seemed to go nowhere useful. My legs weakened and threatened to give way at the knees.
“Come on. Time to see your daddy again. I hope he knows what to do with you cause if he don’t, I will be seeing you again, and I don’t think you want that, do you?”
With the last few words, he’d eyed me once more. Then he pulled me out from the car, and towed me toward the stairs by the rope around my head and mouth. I shivered, and stumbled, going back to the men
I dreaded seeing.
By the time the door opened and Chris saw me kneeling on the landing, I was numb.
“Can I keep the rope for a while?” Though he asked the man who’d caught me, his eyes never left my face.
“Be my guest.” Scrim said, in an amused tone. “Give it back when you’re done.”
“I will, though that could be a few hours.” Then he leaned over and undid the rope around my hands, took the end of the head rope from Scrim and pulled. “Don’t get up, Kat. Crawl. Put your head down and crawl.”
I sniffed, torn by my usual response to Chris to do the opposite to his command. Then my energy evaporated. I crumpled inside. Too much had happened. I was weary and I was scared and for once I saw comfort and safety in being with Chris. So I lowered my head and I crawled in until I was beside his leg.
“This is yours,” Scrim said. “She was taking it with her.” Something was passed over my head.
“Thanks.” Chris shut the door. In the hallway, the echo of it shutting seemed muffled after the sharp sounds outside.
Another man stood a couple of yards away. Andreas. I could see his hand curl into a fist then uncurl. Next to his foot, he’d set down his laptop. “Hello, Kat. How…interesting to see you again.”
I swallowed. Two men standing over me and I had nothing. I was all out of bravado and snark and defiance.
“I’ve made a mistake, Chris,” he said slowly. “This was my fault.”
The moment stretched and I wondered what Chris was thinking or doing but when I went to raise my head he pushed it down.
Andreas went on. “You’re going to hear me apologize, and then you’re going to hear me tell you why I want to stay. I hope you can forgive what I did.”
Oh fuck. Yet I was giddy with relief in a strange way. I could hear Scrim going down the steps.
“I see.” Chris took a deep breath. “Let’s go into the living room.”
“Can I touch her? There’s something I need to do.”
What was this? Again I tried to raise my head and was pushed down.
“You want to touch her?” Though sounding irritated, a moment later, Chris added, “Sure.”
“Thanks.”
The carpet was all I could see, and Andreas’s feet coming closer. Then he wrenched up my head by the rope and I found myself looking at him and his very angry eyes. My mouth ached from the way he’d twisted the rope. I whimpered at the pain and at how he regarded me.
I’m sorry, I wanted to say, ever so sorry. But the damp rope in my mouth made that impossible. Tears wet my eyelashes.
“Kat,” he murmured. “I can only think of one reason why you’d take my laptop. Shake your head if I’m wrong.”
Confused and panicking, I pretended my eyes weren’t watering, I wasn’t gagged with a rope, and a man I’d come to respect wasn’t spearing me with a look. Tentatively, I shook my head then froze when his face stilled, venturing into that territory of facial expressions where the apocalypse was just over the horizon.
“I know you’re lying.” His focus wandered lower and his mouth pursed. “Not getting the cops involved…that was the one thing I asked of you. Bitch, girl, that’s pure bitch. Now you’ve got two men who want to beat your ass…and worse. Much worse.”
Ice cold prickled across my skin, yet the longer he held me and stared the more heat mingled with that cold and gathered between my legs. My nipples hardened.
God help me. What retribution did Andreas and Chris plan? Despite my fear, I also felt relief. Scrim had gone. I’d do anything not to be in that man’s power again.
Chapter 15
Chris
So many things had just gone wrong. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t angry at Andreas either. I’d listen to his explanation but his actions had knocked me so off balance a small earthquake would’ve been an improvement.
Kat had almost escaped.
And Scrim had been face to face with Andreas, again. The potential mess from that, if Scrim accidentally said the wrong words, made my gut crawl. He’d brought her to the door looking like he’d dirty wrestled her on a bed of nails. I could see so many scratches on her stomach. The skin of her hands had been dark from the tie around her wrists – way too tight, obviously. Then there was the rope gag. Fuck. My balls tightened.
That part, I liked.
With the rope wrapped around her head and between her teeth, she crawled so damn obediently. It was also amazingly sexy. As we headed into the living room I couldn’t tear my gaze away and did a last second dodge to avoid head-butting the door jamb. Behind us, Andreas chuckled. I raised an eyebrow when he too devoted a few seconds to watching her crawl. The sway of her plump butt would hypnotize most men.
“Stop.” The chain-attached ceiling ring was above. “Stand.”
I gave a small jerk on the rope to encourage her and watched as she sat up on her knees then rose shakily – her body and gorgeous long legs unfolding like some origami siren. If they’d had one of her for us boys to play with when we did Japanese at school, the teacher would’ve found us far more interested.
Andreas perched himself on the edge of the dining table.
The drool from the rope wedging her mouth open was par for the course but the tears tracking down her face surprised me. I felt, as I often did, that contradiction between wanting to cuddle her and shower her with flower blossoms and kiss away whatever had caused her tears…and wanting to do terrible things to her. Today was a day for terrible things. Today she’d almost left me and the need to hurt her was high.
I wanted cries and whimpers, and even more tears. As a Dom, vengeance wasn’t tolerated, as her captor, I could do what I liked. I wound up the rope in one hand and wedged that hand across her throat in a V.
My voice was quiet but intense. “You are in so much trouble. You’re going to stand here, very still. You’re going to obey, unless you want to provoke me even more, and right now, flaying you with a butter knife is tempting. Nod.”
In the past, it had always been rare when Kat obeyed me without fuss. When she nodded, I couldn’t help that twinge of pleasure at the power I possessed.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
Again, quiet obedience. “Good girl.”
If only I could draw what I could see. The lines, the lines. I had an artist’s eye but not the hands to render her on paper. Exquisite. Charcoal background with pastels for her breasts, her face, her body then maybe more fine black lines for the rope on her face. I held both her breasts in my hands, weighing them, enveloping them. “Mine.”
She sucked in a quivery breath, her shoulder muscles rolling as if she debated the rightness of doing this.
Fuck, I could live on this elation for a week.
Once she’d settled, I attached the rope to the ring and pulled it through until there was very little slack in the rope. The piece of rope that had been around her wrists I laid across her chest just beneath her breasts, crossed it over at her back and brought it to the front above them. As I worked to create a harness, I sometimes brushed my hand against her breasts and nipples to show her I could do what I liked, when I liked.
I pretended to ignore her few shivers. Inside though, I exulted. No swearing, no garbled arguments through the gag – beautiful.
When I was at the stage of attaching the rope ends from the harness to the above ring, Andreas arrived at my shoulder.
“Need help?” Andreas rasped his palm across the stubble of his mouth and chin.
“No.” He wasn’t looking at me. The absolute mind-bending focus as he stared down at Kat made me tumble down that pathway I’d been avoiding for days. The man was spellbound. I almost ground my teeth. But, he was my friend. Maybe I could tolerate this if it were him. Another man I’d be ready to kill.
“You want her?” Can’t have her, I wanted to say. Uh-uh. I should play nice. Friend.
Kat’s breathing faltered and I scraped a fingernail up her arm, smiling at her predicament. Listening to two men calmly discussing whether they
wanted to fuck her, or do other nasty things, must be unnerving.
Though I was thoroughly unhappy with what Andreas had done, I wasn’t a man who dumped friends, or punched them, on a whim. If he murdered someone, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. If he wanted the same woman as I did, I’d make myself listen.
“Do I?” he murmured.
“Difficult question?” I hadn’t quite heard what he’d said to Kat earlier when he crouched over her, but he’d sounded pissed off. I had never seen him talk to a woman like he had to Kat. Never. Full stop.
While he thought, I finished the last knot above with a firm tug on the rope that jolted Kat and made her breasts bounce. Her feet shuffled as she adjusted position.
With my finger and thumb, I caught each of her prominent nipples and squeezed. “No moving.”
That I’d forced her to move made me want to grin. I was like a boy with a new toy. I could do anything to her. Turn her fucking world upside down.
On both nipples, I added pressure, until she gave a tiny grunt. A little more and she whined and tried to escape my grip. Her nipples stretched out an inch then I saw the telltale way she brought her thighs together. I narrowed my eyes. She’d kept her hands at her back despite the pain.
For a second I contemplated feeling her pussy to see exactly how turned on she was. Very, I was certain. I could probably slide straight into her. God, I wished I could. I could almost feel the moist slide of her along my cock, opening up…
But Andreas was here.
Simmer down. I released her nipples and satisfied myself with watching her pant. Punishment first. Blue balls were staying blue. I stepped away, assessing my work.
Most of her weight now hung on the chest harness, making her tits pop out. Manipulating her nipples had made them nicely pink-red. And that downcast submissive gaze…
Pornography personified. The woman almost made me groan.
Shit. I needed to stop gawking. I stalked over to the TV and picked up a coiled power cord from the shelf. As I walked back to them, I let one end uncurl then doubled over a few feet of length. The weight was good. I flicked it lightly on Kat’s lower thigh, making her jump.
Make me Yours Evermore Page 9