by Maren Smith
"I don't…" Dominick rolled his shoulders against the line of tension growing across his back. "I don't like snakes."
Emil blinked twice. "You don't like snakes," he echoed. "What kind of dislike are we talking here? If you see a six-inch baby boa are you going to erupt into girlish screams? Frankly, it's not the snakes you ought to be scared of; it's the mosquitos that will eat you alive."
Dominick frowned. "I think I'll stay here."
"Good idea. Great idea, in fact. And yet, why do I get the feeling that if she sets foot on that island, you won't be more than two steps behind her?"
"Just being there doesn't mean we're going to run into snakes. We're just as likely never to see one."
"You're already justifying yourself."
"She probably won't even want to go," Dominick muttered, more to himself than Emil.
From halfway across the ship, Maddy suddenly let out a squeal. "Really? Hell, yeah, I want to go! Wait, wait! Let me get my camera!"
She dashed below deck, her wrist manacles clattering on the stairs but doing little to slow her down. By the time she re-emerged, her camera dangling from a strap around her neck, three rowboats had been lowered into the water. Everyone eager to go ashore had already been unlocked from their chains, and were either in a rowboat or making the precarious trip over the rail and down the rope ladders into the steadying arms of the pirates assigned to row.
"Real pirates wouldn't do this for their prisoners," Pirate Jack called as the first boat pushed away from the Poxy Strumpet. Both pirates and guests chuckled.
Maddy's guide sidled up behind her to remove her shackles and help her over the rail. Dominick sidled up beside him and, with a look, discouraged him from following any further. It bothered him a bit to realize that, while he didn't mind someone sticking close enough to keep an eye on her while he was working, when he wasn't working, he wasn't a fan of competition.
Colden took an immediate step back. He raised his hands, silent capitulation accompanied by the slightest of smiles. No real competition for her attention there, then.
Dominick still didn't like him.
"Are you coming?" Maddy called once she was safely seated in the last of the rowboats. Shielding her eyes against the noon sun, she grinned up at them both. "Hi." She waved at Dominick.
He couldn't afford to get this attached and yet, there went his leg, moving of its own accord to swing out over the rail. His foot found the first rung of the ladder and down he went, joining Maddy in the last boat. Already she was turning to face him as he took the only spot left open, at the very rear of the boat, right behind her. Their knees touched when she did that. The confines of the vessel didn't allow for a lot of foot room. She shuffled, trying to find a place to rest hers that didn't first involve stepping on him. Laughing, she gave up and, like a little girl learning to dance on Daddy's feet, finally set hers on top of his.
"Sorry."
"Not a problem." When it came to her, falling into Daddy Dom mode came so easily. She already made him feel protective. Although, admittedly, when he looked at her as he was now, 'paternal' was the last word that came to mind.
"I thought you had to work," she said as the four pirate crewmen in their boat pushed away from the Poxy Strumpet and took up their oars.
"Not until we get to the Cove." He wasn't about to admit that it was getting harder and harder to keep his head in the job.
"So you get to waste the afternoon exploring with the rest of us." Green eyes sparkling, she leaned towards him, that slight shift in position amplifying her already perfectly ample breasts. He liked that corset on her. It gave her one hell of an eye-catching cleavage. "Maybe we'll find a cave with prehistoric bondage rock paintings, or a brat of a mermaid trapped in a tidal pool, in desperate need of both a rescue and a spanking."
The gentle rocking of the boat made their legs bump together.
"You're too far away," Dominick noted.
She looked down at the miniscule gap between them, then back up at him with a smile. "If I moved any closer, I'd knock us both into the water."
As if he'd object to a little wetness. Snapping his fingers, Dominick pointed to his knee. He didn't have to say 'come here'. Her cheeks, already rosy from the afternoon sun, flushed with happy pinkness.
Very much aware that they were not alone in the boat, she ducked her head. "I'm okay, thanks."
"If I have to ask again, the mermaid won't be the only one getting spanked."
Maddy rolled her lips to keep from laughing, even as she glanced over her shoulder. It wasn't much of a battle, but he knew he'd won it when she cautiously took his hand and stood up.
"Great. The sea cow's going to capsize us."
Those words were the first Dominick noticed of Tessa. Sitting all the way forward, she was the only person in the boat with an entirely empty bench between herself and the other guests and crew.
"Sit down please," one of the rowers shot over his shoulder.
"She is," Dominick replied in his sternest 'butt out' tone. Her blush and smile both turning chagrined, Maddy lowered herself to sit back down, but he caught her arm and her waist and neatly relocated her bottom onto his lap. Where she belonged, his steely look told Tessa and anyone else who happened to glance their way. The damage, however, was already done. Instead of relaxed, her body felt still. She was trying to hold her weight off him. He could feel the tension in her thighs.
"Relax," he murmured, folding her into the security of his embrace.
Casting her embarrassment out over the sparkling blue water, Maddy flushed hotter as she admitted, "I'm going to kill your legs."
"Say that to me again," he dared, dropping the softest kiss upon the bare skin of her shoulder, just above the revealing neckline of her bodice. "I'll bust your little ass right here. See if I don't."
The exchange was too soft for any but, perhaps, the two lawyers sharing a bench closest to them. Certainly Tessa couldn't have heard, but she was watching and, by the stoniness of her expression, he knew she'd seen the kiss. He bit the side of Maddy's neck, giving Tessa something new to stew over, letting himself be distracted by how good it felt when she lay back against him, offering her neck and shoulder for another nip.
Although the last of the rowboats to leave the Poxy Strumpet behind, theirs was the second to reach the beach.
"Pair up," Emil called, issuing the same set of orders for each boat as it was dragged ashore. "Nobody goes anywhere until you see Maso. I want everyone's name on his clipboard before you go anywhere. Also, no one wanders anywhere alone. Stay within shouting distance, and keep in mind the local flora and fauna are not your friends. If it has teeth, claws, pinchers or a stinger and you poke it, you will get hurt. Consider all fruits and berries poisonous. We do have black widows. If you lick the frogs, you deserve what you get, and twelve out of our thirteen native species of mammal are bats. They are, however, more scared of you than you are of them, so leave them be. Insurance agents with me. Everybody else, I want to be back on the ship and underway in one hour. Don't make me have to track you down."
To Dominick, Emil added, "I'm going to take it clockwise."
"See you in sixty minutes." Dominick waved as the other Master gathered his agents, leading them up the beach toward the fluttering palm trees that edged the thick forest growth which blanketed the center of the island. Lingering at the boats long enough to make sure everyone put their names on Maso's list, he caught Maddy's hand, pulling her closer when it looked as if a nearby pirate intended to attach himself to their company. "We're together."
Given the choice, he'd happily have circled the beach all day, but Maddy had her camera on and once they started walking she headed straight for the trees.
"Look! Monkeys!" Tearing her hand from his, she popped off the protective lens cap off her camera and rushed up the beach to get as close a picture as she could. "I wonder how they got here."
"Probably blown in on a storm and a piece of driftwood." Following in her wake, all Dominick could se
e was the rustling of certain leaves. It wasn't until he reached the tree line, where an inch of dead leaves and palm fronds dirtied the sand, that he spotted the vervets. Small enough to fit into the palm of her hand, their brown, grey and white bodies blended them with the shadows and bark of the branches they foraged along, feeding on purplish buds and bits of hard fruit. Seemingly fearless, the tiny creatures let Maddy get right up to them as she snapped her pictures.
"Oh, wow," she exclaimed, pointing to branches even higher up where a small flock of long-tailed, brightly colored red and yellow parrots were watching them. "Beautiful!"
"Uh huh." Dominick obligingly followed the direction of her busy camera, but he wasn't interested in anything with fur or feathers. He kept a strict eye out for anything with scales. "Let's stick close to the beach."
"Oh, but can't we—"
"No." He snapped his fingers to bring her safely back out from under the overhanging branches. "Because I said so."
She made a face when he snapped three times in rapid succession. She also put her lens cap back on and came out of the trees. "Fine, so what are we going to do for the next hour? Walk around the beach? See if we can find a nice little tide pool, or a quiet place for skinny dipping?"
He glanced back the way they'd come. A group of five were strolling along the surf, picking up seashells and tossing small rocks back into the water. Two women and a pirate were wandering further up the beach, doing some monkey and bird watching of their own as they neared a bend in the woods. In a few steps, they'd be around it and out of sight.
"Skinny dipping," Dominick mused, sweeping the beach for any other potential sources of interruption. So far, only the five were close enough to see them, and not one in that group seemed aware of where Dominick and Maddy were. "You won't get self-conscious?"
"Oh, probably." She cozied in close enough to walk two fingers up his chest. "But if we slip into the trees—"
"No."
"—we can get all freaky, kinky and depraved—"
His three favorite things. He eyed the trees.
"—without anyone seeing us."
Except snakes. Snakes saw everything.
She blinked up at him with exaggerated innocence, fingertips playfully tracing his left nipple. Dominick knew some men had sensitive nipples. He'd never been one of them, but perhaps that was because he'd never had someone like Maddy flicking the tip with her fingers. All sorts of things were getting hard when she did that.
"Freaky, kinky and depraved," he echoed, still eyeing the deceptively peaceful trees. Already his will was waffling. "What exactly do you have in mind?"
"I don't know." Gripping the lapel of his coat, she began to pull him back towards the woods, retreating out of the sunlight into tropical shade. "A little slap, a little tickle. Something you really enjoy doing, but which maybe we haven't yet."
"There are many things I enjoy which I have yet to do to you."
"Big man," she purred, oblivious to the danger she was courting just by taking that tone with him. "Go on, then. Do your worst, or your best. I don't mind, either way."
"My worst." Momentarily forgetting about snakes, when she backed up against a nearby tree, he followed her. Bracing his hands on the rough bark on either side of her, he leaned in, feeling the rise and fall of her quickening breath as her breasts bumped his chest. Her teasing eyes were heavy-lidded and sultry with blatant wanting. The beguiling pink tip of her tongue dipped out to wet her bottom lip, drawing his stare. She couldn't have asked any more plaintively to be kissed.
"Why not make that evil look Tessa gave us worth the boat ride?" she suggested, soft and somewhat breathless. "You know we're going to get a second round the whole row back to the ship."
"The Poxy Strumpet." He couldn't stop looking at her mouth.
"So very poxy." She was eying his with the same lean hungriness. Looks like that deserved to be punished by a good hard kiss, but just as he dipped his head to catch her teasing mouth beneath his, a burst of laughter from the beach distracted them.
Trying to judge the distance between them and a potential cock-blocking interruption, Dominick stole a peek back. Grabbing the front of his coat, Maddy rolled off the tree and, grinning, hauled him deeper into the woods.
Having never known the molestation of a proper landscaping, the crisscross of heavy-laden branches formed a multilevel canopy as thick as an umbrella. It was the broad light of day and yet, once they'd left the beach behind, very little of that light reached down through the dense leaves, fruits and flowers to touch the forest floor. In this deepest shadow, the temperature dropped a good ten degrees from what it was on the sand, but Dominick didn't feel that. When Maddy pulled him closer, his internal temperature soared. By the time her small hand finished its wandering caress up the side of his neck, her fingers combing through three days' worth of dark stubble to cup his jaw and bring his mouth back to hers, he'd forgotten snakes ever existed.
She arched into his embrace, molding her luscious curves to all the best parts of him. He couldn't help himself. He walked her deeper into the trees, kiss after kiss, step after step, until he no longer heard the footsteps, talking, calling and laughter of the other guests. Until all that he could hear was Maddy's soft sigh as he cupped her breast, first through her bodice and then, tugging at the ribbons that laced the back of her gown so he could scoop those dusky tipped globes out into daylight, bare palm to pale bare skin.
Her nipples stood for the gliding pass of his thumb back and forth across them. He pinched and plucked, and her sultry sigh became a gasp in his mouth. He loved the sound of it. The taste of it. The way her knees dipped, as if threatening to drop her there at his feet. The way her hands gripped his shoulders, striving to pull him closer when there was no room left between them to start with.
He pinched harder, and she broke from his kiss with a mewling cry. Torment and bliss etched fine lines across her brow and yet, the one word that could have stopped the pain, she never tried to voice. She panted instead, and when at last he softened his touch, he rewarded her for enduring the hurt by taking that first stiff peak into the wet heat of his suckling mouth.
"Yes," she whispered, echoing the nipping pulls of his mouth with a pinch of her own to her nipple's neglected twin.
"Mm," he rumbled. "That's my girl."
Her green eyes smoldered. She tweaked harder and, inspired, he bit. Her knees did buckle then. Catching her ass in both hands, he held her steady for the assault until it became too much. She grabbed his head again, her cry startling the monkeys in the canopy above. They scattered, sending a pattering rain of fruit falling to the earth around them.
The need to mark her as his own grew unbearable. Abandoning her nipples, he sank his teeth into the soft flesh of her breast. At the Castle, marks like this would have been negotiated beforehand. In the cool shade of overgrown palm, mahogany, silk cotton and bellwood trees, Dominick made her his without warning or permission, and left two reddish-purple hickeys that stood out against the cream of her skin where her bodice couldn't possibly conceal them.
Gathering the full skirts of her costume, he stripped the gown off over Maddy's head, casting it to the forest floor over a spider web of old-growth roots and a litter of dead leaves. Everywhere he'd bared her, he kissed her, leaving a trail of hickeys and teeth marks like red and plum jewels from her breasts to her stomach. Her fists locked in his hair when he bit her mons, that womanly mound that guarded the furrow of her sex. She broke into laughter when he bit her thigh, squealing and shrieking as if he were tickling her without mercy.
God, he loved the sound. He loved the squeals. He really, really loved the way her giggling turned back to breathy pants as he rose to stand again, looming over her with such a carnal need to devour that he tore two buttons off his coat in his haste to get out of it.
"I want you," he said. No three words had ever been spoken with more passion or more terror, because he already knew he hadn't meant for now. For only this wanton moment of shadow and sun
light, surf and sand, salt-kissed ocean breezes and suckling kisses that lingered still drying on her skin. There was nothing of 'only for now' in the way she gazed back at him, heavy breasts and ample belly and gorgeous thighs all marked by his teeth.
"I want you, too," she whispered.
This is what came of breaking routine.
"I want you too," she said again, moaning now as she cupped his face.
He shook his head, not because he was denying or disbelieving her, but because he knew better than to believe this was real. It couldn't possibly be. It never was, not for people like him.
Or Master Marshall, his traitorous brain supplied. Or Sam. Or Jackson, Parker, Alan, the twins Travis and Trevor, or hell, even for Kade. They had all of them found someone.
But they weren't him. He was the Dungeon Master. He was the sadist to beat all other sadists. He was the one who punished even when he pleasured, and here was Maddy, the sweetest fucking submissive he'd never laid his whip to, standing naked before him with the marks of his ownership darkening on her body. Her whole body.
His body.
"Knees," he growled, and she dropped there before him without any hesitation in the beautiful green of her eyes.
He threw his coat on top of her discarded silver gown. Her eyes stayed locked with his while he took off his belt, glancing at it once when, instead of tossing that aside as well, he looped the end through the buckle. He could have whipped her breasts, her stomach, her legs—decorating the hickeys with welts—but he didn't. He could have grabbed her by the hair, forcing her head to the ground, and he had no doubt in his mind that she would have offered her ass up for a target. The desire itched at him, but he didn't do that either.
His cock hard as hell, he dropped the noose of his belt over her head and cinched it around her neck. His finger hooked between her throat and the buckle, controlling the tightness. It was the only collar he had to give her and he used it as such, wrapping the excess length around his hand as if it were a leash. When he unfastened the buttons and ties of his pants, Maddy—his beautiful, innocent submissive—opened her mouth in eager acceptance of what he chose to give her.