by Eden Myles
Devon smiled wryly, took my free hand, tucked it into the crook of his arm, and walked me through the French doors and out onto the tiled parapet. Down below, I could hear the sea washing in over the rocks at high tide. I could smell the bitterly sweet Atlantic. “Then why do you look like you want to run away and hide? He hasn’t mistreated you, has he?”
“No,” I answered. “It’s not that.”
Devon stopped and looked down at my bare, shivering shoulders. I wished my ball gown wasn’t cut the way it was, leaving a scoop of bare flesh from one shoulder to the other. I don’t really know what had possessed me to wear it in the first place. I should have sent it back to where it came from. Or burned it. Devon blinked and said, “Are those real Namibian diamonds sewn into the bodice?”
“You can tell?”
“Namibian diamonds are champagne in color.”
Devon would know something like that.
“They’re real,” came a low, somewhat gravelly voice behind Devon. I looked up, and the man I’d been dreading to see tonight stepped out onto the parapet. He wore Regency wear, a black tailcoat, white waistcoat, and a red cravat with a pin in it that bore what I thought might be another Namibian diamond. He carried his walking stick, and he wore his clothes like he’d been born into them—in 1795. I had forgotten how tall and rangy Wolf was. The black made him look taller still, and it washed the little color out of his face and hair so he almost looked like a vintage sepia photograph come to life.
Devon patted my arm reassuringly, then went fearlessly up to Wolfgang Beck and shook his big hand. He had to look up at the man, and Devon wasn’t short. “Well, you’ve been MIA from the Dollhouse,” he reprimanded Wolf with a mischievous smile. “What have you been doing with your lovely self of late, Wolfie?”
Wolfie?
Wolf offered Devon a closed smile. “Ah, a little of this and a little of that.”
“Do a little of this and a little of that have a name?” Devon joked.
Wolf looked beyond Devon and pinned me with his pale, silvery gaze. He turned his head just a little and I noticed that a wide black ribbon held his heavy hank of blond hair in check. “I’ve been terribly sensible, I’m afraid, my friend. Spent the last three months working on the seed villages along the Central Plateau.”
“Admirable. Though you know what they say about all work and no play. It makes for a boring Wolfie.”
Wolf smirked. “I promise there will be much play tonight.” Again he looked my way.
Devon must have picked up on Wolf’s cue, because he offered his mask to Wolf, excused himself, and closed the French doors behind him, leaving me on the parapet with my partner. My lover. My gentleman.
The word gentleman had never really meant much to me until now, until I’d discovered the Society. Or rather, the Society had discovered me. I’d never known what the title was capable of until recently.
“Rachaela,” Wolf said, very formerly. His voice was a low rumble, his eyes narrow and intense. He rolled my name along in that way only a foreigner could do. He held the wolf mask in one hand, his cane in the other. “I’ve missed you.”
I threw my drink in his face.
Wolf and I had been good friends and even better partners in the company up until that night in the restaurant—that night he had invited me to “audition” his potential courtesan, Jasmine. It had started out innocently enough, but we had wound up attacking each other like a couple of sex-starved animals in the ladies’ room. Now I thought about it constantly. It had been, admittedly, the best sex I’d ever had, but then Wolf had laid his ridiculous claims on me. He had insisted that I, too, was his courtesan, that I was to follow his “rules,” that I was somehow in competition with Jasmine.
I had dreaded the following day, afraid Wolf would come to work, flaunting his victory—or, at the very least, teasing me about it in private. But that morning I received an email from him telling me he had to fly back to Namibia, his homeland, that he was in danger of losing some of the lands he had planned to develop to an investor who wanted to mine the Namib desert for diamonds. I knew Wolf took his developments very seriously. It had taken three months for him to secure his holdings on the land. During that time, he hadn’t written, hadn’t called. Nothing for three fucking months. And then, just yesterday, the dress had come, as well as an invitation to Malcolm’s masked ball. Wolf had included instructions. I had worn the dress because it was all I could find on short notice, and the masked ball was for a worthy charity, after all, so I had attended, but I had thrown the instructions out.
Wolf believed he could do as he pleased, that throwing a bit of money and power about was all it took to fix things.
Slowly, he withdrew the handkerchief he kept up his sleeve like some kind of Eighteenth Century nobleman and wiped the champagne off his cheeks. He dabbed at his cravat. “I deserve that. It’s bad etiquette for a gentleman to leave his courtesan without a formal goodbye.”
“Fuck you,” I said evenly. I wanted to throw more than a glass of champagne at him. I wanted to throw the entire fucking bottle. “How dare you up and leave the company like that? How fucking dare you?”
He looked at me somewhat critically. “I have other interests, you know, pet. I own five different corporations. And it’s not like you cannot run the magazine on your own. You’re done so quite well for the past ten years.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
I glared at him. “I’m not some floozy you picked up, Wolf. I’m your corporate partner. I deserve a little more respect than that, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he answered. He sounded a little sad. Regretful? I doubted it. “Which is why I chose to leave you in peace so you might attend to your current affairs without interruption. Your very messy divorce. Your daughter, who needs you. How is your daughter?”
Wolf’s voice was low, concerned, much too personal for my liking. I said, “Asia is Asia. We’re both getting used to things. It hasn’t been easy, but it never is.”
“Yes, I see.” He looked away towards the ocean, the wolf mask still in his hand. I felt the mood shift slightly. He smirked a little. He didn’t smile, only smirked. I’d never understood why until I’d kissed him that night for the first time. Wolf had very good, very strong teeth, but his canines were a little too long and a little too sharp—noticeably so when he grinned, which I had seen only once. What big teeth you have, Grandma. It didn’t surprise me that he was so reluctant to smile. I had a fantasy of Wolf as a teenager being teased relentlessly over his teeth. “Is the dress satisfactory?”
“I can buy my own dresses, Wolf.”
“I wanted to spoil my courtesan,” he said as he looked at me again in that way he had, as if he’d very much like to rip my clothes off me. He moved a few steps closer to me. “Let me. It is a gentleman’s prerogative to do so.” His voice was a little harder than usual, telling me this was less a request and more a command. He put a hand on the railing I was leaning against. He stood over me, looking down. The gesture was both protective as well as a little possessive, like the way male lions and leopards rest their heads atop their mates. “Though perhaps I should not have. You’ve forgotten your etiquette in my absence, Rachaela. We are off the clock and you’ve failed to address me as ‘sir’ five times.”
Oh God, not more of his courtesan nonsense. “You’re counting?”
“I have an eidetic memory. That’s six times.”
“For heaven’s sakes.”
“Seven.”
“What happens when I forget?”
Wolf smirked. “I punish you.”
I gave him a surly look. “For forgetting to address you as ‘sir’?”
“That’s correct. You’re my courtesan. I’m your gentleman. It’s my job to discipline you. You’re up to eight. Do you want to continue, Rachaela?”
I closed my
mouth.
“Very wise,” he said. He reached down, palmed my cheek, and kissed me. It was a very hungry kiss. He almost seemed to sigh into my mouth. The rough burn of his blond and nearly invisible beard made my pulse jump. The citrus smell of his cologne made my head spin. His tongue probed my mouth and went halfway down my throat. He nipped at my mouth with those very sharp teeth of his. “I’ve missed you, mein liebeling,” he said low and intimately as his hand moved over the bodice of my ball gown and palmed one of my breasts. I felt a spark and my heart seemed to flit erratically inside my chest.
Sometimes, when he spoke, he sounded neither British nor Afrikaans. Sometimes he sounded like what he was—a big, blond German dispossessed from his original homeland. Were I to dress him up in furs and give him a spear, he’d have fitted in perfectly with Leif Eriksson’s men. The thought did nothing for the dull ache between my legs. As if sensing my unease, he pushed the edge of the dress down until my breasts were revealed. I was small enough that I didn’t really need a bra, and the cut of the dress didn’t allow for it anyway. The coolness of the salty coastal winds made me shiver and made my nipples dark and hard. He saw and dipped his head, the top of his blond head just brushing my chin as he seized a nipple in his teeth. He put a hand in my back to steady me. He worked my nipple hard, all the way to the edge of pain, until the breath went out of me and I groaned, clutching at his shoulders. The near pain of his biting and sucking made a jagged line that ripped right through my body, from breasts to groin.
He stopped and looked around the parapet until he noticed a bench situated just behind some of Malcolm’s potted climbing roses. He took my hand and led me toward the bench. Silly me, I imagined us sitting together and listening to the sea, maybe making out like a couple of teenagers, but the moment he was sitting, he grabbed me and dragged me down across his lap. “Wolf!” I cried.
“Nine.”
“Let. Me. Go!” Oh God, not now. Not here…
“Ten.” He pushed the huge fluff of my skirts away and his hand fell across my ass, clad only in my bikini underwear. He grunted in disapproval. I had worn the dress that Wolf had sent me from Africa, but I hadn’t gone without panties, as he had instructed. I certainly never thought he’d check. “You haven’t followed my instructions, pet. That’s eleven, but I’m feeling merciful tonight, and I feel I owe you something for absconding, so I will let this one mistake pass—so long as it’s not repeated, of course.” He ripped the thin strip of cloth away and I sucked in a sharp breath at the sudden cold.
“I told you, Rachaela. You need to learn discipline.” His hand returned to my ass, warm and caressing. He palmed my left cheek, kneaded it for half a second, and then his hand cracked across my bare flesh. Holy fuck! I’d thought he’d been joking, one of his stupid little sex games, but the impact fucking hurt like hell and I let out my breath in a gasping, strangled little voice that barely sounded human. I tried to wriggle free. He held me down in his lap. I let out a whimper of frustration.
Wolf ignored me. He hit me again, though not exactly in the same spot, thank God.
Now I did cry out. His blow packed incredible power, pain and humiliation. I nearly jumped straight up out his arms.
He rested his hand atop my ass, rubbing at the heat he was producing. “Hush,” Wolf said, sounding annoyed. His voice grated like sheets of metal rubbing together. “I told you that you would be punished, Rachaela. And now you shall. We learn nothing from our victories. We do learn from our mistakes.”
Crack.
The third hit broke me. I screamed, long and hard, muffling it against the palm of my hand to keep the others from investigating. He held me down and let me carry on until I’d exhausted myself. He showed absolutely no reaction to my cries, and displayed no mercy despite my pleas. His hand moved over me as if he were savoring his work. There was no way I was going to get through seven more repetitions of this—these weren’t love slaps, he was fucking serious about the pain—but Wolf shushed me, petted me, talked me down in his low, disjointed African-English dialect. Then he hit me again and I cried out, biting into my lace-gloved hand. His blows fell one after another. I cried out every single time, all the way until the end. I had never been treated like this in my fucking life. No one had ever hit me, not even my parents. My mom had been from New York, but my dad had come from the Deep South, where no parent spared the rod, and still he had never hit me. I was his only child, his little girl, his princess. By the time it was over, I was lying across Wolf’s lap and sobbing like a hysterical little girl. I didn’t know what hurt more, the pain or the shame, but I decided this was the most humiliating moment of my life.
Then Wolf flipped me over so I was lying on my back on the bench. He lifted my skirts again, pushed my legs apart, and then his hands were there, in the wetness between my legs, and I decided that this was the most humiliating moment of my life. “Ah, there’s my good girl,” he said as he crouched over me. “You’re wonderfully responsive, my pet. Beautifully wet, my orchid. My rose. My little courtesan.”
I shifted around, still hiccupping from my cries, trying desperately to find some position that didn’t aggravate the terrible heat of my ass, but Wolf held me down, held me open. Then he was right there between my legs, his ponytail brushing against the quivering insides of my thighs, and I could feel him licking and sucking at my clit, using the same incredible hunger he had used on my breast. I thrashed under him and immediately came, which only made him groan in appreciation as he licked up all my wetness. My cries hitched in my throat, but now for an entirely different reason.
Wolf drew his tongue all along my slit, probing both my openings. He nibbled me with those sharp teeth of his, wetting me all over with his saliva. I bucked my hips against him, against that cruel, tyrannical mouth of his that wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t stop moving, probing. I wanted to run away. I wanted him deeper than that. But he moved up my body until we were face to face. His eyes gleamed metallically, like chips of the moon. He lowered his face and kissed me, his teeth almost frantic as he nipped at my lower lip. The roughness of his cheek scathed my face. To my extreme embarrassment, I realized I could taste myself deep in his hot, meaty mouth.
He turned his head and attacked the side of my neck, kissing, licking, biting at my shivery skin. I breathed roughly, my heart thundering so hard in my chest I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears and I swore my vision turned red around the edges. I had never met a man so into teeth and pain. I’d always thought of pain as something to be avoided. I reached up and buried my hands in his thick, coarse hair, ripped at his ribbon until all that long, straight, silvery-blond Viking hair cascaded down around us. He kissed me hard, bruising my lips, biting at my tongue. He made a low, groaning noise of male pleasure deep in his throat. Meanwhile, I could feel him fumbling with the front of his trousers, and then with a condom.
Even in the midst of this insanity, I realized he cared enough about me to make certain we were safe. Jerrel never had. That’s why I’d wound up pregnant right out of college, with barely any money to support the baby. It had worked out well in the end, because it was my pregnancy combined with my business degree that had helped me launch the magazine. But I didn’t want to think about that right now. Not the magazine, certainly not Jerrel.
I raked at Wolf’s hair, kissed him. “Now…now,” I told him shamelessly, and then remembered to add the “sir” at the end. I didn’t think I could take another round of punishment at Wolf’s hands.
“You haven’t forgotten,” Wolf said, his voice raw and a little hoarse as he kissed me and bit gently at my mouth. He pushed himself up a little ways so I could see what he had for me, what he meant to shove into me, and I shuddered at the sight.
“Nothing, I’ve forgotten nothing,” I admitted. Jesus, how many nights had I lain awake in bed these past few months, just thinking about that night in the restaurant, trying to recall specific details? I would never admit it to Wolf because it woul
d just feed his already overbearing ego, but every time I thought about it, it was all I could do to keep from touching myself. One night I came in my sleep, just remembering it.
He growled against my throat. The sound of his voice touching me so intimately, so dangerously, made all the little hairs on my body stand on end. His hands gripped my breasts through my bodice, squeezing me enough to hurt, and at last I felt that incredible hardness of him probing my opening. Three months. I hadn’t felt this for three fucking months. It felt longer, somehow. A lifetime…
Wolf’s eyes were wild and full of the night, and his face looked bone-white, like a carven mask under the somber light of the moon. I lifted my hips a little to help him. I felt the head of him push into me, followed by the rest. He gave me no warning. He thrust into me so hard that I cried out at the impact as my ass grazed the slats of the bench. The friction was almost worse than the impacts themselves, which were painful all on their own. I bent my knees so the heels of my shoes rested at his ass, trying to relieve the terrible tension, but that just opened me up to him a little more. A natural opportunist, Wolf took full advantage, ramming his way inside me, grunting and growling. Each thrust made me want to scream. Each lifted me off the bench before scraping my raw bottom mercilessly against it. I raked his back, his ass. I tried to pull him down into me.
Wolf grinned against the side of my neck, licked, then bit. Not a love bite. He bit me like a fucking vampire so I cried out, and only the fact that the waves had chosen that moment to crash against the rocks far below us saved us both from being discovered. Holding me down, his teeth embedded in the skin near my clavicle, Wolf pumped himself into me like he was trying to drive his cock right through my body, from one end of me to the other. He growled at the end, really growled like some animal, and twitched and shuddered as he spurted deep inside me. For a moment there seemed to be no end to him, and I lay there on Malcolm’s bench in a kind of half trance, watching the full moon ride high overhead, and just enjoyed the relentless thrusts of this incredibly powerful man shivering and coming inside me over and over like he hadn’t know this kind of release in months.