by Ann Jacobs
She stuck out her tongue and sampled a drop of lubrication at the tip of his smooth, plum-shaped cock head. “Oooh.” He tasted salty, slightly bitter, deliciously male. Her lips went slack, and she took him in her mouth, tilted her head back and swallowed. Sucked and swallowed, consuming his essence, she gave him head. Pressure from the net reminded her of her enslavement and made her ache for him to fuck her.
“You like sucking cock, I can tell. Jesus, your mouth feels like heaven.” He knotted his fists in her hair, holding her steady to take the rhythmic thrusts of his hips against her lips. “Yeah. That’s it, make me come if you can.”
Yes. She liked it. Liked him. Liked the feeling of being alive again, of giving pleasure to another human being—a man who’d been through hell and survived to come home. “Jared,” she murmured, though the word was lost but for the reverberations of sound that rippled through her throat, his cock and balls.
“Stop. Now.” If she didn’t, Jared was going to explode, and despite what he’d told her, he didn’t want to. Not yet. Not until he took her every way, claimed every orifice. Not until he drove away the loneliness, the doubts, the fear that when he opened his eyes Ninia would be gone, another mirage sent from hell to tease and taunt him.
But right now she was real. Beautiful and beautifully submissive in the Karada bondage she’d taught him to apply, caught like a flitting butterfly within a net of her own design. Jared lifted her to her feet, loving her responsiveness, the fine sheen of perspiration that made her pale skin glisten. “Shall I open the curtain to the observation window?” he asked once he’d pulled down the coverlet and settled her on her back on the bed.
“Only if you wish to, Master Jared.”
At the moment he didn’t care if the whole fucking world saw his scars, not if having observers would enhance her pleasure. But he sensed her reluctance, imagined she might have played out similar scenes here with her late husband and might feel awkward if other members were to watch her putting his memory to rest. “We’ll leave them closed this time.”
He sat beside her and traced the blue net, soothing the small angry marks made where the knots abraded her tender skin, the light welts he’d put on her with the cat. “You’re beautiful.” And so damn responsive. Her nipples beaded at the mere brush of his fingertips and when he pinched them, she let out a high-pitched whimper that spoke more of pleasure than pain. “I want you to have these pierced for me.”
“Yes, Master.” From her quick response he surmised she realized he wanted to own her long-term. It pleased him immeasurably that she didn’t spit out her safe word and run for cover.
He bent his head, took a nipple in his mouth and sucked it, hard. When he did, he felt her hand in his hair, a caress more than an effort to hold him to her breast. Soothing yet incredibly arousing, it was a lover’s touch however fleeting it might be. Her giving made him want to give back, show her pleasure beyond this D/s scene, beyond a night.
Unconfined but for the rope net, Ninia held a position of submission, her arms outstretched and legs apart, open for his inspection and use. Jared stroked her inner thighs, assuring himself by touch as well as sight and sound that she was here and she was real, awaiting his pleasure.
When she stirred and lifted her hips in blatant invitation, he removed the butt plug, untied the Karada bondage he’d tied earlier and unwound the silken rope from her lush body. “I want your arms around me, your gorgeous legs wrapped around my waist when I take you.”
I want you to want me. Not just as a convenient release from sexual tension, not only for whatever satisfaction you find by relinquishing control. He wanted her to desire Jared McTavish the man, with all the emotional baggage he carried, all his scars.
For a moment it seemed she hesitated, but then she smiled and laid a hand against his cheek. “It will be my pleasure, Master. My greatest pleasure.”
So, with the curtains drawn in a private room at Boundless Pleasure, Jared had the most satisfying sexual experience in his thirty-two years of living. Plain vanilla sex, more or less missionary position. No toys and no kink. Just him and Ninia wrapped in each other’s arms, their bodies locked together in ecstasy.
Reality. No posturing, just a sharing like he’d never known before. God, let it last. Let this be real. For the first time in his life he wanted to fall in love, not just in lust.
* * * * *
Later on, while he waited for a cab to take him home, he clutched the folded paper Ninia had given him along with a shy promise that if he’d join her at her place the next night, she’d fix him a home-cooked meal. When he recognized her address as being in the same apartment complex as his, he wondered…
Could she have been the one who’d given him the show of his life last night? Time would tell.
Chapter Five
Ninia hummed the next morning as she prepared the yogurt and granola she ate for breakfast. She could barely wait to be with Jared again. Every move she made, the plug he’d ordered her to wear brushed against the tender flesh of her anus, reminding her that last night had been real. Very real.
Not that she needed a reminder. With his careful mastery, he’d managed to imprint himself on every cell of her body. Her nipples tingled, her pussy wept—and her skin remembered every skillfully laid welt, each knot in the Karada he’d tied a little clumsily but with incredible care for her well-being and pleasure.
She had an appointment at ten to follow his orders and have her nipples pierced. Crossing to the patio door where she’d exposed herself to him, she looked across the courtyard, hoping to get a glimpse of him. No luck. He was sleeping, she imagined, rolling her nipples between her thumbs and forefingers and wondering what kind of jewelry he’d want her to wear in them. She’d never thought of getting body piercings before. Earl hadn’t cared for them on females even though he’d sported one in his cock, adorned with a thick curved barbell that entered on the underside and exited through the eye in its head. Now the idea of piercing her intimate flesh for Jared had her panties damp, her heart pounding with anticipation.
She’d get gold hoops, she thought, simple and elegant. Imagining him hooking a finger through them, twisting them until she moaned with the pleasure-pain of it, had her practically panting with anticipation. He’d want to use them to tug her until his lightly furred chest brushed her nipples. Then he’d bend and catch a ring with his teeth, tugging the captive nipple into his mouth. She could hardly wait until she got the piercings and was healed enough for play. Imagining him looking at them, knowing she’d pierced them for his pleasure had her pussy swollen and wet with anticipation.
Oh yes. She could barely wait to feel the sharp bite of the needle as it pressed through her nipples, experience the unfamiliar weight of delicate gold hoops hanging from that sensitive flesh. Fingering her hairless mound and recalling the care with which Jared had shaved her there last night, she decided she’d go one step farther and have her entire body waxed smooth. Jared would like that, she was certain. The rest of the day she’d spend preparing, not just for dinner but in every way she could think of that would turn her lover on. Her Master, if she had her way.
* * * * *
The sun was close to its zenith when Jared opened his eyes and looked out the window. For the first time since his injury, he’d slept a full eight hours. He grinned as the events at Boundless Pleasure last night flooded his memory—and let out a big sigh of relief when he reread the dinner invitation Ninia had handed him before sliding behind the wheel of her car and driving away late last night. After limping back from the parking lot to the door of the club where he’d waited for a cab, he’d read it. Her words, penned in neat, rounded letters had practically obliterated the pain that had kept trying to remind him he shouldn’t have stayed on his feet so much.
Suddenly he felt as if he needed to get his life moving. As if he had a future worth looking forward to. He looked around the sparsely furnished apartment, realized it was time to move along. Time to go home and put the Special Forces
behind him. Picking up the phone, he called his brother Brad and arranged to have someone go clean up the big log cabin his grandfather had left him on his portion of the family’s nine-thousand-acre ranch.
His stump hurt like hell, but he didn’t care. If he was going to take Ninia home, he needed to buy a car or truck. Somehow the idea of asking the dealer to equip the vehicle of his choice with hand controls didn’t seem quite as embarrassing as it had been at first. He’d balked at the requirement soon after arriving in Cheyenne a few weeks earlier, after a hard-faced woman at the Wyoming Department of Motor Vehicles had insisted he’d have to have “handicapped assist” controls if he wanted to drive.
Several hours later, Jared was in real pain, but he was also the proud owner of a shiny, black Honda Ridgeline pickup. The dealer had assured him he’d have the console-mounted hand control installed on it within two days. Damn it, he’d never liked an automatic transmission, especially in country like this where snow was pretty much a constant seven or eight months of the year. Since the DMV required it, though, that’s what he’d have to live with.
What he’d be fucked if he’d do was hang out a handicapped tag for everyone to see. He could make his way from a regular parking spot just like everybody who hadn’t lost a limb. And nobody better dare try to tell him he couldn’t.
* * * * *
After firing up the gas grill on the patio and setting out a pair of T-bone steaks to come to room temperature, Ninia scurried around her condo, dusting here, moving a photo of Earl off the mantel and settling it in the drawer of a side table. “You’d like Jared,” she said, caressing the glass covering her husband’s smiling face, certain as she looked at his silent image that he’d given his blessing last night in the club when she’d removed the chain he’d used to collar her and stored it figuratively in the spot in her heart where she kept her most cherished memories.
She was alive. And so was her new master. She started a pot of coffee then remembered Jared had always asked for tea at the hospital and put the teapot on the stove. The activity helped her ignore the stinging in her newly pierced nipples every time the hoops swayed as she moved—and the growing arousal that had her anxious for Jared to arrive and put out the fire.
She’d been hot ever since she left the piercing parlor, and the body waxing she’d had done afterward had only fanned the flame. A whole day preparing to serve her Master, down to a thorough internal cleansing done before her bath, had her focusing on her body and all the delicious things he’d do to her—even before she’d lubricated and reinserted the plug he’d ordered her to wear.
Before she’d dried herself, taking frequent looks in the mirror to watch her new gold hoops dangling merrily from her sore, puckered nipples, to check her buttocks and see the slightly raised welts he’d given her. Finally she’d put on a midriff top and a miniskirt that barely covered her ass, and tied her hair back in a high ponytail that bared her newly waxed hairline for a lover’s pleasure and her own. She could hardly wait to feel Jared’s hot breath on that sensitive skin, the rasp of his teeth and the rough callused surface of his fingertips as he held her to him for a deep, hard kiss. Unable to resist, she reached up and stroked that highly erogenous spot at the base of her skull until her nipples swelled against their new rings and her inner thighs grew wet.
Now all she had left to do was calm her frazzled nerves. And wait for Jared to show up for the dinner she’d promised. When she watched him come out of the glass-walled elevator across the way, she noticed how badly he was limping. His stump had to be hurting. He’d worn the prosthesis all night last night at the club. She understood why—stupid male pride—but now he obviously was paying the price in pain. Damn it, he didn’t even have his crutches!
His stump was going to be a bloody mass of pain. Making a detour to her bathroom, she grabbed a first aid kit and set it on the coffee table on her way to answering the front door.
When she opened the door he strode by her, slid open the patio door and looked out over the courtyard. Then he turned back, stared at her framed in the doorway, an intense look on his face. Seizing her and dragging her hard against him, momentarily driving any thoughts of nursing him from her head, he practically torched her with the intensity of his gaze. “It was you,” he growled, laying his hands on her shoulders and holding her at arms’ length. My little temptress on the balcony. When I saw your address last night I wondered… God, I can’t believe it. You’re the one who gave me one hell of a show the other night.”
She wouldn’t even try to deny it. “I also was the one who got you the invitation to Boundless Pleasure. I don’t know why I want a master who’s too stubborn to take care of his body so he can enjoy having me pleasure him, but I do. Come here.”
Before she could stop him, he’d scooped her up in his arms. “My body’s doing just fine. Aching to fuck you until you can’t stand up, right after you feed me.” He jostled the butt plug, shot her a self-satisfied grin. “It pleases me that you’ve followed my instruction.”
When he set her down, he was grinning, but she saw the pain in his dark, expressive eyes and realized what his act of bravado had cost him. “Go sit down. On the couch. I saw how badly you were limping when made your way across the courtyard.”
For a minute he stared at her, his expression transforming from desire to anger—or bitter disappointment. He looked as though he might walk out, but instead he moved to the couch. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’m not angry with you. It’s this that disappoints me when it won’t do what it’s supposed to do.” He gestured toward his prosthesis. “Kind of hard being a Dom when I can’t get past the fact of this. But the soreness is nothing. Just a little swelling in the stump. Happens all the time.”
“I imagine it does, especially when you don’t use common sense. No, don’t sit just yet. Let me get these pants off you.”
His grin was absolutely feral—and a bit nasty. “Eager, are you?”
She wished she dared wipe that smirk off his handsome face. “Right now I’m eager to see how seriously you’ve hurt yourself. Don’t you know you don’t have to pretend this didn’t happen to you?” As she dragged his khakis down, she rested a hand on the socket of his prosthesis, then slid it up onto his scarred thigh. “Now sit.”
“Hey, who’s the Master here?” His smile turned to a scowl, and he made a move to heave himself up off the couch. “I came for dinner. I can get TLC at the hospital when I go for my therapy.”
Ninia kept on, slipping off his shoes and stripping him down to his plain white boxer briefs before looking up at him and issuing a challenge. “Right now we’re nurse and patient, not master and slave. Let’s get this thing off and see what damage you’ve done.”
“If you insist.” He reached down to loosen the prosthesis, unapologetically brushing his fingers over her breast on the way. “Damn it, don’t you understand I don’t want my lover having to take care of me like this. I want to be a Master for you, not a pathetic cripple who needs tending.”
So that was it. Ninia stopped what she was doing and looked him in the eye. “You don’t get it. You don’t see it, you dense cowboy. Being a master has nothing to do with physical ability, although you’ve got plenty of that. It’s something bone-deep, some quality I recognized in you the first time you came onto my ward.” She paused, took a deep breath and formed the words in her head before saying them aloud. “You look at me, just look at me with those intense brown eyes, and I get wet. I want to get on my knees like this and take your cock in my mouth. I want to feel you taking me over. Controlling my every move. But I can’t do that if you kill yourself.”
“I’m not going to kill myself.” As though daring her to argue, he slid the prosthesis off and peeled back the stump sock, revealing his swollen flesh and a couple of raw, red spots where the doctors had worked out more pieces of shrapnel a few days earlier.
She could barely control the fury that he’d treated himself this way. “If you’re going to keep doing this to yourself, you might as well g
rab a gun and do it the easy way,” she snarled, pointing at his inflamed leg. “How the hell did you manage to walk over here with your leg swollen like this? Why did you? All you’d have needed to do was look, and you’d have known you ought to have left the prosthesis off and used your crutches.”
“Calm down, would you?”
“No. I won’t calm down.” She took some sterile antiseptic wipes from her first aid kit and started to cleanse the stump. “By not taking care of this, you’re weakening yourself, destroying your own spirit by refusing to accept who you are. A wonderful, sexy Master who happens to be missing part of his leg.” She thought of Earl, tried to stop the tears from spilling onto her cheeks. “I can’t bear to lose another…”
He caught her face between his hands, wiped away the moisture she couldn’t hold back. It was as if her tears had washed away his anger, left only a gentle caring in his eyes. “You won’t, honey. You won’t. It wouldn’t look this bad if I hadn’t spent the better part of the day tromping around car dealerships to find me a new truck.” Bending his head, he took her mouth for a long, hard kiss. “Now do your worst so I can show you I’m very much alive.”
“All right.” She reached for the first aid kit and began working on his leg again. “Promise you’ll take better care of yourself, okay?”
“Okay. Ouch, damn it! I’m into dishing out punishment, not taking it,” Jared said while she dabbed more antiseptic on the raw wounds. “Easy there.” She heard the apology in his tone, if not in the growled complaint he made.