by Angel Payne
He let out a savoring snarl. “Twist against the bondage for me, baby.” He stared in fascination as the muscles along her arms clenched, and she jerked her wrists as if fighting full knots. “Yes. That’s good. You like this? Being helpless beneath me? Knowing I control everything your body does right now?”
“Yes,” she exclaimed. “Yes. More!”
“Exactly what I had in mind,” he replied.
“Tell me,” she pleaded.
“That comes after you show me, baby.” With her confused grunt trailing him, he glided his hands together, joining them atop the silken skin of her lower abdomen. He pressed down. “Here,” he said. “Clench hard here.”
Her brows knitted. “I—I don’t under—”
“Do it,” he insisted. “Tighten everything hard. Harder!” When he felt her muscles squeeze, he ordered, “Now release it.” He grinned, even more delighted when her lips popped open and her eyes, alive with indigo arousal, followed suit. “Again. Harder this time.”
Ava obeyed without question this time. She winced when he made her stay tight a second longer this time, but let out a laugh on the release. “Oh…my…God.”
He cocked a brow. “Good?”
“A little better than that.” She swallowed. “Again? Please?”
Ethan nodded. “Again.”
“Yesssss…”
He compressed his hands harder, now as giddy as her. He’d read plenty about the Kegel muscles and exactly what areas they stimulated when employed, but the idea of coupling such a workout with a thorough mind fuck was a complete crapshoot on his part. So far, he wasn’t disappointed with the results. Didn’t look like Ava was, either.
“Keep doing it,” he instructed, loving the rhythm of her body beneath his touch. “Don’t stop.” Unable to resist, he slicked a hot kiss across her lips. “With every contraction, imagine that clamp on your clit, stimulating you.”
“Ohhhh.” Her head lolled to the side, her eyes closed again. “Yes…okay.”
He hesitated a second before issuing his next command. Would he be able to say it without doing it?
“Now imagine me fucking you, Ava.”
Barely. Oh shit, only by the thinnest thread of control did he resist turning that image into reality. Only by tightening his own muscles, nearly every one, did he hold back from plunging into her hard, letting her muscles squeeze him, her body surround him, her tunnel take him. Her utterly sexy whimpers didn’t make the ordeal any easier—but when she began to rock front to back, her pelvis thrusting as if he was really driving into her, he couldn’t leave events to chance anymore. Within thirty seconds, he fished the condom from his pants, tore apart the wrapper, and sheathed up.
Now he only had to decide one thing. Keep dominating her mind, or start claiming her body?
Another look at her made the decision for him.
She was still lost to the fantasy. Immersed in the sinful simulation of his creation. Every detail of her dream, of her mind, was still his to guide and control. If he took her now, reality still wouldn’t suck for her—but the fantasy would be over.
Time for your happy ending, sunshine.
“I’m deep inside you now,” he growled. “Driving hard and fast, my cock kissing your cervix with every thrust.”
She pitched her pelvis faster. Damn, it was all he could do to keep her from impaling herself on him from the force of the motions. “Yes!” she cried. “Harder, Ethan! Oh God, I’ve dreamed of this since the forest. I’ve wanted this for seven damn months.”
Despite the agony gripping his dick, he smiled down into her face. “You have?”
She nodded frantically. “Yes. Yes.”
The confession, so sweet and real, made him swell against the latex. His balls began to throb, threatening to send in the bullets whether he had the damn chamber loaded or not. He gritted his jaw. Not until she gave it all to him. Not until she came from the sheer force of his control.
“Ava, listen carefully now.”
“Mmmm. Yes, Sir.”
“I’m going to bury my dick all the way in, baby—and I’m going to stay there while I pull the clamp off your clit.”
“Ohhhh,” she moaned. “Okay. Oh, yes.”
“The blood’s going to rush back in. I’m going to touch you…once. Then you’re going to come for me. You’re going to come hard.” When she only emitted a little mewl, he demanded, “Do you understand the order?”
“Yes…I understand.”
Christ, she moved him. So committed in her passion. So complete in her submission. He kissed her again, gently this time, before asking, “Are you ready?”
She nodded. Smiled. And kept thrusting those beautiful, curvy thighs like he was really inside her…like he yearned to be inside her. “Yes. Do it. Make me come, Ethan—please!”
Chapter Six
She was seriously messed up. She had to be. In a recess of her mind, Ava knew much of this, most of this, wasn’t real—but right now, reality was her enemy. Right now, the illusion was all she wanted, all she craved, all she needed. The way Ethan wove his words into her mind and his scenes into her imagination had her breasts thudding with dual locks of pain, her arms flexed against invisible ropes, and her pussy dripping as it ached for final release. Every cell of her body simmered and strained, quivered and clenched, reaching for the fulfillment only he could give.
That settled it. Ethan Archer didn’t just look, smell, and sound like a beautiful, wicked warlock. He was one.
She felt his fingers tracing the top of her pubic line. Her heartbeat stuttered. Was his touch real this time? As he trailed two fingers lower, parting her swollen labia as he did, she wondered if it was worth questioning…even as the tips of those digits closed over the center of her clit and squeezed.
“Ohhhh!” she cried. Ow. And yet yum, too. His pleased growl enforced the latter.
“One,” he murmured. And pinched her even tighter.
“Damn!”
“Two.”
Yeah. Harder again. “Ethan!” she screamed. “Seriously?”
“Three.”
It was barely a breath above her lips as he pressed a thumb along her clit. When he spread his fingers back, the heat was unlike anything she’d ever felt. She screamed as her body broke into a million shards of blinding, beautiful sensation. And her mind? It was collateral damage from the blast, annihilated into ecstasy-filled mush. Nothing mattered or existed but the white ball of fire she’d become—and her longing to engulf Ethan in its flames, too.
“Please!” She managed beneath desperate pants. “N-need you, Ethan. N-no more just in my head. You. You. Please!”
She was making as much sense as a bimbo who’d had too many shots in the party limo. But somehow he understood. The rough sough from his chest told her so. His insistent kiss showed her so.
The slide of his cock into her core told her so.
“Ahhh!”
How the hell could he have asked her to imagine this? Nothing she’d dreamed came close to what he really felt like, stretching and filling her, driving her toward a second detonation of light, lust, flames, fulfillment. When he grunted and gripped her hips, sealing her body completely around his, she abandoned her grip on the couch to throw her arms around his neck. Their slick torsos slammed together. His approving snarl gave her the impetus to hold tighter. So close. Oh hell, she was so close…
“Now, sunshine. Now!”
His demand, coarse with control but silken with seduction, spoke to every drop of blood in her body. The walls of her control toppled, the shreds of her reserve were gone. Her pussy was flooded by a second wave of scalding sensation. Her scream of release tangled with Ethan’s harsh groan. Deep inside, she felt his cock pulse over and over again.
They rocked against each other for long, lingering minutes, heartbeats hammering at each other through their pressed bodies. With a heavy sigh, Ethan finally rose, peeled the condom off, yanked a sommelier’s wipe off the roll on the marble tasting table, then tossed them bo
th into the trash.
As she rose and walked toward her clothes on wobbly legs, Ava tossed him a wry laugh. “Guess that was a damn good vintage, right?”
He didn’t take her up on the joke. Instead, he caught her around the waist, his bicep tightening to hold her back. “What the hell are you doing?”
She pushed away. “Getting back to work.”
She winced, instantly regretting the glacier she tossed in the wake of his sexual tsunami. With a guilty pout, she turned back and pulled his head down for a tender kiss. The move delivered on the payback. His hair, short yet so thick, felt wonderful between her fingers. “Thanks for the concern. I just don’t require huge cuddle time, okay?”
Ethan unleashed a full glare. “The fuck you don’t.” Beneath his breath, way beneath, she heard him add, “The fuck I don’t.”
It was a ripe opportunity for another teasing giggle. Instead, as Ava bent to retrieve her bra, the heavy sting of tears assaulted. She froze, horrified by why her emotions ratted her out like this, but achingly clear about their reasoning, too. She’d had a glimpse of Heaven, and it had been good. Really good. Everything, everything, she’d ever longed to share with a truly dominant man. This one was so good at the helm, he’d commanded her into an orgasm damn near with his words alone.
But it was done now. The sole bite of Ethan Archer decadence had passed her lips. She had to put the fork down and be thankful for what she had enjoyed. If you indulge any more, you’ll be puking by tomorrow morning.
It might be too late for the nausea, anyway. She let out a sniff as the conclusion pummeled her full force.
“Ava.”
His orgasm hadn’t erased an inch of his Dom streak, reinforcing both his voice and touch as he cupped her shoulders from behind. Shit. Didn’t he understand that only made this worse? Couldn’t he get the message that she couldn’t do this stuff? The hardcore “lifestylers” even had a name for it, didn’t they? “Aftercare.” Right. Not happening. If it did, he’d aftercare her into a gigantic ball of needing him again. Yearning for him. Wanting him like a gooey, fresh honeycomb, complete with all the little buzzing buggers who’d created it, without an epi pen to be had for miles. It would kill her.
“Ava.”
And yet she allowed him to curl her back against his chest, engulfing her in his hard, wonderful warmth.
Ohhhh, no.
She lost the battle against breathing him in. Her senses filled with his scent, a mix of leather and sex…and her. His deep breath conveyed it wasn’t just her smell he’d taken in. His embrace alone, capped by him tangling one hand in her hair, told her that he considered this just the beginning.
The beginning. She laughed at the words through her tears. The beginning of what? Of giving her heart to this knight in camouflage, letting him ride off into battle with her favors tied to his “lance” of an M4, only to wait for the day when there was a knock on the door and the notifications officer stood there with the stare that meant only one thing? Or maybe it was the phone that rang and it was camo knight himself, calling drunk from Vegas to tell her he’d found the “soul mate” she’d never been and had just decided to marry the woman?
Those were just the scenarios life had punched her with firsthand. There were thousands more. So many more ways to define how she could make the mistake of falling for a too-good-to-be-true military man again.
She pushed from him again. Wrapped her arms around herself. “What?”
Lovely. She’d traded one-liners with TV stars, rock idols, and even Prince Harry during his set visit, and the best she could do was a tearful what?
Ethan clearly agreed. His eyes darkened to the color of midnight. “‘What?’ Is that really where you’re taking this now?”
He spread his arms, making a damn good case why Michelangelo got it wrong with the original model for David. Ava forced herself to look away from his naked beauty, now matched in intensity by his frustration.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “It’s…PMS, okay?” Good save. That one always worked. Guys pretty much started for the exits once that three-letter card got played. “I’ll be fine in a few—”
“Bullshit.”
She lifted a glare. “Excuse me?”
“You know what I said. But just so we’re clear, I call bullshit.” He shifted closer by a steady, noiseless, step. Another. He didn’t try to hold her again, though the proximity of his body, with the bottom of his rib cage hitting her elbows, had her again feeling swallowed by the force of his focus and the power in his stance.
She wetted her lips in lieu of backing up. “Ethan, I don’t think now is the right time—”
“Now is the perfect time. I’ve waited seven damn months for now.” He took her bra from her, tossing it onto the tasting counter in the same motion. In the next, he swept an arm around so he could brace her jaw, forcing her face up. “And something tells me you have, too.”
He emphasized his meaning by brushing her tears with the tips of his fingers. Like his voice, the sweeps were soft but ambitious…emotional ninjas. She had to fight back. She had no choice, despite the sorrow that still welled and the tears that still came.
“It was worth the wait,” she finally murmured. She tried lightening the air with another laugh but gave up when his face didn’t change by one solemn inch. “It was amazing, Ethan. But you—you’re—and this—”
“Is pretty fucking awesome.” Despite the earnest words, his features steeled. “You going to squirm away from that one too, sunshine? Go ahead. I’ve got the juice to go a hundred rounds with you on why I’m right.” His mouth quirked in humorless triumph. “But something tells me you’d be lucky to last three.”
“Something tells me that’s pretty accurate.” She gazed up at him, smiling softly with the confession. “Fucking awesome is a pretty good way of putting it. I don’t think I’ll look at that couch the same way again.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“I’m making it sound like a real thing,” she clarified. “Ethan, look—”
He shifted his thumbs to lock on top of her mouth. “You want to know about real?” he growled. “Fine.” For the first time, he dipped his gaze—making her know, with better-than-high-def clarity, that she was really in trouble now. “Real is what I felt, for the first time in a long time, the moment you smiled at me from Sage and Garrett’s living room floor. Real was the way my spirit got zapped when my lips met yours in the forest the next day. Real was the thing my life missed for seven fucking months, before I saw you again on the soundstage today. Real is this, Ava. It’s rare. A treasure that’s been given to us. We should—”
“Whoa.” She finally jerked from his hold. “Okay, stop. Just stop.” Stop before I break every promise I’ve made to myself over the last three years and let you shred my soul into pulp for your nobility smoothie. “A ‘treasure?’ Don’t you mean your treasure? The kill you chased and finally shot down?”
It was brutal. She knew it. Ethan’s face reflected it. His lips twisted as if he were nauseated. “Is that what you think? That you were some kind of conquest for me?”
She didn’t say anything.
His jaw went the texture of steel. Ava bunched her hands into fists in order to control herself from negating him, from running back into his arms and blubbering that of course that wasn’t what she thought. That in the first second of his hold on her in the prop room, she’d felt the agony of every moment he’d waited to see her again, and the torture of plodding through life without knowing he ever would.
Treasure. He had to have found the perfect word for it, hadn’t he?
But sometimes treasure was cursed. Especially if the wrong person found it. Especially if they weren’t the one meant to have it. The treasure always knew that part, didn’t it? And then it turned to dust.
With a heavy gulp, she pivoted and picked up her bra.
“I have to get back to work.” She deliberately picked panties and slacks next. That made it easier to keep her ga
ze down, away from where he’d be able to see it. To probe her in that way where he could read her thoughts in 3D. Her thoughts weren’t his business now. And her heart sure as hell wasn’t his “treasure.”
He finally moved. The very air seemed to shift around him as he did, like afterburn of his ire. With two violent sweeps, he scooped his own stuff off the floor but made no move to get redressed. “Fine,” he spat, “but this is far from over, Ava.”
She didn’t give him a response. Oh, she had one, but the chasm between thinking it and saying it was unbridgeable—and painful. As she jammed her top back over her head and picked up her boots, that didn’t stop the retort from blasting open a few tormenting holes inside her head.
The hell it isn’t, Sergeant Archer. The hell it isn’t.
Chapter Seven
Ethan had only steadily dated one woman in the four years since breaking up with Bella. Fallon was an airline flight attendant who didn’t just understand his insane life but often had a wackier one. As luck had it, her routes often landed her close to him if the team was forward deployed to a major city, making conditions ideal for enjoying each other’s humor, fondness for foreign food, and passion for hotels with four poster beds and thick walls.
Though Fallon topped too damn much from the bottom to be his long-time submissive, Ethan never sidestepped her aftercare. Yeah, including the cuddling. Letting Fallon watch Sex And The City reruns always assured he’d get to shower her with more than ten minutes of it, too. He even tried to understand the show, though that cartridge never clicked in his chamber. Did women actually talk like that? Did women actually dress like that? And his gut clenched at watching the scenes where the women snuck away in the morning light, in such a hurry to get home and regret what they’d done that they couldn’t bother to put on their shoes.
Ava left the wine room without putting on her shoes.
Even through a wardrobe change, exchanging her work jeans and blouse for a classic black sun dress with a matching bikini underneath, the shoes were neglected. He knew it because he kept track with a stare that was likely a cross between an evil eye and a fuck-off glower. And he knew that because everyone made distinct efforts to steer clear of him.