He hated it when pop psychology worked. “I promise that, sometime in the future, we can deal with my old heartaches, from Musette, and my childhood, and innumerable others, I’m sure.”
She was serious, and he stopped half grinning down at her. “I only want to help.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know.” Max kissed her again. “I only want to love you.”
He watched her eyes go round. “I – you – you couldn’t possibly have said what I thought you said.”
“Yes, I did. I love you.”
“How could you? You barely know me!”
“I’ve had access to every nook and cranny of your mind since the day I bit you. I know you better than you probably want me to.”
She looked even more seriously alarmed. “Every nook and cranny?”
“Oh, yes,” he whispered, “even those crannies.”
Damn. She was royally screwed if she became seriously involved with this man. He knew her entirely too well. She and Dag had had a mental connection, but he had – at least she thought – had some discretion about it.
Perhaps not? Maybe she was just kidding herself.
Hell, what was she doing, thinking about getting involved with him in the first place? He had bitten her, and could have killed her! He had held her captive and worse! How could she possibly be considering it?
But she was. She really was.
He was smiling, because he knew she was, too. Max had taken her hands into his. “I don’t want you to feel obligated to say it back to me, or to rush into a relationship with me or anything like that at all. We have all the time in the world. And,” he had to force himself to say this, because if he didn’t say it now, he never would, “regardless of your decision, I want you to know that I’ll be here for you. We’ll always be connected. We’re blood now. That connection, unless one of us dies, cannot be severed. So any time you need me, all you have to do is scream in your head and I’ll come running as fast as I can. And I don’t ever want to hear that you’ve hesitated about that, or you won’t be sitting comfortably for a month.” He tipped her wet chin up. “Understand?”
Fawna couldn’t say anything at that moment, but nodded vigorously.
“And, speaking of which...”
She reached out and put her hand over his mouth, whispering through the enormous lump in her throat, “No, we don’t need to speak about that.”
Max moved her hand away, saying, “It seems to me that I remember someone is owed at least one spanking this evening, if not two.”
“Two?”
He stood up with her in his arms, carrying her up the huge staircase of the center hall colonial, up to a room she recognized more than vaguely.
It was a room she’d been spanked in more than once in the past week.
“So this room does exist? And I have been spanked in here before! You did bring me here!” She ran around touching things, reassuring herself that they were real while Max just watched her, enjoying how much joie de vivre she brought to him. It was just what he’d been missing for a millennium or two. There were fresh lilacs on the mantle, which went with the purples in the room beautifully, a wing backed chair that she often saw him in, and a full-length antique mirror, one of the kind that could be tilted in various angles and it sat in the corner, where she didn’t remember having noticed it before. The drapes were a deep mauve velvet that she thought might make the place look like a brothel, but it just made the room look rich, with all the gleaming wood and roses.
She swirled around the place like a ballerina, until he caught her around the waist, and suddenly, her clothes melted away from her. “Hey, that’s a neat trick! How do you do that?”
He tilted his head. “I have to keep some secrets, bebe. Or else you’ll grow bored with me and run off and find someone else to keep you amused.”
Fawna was a bit sensitive to being thought of as a superficial kind of person, and she locked her fingers through his, asking, “Do you really think I’m that kind of person?”
Max captured her face with his palms. “No, of course I don’t, Cherie. It was just my clumsy attempt at teasing you. You forget. I know who you are in your heart of hearts. You never, ever have to worry that I think ill of you. I, more so than anyone else on this planet, know the real you.”
“And yet you still love me?”
“I do.”
On that tender note, she found herself in front of the mirror. He didn’t, as she expected, immediately begin to spank her. Instead he stood behind her and cupped her breasts. “You have lovely breasts, Fawna.” Max reached into her hair and pulled the pins out that had held it out of her way. “I don’t like your hair up, by the way. It’s gorgeous, and I like it to be free. Especially when we’re alone together.”
He brushed it to one side, so that he could nuzzle her neck, and she couldn’t help it. She cringed.
Max’s heart sank, but he couldn’t blame her for that reaction. Not in the least. The only person he had to blame for that was himself.
Fawna looked at him like she thought he was going to give her the back of his hand, which was the last thing he was going to do. He turned her to him and hugged her hard. “It’s all right. I understand the fear, and it’s fine. I don’t know what to say to calm you about it, but I’m not mad at you at all, just at myself. Your reaction is entirely natural after what I did to you, and I should have thought about that before I approached you there. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged her shoulders, her eyes darting everywhere around the room, refusing to look at him.
Max wanted to kick himself, but he also wanted to forge ahead. So he slowly turned her around again, so that her back was against his front, and positioned them so that they were in front of the mirror. “Look, Cherie, look at us.” When her gaze settled on them, brought his hands up to capture her breasts, taking her attention off her neck and the fact his mouth was very close to it. His fingers pinched each nipple hard, making her further forget her fear and concentrate on what his hands were doing to her – and begin to worry what they were going to do to her.
Her breasts were just the slightest bit too ample for a woman her size, which was exactly what most men were looking for. They were wonderfully full, and her nipples were that dark coral color that looked like she’d darkened them, but she hadn’t. They never failed to respond to him, and neither did she. After a very few minutes of playing with her breasts, she had nearly collapsed back against him, all worry about him and his fangs and their proximity to her neck completely gone, for which Max wax extremely grateful.
“Are you wet, Cherie?”
Fawna whimpered first, but then answered promptly, “Prolly.”
“Why don’t you check for me.”
It was in Fawna’s mind to want to interpret that order as a question that she could say no to, but even on such short acquaintance, she knew better than to assume that. Max wouldn’t say things to her that she could say “no” to. That wasn’t how he worked. He expected to be obeyed.
So, as slowly as she thought she could get away with, and she knew that he knew that that was just what she was thinking, she began to move her right hand down between her own legs. She knew that her whole body was flushing a deep pink color at about the same rate as her hand was traveling towards her crotch, and that only made her blush that much brighter, of course.
The flat of Max’s palm on her butt cheek convinced her that she should step up her pace, which she did, delving between her own lips and finding the evidence he sought, wishing quite fervently that he had gone on this expedition himself, as he usually did.
“Show me.”
She brought her wet index finger up between them, and he took it greedily into his mouth.
“Good girl. Now go put a pillow on the edge of the bed and lie over it.”
He was busily looking in the closet, and she was trying desperately not to look, knowing she really didn’t want to see what he was getting.
Again, the pillow, like the couch at the
house in the woods, made her just short enough that she couldn’t reach the floor. Max liked this. It meant he wouldn’t really have to restrain her, just make sure she didn’t fall off the bed to one side or the other. He liked having her free and unfettered. It smacked more of submission than did shackles.
Max came to stand to one side of her, resting his fingertips on the small of her back, just as a reminder. “I want you to stay in position. This is not going to be easy, because this is your spanking for trying to escape me.”
He heard her indrawn breath, and knew she had already started to cry, realizing that this next half hour or so wasn’t going to be a fun time. “I thought long and hard while you were in the woods and then with your family about what I was going to use, and I decided that it should be something that reflected where we were are the time. Something natural. Something of the woods. So I actually went back there, and I found something that fit the bill exactly.”
The first time whatever he was using connected with her backside, Fawna wanted to get up and run away. Just get up and leave the house entirely. Because not only was there a deep sting applied just in the meat of the backs of her thighs, but at the same time, there was a line of fire laid down on the very crown of her bottom. Two strips taken off her hide in one! What the hell was he using?
She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know, but she didn’t think he was going to give her the peace of mind of not knowing.
Four more strokes issued right in a row – ten thin red stripes decorating her otherwise pristine white flesh already raised and red and angry, and one very sorry young woman, bawling her heart out onto the comforter, promising to be better behaved in the future, and already saying “please, no more!”
“It’s a switch, Fawna. A switch from your very own property that’s lathering your gorgeous little bottom.”
She was doing her best not to move, trying not to reach back, when all she wanted to do was grab that horrid thing – her property or not – out of his hand and throw it out the window. She was vowing in her head that she was going to have every hickory tree on the property cut down as soon as she got home, but that was going to have been too late to save her poor, ravaged bottom now.
“That’s right, Fawna. You are not to run away from me, do you understand?”
Knowing he expected an answer, she managed to collect herself enough to answer, “Y-yes, M-max!”
He had been giving her a few whistling strips here and there, but not many in a row, but to finish her off, he gave her a whirlwind of fifteen or so that he was careful didn’t land anywhere but where he wanted them to, that had her dancing in place to the terrible fall of that slim but terrible branch.
And then he steadied her on the bed with his fingertips on her back again, telling her to stay in place while he put it away.
“Away? You’re not going to throw it away?” she nearly shrieked in indignation.
As he returned from the closet, where he kept a veritable cornucopia of implements, he said laconically, “Now, why would I do that, when I’d just have to go all the way out there again the next time I needed to give you a good switching? That wouldn’t make any sense, Fawna.”
He stood beside the bed, not letting her get up, while he divested himself of his own clothing, then joined her on the bed and drew her up and over him. He was already much more than fully capable, but didn’t join them yet, preferring at first to soothe her, allowing her to cry on him a bit before drying her tears and kissing her, arranging her legs on either side of his hips, so that she was spread wide, completely unable to prevent him from taking her when he so desired.
Max cupped Fawna’s damp face in his palms as he kissed her slowly. “Never run away from me again, my love. For the next time will be much worse. You don’t have to have me as a lover. But don’t try to hide from me. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”
He hugged her then, probably tighter than he should, because she squeaked from it, and he immediately released her, but then he kissed her again, taking her breath away in an entirely different manner, as his fingers sought that place she’d already had to delve into herself.
It was, as he’d already suspected, sopping wet. Her little button was hard as a pebble, and he rewarded it for being so by massaging it with her sweet honey until he knew she was millimeters away from losing control.
“Not just yet, sweetie. Not just yet. I want to see those wings, but not until I say so.”
Fawna was not very good about controlling her pleasure. It went right along with not having much control over her thoughts.
“We’ll work on that. Don’t worry.”
She was too caught up in the moment to argue with him about it. She’d save that for later. Much later.
When he lifted her up in preparation for his possession, his fingers wrapped around her hips and touched her scourged bottom, making her reach back to try to pry them off her, which earned her several hard swats on her already flaming derriere that had her crying again.
Right after he’d delivered those swats, Max’s fingers were teasing her again, bringing her back near the height of pleasure, despite what he’d just done to her bottom. When he moved again to lift her onto him, she squeaked and squawked, but didn’t touch his hands. She learned her lessons well.
And he was rewarded by the longest, deepest, throatiest moan he’d ever heard as she slid down the thick, swollen length of him. He took her ankles, just when she thought she’d taken him to the hilt and moved them just so, and she realized that there was even more of him, and that she could become even more achingly open.
Finally, he leaned towards her, grabbing a flaming cheek with one hand and pressing a thumb against her with the other as he moved. She went off like a rocket and those wings unfolded around them, and he knew, for the first time in his long memory, complete and utter bliss.
***
When Max dropped her off back at the palace, both Dain and her mother greeted her at the front door, even though it was four in the morning. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” Her mother did the whole airport security routine, patting her down as if she had a concealed weapon or something.
“I’m fine, Momma, really.”
Dain gave her the once over. “Is he really on the up and up now?”
Fawna stopped and turned to her family. “He says he loves me.”
They were flabbergasted, to say the least. Welcome to the club.
“Do you love him?” her mother asked, her face clearly stating that she was terrified of the possible answer to the question.
Keenly aware that Max was probably listening, she still answered from her heart. “Yeah, I think I do, Mom.”
Her mother looked absolutely crestfallen, and Fawna knew she’d let her down. She knew that what her mother wanted to hear was that her daughter was going to have nothing more to do with any vampires of any sort – Dag, Max, it didn’t matter who, really. She wanted Fawna to find a nice man – human, faerie, it didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t a vampire – settle down, and get to the real business of having babies.
But now she was going and getting herself involved with yet another vampire who could get her killed.
Fawna walked back to her mother and hugged her tight. “It’s going to be okay, Mom. It really is.”
Strangely enough, although it sounded like a platitude, Fawna herself believed it.
Epilogue
Fawna slept like the dead that night.
Like the long dead.
She dreamt of trying to shop, but not being able to get to the mall, because it was under water.
She dreamt about being in high school, and going to a class that wasn’t hers, with people she didn’t know, given in a language she couldn’t understand.
She dreamt about a meeting she was trying to get to that they kept changing the location of once she got there.
But the last dream she had before she woke was the one that disturbed her the most.
It took place in the room that Ma
x had for her in his house, that she now knew existed. Only when she entered the room this time, the man waiting for her in the winged back chair wasn’t Max, as she expected.
It was Dag.
The End
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