Anna pulled back a little, and stroked his balls while she kissed and licked the last few inches. She loved the feel of him, iron sheathed in silk, with tissue-thin skin covered in veins. As dark as he was, his skin was almost as pale as hers here, except at the tip, where it darkened to a deep rose.
He cursed at her when she pulled away, and blew on his damp skin. “Fine. We'll play it your way.”
She stroked his cheek with her nails. “We always do.”
Then she was beneath him again, and he kicked of his pants and yanked down her dress, closing his mouth over one of the pink nipples as he worked the silk off her small hips. Her skin was as pale as his was dark, and had always vaguely reminded him of cream. He lapped at her as if it were, suckling and biting, and his hand slipped between her legs. “What will your husband say when he finds out you're not a good Catholic virgin?” he purred. “I imagine he'll be disappointed.”
“I'll think of something,” Anna breathed. “Maybe…oh…maybe I'll tell him I was ra—aah— ped.”
“Mm, it's a pity you won't let me teach you how to play chess, mi cariña.” His lips moved back to her mouth, fleetingly, before he returned his attention to her other breast. “You're so cold-blooded, I imagine it would come as naturally to you as breathing.”
“Well, that's no good, is it? Because I like a challenge.”
His fingers probed deeper. “Oh, but think of the countless men you'd destroy.”
“Tempting.”
“Think of…all the things I could do to you on that chessboard.”
“Slightly more tempting.”
“Taking your king with my queen,” his fingers continued their cruel assault, “Over and over. And perhaps…if you're…very good…we'll try playing with just the pieces.”
“Very tempting.”
God, just when she started to get bored, he reminded her why she let him keep coming back. His incredible body, his sinful mouth, those laughing Moorish eyes, the way he could make her scream so loud that she often marveled that her voice didn't just snap like an overstretched rubber band.
Anna closed her eyes, arching her back, and she dug her hands into his scalp, twisting the soft tufts of black hair to keep him in place. “Harder, Ragazzino.”
He bit her hard, and his hand was replaced by his cock. Which was exactly what she wanted. She laughed, delightedly, like a little girl. “Little boy?” he said, arching an eyebrow.
“Prove me wrong.”
He exhaled and braced his arms on either side of her head. “If you were as poor of a lay as you are a liar, I'd be out the door.”
She choked when he slipped partway inside her, in one smooth single stroke that made her feel like she were butter and he was a hot knife.
“So you admit I'm good,” she said, looking up at him through her lashes with clashing shyness. “I never said that. You're acceptab—aah.” She bucked her hips, pushing him deeper inside.
She smiled at him in triumph; a smile that disappeared when he said, raggedly but nonetheless coldly, “I'll leave you like this, half-finished, if you don't stop smirking at me like that.”
And then they both stopped speaking, except for their moans and gasps of pleasure. She wrapped her legs around his waist. Anna had always loved watching his face during coitus, the way his full lips swelled from their violent kisses making them look even fuller when parted with desire, his eyes closed, the thick sweep of eyelashes smeared across his cheekbones like black charcoal.
He was a dark angel. She wanted to sculpt him, and then she wanted to smash him.
He laughed into her hair as he came, and delivered a final thrust with a vibration that made her bones quiver and melt. Anna couldn't have walked if she tried—and he knew it, the smug bastard. He grabbed the tie she'd discarded earlier and picked her up, carrying her to his bed.
“What if I get pregnant?” she asked him, before he lashed her to his bedposts for the second round. He was allergic to latex and she hated anything that deprived her of sensation, so they never used condoms. She knew it was foolish, but life wasn't worth living without a few risks.
Damían thought it over. “Hmm.” He kissed her, languorous and deep, as he dipped his fingers into a glass of wine on the nightstand. “Better hope he takes after me, not you.” He trailed the scarlet liquid over her body, and both of them watched the liquid trail across her skin like blood. Then he bent his head and licked it all off before the wine could soak into his sheets.
“Fool. It doesn't—oh that's nice—work like that. Children inherit half both their parents' genes.”
Damían rested his forehead against hers, an ironic twist to his mouth. “God have mercy on the world.” Forward
This next story was the result of a lost bet. I forget what the terms of the bet were, but it was with a very evil woman who decided that I should be made to write a story about incest.
Yes, it was inspired by Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Right-o. Back to the cringing corner of shame.
En Prise
Anna Mecozzi sat on the shaded porch of Wolverton Manor, basking in the dying light of the magnificent New England sunset. She charmed her newest suitor with hard lemonade in tall, frosted glasses while her children played in the yard.
“Predators and prey” was a popular favorite among the Mecozzi children.
Eight-year-old Celeste was running, hand-inhand with her twin brother, Dorian. The two of them giggled and screamed as their eldest brother chased after them. The twins split up—Dorian shoving his sister aside to make a break for the grove of willows that surrounded the dried-up koi pond. “Cheater!” she cried, which quickly dissolved into a wordless shriek of terror.
Gavin pounced, pinning his younger sister to the ground. His lips brushed her throat, over her jugular vein, and he bit her lightly. “You're dead,” he breathed, and her heart jumped. Then he leaned back on his heels and patted her cheek, and the chase started anew.
While roles were frequently tried on and exchanged, like a bit of fancy dress, some were set in stone. Fifteen-year-old Gavin, twelve-year-old Luca, and thirteen-year-old Anna-Maria were always the predators. Always.
Luca wasn't at all fast, but he was strong— particularly for his age. He also had a temper and the younger children liked to tease him, but it was like poking a sleeping crocodile. Eventually he would lose what patience he had and then grab the nearest offender at hand, pinning them down with his substantial bulk until they couldn't breathe. Groveling was the price of freedom; the amount varied with the degree of his anger and the intensity of the provocation.
Anna-Maria wasn't all that strong at all, despite what she liked to think, but she was fast. Sometimes two or three children working together could overpower her. A favorite trick was to have one child grab Anna-Maria's legs to make her stumble. Then two of them would sit on her. Retribution always followed such attempts, though, and it was as swift as it was cruel. Anna-Maria knew her brothers' and sisters' weaknesses and secret fears, and had no qualms about exploiting them on the slightest pretense. She had once locked Celeste—then six—in the hall closet with a couple of wolf spiders, for embarrassing her in front of a boy she had fancied at the time.
Wolf spiders weren't poisonous, but they did enjoy a bit of a chase themselves. It wasn't until Celeste's screaming stopped abruptly that AnnaMaria opened the door to let her out, only to discover that her youngest sister had passed out from terror— after wetting herself.
Gavin was both fast and strong, but not quite as strong as Luca would someday become, nor as fast as his sister already was. The children almost unanimously agreed that he was the best predator, however, because he was the only one who performed his role “correctly.” He gave them a taste of fear, accompanied by the seductive whispers of power and death. He made them aware of their own fragile mortality and, best of all, he made it appealing.
Luca was fun to annoy, and Anna-Maria was fun to threaten each other with, but Gavin they took seriously and approached with caution. He was no
t incapable of being cruel—in fact, in many ways he surpassed even Anna-Maria in his innovations—but it was not a weapon he wielded high-handedly. Ambiguous fear, he believed, was often far more potent than the kind that is upfront.
Anna-Maria both loathed and respected her older brother. She respected him because he was powerful —intelligent, strong, and wildly handsome, and she wanted those things for herself. She loathed him because he had those things and she had no way of taking them from him they way she could with more tangible things like her mother's diamond jewelry. She loathed him more because he was a man, which automatically meant people took him more seriously. She loathed him most of all, though, because she was in love with him.
But he doesn't take me seriously , she thought, watching him rolling around with Leona like a young panther, while Dorian and Celeste climbed all over him. The sight filled her with a dryness that demanded to be quenched. Anna-Maria walked over to her four siblings and they looked up as she approached. Gavin was on his knees, with a child hanging off each arm, and Leona grabbing onto his neck as if trying to ride him like a horse.
“Off,” Anna-Maria said to her ten-year-old sister imperiously. The little girl released her brother with a sulky pout. “You two—hold him still.” Celeste hesitated, glancing at Dorian, and the two of them tightened their respective grips on their brother's arms, keeping them behind his back.
Anna-Maria dropped to her knees, so her face was level with her brother's. She looked him dead in the eye and then began to unbutton his shirt, quickly and precisely. He had already started to get hair on his chest and a line of it trailed down from his navel, disappearing into his slacks. His body was far better than any boy she'd dated so far. She raked her hands nails over his exposed belly, tracing the grooves and ridges of his emerging abs.
It wasn't fair.
Gavin watched her impassively and that annoyed her. Though she was only thirteen, men were already aware of her. With her long legs, tanned skin, and thick blonde hair, she turned heads. And Anna-Maria liked the feel of their eyes on her, desperately grasping for purchase. It made her feel powerful knowing that they were stripping away her clothing, layer by layer, trying to picture what lay beneath. She liked that she could play them like pawns by using her body as collateral. She liked the fact that the law was on her side, as a minor, which meant she didn't have to pay.
Gavin just looked bored, and a little annoyed. “What do you think you're doing?”
“Just getting a better look at my darling big brother,” she purred, leaning her forehead against his.
“You can look just as well from afar. I'm not one of your devoted denizens,” he sneered.
“No, that you're not,” Anna-Maria agreed. She rubbed his nipple between her thumb and forefinger, slow and teasingly seductive. “I'm not sure I understand why, though.”
“Because I see right through you,” he said softly, “And you're a vain, silly creature who thinks she's a hunter but really, dear sister, you're just a harlot. Your so-called prowess is superficial.”
Anna-Maria pinched him hard. He didn't flinch. “You should talk. I know things about you, Gavin. Things about your father. Mother says he was a sick son of a bitch.” She pressed her lips against his neck, determined to elicit a reaction from him. The skin of his throat was supple and yielded to her pearly teeth as she caught his vein between them. “You take after him, supposedly.”
“I wouldn't know.”
“No, you wouldn't, would you? But mother tells me things she would never dream of telling you. Apparently he was like a tiger in the sack.” Her hand dropped from his chest and she squeezed him roughly between his legs, causing his jaw to clench. “Hung like one, too. You are sick, aren't you, Gavin? Getting turned on by your own sister? Your thirteen- year-old sister.” She squeezed him again, in a long, fluid jerk that made him gasp. “You're such a twisted fuck.”
Growling, Gavin batted Celeste and Dorian aside and tackled her, pinning her down as he had Celeste when he had been chasing her in the garden. AnnaMaria laughed delightedly. “You know you want me,” she purred, smiling into her livid brother's face. “All men do. But you, especially.”
“Wrong,” he said coolly.
She laughed again, and it tinkled like ice. “Then why are you hard for me, dear brother?”
He slapped her. It was a casual slap, not meant to hurt so much as to humiliate. “You shouldn't be talking like that,” he snarled. “Thirteen is too young to be a slatternly whore.”
“Oh, don't worry, big brother. My virtue is still intact. In case you want that pleasure for yourself.”
“I don't want any woman even remotely similar to you or mother. But especially not you.”
“Ooh, could it be that big brother afraid of meeting his match?”
“Even if that were the case, you would still be exempt. Look at you. Hardly a challenge.”
Her saucy look vanished, making her face look cold and hard. “Really. Do your tastes run younger, then, Gavin? Have you got your eye on Leona and Celeste?” she added, gesturing at the blonde-haired eight-year-old and the dark-haired ten-year-old watching wide-eyed nearby.
“Don't be ridiculous,” he scoffed. “There's no pleasure to be had in taking a child. I want someone innocent. Somebody passive whom I can control, and teach how to pleasure me. Not somebody who already thinks she does know, and will fight me every step of the way for control.”
“You like the fight,” she hissed.
“You don't fear me, though,” he said dryly. “Not the way I want to be feared.”
“And how is that?” Anna-Maria asked, making a face.
He smiled. “The fear of wanting something you know shouldn't—and knowing you can't resist. You're not innocent enough to understand, dear sister. Not anymore. If you ever were.”
With that, he got up and began doing up the buttons of his shirt. Anna-Maria eyed him hatefully, lust and respect and scorn and fear and jealousy all warring with the innate hatred and contempt she felt for all her siblings. “Your ideal woman sounds weak,” she spat. “Like prey.”
She had meant to bait him, but he smiled and said, “Exactly.”
“On the contrary. I find the thought very… appealing.”
“That's stupid,” Anna-Maria said. “You'll break her, or else turn her into a mindless slave that grants your every wish in fear of being cast aside. Either way, you'll get bored.”
“I doubt it.” He fastened the last button of his collar. “The hunt alone will keep me occupied for quite some time. And there is the matter of capturing her, taming her.” He grinned. “Teaching the lamb how to lie with the lion, without succumbing to his hunger. Should be quite the experience.”
“I'll kill her,” Anna-Maria blurted, startling herself. But the words rang true, and she meant them. “I'll kill any female you take for your own. I won't let you taint our family's blood.”
Gavin raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a threat, Anna.”
“It is. I'll do it. Maybe not by my own hand, but she will die.”
“And you think one of our siblings will oppose me?”
“We both know I'll most likely marry rich. I'll have a stupid husband who will be generous with his money and lax in attention to what I do.” She smiled; it was a beautiful smile and filled with cruelty. “You remember Snow White, right, Gavin? I'll be the wicked stepmother. I'll hire a huntsman. He'll kill her and bring her heart to me in a metal box filled with ice.”
“Is that a fact?” Gavin said, taking a step closer. “And what makes you think I'll let you do that?” “Do you think you can stop me, big brother?
Compete with my wealth and resources?”
“You haven't got either of those things, yet.” “And you don't have a woman,” she pointed out.
“Yet we speculate. Why? This isn't really about the blood, is it? You don't seem to have any qualms about mother whoring it up where she pleases.”
“You're the male,” she hissed. “You carry on the f
amily name.”
Gavin laughed. “I can't believe it. You're jealous. Of me.”
“You're everything I want in a man. I see no reason why I should settle for second best.”
His smile faded and he folded his arms. “Well. It seems we have the makings of a bet.”
Anna-Maria smiled. “Yes. And it begins when I take a husband and you take a mate.”
“What happens if I win?”
She paused to think. “I'll give your female a generous dowry—if you don't kill her, first. The amount will depend on that of my future husband, but it should fancy any foolish whim she has.”
“And if you win?”
Anna-Maria put her hands on her brother's shoulders and brushed her lips against his. “If I win,” she whispered, “You, big brother, will fuck me in ways my undoubtedly impotent husband-to-be could never dream of and get me with child. Our child.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” he growled. “Like father, like son,” she whispered.
They shook hands, both of them squeezing as hard as they could to force the other to let go. AnnaMaria used her nails, which were quite long, but that didn't seem to faze him. His grip was like steel, however, and she was forced to let go when the bones in her wrist felt like they might snap. She massaged her hand. “Don't get too attached to your pet lamb, Gavin, dear.”
And then she turned and went back inside the house.
After a moment's pause, Dorian and Celeste hugged him in a silent show of support, and followed along with Leona after their older sister. Casting a disgusted look at his mother, with her victim wrapped up in her arms the way a black widow spider lures her mate into her web, he, too, went inside. He had never lost a game before.
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