Clearly he hadn't been interested in that level of intimacy. Maybe he was incapable of it. Maybe he always bought the sex he needed, consciously avoiding any connection that might possibly move into something more intimate, something that might hurt him.
That was pretty pathetic, wasn’t it? Why did she keep thinking these absurd romantic thoughts about a man who was incapable of any kind of meaningful relationship?
And yet…
When he’d dipped his head down between her legs, his tongue stoking the flames of her need, wasn’t that in itself a supremely intimate act? And when Adam had gathered her into his arms, pulling her close as he moved inside her, that hadn't felt like some guy just getting his rocks off.
It had felt like a man making love.
Lifting her head, Carly turned her pillow over and punched it back into shape. It felt stupid and wrong to be sleeping at the foot of the bed. She should be up there beside him, curled into his strong arms, her head on his chest, her leg over his thighs…
What if…?
Did she dare?
Lifting her head again, she saw on the clock beside the bed that it was 2:46. She’d been tossing and turning for over three hours. This was insane. She just knew if she could lie beside him she would fall instantly asleep. And she could set her internal alarm, which never failed her, so she could wake up and move back down before he woke in the morning, none the wiser.
“Adam,” she whispered, just in case he was a lighter sleeper than she thought. There was no reaction. She touched his leg through the blanket that separated them. He didn’t move. Throwing off her own coverlet, she scooted slowly along the bed until she was beside him. Her heart was beating fast and she recognized this probably wasn’t a good idea, but she was too keyed up and exhausted all at the same time to care.
She stayed still for several minutes, just watching his face, silvered by the moonlight. His thick lashes cast a shadow on his cheek and a lock of his dark hair had fallen over one eye.
Slowly, silently, she lifted the covers and slid her body down beside his. He was warm and solid, a comforting masculine presence that she didn’t realize how much she had missed in the year since her last real relationship. Carefully she nestled her cheek in the crook of his arm, not quite daring to put her head on his chest, though she wanted to.
His breathing continued, slow and deep, and after several more minutes, she dared to put her arm over his body, snuggling closer. Her heart nearly stopped when he rolled toward her, his arms coming around her.
Adam sighed softly, but still seemed to be asleep. Gradually Carly relaxed in his embrace, her eyelids drooping, her mind emptying, her muscles easing. Just before she drifted to sleep, she leaned her face up to his and kissed his lips, just the lightest brush of skin on skin.
To her astonishment he kissed her back, pulling her closer, his lips parting, his tongue entering her mouth. She couldn’t stop the urgent, sudden moan that filled her mouth, nor control the dance of her tongue against his. His hands moved over her back as they kissed, and she could feel the press of his erection against her thigh.
As suddenly as he’d embraced her, Adam moved away from her. He rolled onto his back, pulling Carly with him so that her head found its way to his chest. His breathing had again assumed its slow, even rise and fall. Had he really been asleep during that amazing kiss?
She could feel the steady, reassuring thump of his heart against her cheek, and while she could have kissed him all night, fatigue again stole over her, making her muscles limp and drawing her eyelids down. It felt so good, so right, to be in his arms. So what if he caught her there in the morning? Whatever punishment he decided to mete out would be worth these few hours of sweetness in the dark.
~*~
Something was tickling Adam’s nose, pulling him from a sweet, warm dream. He twisted his head away from the tickle and then opened his eyes when he realized what it was. Carly’s silky curls were in his face, her cheek warm on his chest, her body molded against his.
All at once the kiss came back to him, the kiss that, half asleep, he’d allowed himself to believe was part of a dream, though in his heart of hearts he’d known it was no dream.
Carly had defied him, breaking one of the rules he’d set out from the beginning—she was to sleep at the foot of his bed. Slaves did not curl up beside their Masters, at least not the sort of slave he was interested in owning.
Or so he had told himself.
But that was before he’d made love to Carly on the bondage table. Before he’d tasted her spicy sweetness and felt the tight, perfect grip of her cunt around his cock.
Holy shit.
He was getting in too deep for comfort. It had been years since he’d felt this sort of attraction to a woman, the kind of attraction that he well knew could be his undoing. He would fall for her and even if she stayed with him when the month was done, he would never know, not for certain, that she was there because she cared for him, or because she liked the free meal ticket and roof over her head.
The very nature of their strange liaison assured that it had to end when the month was done. Anything else would be fraught with potential pain and disillusionment, and he’d had enough of that to last a lifetime, thank you.
Pushing the sleeping girl from him, he yawned loudly and turned over, his back to her. A moment later he felt her scrambling down to where she should have been in the first place. He lay still for a long time, letting his thoughts drift and slowly easing back into a light sleep.
He was awakened by her burrowing beneath the covers, this time to seek out and suck his cock. As he let her lick and stroke him, he decided not to say anything about her infraction. It would just muddy the waters. Better to leave it be and pretend it had never happened.
~*~
All day Monday Adam put Carly through her paces, barely giving her a chance to catch her breath. As the minutes and hours ticked by, Carly kept waiting for him to say something about what she had done, certain her punishment would be severe, but he never said a word.
He bound her from head to foot in rope, leaving only her cunt and ass exposed. She was blindfolded and suspended horizontally from the dungeon ceiling beam, sexually teased and tortured for hours, after which he spanked both her ass and cunt until she both orgasmed and cried, in the end not sure if the pleasure or the pain had gotten the best of her.
She barely had the strength to eat the dinner he fed her. She was grateful when he let her soak in the tub and go to bed early. Almost the moment she lay down at the foot of the bed, sleep had dropped over her exhausted body like a curtain.
When Carly woke up early Tuesday morning, she realized she’d never even heard Adam come to bed. Lifting herself on one elbow, she watched the sleeping man for several minutes, still musing about the stolen kisses two nights before and whether he even remembered or knew it had happened.
After her morning shower and grooming, Carly stood at attention, arms behind her head, waiting for Adam’s daily inspection of her body. He came into the bedroom a moment later, his cell phone in hand. He looked unhappy. “I had planned to take the whole week off, but I got a call just now while you were in the shower. There’s a problem at one of the subsidiaries in the city and I need to get down there and put out a few fires. I’ll probably be gone for at least five hours.”
Carly realized she didn’t want him to go. She found herself annoyed that Adam’s business, whatever it was, couldn’t take care of itself for one freaking day without him, but of course she held her tongue on the matter.
Pocketing the phone, Adam ran his fingers over Carly’s body, sending a shiver of desire through her that she struggled to contain. He seemed distracted, even when he marked her ass with the whip.
As they walked down the stairs, Adam continued, “I don’t want to leave you idle for too long while I’m gone. After your regular chores, there’s a closet in my study I’ve been meaning to clean out for months. No need to wear your French maid outfit, since I won’t be here
to see you.”
They entered the study together. Adam moved toward the closet in question, pulling open the folding doors. “I don’t want the cleaning crew to get their hands in here because they like to throw everything away and I’m something of a pack rat. I’ll show you what I want done after breakfast. Then I’ve got to hit the road before the rush hour traffic gets too insane.”
Carly looked around Adam’s study, taking in the furnishings and the pictures on the walls. It was a masculine room, all dark leather and polished wood. A faded Oriental carpet covered most of the hardwood floor. There was a large mahogany desk with a gold pen set in a marble base and a sleek looking laptop on the polished surface. Framed photographs lined the walls, most of them of Adam shaking hands with various dignitaries, politicians and movie stars, many of them in front of office buildings with the words Wise Subsidiaries engraved in brass and stone. Carly made a mental note to do a Google search on the company, and on Adam himself, maybe even later that morning if she had a chance.
Carly realized as she thought this that she hadn’t had access to a computer or a cell phone since she’d signed up for the slave training at the auction house. She thought about the countless hours she used to waste on Facebook, YouTube, and at various BDSM porn sites. She realized now that she didn’t miss any of that, not a bit.
Glancing at the antique pendulum clock on the mantle, she noted it was already after nine. She’d completed her upstairs chores and now it was time to focus on the task at hand. She moved resolutely toward the closet. Adam hadn’t been kidding about being a packrat. There were dozens of boxes piled one on top of the other on the floor of the closet, and more boxes stuffed into the shelves that lined the space. There were plastic folders stuffed with papers and boxes of unopened office supplies.
“I admit it’s mostly junk—old receipts, Christmas cards, letters from family members, several boxes of old photos I haven’t looked at in a hundred years,” Adam had said when he’d showed her the closet. “There are even some old VHS tapes I used to keep around for my nephews, and other crap I don’t even remember. What I’d like you to do is organize it into some kind of order. I have some plastic bins I bought for the project, but I just never quite get the time to make it happen. Just do the best you can and sort the stuff into some kind of logical order in the bins. Don’t throw anything out. I’ll look it over when I get a chance. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes, Sir. I was an office manager and administrative assistant in a law office. I have a very organized mind.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you later today. When you’re done with the closet, you can do what you like—take a bath, take a nap, whatever.” Reaching into the pocket of the sports jacket he was wearing, he had handed her a cell phone. “I’m going to call you when I’m ten minutes from the house. I will expect to find you kneeling in the front hall, your forehead on the floor, arms in front of you, ass in the air, when I get home. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Now Carly took the six colored plastic bins he’d brought into the study after breakfast. She lined them up on the desk and then took out a box. She began to sort through receipts, Broadway playbills and business correspondence from someone named Nathan Wise to various vendors and suppliers, none dated more recently than 1993. She decided Nathan must be Adam’s father, and wondered what he was like. What family did Adam have? Was he, or had he once been married?
There were two boxes of VHS tapes, many of them Disney movies and cartoons. She realized she knew next to nothing about Adam Wise, not even if he had kids. This closet, she realized, was an opportunity to learn more about him, even if that hadn’t been his intention.
And yet, she thought as she reached for a box that contained a jumble of old photographs, maybe it had been his intention, at least on some level. Why else give her access to a part of his private life? Finally she found a box that was of personal interest to her. Inside were photos of family members, or so she guessed. Various Adams ranging in age from his early twenties to the present were in many of them, waving and smiling against gorgeous beach backdrops or snowy-peaked mountains, or leaning with the casual nonchalance of the very wealthy against the hood of some incredibly expensive looking automobile.
At the back of the closet she found an old trumpet in a musty case, and what looked like an Eagle Scout sash, covered with faded embroidered merit badges, including an open-mouthed snake, a swimmer’s lifebelt, a campfire, a compass, a pine tree, a red cross, a canoe and half a dozen others, all neatly stitched onto the wide, faded green sash. Carly closed her eyes, trying to imagine Adam as a Boy Scout, working hard to earn each badge, always prepared.
She sorted through the photos, neatening them into piles and placing them in precise stacks in one of the bins. One photo in particular caught her eye and she stopped to study it. It was Adam, a younger Adam—he barely looked to be out of his teens. Beside him stood a beautiful young woman with ice-blue eyes, tall and slender, her white-blond hair piled in an elaborate twist intertwined with silk ribbons, her long, lithe body draped in a heavy satin wedding gown with seed pearls beaded over the bodice. Adam, his hair curling nearly to his shoulders, was grinning broadly beside her, his head angled in her direction, dressed in a tuxedo with a red satin cummerbund, a red rose pinned to his lapel.
Carly leaned against the desk, studying the picture. So Adam had been married! That wasn’t so surprising—most people got married at some point, why not a handsome, wealthy guy like Adam Wise?
The question was, where was this woman now?
Carly had just assumed Adam wasn’t presently married—there was no sign of a woman in the house as far as she could see, nor could she imagine a wife who would permit her husband to bring home a sex slave for a month while she discreetly melted into the background, no matter what kind of relationship they had. Adam wore no ring, nor was there any telltale tan line or subtle indentation on his ring finger that indicated he had merely removed the evidence of his marital status.
More than that, he didn’t have the feel of a married man, which, unfortunately, Carly was all too aware of, having once had the very bad judgment to fall for one of the married attorneys in her office. Married men carried themselves differently. While Carly might have been hard pressed to define it precisely, they were marked in a way single men were not.
No, she told herself firmly, Adam was definitely single.
So what had happened to cause him to divorce? There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, so much she wanted to know about this man who was basically a mystery to her, beyond the fact that he had once been married, had been a Boy Scout, was insanely rich, too handsome for his own good, and the best Dom she’d ever been with or known, not to mention an amazing lover.
She grinned at herself, imagining what her best friend Donna would say when she told her all she knew about the guy was that he was rich, handsome and a great lover.
“So what else do you need to know?” Donna would have demanded, laughing. “When’s the wedding?”
Carly stared again at the photo of the newlyweds, noting that it was Adam who was turned toward his bride, while she stared into the camera, something in her expression cool, even aloof, on the day that should have been her happiest.
Carly thought about the idea of the lover and the beloved—how one person was the object of the other’s love and accepted it as their due, while ultimately being unable, or unwilling, to return it in kind. Most relationships were like that, Carly thought—with one person more invested than the other, turning their face and their heart toward the beloved, who looks straight ahead, their eyes already on a future that doesn’t include the lover, even if neither of them knows it yet.
Carly placed the photo into the bin.
Was that what was happening now between her and this man she could never know?
“Adam,” she whispered with a sigh, angrily brushing away a tear.
Chapter 11
Carly was standing in front
of the sofa, naked save for her red leather collar. Her arms were behind her back, each hand gripping the opposite elbow. Adam, James and Amy were sitting together sipping glasses of wine, Adam on the chair, James on the sofa with Amy kneeling on the carpet beside him, her cheek resting on his knee as she gazed up at him with a serene look of utter contentment. Something about Amy’s expression caught at Carly’s heart, filling her with longing.
When Adam had told her the couple was coming over that evening, Carly hadn’t been sure what to expect. He’d explained they were husband and wife, as well as Master and slave, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about the radiance that seemed to bounce between them, a kind of light that shone from their eyes whenever they looked at each other.
Was that love?
Carly had been in love before. Well, perhaps not precisely in love, but in intense and lustful attraction that had masqueraded as love, at least for a while. She’d lived with three different men over the years, two of them into BDSM on the dominant side of the equation, or what she had thought of as dominant, though neither of them came close to Adam’s level of intensity and control.
Looking back on those failed relationships, Carly realized she had been able to manipulate each man into doing what she wanted, or what she had thought she wanted, but in the process she’d lost the respect and passion she now understood was necessary for a D/s relationship to be sustainable. Adam wasn’t a man who could be manipulated, but nor was he a man who would have looked at her twice outside of this artificial construct.
Okay, so what? We’ve already established that, Carly, so get over it. Even though she knew there was no potential for anything past these thirty days of play, that didn’t mean that Carly didn’t want to please her temporary Master, especially in front of Amy and James.
The Auction Page 11