Complicate

by Pam Godwin

  Cole belonged on a motorcycle with a rifle on his back, flying down a lone highway on some hell-raising mission. He didn’t belong in restraints, stripped of his clothes and his freedom, and forced to endure another rape.

  Because that was what this was. No matter how hard his dick grew in her hands. He wasn’t a willing participant. He was a prisoner, and in the last three days, she’d raped him three times, each time finishing herself off while denying him a completion.

  The first time, she convinced herself he was right there with her, fucking her as passionately as she fucked him. She thought, when he was seconds from climax, that he was too injured to come. He’d just fought off the raging blows of ten men, his face swollen and covered in blood. But he hadn’t flinched when she’d washed his wounds. It was as if he didn’t even feel the pain.

  The second day, she orgasmed too quickly. With the memory of his feverish, toe-curling kiss still fresh in her mind, she was on the brink of coming before she even got his cock inside her. When her orgasm hit, she collapsed in a boneless puddle against his chest, gasping and so lost in the pleasure she’d forgotten to deny him a release. And yet, he didn’t come. As if he were deliberately holding it back.

  By the third day, she started questioning who was controlling whom. Just like the times before, she bathed him, teased him, and made him hard as a rock. Then she sat on his lap and rode him to the cusp of orgasm. He grunted vehement sounds with his teeth clamped tight. His eyes blazed. His sinews flexed, and she pushed him harder, faster, testing the limits of his self-restraint.

  Instead of denying him a release, she teased him toward it.

  She teased and teased until she wore herself out.

  Still, he didn’t come.

  How in the fresh hell was that possible?

  Desperate to beat him at his game, she’d ordered the guards to shackle him during his time in the cell, preventing him from touching himself. His only relief would come with her, and much to her despair, that went both ways.

  She slept beside Mike every night without a moment of privacy. It was for the best. She wasn’t here to engage in self-pleasure. Except, whenever she closed her eyes, Cole’s gorgeous face was waiting. His smirking lips. That bottomless brown gaze, searing into her thoughts.

  Too often, she caught herself daydreaming, recreating the delicious sensation of his tongue in her mouth, the scratch of his beard on her cheeks, the sultry sounds of his breaths, and the intensity of his strokes.

  Didn’t matter how tightly the rope cinched around him, he was incapable of holding still while inside her. He fucked her from the bottom, with his cock, his mouth, and the dominance in his dark glare. Every single time.

  And he didn’t come.

  Today, when the men dragged him from the cell, she had him arranged on the floor, arms stretched above him, his gorgeous physique on full display.

  After he’d lost so much weight in the beginning, she started feeding him high-calorie, high-protein meals. Then there was the rock hauling, the workouts in his cell, and the sex—all the thrusting and grunting and flexing. He’d regained his strength and then some.

  With his back to the floor and the rise and dips of his musculature so round and defined, there were only a few points of contact where his body touched the concrete.

  No man should have that many curves. God help her, she’d traced every sinuous muscle with her own hands and knew how outrageously hard and masculine he was, as if each sinew and tendon had been carved with an artist’s chisel and stacked together to form a dangerously arousing masterpiece.

  The granite bricks of his ass drew his lower spine into a sexy arch, leaving a shadowed tunnel beneath. The circumference of his biceps exceeded that of her thighs, and his shoulder blades, sculpted like marble wings, supported the weight of his upper body on the floor.

  His powerful legs—wide at the calves and thighs—were in remarkable proportion to the pillar of his heavy, thick cock. Striae of muscle flanked his eight-pack abdomen, the terrain of his torso like a rippling sheet of metal, hard and flat enough to bounce quarters.

  Zero-percent body fat. Not an inch of softness anywhere. Utter perfection through and through.

  She might’ve felt like a despicable pervert, ogling him the way she did. But his gaze, as sharp as a freshly honed blade, violated her just as rudely.

  His eyes especially enjoyed the tops of her breasts as they expanded and contracted with her breath. She wore a dress he’d seen before—the black one with red cherries. Yet he stared at it as if it were the first time, feasting upon every stitch and lingering where hemlines met skin until she felt stripped and just as naked as him.

  He liked what he saw, if his engorged cock were anything to go by. He never had trouble getting hard.

  Each time she came to him, he didn’t fight against the rope or make demands. He didn’t gnash his teeth or shout at her.

  In fact, he hadn’t spoken to her at all today.

  He never said a word to the guards. Other than the fistfight three days ago, he tolerated their taunting, shoving, kicking. His endurance of pain and hardship without any display of feeling didn’t seem human.

  How could a man sit in a pitch-black cell, shit in a bucket, and never voice a single protest? How could he listen to the same song on repeat for over a month and never complain? He didn’t grumble or whine or express any sign of dissatisfaction.

  She’d offered him better accommodations, better food, a warm bed, sex with multiple women, anything in exchange for the location of the hard drive.

  Anything but his freedom. She couldn’t give him that, and he knew it.

  Any other man would’ve surrendered by now. No one had this much stoicism. Even she was starting to lose her nerve.

  So what was his deal? He had the patient self-control of a robot, like an upgraded model of the Terminator.

  Except when he looked at her, when it was just the two of them, she saw a human man beneath the steel. A confident, lusty, hotblooded man with so much heat in his eyes she caught fire.

  Like now.

  He stared at her like he wanted to eat her alive. Like she was the only thing that existed. But she wasn’t. He loved the dancer.

  Maybe that was how he maintained such ironclad discipline over his orgasms. His heart wasn’t in this. Of course, it wasn’t. Nothing they did together was consensual.

  Even if it was consensual, would it have changed anything? The man had been celibate for seven years because no one was good enough for him. No one but Danni Savoy.

  It only made Lydia want him more, and that was fucking dangerous.

  She lowered onto the floor beside him and slid her palm beneath the rope across his chest, soaking in the warmth of his skin. He was so well-built, his pectorals smooth and hairless, the crevice between them deep and inviting. She wanted him to touch her, to be free with her body as she was with his. But if she untied him, he would hurt her. Possibly kill her. She’d given him no choice but to hate her.

  “Do you want to end this today?” she asked. “All I need is a name.”

  One brow, higher than the other, twitched with the force of his stare.

  With a sigh, she focused her attention on bathing him. But as her fingers and palms delighted in his texture, firm shape, wiry beard, soft hair, all she wanted of his hands was that they would touch her with the same burning passion as his gaze.

  When she finished the final rinse, his gravelly voice broke the silence.

  “It’s just the two of us. Wash off the makeup. Remove the clothes. Let me see you.”

  She couldn’t do that. The persona she wore was a safeguard. It protected her identity.

  “No.” She looked down at his swelling erection. “How you can be so patient is beyond me. Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Watching you stare at it is my favorite part.” His hands flexed above his head, straining the rope that bound his sinewy forearms. “Your eyes get this disturbing jolt of light, like you want to tear your teeth into me.�
�� His voice dropped, rasping with dark sensuality. “There’s something deranged and alluring about watching a woman devour what she wants with rabid intent.” His eyes hooded. “Go ahead, Lydia. Wrap those filthy lips around me and eat.”

  Heat bloomed between her legs, pulsing angrily. “I’ll use my teeth.”

  “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

  “And you called me a freak.”

  “Takes one to know one.” His cock nodded in agreement.

  Happy to oblige, she positioned herself over him, straddling one of his restrained legs. Then she lowered her head.

  With the flat part of her tongue, she teased the tip of him. He didn’t move. She sucked on the plump head, tasting him in languorous strokes. He didn’t breathe.

  Her lips stretched around his thickness as she slowly drew him in, deeper, harder, opening her airway, until her mouth reached the soft hair at his base.

  She fought her gag reflex, breathing through the fullness in her throat as a series of twitches rippled across his abs. His leg trembled between the clinch of her thighs, and his addictive male scent flooded her senses.

  As she made her way back up, she found him watching her, his lids half-mast and lips parted, breathless. Christ, that look on his gorgeous face, the sheer intensity in his eyes, awakened her pulse and spread fire through her circulation.

  Without averting her gaze, she sucked him with vigor. The heavy hardness of him pressed down on her tongue, leaking salty beads of arousal from the tip. She lapped it up and felt her own moisture trickling down her thighs.

  Since the hem of the dress fell to her knees, she’d gone without panties. Ideal for her position with his leg locked between hers. She rested her pussy against his thigh and let him feel the wetness, rubbing against his hard muscles and soaking his skin.

  His groan of pleasure was the greatest reward, spurring her to grind harder as she took him deep into her throat. Her fingers gently kneaded and tugged at the soft heavy bag below his shaft. She hummed around his girth, swallowing a gush of pre-cum and savoring his clean, salty flavor.

  She’d performed this act countless times with dozens of men in her adult life, none of which had left a lasting impression. But she would never forget this one. Not his taste, nor his velvety texture, nor the molten desire in his sexy brown eyes.

  The man was fucking hot, and the more she pushed and pulled and licked, the more he failed to conceal his reactions. Muscles contracted on top of muscles. His feet scraped and dug against the floor. His exhales chased his inhales, his jaw tipping up, straining with the tautness of his body.

  She added her teeth, scratching up and down his silky, turgid flesh, and his groaning turned to growls. His erection grew impossibly harder, and his spine bowed with the force of his need.

  Her mouth was beginning to take its toll.

  She pushed on, devouring him with slobbery, teeth-cutting, vulgar strokes. There was nothing clean or sweet about the way she sucked cock. But this kinky bastard didn’t care. He liked it sick and depraved. The dirtier, the better. Same as her.

  With a hand clenched around his sac, she squeezed his dense balls while pressing a fingertip against the tight, silken entrance of his rectum.

  “Fuck.” He gasped, shaking and flexing, his eyes wild as he stared down the length of his body. “What are you doing?”

  “You like your ass fingered.” She stroked the little clenching knot of flesh.

  “Help me out here because I’m getting mixed signals.” His chest heaved, and a twitch kicked up the corner of his lips. “Are you trying to deny orgasms? Or force them?”

  Damn him and that lopsided smirk.

  She flicked her tongue against the head of his cock and licked deep into the tiny slit, earning another trickle of salty fluid. “Depends.”

  “On?” He struggled to push the word past his choking breaths.

  “You.”

  Beautiful, strapping, rugged, seductive, iron-willed Cole Hartman. She had eleven years of patience and planning riding on his willingness to cooperate.

  It was hopeless.

  This man wasn’t going to help her in exchange for an orgasm. He was stronger than his baser needs. Smarter.

  And he didn’t want her.

  She knew it weeks ago. But she had to try.

  So she renewed her efforts, worshiping every inch of his gorgeous cock. She sucked him with everything she had, working her fist along his length, applying just the right balance of tongue and teeth.

  His hips snapped upward, desperately trying to ram himself into the back of her throat, and his groans ran away from him. He was an ensnared beast, seething and bucking in the tethers of his restraints, testing the strength of the rope.

  “What do you want from me, woman?” he snarled.

  A loaded question. One she could only half-answer. “You know what I want.”

  He halted abruptly but for the flexing of his need in her mouth. His jaw hardened, and the air changed, growing colder, thinner. His gaze fell flat, and his muscles loosened beneath her.

  She continued sucking him, but he wasn’t feeling it.

  Neither was she.

  His erection didn’t deflate, but the energy between them all but dissipated, the moment gone.

  “Hurry along with your games, Lydia,” he said in a cruel tone. “I’m growing bored.”

  Her stomach sank.

  He didn’t want her. No amount of seduction would change that.

  She’d wasted a month trying to force a different outcome. Because she knew that the suffering he’d endured at her hands was a whole lot better than the brutality that would come from Vincent Barrington’s men.

  But she’d failed. White torture, psychological manipulation, isolation, blow jobs—he was immune to it all.

  Disappointment constricted her chest. She needed more from him. Far more than the hard drive’s location.

  She needed him to help her retrieve it. But she couldn’t tell him that. Not until she trusted him. Until he trusted her. And that would never happen.

  Because he despised her.

  He despised the way she looked, the way she spoke, the things she did. Could she blame him? She’d threatened his friends, captured him, and raped him. She was a horrible person.

  With her heart in her throat, she sat back on her heels and admitted defeat. She only had one option left, and if that didn’t work, Vincent would get rid of her and let the team slice, dice, break, and ultimately kill Cole for the information in his head.

  She couldn’t allow that. Not while there was still blood in her body.

  Determination chased away the trembling in Lydia’s legs as she strode to the bag she’d left nearby.

  The guards were never in the warehouse during her sessions with Cole. But Mike was. Always. He remained close, out of view, armed, and ready to step in if Cole managed to overpower her or escape his restraints.

  Knowing Mike listened to her having sex with another man was upsetting. But they shared an unusual bond with a complicated background. They would survive this like they’d survived everything else over the past eleven years. Together.

  She glanced in the direction of the exit, unable to see his position around the corner. But he was there. She bet her life on it.

  From the bag, she removed a laptop, launched a recorded video, and set it on the floor beside Cole’s head.

  He glared at the rafters, refusing to look at the screen. The same reaction he had the night she showed him the footage of the drone. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that whatever she intended to show him would hurt. It would hurt worse than anything he’d endured so far.

  She pressed play on the video and stepped back, detaching herself from his impending pain. God, how she’d tried to avoid this. Tried and failed.

  Because the way to Cole Hartman wasn’t through his stomach or his dick.

  It was through his heart.

  The video began, streaming sultry music through the warehouse. His entire body turned
to stone.

  Slowly, his neck twisted, his eyes shifting toward the screen. His expression, starkly blank, gave nothing away. He lifted his head, straining to see around the bulge of his bicep. She couldn’t see the video, but she knew it well.

  The glittery costume, sensual hip rotations, long golden hair, and room full of admirers were but a backdrop to the main attraction.

  Danni Savoy was stunning. With huge gray eyes, flawless skin, and a body that dripped sex, she wasn’t just a gorgeous woman. She was a gorgeous belly dancer. Dear God, the woman stood on that stage and danced like no one was watching—shameless and serene, self-possessed and sinfully, enchantingly talented. And everyone was watching.

  The video captured ten minutes of her performance, focusing on the gyration of her hips, her pretty face, and most importantly, the vulnerability of her position. She wasn’t locked away in hiding. She was dancing in public for all to see.

  Lydia didn’t have to voice the threat to Cole. The footage spoke for itself.

  “This is where you went for five days,” he said in an eerily calm tone.

  “Yes.” She’d driven seventeen hours to St. Louis to locate Cole Hartman’s heart. “Your dancer is extraordinary. Painfully beautiful. If I were into women, I would be obsessed with her, too.”

  “I’m not obsessed with her.” His dark gaze snapped to hers, stony and unbreakable. “She doesn’t belong to me, Lydia. You do.”

  His erection, which had lost some of its life, hardened anew. With his magnificent body laid out like an erotic buffet, rigid and vibrating, he exuded an animal magnetism that made her feel things, want things that she couldn’t freeze out.

  It was impossible not to desire him. Any woman with a pulse would throw herself at his feet. So to hear him say that she belonged to him? It satisfied an ache she didn’t even know she had.

  It also distracted her from the job.

  He continued to stare, watching her with a brooding intensity in his eyes, the video seemingly forgotten. Why wasn’t he freaking out and asking about Danni’s safety?