Twist (A BDSM & Romantic Erotica Boxed Set)

by Tara Crescent

  “I’m not afraid of them,” Janet replied, shrugging. His face lit up. She had no idea why, but decided to play it safe, in case he’d gotten strange ideas. “I just ain’t having sex with one, thank you very much.”

  “A metaphor!” the creature exclaimed, shrilly and impatiently. She guessed that it didn’t much like the fact that it was being questioned and ignored at every turn. “It’s a metaphor, you insolent wench!”

  Janet sagged with relief. Metaphors she didn’t mind.

  “I see. Anything else?” she inquired. The creature bristled, but said nothing. “Then it’s settled, I think. Now shoo! We need privacy!”

  “The forest will know if the toll was paid.”

  “Alright by me. Goodbye!”

  The creature gave her a hateful look, and she stuck out her tongue — it wasn’t in her best interests to annoy it, but in all fairness, she didn’t like it back either. Besides, there were few things that would kill the mood quicker than having that thing creeping around and watching them, or, perish the thought, providing a running commentary. It did as it was told, though, and jumped into the shadows until it became the shadows, and vanished.

  She was left alone with Tam Lin, and immediately her heart began beating faster. He stood staring at her with a guarded, unreadable expression, as if she were some difficult mathematical problem. It excited her, but it was just the slightest bit unnerving.

  Did he want her? Her, not the freedom she could offer him? The answer shouldn’t matter, considering that they were two strangers with specific goals, hers getting laid and helping him, his being allowed to leave. Making him desire her was something of a matter of pride, though. She didn’t want or expect him to love her — she had confused love with sex once already, and once had been enough. Nevertheless, it would be a hard blow to her ego if he went through the motions dutifully, in a way that made it clear he’d never be sticking it in her if it weren’t a condition to his freedom. There ought to be a part of him that was thrilled beyond words that he was getting the chance to bang her.

  Still, if he wasn’t about to take the initiative, she might as well. She sauntered towards him, shaking her hips as she did. When they were just one step away she brought up a hand in an arc, along her breasts and neck, and shook her hair free from the ponytail, letting the pale blonde waves cascade over her shoulders. She wished she were wearing something more suited to the dance of seduction, something sexier than a shirt two sizes too small and washed out pants, but there was nothing to be done about that.

  Furthermore, working with what she had wouldn’t put her at too much of a disadvantage.

  Janet didn’t like to think of herself as vain, at least not anymore. She remembered being insufferable about her looks from age twelve to seventeen, but that had been a different Janet. One who had her mother telling her how pretty she was every day, first thing in the morning, and who hadn’t tasted more than a drop of the bitterness of life. Still, the fact that she’d ceased to spend three hours a day preening in front of a mirror didn’t mean that she had stopped being pleased with the way she looked. She was hot. She knew that she was hot, and here, standing before the strange man she’d made it her mission to save, she wanted nothing more than to hear him acknowledge it.

  She tilted her head, exposing more of her slender neck to him — there was no male under the sun who wouldn’t go wild over such a display of vulnerability — and licked her lips with slow deliberation.

  “Do you like?” She made her voice smoky and breathy and alluring, which was easy, after spending her teenage years competing with her friends to see who could get boys flustered the quickest.

  What she had in front of her now wasn’t a boy, though. It was a man, from a different time, who had been away with the fairies for long enough to have absorbed some of their oddness. The standards for what was considered beautiful were bound to have changed between now and when he was from, too. Maybe what Tam Lin really liked was Rubenesque women with overstuffed calves and faces like full moons. If that were the case, she was in some trouble, as she was severely lacking in both.

  “In an age gone by,” he told her, without meeting her eyes, “fathers would warn their virgin daughters about me. ‘I forbid you come or go by Carterhaugh,’ they would say, ‘for young Tam Lin is there. There’s none that goes by Carterhaugh, but they leave him a wad. Either their rings, or green mantles, or else their maidenhead.’ But young Tam Lin has grown old, and he has lost his love, and things aren’t the way they were.”

  “Right,” Janet intoned, slowly, not at all interested in hearing about his reputation as a burglar or a man-whore. It was of no concern to her if he’d gotten around a lot and laid a girl or twenty back when he was young — er. What mattered was what he wanted to do to the one standing in front of him now. She subtly thrust out her chest, so that her nipples would brush against him, so that he could feel how hard they were even with the fabric in the way. Whatever the standards he was used to, he had to like breasts, didn’t he? She’d never met a man who failed to appreciate hers. It was a source of pride and annoyance both, and she intended to use it to the fullest. “But do you like what you see?”

  He swallowed. If he said no that would be God’s joke, because the small bob of his Adam’s apple was enough to get her flushed with carnal want. Tom “Yes-luv-I’ll-call-you-back” hadn’t been that gorgeous or reeking of sex-appeal, nor had any other man she’d ever met. Maybe it was partly the situation that made him so alluring, but she was sure that the larger slice was simply him.

  “Aye.”

  Ordinarily she would have asked him to elaborate, to go on at length about what exactly he liked. She might be less vain than she had been, but everyone enjoyed a compliment or two, or twenty. But the look he gave her was smouldering enough to make up for his lack of eloquent praise, so she forgave him.

  In fairy tales — the nice, safe ones her father used to read to her— the way to break a curse was often a kiss. Janet wasn’t certain that Tam Lin’s predicament could be called a curse, but it seemed to her that the classic approach was as good as any to start with. She lifted herself on her toes and tilted her chin up, meeting his lips with as much softness as force. Her sudden attack knocked him back against a tree, but she barely took notice, focused as she was on snogging the gentleman out of him.

  It worked much, much better than she’d dared to hope. Perhaps it was fairy tale magic. Perhaps being pressed against yet another tree had triggered his PTSD. Perhaps she was just that much of an expert kisser, which was a pleasant, if unlikely, thing to believe. Whatever the reason, she had only just started when he brought his arms up and put them around her, crushing her against his chest. Janet made a noise of surprise as air left her lungs in a rush. Then, when it became clear that he meant to keep her trapped in his embrace, she closed her eyes and smiled against his mouth.

  Now they were getting somewhere.

  Janet closed her eyes, deepening the kiss, adding tongue. He didn’t taste like someone who had been bound to a tree for ages, which was just as well, otherwise she couldn’t have abided kissing him for that long. No matter how thoroughly she licked him, how often she ran her tongue across his teeth, his own tongue, the inside of his cheeks, she couldn’t taste anything but roasted meat, which overwhelmed her senses until she felt ready to faint like the fragile maiden the fairy creature had taken her for. There was something primal about his flavour, about what they — although mostly her — were doing. The kiss was but the start of a game of dangerous contrasts. Man, woman. Forest and fire. Fuck or die.

  ‘Fuck or he’ll have to go back to being a tree ornament’ didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

  The creature hadn’t given many specifics about how long the whole thing was supposed to last. Until her virtue was taken, of course, but since that point was moot from the get go, she’d have to use something else as a guideline. However, she could worry about niggling details like that later. First she needed to get rid of her clothes,
since Tam Lin was already one step ahead of her in that department.

  She would have delayed it, as she did enjoy the small spark of power, of being in charge, that she got from seeing him exposed while she was not. But she didn’t know how much time they had, and if she were honest, the prospect of having him look at her, all of her, with awe and desire and admiration, excited her more.

  Perhaps she was still vain after all. She could live with that, though. At least it wasn’t misplaced vanity.

  She pushed him away, attempting to create enough distance to sneak a hand between them and lift her t-shirt over her head, but he held fast, as if he had decided to carry out the holding part of the business all by himself. It was sort of charming, even if it was inconveniencing the proceedings somewhat.

  “I need . . .” She came up for air and gestured, clumsily on account of her endorphin-ridden brain, at her old shirt and faded green trousers. She immediately regretted calling his attention to what she was wearing, but he didn’t give any signs of caring. “. . . a moment. And space.”

  Tam Lin didn’t seem to hear the actual words that came out of her mouth, but he understood that she wanted her clothes off. What Janet did not expect were the measures he took to remove them. Rather than releasing her, he moved both his hands to the front of her shirt and slid them under the hem. She only had a second to marvel at the burning pleasure his fingers ignited in her when they brushed her belly, before he grabbed a handful of fabric and ripped it up to her neck.

  Janet stared at him, stunned, torn. On one hand, clothes did not grow on trees, and returning home in her bra was something that someone would question — if not her father, then her nosy neighbours. On the other hand, her fairy tale had just become a trashy romance novel, and the only thought that unexpected fact could drag up from her lust-filled mind was ‘Wow!’, shortly followed by ‘Yes, please!’

  He went on disposing of her clothes, pulling them down and tearing them when it saved him time, like a child too eager to unwrap a Christmas present. The tearing stung, sometimes, when the force of it made the surrounding fabric dig into her skin, but Janet didn’t think to complain even once. Her attention was all on his face, on his eyes, which shone with single-minded concentration, and on the throbbing she felt between her thighs. The more he looked at her like that, the more it became like a second pulse, pumping blood up her legs and leaving her flushed, trembling, wet.

  He hadn’t even removed her bra yet and already she was close to coming undone.

  She wished he’d hurry, although it was an unfair thing to demand, considering how fast he was going already. Every scrap of fabric between her skin and his felt like too much, an unwelcome barrier that she couldn’t be free from too soon. She bit her lip, holding back a whimper of impatience.

  Finally, finally, her pants were off — they fared better against his rough pulling than the shirt, but not by a large margin. Tam Lin threw them over her shoulder and, without missing a beat, snuck a finger under the bow that connected her bra cups. Then he stopped suddenly, his brow knitting together as if the garment confused him. Janet took pity on him and reached behind her, blindly unclasping it. The cups fell off, and his eyes roamed over her chest, over skin flushed with anxiety and anticipation, over smooth, shapely globes and dark areolae. A throaty sound escaped his lips, and before she knew it he was palming her breasts, kneading them between his fingers until they went red and pink.

  Janet permitted herself a smile.

  “How about I get you started?” she offered, gesturing down. She hadn’t been sure whether he would get the innuendo, but he appeared to have understood what she meant well enough. Tam Lin let go of the nipple he’d been toying with and nodded, dark clouds of hunger in his eyes. Still with a smile on her lips and wearing nothing but her knickers, she sank to her knees. It pleased her that he was hard — rock hard, reassuringly so — against her hand. If he hadn’t been by that point, she would have felt mortally offended.

  She began by lightly stroking the dark crown of hair around his cock, but that didn’t seem to be enough contact for his liking. He pressed himself against her fingers with something like urgency. She looked up, made a smirk out of her smile and touched her index finger to her chin, pretending to consider his wordless request. After a moment, which he spent bristling with exasperation, she made a show of acquiescing and started to massage his balls. Hisses of pleasure escaped his lips as her deft fingers worked on him.

  She wondered, idly, if he was aware that what she was doing was but a preview to the main event.

  “Hak!”

  He wasn’t.

  “Yes.” She stuck out her tongue at him and ran it, again, from the base of his cock to the tip, around which she swirled it a few times, without taking her eyes off his face. His look of amazement was one of the best things she had witnessed all year. She ceased her licking and spoke, breathily, so that her voice would vibrate along his length: “I suppose you wouldn’t expect this, if you’ve been surviving on virgins all this time.”

  He made another hoarse sound of approval, but didn’t say anything back. Far from frustrating her, this time his laconicism was a huge plus in his favour. Tom Who-Hadn’t-Called had been a talker, and a shouter, and those had been about the only things he’d been good at doing with his mouth. She’d take silence with a chance of moaning over a continual chant of ‘Oh baby, you’re so tight!’ any day. The expression of complete bliss that had taken over his face was feedback enough, too.

  Once she had coated all of his cock in her saliva, Janet gripped the base with both hands, eliciting a moan, and closed her lips over the head. He was a bit too much for her to swallow, and she wouldn’t go that far anyway. What she did was pucker her lips around him and hum, and slowly start moving down his shaft, taking him inside her mouth little by little.

  Soon he hit the back of her throat, and she slowed down, until she was too full of him to continue and stopped entirely. Even with her throat mostly unobstructed, it was difficult for her to breathe. She sucked in air through her nostrils, but with his girth stretching her lips taut, the one coming in from her lungs had nowhere to go. She held on for another moment, counting seconds inside her head, and then retreated so that she could expel it.

  His reaction was so sudden it took her breath away, quite literally. Tam Lin gripped a handful of her hair, alarmed, thinking perhaps that she was about to let go completely, and used that hold to push her back against his groin. Hard. She gagged in surprise and relaxed her throat at the last possible instant, saving him from accidental castration, as her first reaction would have been to bite.

  “Mmmph!” Too much, there was too much of it, and his pushing had forced some of his cock further down. Janet’s eyes began to water as she struggled to breathe around him. She made another noise of complaint, trying to bring to his attention that as good as it undoubtedly felt to him, his attempt to deep-throat her was too much of a choking hazard to be welcome. Something must have gotten lost in translation, though, because he didn’t stop.

  He started thrusting.

  Her thoughts were starting to cloud, but Janet still had the presence of mind to bring her arms around his hips and hold on for dear life while he pounded her mouth. The man seemed determined to get the full package, so to speak, and there was little she could do about it, as his hand on the back of her head prevented her from breaking away. If it weren’t for the very real risk of asphyxiation, she’d have considered it hot. In fact, she still did, a little. His eagerness to possess her was a huge turn-on. It was just the whole ‘Help! Air!’ angle that she had trouble with.

  She looked up at him through her lashes, pleading with her eyes that he’d at least go slower and give her time to adjust. He stared back without a hint of pity. Maybe it was the oxygen deprivation making her brain work backwards, but Janet thought there was something strange about the look he gave her.

  She couldn’t spend too long deciphering what it was, though, because her body appeared to have swi
tched to auto-pilot. She was aware of herself doing things, but there were no cogent thought processes behind the actions. Just instinct, an inbuilt, animal drive guiding her step by step, whispering harsh encouragement in her ear. Fuck or die. Swallow cock or choke on it. It was simple, provided that she didn’t actually think.

  So she did not. She closed her eyes, fought her gag reflex as if they were lifelong enemies and allowed him in. Not seeing the amount of shaft that she still had to go through helped, she found out, as did working it down a quarter of an inch at a time. When she realized she was done, she opened her eyes and dug her nails in his backside, both to steady herself and to exact petty revenge on him for acting like a beast. He was throbbing inside her. Or maybe she was throbbing around him. It didn’t seem like an important enough distinction to make.

  She’d done it, though. Her face flushed with inexplicable pride. She had believed wholeheartedly that she wouldn’t be able to manage more than a third of his full size, but now she had the whole thing sitting in her throat and stretching her mouth, and her lower lip was brushing against his balls. It was not the kind of accomplishment that she’d ever brag about, but just knowing that she’d gotten it done warmed her from the inside out.

  After a while, he grunted and removed himself. Janet sagged forward, spent air rushing out of her so hurriedly that she felt pricks in her chest, and rested her head against one of his legs. Her mouth tasted funny. Not unpleasant, but salty. It took her another moment, and the regaining of some of her composure, to realize what it had to be. This, at least, was new. She’d always insisted on condoms on every other occasion, for everything, but even if she happened to have brought some of them with her, they’d be out of the question. It was in the rules, too. Fill her with his seed, and etcetera.

  Speaking of which . . .

  “Wow,” Janet said, admiringly. She stroked his cock, which hadn’t softened one bit and still stood stiff and ready for the next round. More fairy magic, or a side effect of an eons long dry-spell? She didn’t know. She didn’t care to know. All that mattered was that it was her turn, finally, finally.