by Hondo Jinx
Brawley gave her half a grin. “Is that right?”
She gripped his wrist. “Yes, it is! I swear. Feel my heart beating in my chest.”
Arabella pressed his hand to the firm curve of her upper breast. He could feel her heart hammering away like mad beneath her delicious flesh.
“Do you feel it?” she asked in a throaty whisper, drawing closer to him.
Brawley nodded and pulled his hand free.
Arabella looked briefly surprised, then lifted her chin haughtily. “Make me your wife. Make me part of your harem. Bond with me.”
Brawley paused for just a second, the memory of her breast lingering on his fingertips like a fading song. She was an incredibly beautiful young woman, brimming over with vitality. But then he thought better of it and laughed. “No thank you.”
Now Arabella looked genuinely shocked. “What? Why? Did you not hear me? I am offering myself to you here and now.”
“How about I just wipe you clean instead? Erase your memory back to whenever Cherry kidnapped you and throw your ass on a bus back to Georgia.”
Arabella was thunderstruck. Then angry. “Just do it, then. I can’t stand the sight of you, Brawley Hayes. You think you’re too good for me? Just do it, then. Wipe me clean and throw me out like a piece of trash, you cold-hearted bastard!”
Brawley shrugged. “All right, then.” He started to reach for her.
Arabella reared back like a spooked horse. “No—wait! Don’t do it. I didn’t mean it. I don’t want that. I hate the idea of not remembering, of going back home. Please, Brawley, don’t.”
He shrugged again. “Fine. But lose the cutesy act and quit bucking. You want to stick around, you’d best remember who’s in control here.”
Now it was Arabella’s turn to laugh. She raised a hand to her collar. “Take this off, and we’ll see who’s in control.”
Raising one brow, Brawley fished a small key from his pocket, reached out, and popped the hobble collar.
“Ha!” Arabella crowed. Her face tightened with concentration.
Brawley felt a ghostly prickle whisper across his shielded mind and whip away into the ether.
Arabella’s pretty mouth fell open in exaggerated shock. She knew he was shielded. But she still stamped her foot in frustration.
“Darlin, I control you. Period.” Arabella’s beauty and breeding and impetuous resistance had fully awakened Brawley’s dominant primordial beast now, and he was going to finish this once and for all.
She wanted him?
Fine.
He released jets of Seeker juice, staring at her pretty face and hosing her down with thick spurts of sexual desire.
“Oh,” Arabella moaned, backing away and bending to clutch herself between the legs, nearly spilling her breasts from her tenuous top. “What the fuck?” she gasped.
“I control you,” Brawley said. Concentrating on her desire, he opened the throttle, rushing her to the edge of climax.
“Oh,” she groaned, clutching herself, wincing as she teetered on the edge of spontaneous orgasm.
The juices of her excitement drained down her exposed thigh in a thin rivulet.
“You’ve never been so wet in all your life.”
“I… uhn…” Arabella panted, her face bright red with arousal and white-hot humiliation.
One little flick and Brawley could make her explode.
But no.
He would leave her aching and ashamed. Brand her with tonight’s lesson: he was in control, not her.
Focusing his mind, he eased her half an inch from orgasm, making her pussy throb and leak.
She tried to straighten but couldn’t. “You cruel, cruel man.”
“Who are you, really? What’s your deal, darlin?”
Now she did straighten, some of the haughtiness coming back into her face. “I am Arabella Louise Carter, and I was just about to begin my senior year at—”
“Cut the bullshit,” Brawley said. “Let’s get down to it. The truth, I mean. How come you’re still here? Why not ditch a month or two of memory and go back to your old life?”
“I told you. I can’t stand the idea of forgetting. It’s—”
“Stop lying,” Brawley said, feeling the dishonestly coming off her in waves. Dishonesty and something else… fear? “Why don’t you want to go home?”
She crossed her arms huffily. “If you won’t accept my word, I don’t know what I can do for you.”
“Tell me the damn truth,” Brawley said. His dominant primordial beast raged in him now, and he was toeing an edge himself, the edge of giving in to his super bison’s demands and breaking this girl here and now. “Or I’ll punish you.”
Arabella’s eyes flashed, and she threw back her head with haughty laughter. “You don’t have the balls, cowboy!”
“No? You don’t think so?” He took a step forward.
Arabella yelped and skittered away, holding up her hands. “Hold on, hold on. I’ll tell you the truth. But you have to promise you won’t put that collar on me again.”
“I’ll do whatever I want.”
“No, you have to promise.”
“Forget it, darlin. If I wanted to know that bad, I’d—”
“All right,” she interrupted, “I’ll tell you, okay? I hate my life. All right? I mean, I really hate it. I hate college, I hate my sorority, I hate my boyfriend. I don’t even want to be a teacher. I only went into education because I knew it would make my parents crazy. I’m sick of them telling me what to do, and I’m sick of pretending to be their perfect little princess.”
Now her words thrummed with truth.
Brawley nodded. “All right, then, darlin. Nice to finally meet you.”
Arabella laughed softly and straightened her dress. “Telepathy doesn’t help. I’m so sick of people saying one thing but thinking something else. It drives me crazy.”
“Well then, wearing this thing should come as a relief of sorts,” he said, and held the collar out to her.
“What?” Arabella said, recoiling from the hobble. “You promised!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did, you brute. You said that if I told you the truth, I wouldn’t have to put it back on.”
“No, I didn’t. I take my promises very seriously.”
“Yeah, right. The only part of promises you take seriously is breaking them!”
He held out the collar again. “Put it on.”
“No,” she said, then rapidly infused her voice with sweetness. “Please, sugar. Please don’t make me put it on. It chafes. I hate it. I really do. I hate being without my powers. It’s like losing your voice or going blind. And I’m defenseless. The other girls make fun of me. They look down on me and tease me because you don’t make them wear theirs. It’s not fair. I—”
“Stop,” he said. “You want to hang around here and start your life over, you’d better learn to take no for an answer. Because you’re going to be hearing it a lot.”
She gave him a cocky grin and said, “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll bet you can’t say no to this.”
Turning her back to him, she leaned against the picnic table and smoothed a hand slowly over the thin veil of silk covering the perfect roundness of her outthrust ass. The silk slid and rippled smoothly over the clean lines of her firm body, telling him she wasn’t wearing panties.
Smiling over one shoulder, she said, “What do you say, cowboy? Think you can last eight seconds?”
Brawley’s super bison bugled from within his throbbing hardness, threatening to break free of his jeans and gore this soft, wet beauty on his erection. “It’s a nice ass.”
“Just pull my dress aside, then, and it’s yours,” she whispered, her voice dripping with honey. “Better yet, rip my dress off. You’re a power mage. Do it. Control me. Rip my dress off and take me. Crack my strand.”
Brawley was sorely tempted but thought better of it. “Thanks for the offer, darlin, but no. Now put that fine ass away before you hurt yourself.”
But of course, Arabella couldn’t take no for an answer. She doubled down, instead, twitching her sweet ass back and forth seductively. “Come on, cowboy. Quit playing games. You know you want it. Fuck me. Crack my strand. That’s what I want, okay? I want you. I want to be your wife.”
Her words weren’t lies, but they weren’t the whole truth, either. In that moment, he reckoned that she believed them.
But ultimately, this was about control. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to win, seduce him, control him. She reckoned if she was his wife, she could conquer him, control him with her mind, and rule him with her pussy, lording her status over the other girls.
The girl was all mixed up inside, a spoiled child in the body of a porn star, playing dangerous games with the wrong hombre.
“Mmm,” Arabella purred, and pulled the blue silk away, exposing a perfect ass, high and tight and round as a Georgia peach. She lifted one shapely leg, offering her pink and swollen sex, which sparkled in the moonlight, dripping with her sweet essence. Brushing a fingertip over her inflamed wetness, she shivered.
Brawley saw goosebumps rise on her flesh. He could smell her excitement.
“Take me now,” she begged.
“No.”
“Do it,” she whimpered. “Give me what I want.”
“Cover yourself. Or else.”
She shook her head petulantly. “Not until you give me what I need. Crack my strand.”
“I said no,” he growled, and brought his hand down hard on her firm ass.
SMACK!
“Oh!” Arabella’s eyes and mouth flew wide open.
She started to straighten up, but he put a boot up on the table and bent her over his knee. Then he gave it to her, spanking her big, fine ass between each word he spoke, drilling in the night’s lesson once and for all.
“You…” SMACK! “Spoiled…” SMACK! “Little…” SMACK! “Brat!” SMACK!
Arabella cried his name.
He kept going. “I…” SMACK! “Own…” SMACK! “You!”
“Oooh…uhnn…uh…uh…uh!” Arabella grunted.
Oh shit, Brawley thought. He’d meant to punish her, drive the lesson home, and put her in her place. But the spanking—and probably the realization that she was being controlled for the first time in her life—had pushed her over the edge.
Arabella warbled with release, jerking and shaking, moaning and convulsing, clutching her exploding sex as it showered down wave after wave of gushing juices.
She started to topple, but Brawley caught her and laid her gently upon the ground, where she winced and moaned and bucked, squeezing her crotch as if trying to muffle the unbearable ecstasy.
Her ass shone brightly with his big red handprints.
Looking down at Arabella’s raw and artless agony of pleasure, he realized he was seeing her, really seeing her, for the first time.
She was a beautiful, messed-up, little control freak, broken upon his knee.
Arabella curled into a fetal position, pulsing with orgasmic contractions, muttering a stream of garbled and throaty nonsense peppered with his name.
He dropped the collar beside her. “Put it on,” he said, and turned and started away.
When he reached the ranch house and glanced back, Arabella remained on the ground, still jerking with climax… but smiling as she fastened the collar around her own throat.
12
There was something about the guy.
Jerry couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But he’d been a cabbie for long enough that he trusted his gut, and there was something different about this guy, like he was a celebrity or something. That kind of vibe.
Not that he looked like a superstar, jammed between his wife and daughter in the back seat of Jerry’s taxi. The guy was tall and skinny and mostly bald, maybe forty or forty-five with a bushy mustache just starting to go gray and a pair of chunky plastic-frame glasses that reminded Jerry of the BCGs they’d made him wear back in basic a thousand years ago.
The wife was a looker. One of those cross-fit types and real lively looking. She laughed a lot and never seemed to stop moving.
Jerry had a good imagination when it came to women. He couldn’t even control it. And right now, his imagination kicked in, making him figure this broad was probably balling her personal trainer behind Slim’s back. Because let’s face it, a woman who looked like that, gushing over with life, how was a skinny sourpuss like this guy gonna keep her satisfied?
The daughter was skinny like her dad. She had a cute face, what little he’d seen of it. Like most kids her age, she was staring at a phone and had buds shoved in her ears. She sat with her knees up, tapping away on the phone, squeezed between her dad and the door.
All in all, they looked like a lot of folks Jerry picked up from the airport, just one more family escaping reality by vacationing in Key West.
But there was something about that guy.
He drove them across the island not to a hotel like he would’ve expected but to a run-down residential block near the naval station.
Must be a nearby Airbnb or something. Lot of people were doing that these days.
Not Jerry. You drive a taxi for a while, you won’t go letting strangers in your house.
Pulling up to the curb, he stopped and got out and went around to get their bags.
The man and his family came around.
Jerry hoisted one of the big canvas duffle bags out of the trunk. It was a heavy son-of-a-bitching thing.
He handed the bag to the man, who hooked the bag with one finger and hoisted it up like it was full of feathers.
Jerry managed not to stare. Some skinny guys are like that, he reminded himself. Super strong and all.
“What do you got in there, mister? Bricks?”
“No,” the man said, handing Jerry a tip.
“Thank you very much, sir. Wait, don’t tell me what you’re lugging. I got it. You’re a Bible salesman, right?”
This made the man smile for some reason. “No. Not Bibles. Hunting gear.”
“Oh,” Jerry said, lifting any heavy-ass bag from the trunk. “Must’ve been a pain in the ass getting through security.”
“Not really,” the wife said, taking the bag from him just as easily as her husband had. Must be all that cross fit. “We breezed right through security.”
“Well, good for you,” Jerry said, grabbing the last bag. This one felt even heavier than the others. “Jeez Louise, what are you hunting, elephants?”
“No,” the teenager said, one earbud in, one out. “We’re hunting pigs.”
“Pigs?” Jerry laughed. “We don’t have pigs in the Keys.”
“Sure you do,” the skinny girl said, taking the heaviest bag without so much as a grimace. “You just have to know where to find them.”
This drew a laugh from her parents. The family thanked him and walked off, each with a bag thrown over one shoulder, carrying it as easily as a spring windbreaker.
Jerry just stood there for a second, staring after them, wondering what the hell he had just witnessed.
The skinny girl giggled, and the guy—who Jerry suddenly decided wasn’t her father… at least he hoped to hell he wasn’t her father—slapped her butt and gave it a good squeeze, making her squeal and skitter, dancing around with that heavy-ass bag like it was nothing.
As they slipped into the alley between two old buildings, the guy grabbed the other woman’s ass, too, and she responded by grabbing his in return.
Jerry shook his head.
You saw a lot of weird shit driving a cab.
Funny thing, though. By the time he’d pulled away from the curb, the incident no longer seemed all that remarkable, and by the time he crossed Duval, his memory of the people and their bags and talk of hunting pigs all broke apart and drifted away like a dream forgotten upon waking.
First, Brawley killed the security system.
Then Callie killed security.
Two sentries stood outside the wharf house chatting and smoki
ng. If you ignored the shotguns slung over their shoulders, they looked like a pair of cons on the yard, spinning bullshit plans that would never come to fruition.
The calico cat girl dropped from the roof and landed silently behind the pair of muscular fuggles. In a blur of speed, her claws whipped across their necks, opening their throats and giving the men aprons of blood.
The sentries dropped to the cobblestones and flopped like fish out of water. Brawley reckoned their thrashing and gurgling was making a racket. But he couldn’t hear a peep because he’d covered them over with a dome of silence.
Callie crouched between the dying men, talking as she lifted their wallets and searched their pockets.
She was probably telling them who she was. Probably telling them about her uncle.
Brawley doubted these two had helped murder the Cat Wizard. But he also reckoned that didn’t matter to Callie, who had begged him to let her finish them.
We all grieve in our own way.
Cloaking hard, they turned the corner.
Everything was exactly how Jamaal said it was. Dutchman stood in sandals, board shorts, and a gore-streaked t-shirt, gutting fish, flanked by his two new bodyguards.
The Carnal leaned beside the cleaning station, looking like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Beastie, a reported boar man and mean son of a bitch imported from Arkansas, was sleeved in crimson, helping filet the day’s catch.
And that’s how the boar man died. Brawley’s telekinetic round blew straight through his skull and spread his brains across the weathered boards like so many fish guts.
At the same instant, Remi fired the silenced MDR, giving the other bodyguard a ruby crown that instantly reduced him from Carnal to a steaming pile of dead asshole.
Dutchman reacted well, throwing himself away from the station even as he released a wild blunderbuss blast of telekinetic force.
Brawley’s telekinetic shield shivered with impact, then shivered again as Dutchman, diving for the wharf house, fired another shot.
As instructed, the girls remained by the shield, weapons raised.
Brawley dove to one side of the shield, not wanting to block his own fire. As he soared through the air, he brought his mental crosshairs to bear and pulled the psionic trigger.