Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Noah carries me from the clearing back toward the large, looming house known as Mr. Taylor’s manor.
But as it turns out, it was the wrong Mr. Taylor.
All this time I’d assumed the Mr. Taylor who had hired me was the one who greeted me on the front steps the day I arrived. I had no clue the other Taylor brother was the real mastermind behind this entire game.
Our correspondence was so vague I’d assumed the man I was emailing was the older man in the blazer.
It’s not as if there was much information about either Taylor brother online.
The research I did do into their real estate empire revealed only the bare minimum with the occasional dated photo.
I hadn’t even come across any photos of Noah, nor had I realized he and Neil were so easily interchangeable.
The wind howls as we make our way through the snowy landscape. I’m so cold, I’m shivering, cocooned into the warmth Noah’s arms provide as he carries me up the front steps.
It doesn’t help that I’m wearing only a torn scrap of lace lingerie and a coat soaked by snow. But it’s not only the snow that has my body in shock.
It’s the aftermath of the intense, mind-blowing pleasure he brought me. The back-to-back orgasms and the rough, carnal sex in the snow I’ll remember so long as I live.
We became one with nature tonight. We fucked like animals, panting and tearing at each other as if seeking to devour or destroy. The lines were so blurred it didn’t matter anymore.
But as Noah guides me inside the welcoming warmth of the mansion, I’m left wondering what comes next. Where in the hell can we possibly go from here after the last seventy-two hours?
We’re still virtually strangers—at least that’s what I think—and this situation is still so crazy I don’t even know how to process how it’s real.
A billionaire sought me out for a terrifying primal game where he hunted me and then fucked me ’til I saw shooting stars and galaxies explode.
It sounds totally fake. It sounds like something out of your wildest fantasy.
Yet it’s as real as the snow drifting outside or the hot flames crackling from the hearth inside.
Noah takes me straight to the living room then sets me down on the closest sofa. I release a soft breath, grateful for the heat after enduring the last hour or two in the arctic cold.
He kneels before me and gingerly begins undressing me, sliding off the soaking wet coat and untying the laces on my boots.
Firelight dances across his face, highlighting every angle of his rugged face. He’s just as striking without the horned mask, equally as intimidating and masculine with his messy dark hair and broad jawline and piercing eyes.
I find myself staring as he slides off the second boot then looks up at me with his penetrative gaze.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks,” he says at last, his voice low and husky. “From the first moment I ever saw you.”
I swallow hard, throat tight. “You were watching me.”
He nods, not ashamed or defensive. “I learned you. Long before you stepped foot on this property. Long before the first night. I needed to be certain.”
“Certain of what?”
“That you could survive this,” he answers. “That you were what my instincts told me you were—a woman with a fire lit inside her but who lived her life by playing it safe instead. Deep down you were looking for excitement. For the thrill of the chase.”
My brows quirk. “And you knew all that just by watching me?”
He reaches out to tuck a damp curl behind my ear. “Yes. Because human instincts never lie. Mine knew from the moment I saw you, you were the woman I was looking for. But I spent a long time observing you just to be sure.”
I look away, unable to bear another second of his intense dark gaze. Instead, I focus on the flames in the fireplace. They’re so bright and vivid compared to the shadowy winter hellscape we’d played in.
For a second they transfix me, drawing me in so deeply I’m able to figure out the next question on my mind.
“Then why didn’t you just… why couldn’t you approach me?” I ask. My eyes flick back to him. “Why couldn’t you be upfront about it?”
The corner of his mouth quirks. He stares at me as if the question’s amusing. Like the answer couldn’t be more obvious and it’s funny that I’d ask.
“Because,” he says slowly, “then it wouldn’t be a real hunt, would it?
You wouldn’t feel the sense of fear and thrill you love so much, would you?
I wouldn’t get the same pleasure out of chasing you and dragging you kicking and screaming in the woods—taking you like a beast with his hard-won prize.
It was important to keep the realism. Especially for the first hunt. ”
…first hunt?
I try to make sense of what he’s said, but he goes on before I can.
“You did a design job for a man I do business with,” he says.
“You spent a week coming and going, making a dead space come alive. You didn’t realize how deeply you inhabited the rooms you touched.
That you breathed life into them simply by walking through them.
You were quiet but sharp and observant. But you carried this tension in you—a kind of silent hunger.
I recognized it at once and knew what you were.
Even if you didn’t know I was around when I was. ”
I go for a breath and find myself coming up short. Our gazes are still connected, still so locked in on each other I’m cognizant of the visceral effect he has on me.
Racing pulse. Breathless lungs. Flushed skin.
I’m on the receiving end of all of it and more.
Somehow, my nipples are hard and stiff again. I’m distracted by how slick my pussy is—fresh arousal but also the cum Noah had filled me with.
His eyes darken as he watches my reaction. He clearly knows what I’m thinking. Probably even smells how wet my pussy is.
“I knew I had to give you this experience,” he rasps. He cups my chin and draws my mouth to his for a soft, fleeting kiss. “Even if it were a game you never wanted to play again. I knew you deserved to be my prey even once—and that it’d give you more satisfaction than you ever conceived it would.”
I lick at my lips, tasting the salt of him. “I… I’ve never done something like this before. I never knew…”
“But I did, Ivy,” he says, a crooked grin coming to his face. “A predator recognizes his prey in the wild. Just like you knew what I was from the moment you met me.”
I smirk back at him. “Mark the driver or the crazed Krampus chasing me through the woods?”
“Both. At first you were simply ignoring any red flags. You wanted to believe so badly the job was the real deal.”
He’s got me there. I can’t argue with a word of it, because it’s the truth—I had wanted so badly for this job to be mundane and normal.
…at least that’s what I thought I wanted until I spent the last three days being chased through the woods at a deserted mountainside estate.
A shiver passes through me. I glance down for the first time at my balled up hands and let the truth wash over me.
For the first time in my life, I acknowledge my secret desire for danger and excitement. The electric thrill that sparked inside me when I heard his pounding footsteps behind me in the dark. The consuming sense of fear as I ran for my life only to be caught then viciously fucked.
It brings color to what’s been an otherwise boring, black-and-white existence, where I skated by with a fledgling business and inactive social life.
“This can’t… this can’t be right, can it?” I ask.
Noah cradles my chin in his large hand a second time, guiding my gaze back to his.
“Right and wrong are relative. They mean nothing until you give them meaning. What’s right for us doesn’t have to be right for others.
You enjoy tapping into more primal, intrinsic emotions and experiences.
As do I. Why should we have to deny ourselves? ”
I can’t think of a single reason to give. I can’t provide any sort of counter argument.
“You needed someone who could meet the darkness inside you without flinching,” he explains. His thumb brushes along the corner of my lips. “I needed the same. Someone who wouldn’t be afraid of it. Someone who would give in so completely the way you did in those woods.”
I lean into him this time, reaffirming his words with a deep kiss. His other hand slides along my jawline, framing my face in his hands as we kiss and let our mouths speak for us in a different way.
When we break apart, Noah rests his brow against mine. His fingers stroke at my cheek then jaw, as though mapping out the soft shape of my face.
Then he draws back and says, “I have something else I want to show you.”
He reaches for something on the end table. An item I’ve never noticed but that he must’ve somehow placed there in between me leaving the house tonight and him showing up in the woods to chase me.
It’s a thick leather folio with a pen tucked inside the spine. He lays it in my lap as if it’s a gift he’s picked up specially for me.
“This,” he says, “is the real contract. The only one that matters.”
“A… a contract?” I stammer. “Another one?”
“Read it,” he urges.
I openly it so cautiously you’d think I was afraid of the paper biting me.
My pulse jumps when I see my name written at the top in neat, clean print. I read carefully this time, eyes scanning line by line, absorbing every word on the page.
The verbiage is much like the other contract, except the terms are a lot more intensive.
The participant may start, pause, or end the hunt at any time by uttering the safe word.
Hunts will be arranged with both participants’ consent. But the specifics of the chase to include time, location, and other elements are at the hunter’s discretion.
The dynamic is prey and predator with primal play and other sex acts incorporated into the hunt..
I swallow, reading the next part.
Ivy Davis agrees to participate willingly.
Noah Taylor agrees to protect his prey at all times, ensuring no real harm comes to her, and bears the responsibility of aftercare.
My breath stalls when I reach the final line:
The prey is only prey if she chooses to run.
I bite at my bottom lip and then glance up at him. He’s still kneeling in front of me, his dark and penetrative gaze set on me this entire time.
He’s waiting for my reaction. For my thoughts.
When I reach for the pen, a fresh wave of nerves rushes me. But it’s not from unease or anxiety. It’s from the intense thrill I get imagining the many scenarios to come.
All the ways we can play this game and he can hunt me.
I sign my name.
A long, flowing signature that stretches across the line like a vow.
When I slide the folio back to him, his expression changes—his eyes gleam and the corner of his mouth spreads into a half smile.
He cups the back of my neck with one warm hand and then pulls me toward him for another kiss.
Our lips touch in celebration, further sealing the pact we’ve just made. The arrangement we’ve decided on that might sound insane to normal people, but feeds into things we both naturally crave.
As Noah explained, right and wrong are relative terms. What’s wrong for others happens to be perfectly right for us.
When we finally separate, we’re both smiling like we’ve won the game together. It certainly feels like its own form of victory.
“You just changed everything,” he murmurs huskily. “You have no idea what that signature means.”
“I think I do,” I whisper. “And I want it. I really do.”
His eyes flash with a dark hunger. “Good. Because this is only the beginning.”
He pulls the bell from his pocket and holds it up between us, the silver gleaming bright in the firelight.
We both stare at it as he waves it almost tauntingly ’til it rings like it had hours ago when I’d called for him.
The realization happens slowly. My gaze flits from the bell to the hungry predator staring at me as if he’s ready for his next meal, and he says, “Run.”
THE END