Chapter 56
KATE
He treats me like his equal. He doesn’t ask if my offer is real. If I truly mean it.
Instead, he leads me down to the dungeon.
It’s colder than I remember. The shadows are darker in the corners. The armoire is taller, its doors open to reveal more shelves. A shiver folds through my entire body, like I’m slipping through ice into a winter pond.
He sees me. He sees everything.
His palm burns the back of my neck as he pulls me close for a kiss. Improbably, impossibly, with all the things we’ve done down here, all the ways he’s fired every nerve in my body, this is the very first time we’ve kissed—aside from one quick peck at our farce of a wedding.
His lips play mine, promising, quickening. He growls as our tongues meet, or maybe that’s me, moaning. His fingers tangle in my hair, his palm cupping the back of my head and tugging me even closer.
This kiss is two melting into one. This kiss is a reminder of all the days—and nights—we’ve spent together. This kiss is a promise of all our tomorrows.
Heat radiates from his chest as I spend all the breath in my lungs. His thighs light a fire against mine. I’m reeling when he finally breaks away, and I wonder whether I’d fall if his hand wasn’t still clasping my nape. He inclines his head until his forehead touches mine.
“Red,” he whispers, the word almost a grunt. “If you need me to stop. Yellow, to make me slow down.”
“Green,” I say, my voice louder than I expect as it bounces off the mirrors.
“Green,” he agrees, and he takes a step away. I sway but stay standing. He studies me from the crown of my head to my toes. And then he says, “Show me you want to be here. Strip.”
There’s nothing seductive about jeans and a sweater. Wriggling as I pull my top over my head, I feel like an eejit.
“Slow down,” he orders.
I hook my fingers in the waist of my trousers, yanking them over my hips.
“Slower,” he says.
Shivering in my bra and knickers, I make a face. It takes me about three seconds to work the twin hooks on my bra and throw it to the ground.
“One,” Wolf warns.
My nipples are so hard, they ache. I can’t say if that’s because of the ice core that’s filled me since I walked out of this house or the chill in the room or the dangerous promise of Wolf’s starting to count.
I cross my arms over my chest, desperate to hide my traitorous tits.
The pressure sends a single sharp pulse to the V between my legs.
“Panties,” Wolf says.
“You said to slow down,” I snap.
“Two.”
I don’t even know what he’s counting—blows from his hand or a paddle or the crisp leather tab of a riding crop. Something I can’t yet imagine. But my body doesn’t care. My belly flips at his promise.
“Panties,” Wolf says again.
I plant my hands on my hips, glaring at him in defiance.
This time, he doesn’t bother to count. Instead, he manhandles me over to a leather-covered table halfway across the room. I try to pull back, but he fastens my right wrist into a cuff that’s halfway down the surface. I’m still fighting when he locks my left wrist too.
I swear as my nipples grind into the smooth black leather. “Let me go, ya feckin’ shitehawk!”
“Not on your life, my dear.” It’s not the my dear that stings. It’s the way he laughs. The way he knows he’s in absolute control.
I drop into Irish, cursing his mam and her mam and all the other women who spread their fucking legs for him to be standing here today.
He can’t understand a word I’m saying, but he answers in a universal language.
His hands are tight as iron bonds as he fastens my ankles to cuffs on the table’s legs.
I’m bent over. Arms and legs restrained. Arse high, like I’m modeling knickers for some deranged catalog. My brain bellows that I should hate every single thing about this.
But my body shouts another message. My body is so turned on I can barely manage to draw a full breath. I’m panting like a bitch in heat.
I want this.
I need this.
I should despise what Wolf has managed to do, seemingly without effort. I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by men who take what they want, when they want, without regard to anything approaching social niceties. I’ve fought back from the moment I could first think the word no.
But none of those men was strong enough to truly overpower me. Not the Dark Men. Not the sickly hangers-on around the Canton Crew, the sycophants hoping to impress my da. Not my father himself, screaming his commands, locking me away, paying Wolf to take me off his hands.
They couldn’t break me, not one of them.
But Cole Wolf can. He has the physical strength. And he has the mental discipline. He knows exactly how to destroy me—he’s already done it, so thoroughly I almost lost myself forever.
He can. But he won’t.
And the thought of that control drives me wild.
“Don’t do this,” I whimper.
But that’s not yellow. That’s not red. Wolf slaps my arse with the flat of his hand before he moves to the head of the table.
“Please,” I plead.
He takes his time, peeling off his black turtleneck. He toes off his shoes. Slips off his socks.
“Let me go,” I beg.
He laughs. He’s in absolute control. He can use me any way he wants to, and there’s nothing I can do. I can smell my excitement, even with my cheek pressed against the table. The scent of fresh cream and brine makes me blush, makes my mouth water with need.
“You don’t have to do this,” I whine. “I’ll take off my knickers. I’ll be good.”
“Oh, you will be,” he says, as he takes his time with his belt buckle. That pause might be to build suspense, to make me think about everything he has planned. But it also might be because he has to negotiate his zip over a massive hard-on. “You’ll be very, very good.”
“Let me taste you,” I urge. “Let me go, and I’ll swallow. Every drop. I promise.”
Stepping out of his trousers, he laughs again before he crosses back to the table. I can see him in the mirrors. I can see both of us. His body is hard in the indirect light, carved from some warm wood—cherry or apple or oak. Mine is flushed marble against the table.
He tugs my knickers to one side and plunges two fingers deep inside me. I gasp as he pumps hard and fast, bringing me to the very edge of coming. One stroke shy of release, he pulls his hand free, ignoring my shout of outrage.
“Swallow this,” he says, setting his gleaming fingertips against my lips.
I suck greedily, taking his fingers deep, swirling them with my tongue and moaning at the back of my throat. I should be ashamed. I should be embarrassed. But all I want is to be choking on his cock instead of his hand.
I groan when he pulls away, my voice filled with disbelief and loss.
I barely remember to watch when he pads over to the armoire. My legs are shaking, like I’ve climbed to the top of Everest. I yank my arms hard against my bonds, but the table doesn’t shift, not even a millimeter.
He sets aside the paddle. He sets aside the crop. He sets aside the cat o’ nine tails, and I can’t keep from moaning at the sight of those leather strands weaving between his fingers.
The cane.
He picks up the bamboo cane.
My mouth goes dry.
I’ve wanted the cane from the first moment I set foot inside this dungeon. Since that first night, I’ve done my best not to tell him, not to make demands, not to beg. And finally, after all we’ve been through, after so many days apart, he’s choosing to give me what I long for.
He swipes the bamboo through the air, so fast I hear it whistle. My belly hollows. I close my eyes and clutch the table with both fists, ready, willing, waiting.
Another swipe, this one landing on the table above my head. I yelp in surprise, even as my knees give way.
“Please,” I whisper, knowing I’m breaking the rules, but he already owes me two counts, and I want more. I want three. I want four. I want everything he’s ever promised, everything he can give. I force myself to watch us in the mirror. “Please, please, please, please, please.”
The air howls as he pulls his arm back. His eyes blaze with a fire, with a purifying flame. His gaze meets mine in the glass.
And he brings the cane down hard across my shivering arse.
Agony.
Not fire, not ice, just the tearing apart of individual cells, my flesh disintegrating under the bamboo’s bite. My heart stops inside my chest. My lungs turn to stone. I can’t see, can’t hear, can’t think.
But a tiny light sparks inside my brain. A microscopic memory spins through my skull. My mouth opens. My tongue curls. And I manage to gasp out, “Red.”