Chapter 6
LILY
Pain sears.
Fire ignites against my flesh.
My back arches so violently the restraints bite into my wrists, and a strangled sound tears from my throat.
I scream out, my body jerking, and nipples tightening, as something singes my chest spot after spot. My mind races—a flash of coherency between each bite of pain—and focuses solely on where I think the next place will be.
What the hell is he doing?
His breathing is steady. Measured. As if he’s enjoying the suspense more than the act itself. I can hear the faint shift of his weight before each drop lands.
“Hot wax, Lily,” he murmurs.
Hot wax.
My skin chills but then burns.
Drip.
Goosebumps chase across my arms even as the sting blooms and spreads, a cruel push and pull that my nerves struggle to keep up with.
“Pain can enhance pleasure, mia bella,” he murmurs.
I hiss as another drop falls. The sting. The burn. The cooling off so it then tugs at my skin as it dries.
“Pain can make your nerves sensitive.”
I don’t want this version of pleasure. But before the words can pass over my lips, they dissolve under the rush of heat licking across my skin.
Drip.
“It can make your body overcompensate in other ways.”
Other ways? My stomach knots. Should I dread or anticipate what’s coming next?
Drip.
“Easier to pleasure.”
Where will it drop next? I fixate on the thought, trying to figure out where his hand is.
Stop. Please. Stop.
If I stay quiet, maybe he’ll lose interest.
If I fight, maybe he’ll stop.
Every option feels like the wrong one and not a single one falls off my lips in anything more than a ragged gasp.
The dark behind the blindfold. The anticipation. The sensation of feeling his eyes running over me.
My mind finally forms the words, my tongue readies to say them but—
His mouth closes over my nipple. The heat of the wax is replaced so suddenly by the wet pull of his tongue that my mind stutters, struggling with which sensation to cling to. My back bows and I can’t help my strangled cry.
The movement of his tongue, the contrast of sucking hard and then laving softly, mainlines an electric current to my core that I can’t fight.
Damn my body for betraying me. Damn it for melting when I need it to resist.
And the difference this time is that his body is against mine, pressing me into the softness of the mattress beneath us.
The taut muscles of his abdomen rub between the juncture of my thighs when he moves up my body so his mouth can pleasure my right breast. His hand squeezes my left, fingers pinching, manipulating, and then a pressure edging on pain closes around my nipple.
My mind is yanked cruelly from concentrating on his mouth, my breath hissing, my head angling up as if I could see what he’s doing.
The sting is slight, but combined with the wax and his mouth, my body hums. His teeth nip and tug again before he releases my tightened bud, and then I feel matching pain there as well.
Oh. My. God. Nipple clamps? Is that what this is?
He pulls justly on whatever connects the two clamps, and the sharp tug ricochets through me.
My breath catches.
So that’s what they feel like?
Fuck.
Drip.
“Oh. . . fuck,” I moan. The sting returns, sharper after a brief pause.
He chuckles. It resonates in the room, scarring its way into my memory just as the wax singes my flesh. He lifts up so with the weight of his body gone, my own lifts from the mattress. The bed sways as what? He moves off it? Then stills.
And then nothing.
The silence returns again, smothers my mind and heightens my anticipatory fear.
Creak.
He moves again.
And then without warning the chill of ice hits my skin and wipes away the sting of the wax.
“Ahhh.” It’s a gasp. A plea. A rush of sensations that hit me all at once.
“Silence,” he commands.
I struggle to obey.
To not gasp when he rubs the ice cube back and forth over my nipple. It hardens to the point of pain and the sensation mixed with the clamping causes a bewildering surge of arousal.
But he doesn’t stop there. He moves the ice to the other nipple. To the curve of my breast. To the hollow of my throat and then back down.
Each descent’s a mixture of thrill and torment. Of pleasure edged in pain.
He proceeds to my navel but this time, he leaves the ice cube in the hollow of my belly button.
Ice. Wax. He came prepared.
The chill of the cube sitting idle begins to burn.
I squirm.
“Ah, bella Lily,” he murmurs. I can hear the smile in his voice. The same one I remember him giving me from across the bar. “Do not move. Do not let the water spill over. Not one drop.”
And if I did spill it just to spite him?
Maybe he wants me to fail.
Maybe he likes the punishment more than he lets on.
“The only other thing allowed to be wet is this pussy of yours.” His words crawl over my skin, stick there, and even now, I know I’ll never forget them. If I’m let go. If . . .
His fingers are at the apex of my thighs again, slipping between the seam of my pussy and spreading me apart.
How do I stay still when his fingers are playing with the parts of me that beg to react? To move?
My breath hitches and body tenses as the small pool of melted water pools in the dip of my navel.
Don’t spill.
Don’t. Spill.
“Ah, you are dripping for me, no? Is your pussy aching for me to fill it? To fuck it? Fire and ice is such a good combination. Both burn but in different ways, no?”
He slips two fingers into me.
My eyes roll back but I stifle the moan that he coaxes from me when he bends those fingers and rubs the rough bundle of nerves inside me. My body reacts like an exposed live wire with a never-ending current pulsing through me.
He doesn’t stop there. He continues to fuck me with his fingers. Slow and steady at first then faster and harder.
Somewhere in the small slip of mindfulness that creeps in the thought hits .
. . what is his deal? This entire thing has been about me.
Pleasuring me. Playing with me. His words might sound harsh but his actions seem quite the opposite.
He picks up the pace. Fingers plunging it, pulling out, working me up into a frenzy.
My hands fist air as I fight the building orgasm.
“Oh God.”
The pleasure he draws out of me is so intense, so powerful. I try to suppress it. Try to fight it.
My body writhes.
My hips lift to give him better access.
I fail.
All I want is more. Faster. Harder. A release.
The orgasm builds brick by brick. Layer by layer. My body begs for it to hit to relieve this ache. The traitorous burn.
I begin to writhe, begin to lift my hips for him, grant him access as my body begs him to sate the need he’s created.
“If it spills . . .” he warns, withdrawing his fingers completely.
The sudden emptiness is colder than the ice cube on my stomach as I dangle on the brink of release.
“There will be a punishment, Lily.”
Fuck the punishment. Keep touching me. Keep fucking me.
Despite the circumstances.
Because of them.
God, my head is fucked up. My body even more so as it vibrates on that edge of orgasm so close yet still so far away.
My mind and body war over what each want.
“You will make me go back on my word not to hurt you.” He tsks. “I don’t like to be forced to break promises.”
My mind registers his warning, but my body couldn’t care less when I feel something push into me.
The water on my stomach, the heeded advice—none of it matters because all I can concentrate is the slow insertion of something ice cold, inch by thick inch into me.
Chills charge through my system, tightening my skin and prickling my scalp.
They’re so severe I can feel the hardened wax pull from my skin as he begins to slowly pull the frozen object back out.
“I will fuck you with my tongue. I will fuck you with my fingers. I will fuck you with this ice. And I will fuck you with my cock.” He twists his hand and pushes the ice back inside of me.
It’s a slow, methodical rhythm. My body heats the ice, melts it so when he pulls it back out, water seeps out, runs down the crack of my ass to the sheets beneath. “It is my decision when. Where. How.”
The intensity builds. I fight it. Try to. But each push in, each drag across those nerves and my body betrays every sense of right and begs to be wrong.
I yank against my restraints. My ankles and legs are begging to close, to staunch the . . . the intensity of the mixture. Cold against heat. Hard against soft. Unforgiving against sensitive—it’s too much for me to bear.
“Please,” I beg. It’s breathless and broken and sounds nothing like me.
His suggestive chuckle is the response to my moans.
The orgasm is a low rumble through my body. A storm surge that is building. Thunder that is recharging, And just as it’s about to hit—
Then nothing.
My captor stops moving. The ice within me. His hand on my thigh. Himself on the bed.
The only sound in the room is the harsh rasp of our panted breaths.
“You failed.” That tsk of his is back, chilling my insides just as the ice does. “You weren’t a very good girl.”
My shoulders tense. What? I don’t understand. What will he do? What is my punishment?
Punishment. The water must have dropped. I was so attuned to what he was doing, to how he was making me feel, that I forgot his singular demand.
The bed dips under his weight, and I suck in a breath. Is this the part where he hurts me? Not wax or ice . . . but hurts me?
And more silence.
Don’t move.
The ice between my thighs begins to burn.
Don’t squirm.
The cold trickle of water seeping out of me soaks the bed beneath.
“So many options on how I can punish you,” he murmurs against my ear.
I jump, surprised by his sudden nearness. The firmness of his chest rubs against my shoulder blade as he bends over and the faint rasp of his stubble brushes against my cheek and ear.
So close. He’s so damn close.
His breath feathers against my face as I hold mine in. His quiet scrutiny unnerves me, my eyes darting back and forth beneath my blindfold trying to sense his next move.