The Bride (The Boss) (35 page)

I couldn’t imagine why, but I did as he asked. At ten breaths, I noticed my inhalations had become deeper. At twenty, my mind went with them, deeper still. At thirty, I was no longer kneeling on the carpet, but far from myself. Though my body was tense with anticipation, my mind was perfectly still. I was waiting. That was my only task, and by the time I reached fifty breaths, then a hundred, I was nearly euphoric at the thought of my next command. My chest hitched, my fingers flexed and clenched rhythmically beside my thighs. Between my legs, a hot, heavy desire bloomed and flourished. I needed him, his stern, commanding voice, his orders that I followed unquestioningly.

We had come so far from the night we’d shared in this room. Not just as a couple, but as a Dom and sub. Our deepened intimacy in those roles bled into every corner of our relationship. I wasn’t sure we would have the same relationship without this aspect that came so naturally to both of us.

He kept me waiting because he could, and that high of total control thrilled him as much as complete surrender thrilled me.

“I’m impressed,” he said as he came slowly down the stairs. I heard the crack of the leather flogger against the palm of his hand. I preferred a flogger with thicker tails. It was a heavier strike, a different kind of pain from thinner leather or rubber spaghetti. My skin tingled at the thought of the agony to come. I loved it, I hated it, I couldn’t live without it if I tried.

“Get on your hands and knees,” he ordered. “Get your ass in the air.”

I slid into position, and knew from the cool, damp fabric against my vulva that my black thong was already wet.

Not two feet from where I knelt, Neil had stood before me, six years after our first incredible night together, and inhaled the scent of me off a scrap of black lace.

“What did you do to earn this punishment?” he asked, slipping the handle of the flogger through one leg of my panties to pull them up tight between my labia.

“I shouldn’t have sucked on your thumb without your permission, Sir.” My voice quivered. I sounded so different to my own ears like this. I wasn’t used to my voice free from heavy sarcasm without restrained professionalism holding me in check.

“Do you know what I’m going to do now?” he asked.

“You’re going to whip me, Sir.”

“Five strokes. You count them.”

The decision to brace myself or not brace myself was taken from me when the first strike across my buttocks landed without further warning. I gasped a “one!” in shock; this was much harder than I was used to. I supposed that was what Neil had meant, when he’d said he would surprise me.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth against the pain that would come. The tails of the flogger caught me right under the curve of my buttocks. I couldn’t help the shout that preceded “two,” and I was relieved we were only doing five. I wouldn’t be sitting down much for the next few days.

The next lash landed on the backs of my thighs, with less force in order to avoid the tails wrapping around my leg. The fourth and fifth came in crossed slaps over the already stinging welts left behind from the first, and by the time I uttered, “five,” the word was sandwiched between a sob and a gasp.

He tossed the flogger aside and sat on the couch. “Get up here. Across my lap.”

Seven years ago, in a not terribly impressive hotel room, I’d lain across his lap as he’d spanked me. It had been at my request; it had been the dirtiest thing I could think of at the time.

I was so glad we’d found each other again, and we’d explored so many other dirty things.

He caught me before I could kneel on the couch beside him. He held me with his hands on my thighs, keeping me motionless, and gazed up at me. Beneath the sadistic mirth, there was true tenderness; we both knew what we needed from each other, and that we were willing to fulfill those needs out of love and desire.

“Over you go,” he said finally, pulling me down and neatly up-ending me, so that my torso was supported on his lap, my hair brushing the floor on one side, my legs suspended behind me, ankles up and crossed. He’d tied me like this before, and my body had remembered the posture ever since.

His palm skimmed over my backside, and the gentle touch was still enough to set my welted skin stinging like the worst sunburn I’d ever had. He slipped his fingers up and down my slit, seemingly by mistake as he rubbed my ass, but the touch was far from accidental. My panties were soaked; he plucked at the fabric.

“You liked that, didn’t you?” he asked, increasing the pressure of his fingertips over my clit.

“Y-yes,” I stuttered out, my body caught between aching pleasure and just plain aching.

“Why did you like it?”

I could have said, “Because I’m a dirty slut,” but those words only turned me on if he said them. Besides, they weren’t the answer he was looking for. “Because it pleased you, Sir.”

He leaned down and kissed one of the burning stripes the flogger had left on my behind. “Good girl.”

His hand ventured down again to cup me, rubbing in firm circles, teasing with pleasure that felt sharper in contrast to the fading pain.

Slipping under the strip of fabric, his fingertips circled over my labia, parting my folds and slicking my wetness all over. He sank two digits in, drawing a long moan from me.

Then his palm fell in a loud smack on my burning ass.

There was a difference between a punishment spanking and a reward spanking. I might not have believed that, once upon a time, but now I could tell. When he’d flogged me, he’d done it to punish me for a violation of the behavior he expected from me tonight. Now, he was rewarding me for everything I had done correctly. It just so happened that my ideas of fun and punishment were pretty fucking close.

Another slap brought a hiss to my lips. His fingers were still buried inside of me, and I clenched on them. It was a struggle to keep myself still, though I wanted to reach out for pleasure.

There was a difference between surrendering one’s will and surrendering to pleasure. It was easy to do the latter. At the moment, I was doing the former; stopping myself from giving in to my urge to wriggle and maximize contact, talking myself out of taking too much at the buffet. My shoulders shook with the tension of keeping still.

Neil noticed, took his fingers away, and pulled me up to sit across his lap. “Have a care, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

I rolled my neck from side to side. “Sorry, Sir. I wasn’t thinking.”

“You were thinking.” He patted my knees and I moved to stand, but he simply turned me to straddle his legs, my back against his chest. With a little nudge to sit me up, his hands closed on my shoulders, kneading my muscles with firm pressure that made me moan in an entirely different context.

“You were thinking about when the next slap would come,” he continued, while his strong hands made jelly of me. “You were thinking about when
you
might come.”

I wished he hadn’t mentioned that, because I had no idea when that would be.

“What should you be thinking of?” he asked, his thumbs moving up the back of my neck on either side of my spine.

“I should be thinking of how to please you, Sir.”

He caught my earlobe between his teeth, releasing it to murmur, “I love how you say that. Without hesitation. Without resistance or uncertainty. Look at me.”

I leaned to my right and turned my head, and his hand closed over my throat. It was crazy; I made eye contact with Neil all the time. Yet somehow, being allowed to do so while we were actively playing, when his hand was clasped around my neck, made it somehow more meaningful.
 

“You should be thinking of nothing.” He brushed my hair back, curving his fingers around my ear. He looked into my eyes, then he kissed me with urgency that snatched the breath from my lungs, leaving that weird, semi-painful love ache beneath my ribs.

“Face forward,” he ordered as he pulled back, and I did as he told me.

One of his hands slid between my breasts, to the top of my thong and under. I glanced down, and nearly came right then. The sight of Neil’s hand in my panties was one of the most erotic things I’d ever seen, and was in the top ten of things I loved to look at, probably somewhere between baby ducks and the words “Yoji Yamamoto’s new collection.”

Obviously it helped that the image was associated with some supremely pleasurable physical sensations. His other arm wrapped around my rib cage, holding me captive as his fingers sought out my clit.
 

My body bowed; it wasn’t an instinct I could resist. I’d been so keyed up for this all day long, and I lost myself in his touch.

“You can writhe all you’d like, but you aren’t going anywhere,” he warned, his breath hot against my ear. “You’re mine, Sophie. Tonight I will use you, I will punish you, I will
hurt
you, any way I please. Why is that?”

I wetted my lips. My breath shuddered from my lungs. It was hard to concentrate under the onslaught of his titillating words and his wicked touch. “Because…” My voice broke on a gasp as he slipped one finger up and down my clitoris.

His arm tighter around my ribs, and his hand stilled in my panties. “Say it.”

“Because I’m yours, Sir.”

His fingers moved in a final, slow circle. He pulled his hand away, and I stifled my whimper of protest. Sir would not like it if I asked for more than he wanted to give me.

“Open your mouth,” he ordered, and when I did, he forced his fingers past my parted lips. “Taste yourself.”

I sucked his fingers clean. This was one of his favorite things to do, and I’d gotten used to the musky, slightly salty flavor.

“Did you ever do this before?” he asked, gently pushing his fingers in and out of my mouth in a maddening tease, giving me exactly what I wanted on the wrong part of my body.

I nodded.

“When?”

He dragged his fingers slowly from my mouth, over my chin and down my throat.

“When I’ve masturbated, Sir. Every once in a while, I like to taste myself.” My face got hot at the admission. He could pull secrets from me on a whim.

“Do you think of me while you’re touching yourself?” He trailed the backs of his fingers across the skin between my breasts.

“I do, Sir.” Gooseflesh stood out all over my body.

“Every time?”

“Every time, Sir.”

He pinched one nipple, hard. “Tell the truth now.”

I gasped in pain. “Not every time, Sir. I’m sorry, Sir.”

He rubbed his fingertips in soothing circles over the flesh he’d just tormented. “Who do you think of?”

Without hesitation, told him. “I think of Emir. And I think of other men.”

“Tell me.”

“About Emir, Sir?” My breath quickened as Neil’s hands cupped my breasts, and he drew his fingers slowly back and forth over the sensitive lower curve.

“If you’d like to start there.” He dipped his head to nibble my shoulder, and a chill raced up my spine.

It was difficult to concentrate, but that might have been in my favor. My words rolled out free from self-conscious structure. “Lately I’ve been imagining what he did to you when you two were together. About how it would have felt for you. About what it must have looked like, pretending I’m in the room watching.”

“Spread your legs wider.”

I was already straddling his lap, but I opened wider, my hips canting forward, giving him better access to my body.

“Go on,” he said, one hand cupping my vulva, kneading me through my wet panties.

“I think about what it would be like to be with many men at once. Their hands all over my body, hands on my breasts, fingers in my pussy, in my ass. Being used for their pleasure and taking pleasure in it.”

His cock pressed against my ass through his trousers. I didn’t grind against it. I hadn’t been invited.

“Is that something you’d like to make a reality?” he asked, his deep voice rumbling though his chest, so that I felt it on my back.

The scent of his cologne overrode my senses. “No, Sir. It’s just a fantasy. I only want you.”

“I don’t have to want you.” He gripped my mound roughly. “I already have you.”

“Yes, Sir.” My entire being was focused on him. Nothing existed beyond my hunger to please him.

If I could please him, he would please me, and make sure his pleasure was returned ten fold.

His hand moved too quickly for me to anticipate the smack that landed on my vulva, and I yelped.

“I love every sound that I make you make.” He closed his hand over my throat, pressing on those little points beneath my jaw, but not my trachea. That was far too risky; he enjoyed causing me pain, tormenting me with pleasure, but he would never actually harm me. He slapped me between my legs again, twice in quick succession, and my thighs quivered. I could only whimper.

He released me and pushed me to the floor, not roughly, just as though I were a toy he was finished playing with for the moment, and my body throbbed with longing for contact. He knew exactly how to wind me up, to make me want him more.
 

“Go upstairs and wait for me.”

I started to get to my feet. He pressed me back to carpet with one exquisite Italian leather short-wing blucher. “Not like that. I want to see you crawl.”

I rose on my hands and knees, my back dipped, my hair falling over my shoulders. I knew what he saw; my tight, round ass in the air, my black thong accentuating the curve. He wanted to see me crawl, so I did, slinking in long-legged stretches across the carpet, to the bottom of the stairs. Navigating those was a bit trickier. Luckily, I heard him stand and go to the phone, so he didn’t see my awkwardness. At the top, I could have gotten to my feet and gone into the bedroom, but he’d just said “upstairs,” and he’d said nothing about getting up.

The volume of the music over the in-room sound system grew louder. I didn’t know who he was talking to on the phone downstairs, but I suspected it would have something to do with the noise level he was expecting. When he came up the stairs, he’d shed his jacket and pulled off his tie. Without a word, he bent down and looped the black silk across my face, pulling it up hard between my lips and teeth to secure it behind my head.