The Hunter's Pet (5 page)

For the first time since her capture, Sarah felt a rush of true release. Tension she did not know she had been feeling rushed away, replaced by relaxation. Tears sprang to her eyes, not because she was sad or because she was sore, but because she was so relieved to finally feel right again.

William’s palm ran across her bottom. His hand was large and comforting, petting her heated flesh. And then it descended between her cheeks, back to her sex. She spread her legs, welcoming the touch, but it was fleeting.

“Don’t want you to get any of those dominant ideas again, do we?” He murmured the question down at her.

He still didn’t understand nature. His city had separated him from the natural order of things. Poor fool, he was strong and capable, but without understanding, strength was useless.

Sarah clamped her thighs together and rolled onto her side, looking up at him with wet eyes. He let her move, another little triumph for her. Already she was clawing her way back to control, already… the room spun and her face met pillow as he pushed her back onto her stomach, pinning her firmly just above her bottom.

“I didn’t give you the command to move, did I? I didn’t say this was over either.” Again the leather bit her bottom with a hard, unexpected whack.

She gave a guilty little giggle. Maybe he wasn’t quite as stupid as he seemed to be.

“You think this is funny?” William cut the leather down several more times, until she was wriggling under his securing palm, her clit rubbing against the bed sheets with every grinding attempt at evasion.

“I prefer to be nice,” he informed her from on high. “But if mean is what you need, I can do that too.” He proved it by cracking the leather down across the super sensitive area where her cheeks met her thighs not once, but six times. The barrage of swats made her cry out, but not for mercy. She knew she deserved this, this and so much more if he were truly capable of being her mate.

The next time he stopped, she made sure to lie still. Her hide was growing too tender to test him any further. He reached down and cupped her chin, letting her turn to look at him. His face, always handsome, was quite different in that moment. The expression of determination made his features seem more severe, closer to those of an apex predator. She saw the hawk in his eyes, the big cat in his hands.

A submissive impulse took her. She wanted to be curled up with him, she wanted to see his gaze soften, though she knew it would not that day. He nodded down at her, apparently understanding their silent conversation.

He reached for her, drawing her up. She pressed her face to his chest and breathed his scent deeply. There were not words for what she felt, but he understood her actions and wrapped his arms around her in a silent acceptance of her apology. Nuzzling against the hard planes of his chest, Sarah felt safety such as she had never known while running wild in the forest. She had been alone for such a long time, leader of her own little pack. She had quite forgotten what it was to trust another person, even for a few moments.

Chapter Three

William’s home was full of wonders. A big box-like structure out of which food came, crisp and ready to eat. When it ran low, more was delivered. Lights burned inside whether it was day or night, and when the sun fell below the horizon they seemed to burn brightly all across the city. In her wild days she had wondered why the place glowed. Now she knew.

There were ample means of idle entertainment too. Where Sarah had once watched streams trickle by for hours on end, now she could experience a device called a holochamber, where images were flashed all around her and it seemed as though they were real, and as if she could go wherever she wished in the world or beyond the world even. There were many different destinations, which William called ‘shows,’ which could be called up at the press of a button. Sarah did not much like the machine; it made her uncomfortable on an animal level, so she avoided it.

The house was filled with the buzzing of a thousand little devices. Everything seemed to be controlled by what William called computers. The doors opened and shut if one approached, sliding walls she did not trust. What if it were to decide to close on her when she was but partway through? She spent her first weeks in captivity learning to trust that the myriad devices bore her no ill will. They had no will at all. There was no life to them. They were but mindless automatons with less sense even than a mayfly, though the feats they performed were complex.

Zziiipppppp… Swooooossshh…

Zziiipppppp… Swooooossshh…

Zziiipppppp… Swooooossshh…

“Sarah, what are you doing?”

William came upon her sitting in front of her bedroom door, pressing the control panel open and closed, open and closed, open and…

“Stop that, please,” he said, moving her hand away from the sensor. “What are you trying to do?”

“I’m trying to see if it will get tired.”

“It’s made not to get tired, though I imagine it could burn out if you did that to it all day and all night.”

“And then what would happen?”

“It would stop working.”

“It would die.”

“I suppose, in a manner of speaking, but it could be fixed.”

“Nothing lives and nothing dies in this city,” she said morosely.

“People live here. You live here.”

“I’m just waiting to escape.”

William’s expression drew grim. He did not like it when she intimated that she would escape. He thought the wonders of hot baths and sliding doors and things that went ‘bing’ in the night would be enough to satisfy her. He was wrong. She yearned for the sky, for the breeze and the little creatures that filled every niche of the world. The city was dead, filled with nothing but people. Not so much as a sparrow flew in the sky. Everything was sterile. The air was absent of bloom or pollen and carried no scent or spore. She hated it. These people did not live, they existed in a technological twilight. William had spent time in the wilds. He knew the beauty of the place, which made the fact he’d ripped her out of it all the more unforgivable.

“Well, while you’re waiting for an opportunity to do that, I got you something.” He handed her something dense and rectangular. She gave it a suspicious glance, then picked it up. It was made of many leaves all bound together. A quick taste revealed that it was not edible.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a book. Those markings on the pages inside? They represent words. When you know what they mean, you’ll hear the author’s words in your own mind, in your own voice.”

“More technological trickery.”

“A very basic technology,” he said. “Some wild tribes mark images on rock walls, warning of possible dangers, or places where game thrive. This is the natural extension of that. When you learn what the symbols mean, you’ll be able to decode the meanings of not just this book, but all the writing in the city, and to create your own.”

“I have no need of this, because I will not live in this city longer than it takes for me to find a breach in the wall.”

William put his hands on his hips, seeming to grow larger with dark, handsome menace. The scars on his face could make him look quite fearsome, then she remembered that he was only trying to get her to ‘read’ and she stopped worrying.

“You have need of it, because I say you do,” he said firmly. “You will begin your studies this day.”

“I will not.”

He sighed and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Why must everything be a battle with you, Sarah?”

He was a handsome devil, his native pale skin tanned a warm olive by his exposure to the wilds. The wild men did not have a stature like his. He was taller than any of them, broader too thanks to the high-nutrition foods city dwellers were raised on. His strength was undeniable, but that could only be attributed to the work he did. Most of his people were tall and broad, but slim. He was not slim. He was wrapped in muscle and sinew, a composite of two worlds existing inside one man.

“Because you are not my friend, you are my captor.”

“More than that, I’m your owner.” He leaned down until his nose was almost touching hers. “And you, my pet, need to do as you’re told or you’ll be punished.”

“Don’t care.”

“Don’t care was made to care,” he said. “And your bottom is going to be spanked red if you don’t do as you’re told.”

“Threaten me as you like,” she said, full of defiance. The book was of no use to her in terms of hearing people’s voices in her head, but it made for a handy missile. She threw it at him. To her great dismay and embarrassment, it actually missed him, skimming past his shoulder to hit a lamp instead. The ceramic shattered with a pleasing sound that made her grin with glee. Breaking things, now that was fun.

“Brat,” he growled, snatching her up. It was always quite surprising how strong he was when he needed to be. He had no trouble lifting or carrying her, and he did both in an effort to transport her to the bed she never slept in but was often spanked on.

Tossing her on the bed, he slapped his palm against her covered buttocks with gusto. The pain was not what Sarah considered to be true pain, it was more a discomfort, one that could be endured. She grit her teeth as his hand rained down against her bottom, ridiculous swats that would have been ineffectual even if delivered at twice the intensity.

“Your pathetic attempts at punishment will never work!” she shouted into the mattress. “You are weak! Your palm will never best me!”

He was chuckling to himself, apparently amused at her insolence. “If I wanted to hurt you, it would not be difficult to do so,” he pointed out. “You mistake my intent.”

“Your intent is to annoy me?”

“My intent is to give you something to think about, an experience you won’t wish to repeat.”

“I don’t want to repeat anything I’ve experienced with you,” she hissed as his hand continued to sear her bottom. The heat was growing, as was the discomfort. It still wasn’t pain, but it was very unpleasant and getting more unpleasant by the moment.

“And of course, there’s the intent to teach you not to break things,” he said. “I know you didn’t actually mean to hit the lamp, but you shouldn’t throw things simply because you’re angry. Learning to control your temper is a large part of becoming civilized.”

The lecturing was almost more intolerable than the spanking. Every time his hand landed, it punctuated a word. He wanted her to be civilized, but she was not and never would be.

“I am wild!” she insisted through a flurry of slaps. “You will never change that.”

“We will see, my hot-bottomed brat,” he said, drawing her leggings down to bare her cheeks. She had acquiesced on the clothing front and now wore bright pink pants and a tunic to match. They were made of a material like silk and they felt wonderful against her skin—as much as they were actually against her skin, which was not that often given how often he disrobed her to either spank or mate with her.

Sarah felt a brief cool breeze on her bottom and then he was spanking her again. He was not using his full strength, he was simply slapping her hard enough to make a point, but not so hard that he would have to stop any time soon. It was an act of domination more than discipline, which made her all the more determined to resist his authority.

“I will throw everything in this house!”

“Then you will have a very sore bottom and spend a lot of time in your crate,” he said calmly. “Destructive pets go in their crates.”

“You treat me like an animal!”

“Only if you behave like one. If you want to act like a lady, I will treat you as a lady, but a lady does not throw books at lamps, and she does not threaten to escape at every turn, and she welcomes the opportunity to learn.”

“She sounds awful,” Sarah growled into the covers.

“She sounds like someone who can comfortably sit and doesn’t spend half her days being spanked for various infractions,” he said, slapping her bottom a little harder.

“She sounds like one of your citizen women. Why do you not capture one of them? Oh, because it would be illegal to do to them what you do to me.”

“A citizen woman would not be of any use in the wilds,” William said. “Remember, I intend to take you there regularly to hunt protein for the city.”

“Because you cannot find prey on your own, because your senses are dull.”

“My senses are not as keen as yours,” he admitted, “nor can I stand to live in the wilds as you could. A good pet makes a hunter better; that much is true. But that doesn’t mean you do not stand to gain anything from this. You have already gotten lifesaving medical treatment, one dose of medicine and the fever that could have killed you is gone. You sleep in a warm place and you do not have to keep an eye out for any predator. You’re safe here.”

“I am bored here,” she growled. “This life you lead is boring. I would rather be prey for a wild cat than live like this.”

“It is boring because I cannot trust you yet,” he said, slapping her bottom again. “There is a world full of wonders out there, and you cannot experience any of them until you settle down and accept the fact that your life has changed. The more stubborn you are, the more bored you’ll be. So you just let me know when you’re ready to start learning,” he said, settling in comfortably next to her. The bed dipped, and she felt the hard, large presence of his body near hers. He was right. He could keep slapping her bottom all day and all night—and if he wanted, he could use an implement to continue the punishment indefinitely. Her flesh would certainly give out before his did.

“Fine,” she bit out. “I will do as you wish.”

He paused, his hand on her bottom. “You mean that? Or are you trying to play some trick to get out of this?”

“I mean it.” She spoke in dull tones, feeling heavy and annoyed. There was no choice but to comply, but that didn’t mean she was okay with it. It was depressing.

His hand tapped her bottom, then slid away. “You can get up.”

She sat up, avoiding his gaze. Her lower lip slid out in an unconscious pout. Deeply unhappy, she drew her knees up to her chest, not even bothering to pull her pants up. She sat bare and hot-bottomed, annoyed with him and everything else in the world.