HoldingtheCards Page 20

  “She’s beautiful,” he concluded. “A golden goddess.” He ran his fingers along Josh’s calf, teased his ankle just above the cuff. “Aren’t you pleased to be courting her pleasure?”

  Josh nodded, a slight movement all that his head could manage.

  “You’d like to see her, wouldn’t you?”

  Another nod. Marcus tilted his head to Lauren, only ten feet away from her charge.

  “Maybe in a moment,” she said calmly, though she felt far from calm.

  Her mother had once told her that the difference between love and all the lesser imitations of it was so startling, so powerful in its contrast, that once she had actually felt it, she would never mistake anything else for it again. Lauren hadn’t known what she was talking about, because the perversity of love was, until you experienced it for the first time, there was no way to distinguish it from the other versions.

  To have someone so willingly surrendered to her, open to her like this, was something she had never had, and it was so different from how Jonathan had made her feel that she couldn’t imagine why she ever gave the sadistic prick the time of day.

  She felt an incredible melding of power and tenderness, craving and worship. She had felt it in small doses throughout the past two days, but this was far more. This was utter, voluntary surrender of one human to another, and it humbled her in a way too powerful to explain in words. Marcus had been right. Such trust, such devotion was meant to elicit the heady flood of protectiveness and desire she felt now, the absolute worship for the one surrendering, cherishing their devotion and trust for the gift it was.

  To honor it, to find it and keep it, she would have to risk losing it. That was a lesson Jonathan had taught her as well.

  She stepped forward, the heel a loud punctuation on the stone floor, like the snap of a starting gun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You must prove your devotion to me first, before you can see me,” she said. The edge of the crop drifted along the line of his pectoral. The skin quivered beneath it, and she suppressed the urge to lean forward, bite warm skin and muscle.

  He swallowed. Unbound, but bound by her orders, he had shown occasional flashes of humor. Here, he was helpless, focused on her and vulnerable, and she was about to tread into even more turbulent emotional waters. She thought about calling a timeout to be sure things were okay. It might break the tension that was building, tension that might be important.

  She glanced down at his stiff cock. The head was full of blood, a flushed cap for the column of black harnessing straps, and she knew there was no doubt she had him in a high state of lust, when the psyche was more open to being pushed. She wanted answers. She had to have them, to be sure she could take them where they both seemed to want to go.

  “Okay,” he whispered, before she could open her mouth to ask him again.

  She came even closer, brought her scent and nearness to him for reassurance. She caressed his bare neck, traced his lips gently with her fingers. She let him catch them in his mouth and suck on them greedily before she took them away and rested them on his bare chest, tracing the moistness he had left on them across his nipple while his breath caught harshly in his throat.

  “Tell me what happened, Josh. What happened with Winona to drive you here, to make you hide here?”

  His body went rigid. Whatever he had been expecting her to ask of him, it was apparently not that. Marcus’s eyes narrowed on her, but after a moment, his expression became thoughtful and he nodded, tentative endorsement of her direction. Be careful, his eyes warned.

  She knew. She suspected the danger of this path, and knew it all too well herself, and maybe that knowledge was part of why she dared.

  “Can you tell me, love?” she turned her hand over, stroking with her knuckles now, more soothing than provocative. Blindfolding him should make it easier for him to speak of it, just as it had been easier to tell them of Jonathan while staring at the ocean, as if they were not there. But she couldn’t be entirely kind.

  “Tell me. I’m your Mistress. You’re not to hide anything from me.” Her hand descended, and closed over the harness, her lower two fingers capturing the chain and giving it a sharp tug. He groaned, trying to thrust into her hand, but she stepped back from him abruptly, leaving his hot skin exposed to the chill of her withdrawal.

  “Anything,” she repeated. “Tell me. If I decide you need to be punished,” she sidled up close again, pressed her full length along his body, let his captive cock slide between her thigh muscles. It was like embracing a board; he was so rigid with hunger and heat. “I’ll take care of it. Or perhaps you need a punishment now, to remind you who you obey, who you tell your secrets to?”

  “A punishment worse than not being able to see you?” He groaned out the question. He tried to fasten his teeth on her throat, but she eluded him with a chuckle and a sharp strike of the crop along his inner thigh, the left one this time, and a quick flick over his testicles. Then she withdrew again. She took her time walking back, five paces, to the throne Marcus had vacated. She turned, took a seat, and considered him, a whip in each hand.

  “Tell me, Josh. Tell me what happened. I’m going to sit here in this chair, and wait for you to tell me. Until you do, you will not be punished as you deserve. You will not touch me or suckle my breasts, or get to plunge that steel cock of yours into my pussy. Do you know how wet my pussy is for you, Josh? It’s drenched. I could come just by sitting like this, watching you bound on display for me, as beautiful as one of your sculptures.”

  He made a noise, part plea, part animal sound of pain. Lauren refused to let herself soften, even though she saw concern flit across Marcus’s face. She sharpened her tone.

  “Tell me, Josh. It starts with one sentence. You said you trusted me completely. Prove it to me.”

  She watched and waited. It would have been a nice moment to simply indulge herself in the heartbreaking beauty of his restrained body, but the rasp of his breath and the intensity of his internal struggle came off his body in emotional waves that swamped her. She didn’t need to see the visual chaos of his expression to know he was in anguish.

  She wanted to know who had caused him such pain, protect him, heal it, kiss it away. Forgive him, if he suffered because he had caused pain. She thought she would forgive him anything.

  “Start with one sentence, love,” she said, softly, so her voice was like the murmur of his own consciousness. “I came here because I couldn’t look in a mirror. Why are you here? What eats at your soul, Josh? It’s just us here, and there is nothing outside this room.”

  “I’m a monster.” It came out a whisper, but the raw pain in his voice made it even more potent than a declaration delivered in a shout. She heard accusation, judge, jury and conviction in his resigned tone, the sound of someone trudging off to hellfire with no hope of reprieve.

  “Why are you a monster? What did you do, Josh? Tell me.”

  “I…can’t. It’s too bad.”

  She swung the whip, snapped it a hair’s breadth from his ankle, so he felt the air a moment before the noise and jerked. Even Marcus started, surprised by the force of the move, his look of uneasiness quickly replaced by admiration as she brought the whip back in a sweeping, controlled curve around her calves. She was, for a moment, the image of the unrepentant Lilith, in the garden of Eden with the sly serpent coiled around her body.

  “You have been bad, Josh,” she said. “Bad for holding back on me, and Marcus, who cares for you so much. So you need to be punished.”

  She considered him, then rose, came to him. “So you will be,” she murmured, a silky purr as she slid one fingernail down the center of his chest, depressing slightly to leave a red welt, scraping a line down his belly, stopping just below his navel. She lowered herself to a feline crouch, her breath heated, tickling just above his glans. Josh’s arms became cords of iron, pulling against the restraints, and she wondered if there was anything more erotic than watching a powerful man strain against manacles.
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  She hoped the Salernos had made the bindings strong. This was no playful dungeon session. There was devotion here, and yes, intimacy, but there was also catharsis, purging and release. There was something painful in the room, and filled with rage, and it wanted its freedom.

  She hoped to God she knew what she was doing, because at this point what was happening had taken on a life of its own. The reward might be a leap forward in trust and love, a binding of the souls, or it could destroy them.

  They’d both been there, to that point of soul destruction. Now, whether they were fools or hopeless romantics, they were pushing the envelope again to see if they could find in each other what they had hoped to find the time before and failed. The result was going to be fire, but would it be conflagration, purification or resurrection?

  “God, you are so gorgeous.” She slid the butt of the whip along the inside of his calf, the ticklish indentation behind his knee, trailed it along his inner thigh. She could almost feel the heat pulsing from his captured cock. She coiled the whip behind his leg, tightened the slack so it pressed into his thigh. She leaned in and bit him there, soothing the pain with a warm swirl of the tongue, savoring the warm taste of his skin, the quivering and bunched muscle under her teeth. Her ear brushed his cock. He rasped out her name, a plea. Her eyes lingered on the tight clench-and-release spasms of his buttocks. He could not stop his body from imitating what it wanted to do, the mindless instinct of a dog humping a leg. Instead of amusing or repulsing her, the image increased her own hunger, for they were rapidly leaving niceties behind. Responses were raw, primitive. She wanted those hips pumping, jackhammering himself into her until she screamed. But not yet.

  “Tell me, Josh. Why do you need to be punished? What did you do?”

  She eased herself back into a straight-backed chair Marcus brought for her, so she could sit closer to Josh, brush her heeled boot along the inside of his calf.

  His head lifted, his eyes and cheekbones masked to her, his lips moistening nervously, somehow appearing even more vulnerable for their solitary exposure on his face. “I can’t,” he repeated, desperately.

  She twisted her wrist and the snap end of the crop zapped his thigh just below the bound scrotum, a quick sting, meant to raise the emotional response. He jumped, swallowed, and the quivering in his legs increased. “Please, don’t…”

  Marcus made a noise, and Lauren gave him a sharp, negative shake of her head.

  “Marcus is here, Josh, and I am here. But in the darkness of that mask it’s just you, facing yourself. I will take care of you,” she reminded him, and this time the whip’s touch was a gentle caress, teasing his balls. “Tell me.”

  His fists remained clenched against his bonds, muscles unconsciously resisting his restraints still, but she knew it was only a physical manifestation of resistance to the chains that held him in his mind. She longed to let him go, but he had to put it in the open between them. It was the sacrifice that all Masters demanded before they allowed themselves to be worshipped. Complete openness, no hidden corners. Come on, Josh. Let it go, so I can let both of us go.

  “She was a sub. She liked me to really take control.” The first words were thick, clotted as if they had to fight their way free of the grip of a festering wound, choked with pus. His lips pressed together. “She wanted me to dress her sexy when we were out, make her expose herself. We’d go to a club and she’d beg me to make her lift her skirt when she was dancing, let other people see her bare ass. She’d usually have me spank it good before we went out, hard with a belt, so it would have red welts on it.

  “I liked playing with her, but I was afraid of being too rough. She could drive me up, make me get so savage with her. She wanted it that way, but…I enjoyed how much she got off on it.”

  Marcus’s eyes flicked to Lauren. A frown flitted across his brow, but she shook her head, putting a finger to her lips and he sank back down on the dais near Josh’s feet.

  The mask would let him talk inside his head, temporarily push away his surroundings. The outside became the inside, and emotions not normally allowed the sight of day became irrepressible, because sightlessness and being helpless turned you inside out, made shields and controls impossible.

  Lauren had watched many subs fall apart. A slave was supposed to have no secrets, expose his or her fears, worries and longings to the Mistress, and the Mistress would address them as she saw fit. It was the way the game worked. It was that automatic vulnerability, impossible to avoid, that gave the Dom such a dangerous edge, that made D/s walk so close to the darkness.

  Marcus removed his hand from Josh’s ankle, recognizing, as she did, Josh’s need for an isolated dark void of space into which to spill the weight on his soul.

  “So she got off on you doing all this. Why does that make you a monster? It sounds like you were a good Master.”

  “She didn’t know anything about the clubs at first, just knew she wanted me to tie her up and whip her. It made her come all the time…in the beginning. She didn’t really know about the other stuff you could do. I found out about those for her, because I knew she’d like them, and because, I liked them, too.”

  “It made you hard, didn’t it?” she murmured, bending forward and rubbing her fingertips over his constricted organ, eliciting a moan of pleasure, another whispered plea that she ignored. “So you did what she wanted.”

  He nodded. “Anything. But some things I just couldn’t…she wanted me to leave marks, permanent ones, and when she saw how much it bothered me, she wanted me to do it even more. And if I didn’t want to do it, she’d take me to the clubs and make me watch while some other Dom did it, make me give her to another Dom.”

  “Did you like that?”

  “Yes…no. It hurt, in a strange way, but it always got me off. It just felt…wrong. But I liked it,” his fingers dug into his palms, so fiercely they left marks. She saw the flesh whiten and inflame around the puncture. “I fucking liked it,” he repeated, not as emphasis, but as accusation. “It made me hard as iron. I wanted to pull her out of his hands and pound into her, but it was like rage…it felt wrong. I couldn’t do it, though I was supposed to be in charge. It hurt,” he repeated, confused, arguing with himself.

  Lauren swallowed, feeling emotions of her own rise up. A bad feeling was growing in her and she saw it reflected in Marcus’s eyes. Did she really want to hear the end of this story? No, she didn’t, but she would. She had to.

  She pressed her knee against his left leg. She laid her hand upon his thigh.

  “So what happened?”

  “I just…I did everything she wanted, but it never seemed like enough. I stopped working for awhile, because I was pouring all my energy into new things that I thought might turn her on. It was like…”

  “Being strung out on drugs,” she finished for him, remembering.

  “Yeah…” he swallowed, and his hands eased, twitched a bit. “One night, we went out to dinner together. Just a regular thing, though I did the usual things. I made her wear something sexy I really liked, no panties so I could play with her pussy under the table. She liked me to make her flash the waiter, you know, lean forward over the menu so he could see everything, but she didn’t push as much of that, not that evening. She seemed really affectionate, not real pushy, and I could focus on her, enjoy her. But I noticed that night…we didn’t have much to talk about.

  “I realized we had gotten away from what it was that had brought us together and now it was all about sex. That night felt better, though,” he added wistfully. “It was more like us again. I had my arm around her, and through most of dinner, she cuddled against me and seemed happy with me, like she was pleased with me, and that felt good. It had been awhile since I’d felt that way.”

  Hadn’t it been so similar for her, never feeling as if she had pleased Jonathan, always anxious, on edge, not caring about career or personal identity any longer, too keyed up to think about the destructiveness of it? It shamed her to think of it now, how she signed herse
lf over to him, who she was, with barely a murmur or qualm. It was also frightening how she had done it, with no real sense of having done so. She had just hungered for acceptance, self affirmation, because she lost the ability to give that to herself. She had let Jonathan take it away. She and Josh, two insecure people with low self-esteem, uncovered and stripped bare by two people who needed to degrade them to feel worthwhile themselves.

  It was pathetically formulaic and painful to see the mirror, but she was strong enough to look. She held the cards now, and had been holding them, since she became true to herself again and said the words that made Jonathan walk away. Now she just had to figure out what the winning hand would be for Josh.

  “Tell me what she did.” Her spike heel slid against his instep, depressed slightly, just enough to cause another slight red mark, a warning. “Don’t keep me waiting, Josh.”

  The threat laced into the warm promise was a potent mix. His erection, waning a bit from the fluctuation of his emotions, jumped, began to swell so the straps bit into the tender skin again, and he groaned at the discomfort.

  She knew the torture of desolation and desire mixed. It tore the senses apart and the shields down. She hoped he didn’t need a further push. Marcus was a still presence somewhere to the left of her, and she could feel his tension.

  “We left the restaurant,” he said after awhile. “I had my arm wrapped around her. She nuzzled against me, then took my hand, pulling me into the shadows between two buildings so we could embrace. She was shy almost, where any other time she might have begged me into the alley in broad daylight and pleaded with me to use her where anyone could walk by at any moment and see her. But she wanted tenderness, and it…God, it was wonderful. I practically swallowed her, pushing her back against the bricks, but just to kiss her, hold her, feel her holding me.

  “I didn’t think about how unsafe it was where we were. I was supposed to protect her, and I didn’t even think about it. Something came at me out of the shadows. I was so stupid, not thinking about how we were in a not-so-great an area, though the restaurant was a nice enough one. Letting her pull me into an alley, for Chrissakes, and I was supposed to take care of her…” his lips curled in a sneer of self-loathing so bitter Lauren could taste it on her own tongue.