Truly Helpless: A Nature of Desire Series Novel Read online

Marius changed the angle of his penetration as she moved with him. The result was pleasurable, the stroke hitting the right spot inside. He added a finger, so he was using three, folded together. The man could fuck with his Mistresses’ heads, but when he wasn’t doing that kind of bullshit, he knew how to fuck them the right way, no matter what part of his anatomy he was using. She appreciated that in any man, but particularly this one, right now.

  He went at it with intense concentration, such that she felt like he was aware of every nerve ending in that channel, the ripples of sensation through her clit and labia, the quivering inside as he hit those wonderful erogenous zones. Her body lifted and fell, her head tipping back, though she made an effort to appear like she was just sitting in a car having a conversation with someone, not being finger-fucked into total bliss.

  She could hear the wetness of her cunt sucking on him, and a little moan broke from her as his thumb played music with her taut clit. If he’d only focused on the mechanics, he wouldn’t have tipped her over so fast, but his gaze clung to her expression, swept over her body, so obviously savoring her every reaction it took her even higher.

  “Your nipples are hard,” he muttered. “I want to bite them.”

  She could imagine him doing it, the edge of his teeth like they’d felt on her palm, his tongue following behind to ease the sting. What would it be like to remove all restraint with him, let him be as wild and uninhibited as his lust could drive him to be? To trust that it wouldn’t take them crashing into a brick wall like a fatal car wreck.

  She brought him closer with the hand gripping his neck as she pushed up harder into his touch, her gaze holding his, a breathy moan coming from her. His cock was a bar of steel against his jeans, and her cunt throbbed as if it could feel him there.

  “Please come for me, Mistress,” he whispered.

  “Kiss…” She didn’t get the rest of it out, but he understood. He dove on her mouth, his own restless, violent and demanding. Her climax surged forth, wresting a scream from her throat. Hot fluid gushed against his fingers. Putting her hand on his face again, she prolonged the kiss, her body dancing with his hand, rocking together in a slow, tight waltz as she drifted back down to earth.

  He laid his head on the seat back, his fingers still gliding inside of her in ways that had her shuddering with aftershocks. He greedily drank in every one of them with his intent expression.

  At last, her body settled. His hand went still but his fingers remained inside of her, a place she didn’t mind him being. She watched him, pleased with him, her body on a low simmer. His erection was still prominent against his jeans, registering his tension as he managed his own arousal. Holding it back at her command.

  He rested the heel of his hand on her bare stomach. He used his thumb to play with the tiny silver spiral dangling from the curved barbell of her navel piercing.

  “I love the way you feel,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I just want to stay like this.”

  “Taking you to work like that might be awkward,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t mind bringing you to class on a collar and leash and letting you curl up under my desk. Keep me entertained with that beautiful mouth when my students are taking a test.” The hot flash in his eyes gave her a wicked shot of pleasure. Brushing a short strand of hair along his forehead, she glanced down at his lap. A groan tore from him as she dropped her touch to give his engorged cock several firm strokes. “You keep it in for your Mistress,” she reminded him.

  “If she keeps doing that, it might prove difficult.”

  “Depends on how much you don’t want your dick twisted off,” she said, a threat and a tease at once. “Time to keep your hands to yourself, young man. I see the security check turning into the parking lot. The cameras probably told them there might be a couple out here exercising un-Christian thoughts.”

  He eased out of her. Though his erect state made him move with intriguing caution, he opened the glove compartment, producing a packet of damp wipes. “You can use these or, if you want, I can clean you with my mouth after he passes by. It shouldn’t take long enough to land us in trouble.”

  The idea sent one more hard shudder through her, but she took the wet wipes from him with an arch look. “You underestimate how long I plan to keep you down there once I have you between my legs, boy. You might be living on a diet of pussy until dawn.”

  “Sounds like I better fortify myself with some other nutrition then,” he said, plucking out one of the individually wrapped pieces of cake before she could stop him. She snatched for it and he tried to hold it out of reach in the small space, fending her off as she wrestled him for it. She would have tried a punch in his side to get him to lower his arm, but she was conscious of that bruising along his ribs and wouldn’t add to it. She rethought that when he resorted to tickling to defend his pillaging.

  “What…ah! Quit…asshole…” She was laughing, and he was grinning, the cake juggling between them as they both tried to secure it without crushing it. She snatched it back and tossed him a glare. “You are the rudest man I’ve ever met. Ask nicely.”

  “Please, Mistress, may I have some cake?” He said it with a straight face, a betraying hint of mischief in his smile. She sighed and handed it over.

  “Pain in my ass. That’s what you are.” She stroked his hair again as he settled in to eat the cake, and watched his strong profile.

  He was built like a man, top to bottom, thank the Goddess. But inside, there was so much little boy. She didn’t say that, but it puzzled her, and she really did want to ask some questions. She couldn’t ask about the animal cruelty charge, but thought she could find the truth a different way.

  “When did your father go to prison?”

  “When I was twelve. It took several years for his trial, and then he’s been on death row a long time while some anti-death penalty lawyers tried to appeal his case. A few months back, they told me it was a pretty sure thing the last appeal was going to fail. Like I should be sorry about that.” He scoffed.

  “Can I ask what he did?”

  “He raped and killed a woman. Stabbed her, strangled her, tortured her. Not in that order.”

  The comment came out flat, though he’d obviously intended to sound flippant. She gave him points for not being able to pull it off. Marius looked as if the cake had become particle board. He picked up his Coke and took a swallow. “At the end of the trial, he told reporters he would have been a bigger serial killer in Florida than Collins or Dahmer. Said it like it was the world’s loss he was too stupid to avoid getting caught on his first kill.”

  She remembered realizing he had no frame of reference for having a favorite band as a teenager. In much the same way, she had no frame of reference for this. Not as his Mistress, nor as a lover, or even a friend. As he spoke, he was becoming more remote, drawing back into himself again. He wrapped up the rest of the cake and set it aside on the dash, returning to a broody stare at the structure.

  “What time do you go in?”

  “In about ten minutes. I go in that way, over there.” He nodded. “They’ll take me to the witness gallery when it’s time.”

  He didn’t want to be touched now. He was slouched against the other side of the car, elbow propped on his knee, Coke dangling from his fingers. Regina turned toward him on her hip again, drawing her legs up farther onto the seat.

  “Did he call you Marius or Duncan?”

  Surprise flickered in Marius’s eyes, but he answered her. “Neither. Called me boy. Not like you do it. Sounds like a different word when you say it.” He tilted his head and looked at her, a small victory, though his eyes seemed distant. “I like how you use it. The shadow called me Duncan. She was scared of him.”

  “The shadow?”

  “Yeah. She was scared of everything. If the house was clean and I had the basics, she stayed in her room, with all the lights off, in the bed. I thought she was a live-in maid or nanny, hired help going through the motions. One time when I was five, I asked my dad who my mom was
, where she was. I asked that in the kitchen, in front of her. He thought that was hilarious.”

  He jammed the Coke in a plastic cup holder. “This is fucked up. Go home, Regina. Please.”

  All of it dropped. The submissive, the charmer; every layer she’d seen covering him since this had begun between them. What she saw was a tired man whose eyes looked like they belonged to an eighty-year-old. “Really. I need you to go.”

  “I think that’s the last thing you need. I’ll go sit in my car if you want, but I’m not going.” She spoke firmly, calmly. Not aggressive. Not right now. Just resolute. “When you come out, I’m going to be here, as I said. I’ll be anything you need then, even if it’s someone to sit with you without saying a word.”

  He stared back through the windshield, and she saw his throat work. “Ok. But…do me a favor.”

  “Anything, sweet boy. Except leave.”

  He closed his eyes and was silent a long moment. Then he opened them. “Will you make me breakfast again sometime? With those cinnamon buns?”

  “Yeah.” Reaching across the console, she ran her knuckles along his biceps, up to his short shirt sleeve. She caressed beneath it, knowing she was touching the armor tattoo. The cinnamon buns were the canned kind she broke open on the counter, peeled apart and put in the oven, with a packet of icing to melt over them when they came out, but she agreed, they were good. “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  She pulled his keys out of the ignition and tucked them away into her bra. “I keep these for now. All right?”

  He eyed her. “Putting them there only makes me want to take them back.”

  She squeezed his arm. “Anytime you feel lucky.”

  He sighed and shook his head, pulling away as he opened his car door. “Not today.”

  She thought he’d walk toward the prison entrance without another word, but he circled around to her window, dropped to his heels and folded his arms on the sill.

  “If we’d gotten together a couple months ago, there’d have been time for me to add you to the guest list,” he said thoughtfully. “They did say I could bring a date. Though not in those exact words.”

  She didn’t rise to the bait, twisting her fingers into the collar of his shirt as a warning, and to touch him. “You don’t have to do this. Nothing says you have to watch him die.”

  “I know. But I need to know he’s dead. I need...” He put his forehead down against the side of the car. She laid her hand over the back of his skull and kissed the top of it.

  “It’s okay. Even totally-not-okay situations like this can be okay, once you get through them. It’s just the getting through.”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to feel anything. But I’m afraid I’m going to feel too much, and it’s going to spill over onto you. Don’t let me use this against you,” he added, vehemently.

  “Let me worry about me.”

  “Doesn’t work that way, does it? You’re worrying about me, and I’m not worth it.”

  She lifted his face to meet her gaze. “Yes, you goddamn, fucking are,” she said softly. “When you’re not being a total asshole.”

  He offered her a ghost of a smile. “Which is most the time.”

  “Even so. It may be a small window, but during those five minutes a day, you are very much worth it.”

  He clasped her wrist and kissed her palm, holding his face against it for a brief second. “When I kissed you before, your hand was trembling. I liked that. It made me feel like a far better person than I am.”

  He rose and let her go. “See you in a while.”

  Now that she had more information, it wasn’t difficult to find news articles on his father. Marius had changed his last name, or perhaps he’d used his mother’s, not an uncommon decision for the offspring of a well-publicized death row inmate. Donald Eric Larabee had been caught within a day of murdering Sally Montrose, a convenience store clerk he kidnapped and tortured for two days in a storage facility before strangling and stabbing her to death.

  A little more digging turned up a reference to him in a book on Florida serial killers. Because of Larabee’s boast Marius had mentioned, the author, Mel Wilham, had used Larabee as a dramatic footnote to hint at how many serial killers were perhaps first-time murderers caught before they could “actualize” themselves.

  Her lip curled at the corporate buzzword. She’d bought and downloaded the book, and made herself read the chapter based on the interview Wilham had done with Larabee. One key and chilling paragraph held her, turning the cold knot in her stomach into jagged rock.

  “Yeah, I had a kid. He never had the stomach for it. Made him watch when I practiced on stray cats, their kittens, the occasional dog, but the little shit couldn’t even get it up for that. Preferred me to beat him rather than cause a squeak out of something else.”

  The book had been published about a decade ago, after Marius’s cruelty charge. She wanted a marker in that sealed juvie file, because this confirmed Marius had done nothing to any of those animals. He’d been found burying them, that was all. Had that been his father’s mandate, or had Marius done it himself, expressing the remorse his father never would?

  She wished she could go in there and administer the injection herself. Or set aside the ridiculous notion of humane execution and just use a baseball bat with nails driven through it. She noticed Wilham had added that Larabee’s son had disappeared off the grid years before and could not be located to contribute to the work. Larabee’s wife was living with her sister in Arizona somewhere and had likewise refused any comment.

  So at the time of the book’s publication, “the shadow” was alive. The detached way Marius referred to her, as if he’d never had the experience of a mother, even though she was living in the same house, was as disturbing as the rest. Not only did he have no obvious emotional connection to her, his mother hadn’t expended any apparent effort toward creating one.

  There was a picture of Larabee. He had Marius’s beautiful eyes, his strong jaw and good looks. She hated that for Marius. How often did he look in the mirror and see this monster?

  She closed her laptop. The driver of the Hummer had emerged not too long ago and departed. He looked like some drug dealer’s right hand guy, all decked out in gangster wear. He’d made kissy noises at her as he got into the vehicle. She’d given him a steely gaze and her middle finger, been called a cunt, and he’d peeled off. She’d moved her car next to Marius’s, but had preferred to stay here, in his vehicle. Smoothing her hand over the head rest and his seat back, she thought of his body pressed there.

  She had a reputation as a practical and unsentimental Mistress, but that didn’t mean her heart couldn’t bleed. She thought about what he’d said. Don’t let me use this against you. He was self-aware enough to know that he might twist any sympathy or pity against her in a vulnerable moment. She had more faith in him than that. And in herself. The more she knew, the less opportunities she was giving him to take those shots. The less opportunities he had, the less he would try, and who he really was, really wanted to be, would start to come through. She had faith in it, because she was already seeing evidence of it. Those five minutes a day were expanding.

  The armor beneath the skin. She smiled, thinking of his firm flesh. That tattoo really was more appropriate than he realized.

  Leaning her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes. She’d take a short power nap, because she had a feeling it was going to be a long night.

  She woke a few minutes before he emerged, as if some second sense had warned her it was time. As he moved across the parking lot and drew close enough for her to see his face, she could feel it almost before he reached her. A miasma around him, so potent it was like an impenetrable fog, or a sucking mud that would pull in everyone who got too close.

  “Well then. We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?” she mused. “Get to it, girlfriend.”

  She emerged from his car, locking it, and pocketed the keys. As he reached the driver�
��s door, he put one hand on the handle, and started fishing for keys in his jeans pocket with the other.

  “Duncan,” she said firmly. He looked up, startled. He hadn’t remembered she was going to stay. Or maybe he hadn’t expected her to do so. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice hollowed out. “I’m just going to drive home.”

  “I’m glad you’re fine. But no, you’re not. Get in my car.”

  She went to her Mercedes and waited him out. As she did, she put his keys under her seat, a hard to reach spot and not the first place he’d look.

  She tapped out a song on the steering wheel, humming to herself. He might refuse to get in her car. Hitchhike his way home. If he tried, she debated the merits of knocking him on his ass with a glancing blow of the bumper to get him in the car, but ruled it out. It might scratch the car’s paint.

  About five minutes later, he opened the passenger door and got into the car. He gazed forward, as expressive as a crash test dummy. No anger, no sadness. Just blank.

  She leaned over him, pressing her breast into his chest to pull his seatbelt across him and latch it. As she drew back, she caressed his thigh. His eyes swiveled to her, flickering with something. Signs of life. She wanted to kiss him, hold him, but that wasn’t what he needed.

  She’d already programmed the GPS for the hotel where she’d made reservations for the night. It was about thirty minutes away, because she wanted to put a decent amount of distance between him and the energy of this place, even though they’d have to return to retrieve his car in the morning.

  She didn’t ask him questions, didn’t speak at all. His gaze had returned to the windshield and he stayed in that position, not moving, his hands loose on his thighs. A couple times she saw them clench in reaction to whatever thoughts were going through his mind. Energy was getting denser around him, a feeling of impending detonation. He was locked down, likely strapped to a powder keg of emotions too strong and conflicting to let loose.

  She remembered the night he’d been kicked out of The Zone. He’d gone straight to the fighting ring. Everyone had their coping mechanisms. Belatedly, she realized she should have made a reservation at a fleabag hotel where broken sheetrock and scarred furniture was part of the décor.