Submissive Angel: A BDSM Romance Novella Read online

  When he broke the kiss, Robert ran his hand down Ange’s forearm. Something was tangled with the lights and red ribbon, something he’d missed when wrapping Ange’s wrists because of the profusion of ribbon curls, and because his focus had been on other things. Now, though, he saw a bracelet, a chain of construction paper and glitter, like they had on the tree decorated with homemade ornaments.

  As he noticed it, Ange flushed to his blond roots. If his arm had been free, Robert suspected he would have tried to hide it behind his back.

  “It’s nothing. One of the kids got the idea for making Jesus bracelets during the craft hour today.”

  It had been Ange’s idea to turn the spare storeroom into a place to hold weekly one-hour craft workshops, teaching children and adults how to make their own old-fashioned toys out of inexpensive materials. Robert had picked up books on it and Ange brought the designs to life. It was a good way to highlight the store’s toys as well, since so many of them were made by craftsmen with nothing more than raw materials and creative minds, no dependence on computer chips or batteries.

  “It’s okay. I’m not opposed to the idea.” Robert raised a brow, puzzled. Ange knew Robert was Christian, though he was more spiritual than religious. “So you made your own with the kids. Show me.”

  Ange hesitated. “It was stupid.”

  “No.” Robert studied his uncomfortable expression. “You think I’ll think it’s stupid. Show it to me. Now, Ange.”

  Robert could simply lift Ange’s wrists, holding onto the bonds the Christmas lights formed, but he was making a different point. His sub wouldn’t hide anything from him.

  A muscle jumped in Ange’s jaw, then he held out his arms. Now Robert put his palm beneath Ange’s elevated wrists, giving them support, his fingers closing around Ange’s hands as he studied the bracelet.

  The links were smaller in diameter than the chain on the tree, but large enough he could make out what was on them. Each link had a word on it, embellished with some glitter. Savior. Lover. Best Friend. Master. His. The precise yet innocuous underlines formed a word. Roberts.

  Robert stared at it, then lifted his gaze to Ange, who was squirming without obvious movement. “I couldn’t think of a word that had an apostrophe,” Ange said lamely. “It was something to do while the kids were making theirs. I know it seems kind of juvenile.”

  Robert stepped into him, his arm snaking around to grip three rows of lights that crossed his back. The bite of the lines into Ange’s chest and hips brought his eyes up to Robert’s face.

  “Yeah, it does.” Taking a firm grip on the kid’s hair, Robert pulled his head to the side so he could put his mouth to Ange’s jaw, then his throat. When he started laying hot, sucking kisses there, Ange let out a whistling, unsteady breath. Dropping his hands to Ange’s ass, Robert pulled him flush against his cock, holding him there with a bruising, kneading grip. It broke Ange’s control, had him undulating against Robert in a fucking irresistible way, those wild movements increasing as Robert kept sucking, biting harder on his neck. Ange breathed expletives, bound hands opening and closing against Robert’s shirt where they were pressed against his lower abdomen. Robert bet his jeans were marked with the viscous fluid leaking from the slit of Ange’s cock. He’d enjoy making him pay for that.

  When he lifted his head, studied his handiwork, he nodded, satisfied. Then he met Ange’s dazed gaze. “That’s a hickey. Everyone coming to the store will know someone’s marked you. That’s juvenile, too.” His lips curved. “Every time I see it, I’m going to get hard and want to do it to the other side of your neck. At lunch, I’ll probably make you take your pants down and I’ll do it to both your ass cheeks.”

  Ange blinked, then his green eyes shone with such an eager response, Robert knew he might be in danger of an involuntary reaction of his own if he let Ange’s arousal build fast, too soon. So he straightened.

  “Be still, love.” He began to unwrap Ange, starting at the wrists and working backward, noting the grooves the cords had put in his tender skin, the reddened spots of heat where the bulbs had pressed against him. When he was done, he balled up the string of lights, tossed it in the box. He’d untangle it later. Or his very helpful employee would.

  “We’re going to the craft room.” Taking Ange by the elbow, he guided him, sensing his dancer was not as steady as he usually was. Robert savored the look of Ange naked as a newborn, the heavy bounce of his enormous erection against his testicles as they crossed the main show room. He took the hallway that led to the space they’d carved out for the craft room between the storage and office areas.

  He saw evidence there of Ange’s work on the tree of homemade ornaments, the task he’d probably been doing before he’d had the urge to dance. Tape, glue, glitter, and paper were scattered over the worktable. They kept a handful of vinyl mats stacked in the corner in case younger children required naps while their older siblings created. Robert pointed to them. “Put two of those on the floor.”

  Ange obeyed, his handsome bare form moving without self-consciousness before Robert’s appreciative gaze. When he returned, Robert put a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down to his knees. “Lie down on your stomach.”

  If the statue of a young Roman god stepped off his pedestal and stretched out his marble body as fluidly as water, he’d look like this. Ange had no tattoos or piercings, a rarity these days, but Robert was glad of it.

  Moving to the bin of toys and craft supplies Ange collected from various sources, Robert pulled out two scratched and faded wooden hobbyhorses. He unscrewed the heads and set them aside, gauging the riding sticks to be between three and four feet long. Beneath the workbench he found a handful of Lincoln Logs and a coil of half-inch nylon rope.

  When he saw Ange watching him, hands folded beneath his cheek, he set aside his supplies, dropped to his heels by Ange’s head. Those green eyes tilted up toward his face, his gaze so attentive, expression so...open. “That frog move you do. Where your feet are spread, and you squat until your knees are ninety-degree angles.”

  “Grand plié, second position.” There was a smile in Ange’s voice. Robert ran his fingers through the blond hair, ruffling it.

  “Yeah, that. Do it now, while you’re lying down.”

  Ange’s legs parted and then slid upward as he’d been commanded, showing Robert the smooth ovals of his testicles, shifting inside the sac. He also got a good glimpse of Ange’s anus, a quivering pucker he imagined lubing up for his penetration. God, when was the last time he’d held onto an erection this long? Between that and the hickey, he really did feel like a teenager.

  Focus. He’d told Ange he wanted to wrap his gift. The Christmas lights were just the beginning. He remembered now what it was like, having all the time in the world to do things like this, as if time stopped when the click happened, that key connection between him and the sub dependent on his demands. Except he’d never felt this quiet inner warmth with Freddie. There’d been more of a raw urgency to it then. Like the acceptable side of violence, fucking passionate. But this had a quiet, peaceful core, orbited by an extraordinarily intense arousal. Not only could Ange trust him, he could trust Ange. It was a revelation, the vital difference in the two men.

  Ange’s fingers curled, a tension in his shoulders. Robert also remembered what it was to notice those things, all the subtle emotional and physical details that told him the state of someone under his care. Under his command.

  With Ange’s legs bent in that “frog move,” his hips open, pressed to the floor, he’d created an impressively horizontal line from one knee to the other. Pressing the sticks against the underside of his open thighs, it was easy for Robert to use the exposed testicles as the center point. As he put the sticks in front of and behind that appealing, heavy sac, he used two of the Lincoln Logs as spacers on either side. Then he began to wrap the improvised ball clamp and spreader bar to Ange’s thighs.

  He made it snug enough that his subject would get the anxious, titillating sense of compres
sion, but not so snug that it would pinch Ange’s balls off. He had uses for them, after all.

  “You tell me if it hurts too much, Ange. You promise.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  He ran his knuckles over a cold butt cheek. “I like hearing you call me that. Too much.”

  “I wanted to call you that the first time I met you.”

  Robert lifted his gaze to find Ange staring at him with that hungry look again. “Close your eyes,” Robert said gruffly. “I want you to feel. Jesus, I’m going to turn the heat up. Your ass is too cold.”

  “There are other ways to warm it up. Master.” Ange said that to the mat, in that docile, I’m-not-trying-to-tell-you-what-to-do-but-here’s-a-helpful-suggestion tone. Robert had to bite back a smile.

  “I’ll see about that after I finish this. For now, shut up.”

  When he was done, the two poles were against the back of Ange’s thighs, the rope holding them all the way from the tender inside of one knee to the other. His testicles were clamped between them, spacers aligned all along the sticks in case one set failed. The rope’s snug wrap kept the spacers in place. Ange was helpless, immobilized, and totally vulnerable. A hugely arousing state for a sub who trusted his Master. An even more arousing one for the Master himself.

  Robert finished with an intricate series of cross ties around Ange’s hips, leaving his ass open for whatever he wanted to demand from it. Ange’s chest was expanding and contracting with shallow breaths.

  “You’re pretty hard right now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Master. Oh God…” Ange groaned as Robert tightened the sticks one more degree. “No more. Please.”

  “That’s as far as we go. But it reminds you whose gift you are, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes, Master. Yours.”

  “I’m not sure. You don’t listen as well as you should. I’m thinking we need a lesson about that.”

  His words gave Ange that sexy all-over quiver again. Still, Robert paused, thinking it over. The case he needed was in the store’s safe, and he hadn’t pulled it out since...Freddie had left? Jesus. Had it really been that long since he’d had sex with anything other than his own hand? He’d had a couple dates, set up by those same acquaintances he’d tapped for Ange, but he just couldn’t seem to get anything from it. Once Ange had started working for him, he hadn’t had any interest. Guess his heart and dick already knew what it had taken his fucked-up brain too long to understand.

  Whoa. Getting ahead of yourself here, lad. Even so, Robert rose. The safe was in the back office, adjoining the craft room, so Ange didn’t have to be out of his sight. Flipping the dial for the combination, he popped open the door, slid the case out. As he stared down at it, he realized it represented everything that was before. Before his parents died, before Freddie disappeared... In short, it had belonged to a man with a wholly different view of life.

  His initials were engraved in the top, and there was a strap so he could carry it to the club he used to frequent, the one that held no appeal to him now. But the craft room, with its scents of childish creation, the man naked and bound on the floor, made him want to open it.

  Squatting by Ange’s side once again, Robert saw his green gaze course over his own thighs, linger on the groin area revealed by his splayed leg position. Ange pressed his lips together, moistening them. It was impossible not to imagine his mouth on Robert, and from there Robert took it even further. He saw himself boxing Ange’s arms behind his back with another rope wrap, then putting him on his knees under the register counter. Throughout the day, whenever, however Robert had the urge, he’d just open his trousers and make Ange suck him off. His sub would get so hard and greedy his cock would leak onto his thighs, because of course Robert would keep him naked and wanting.

  Probably not a good reality, given that Mrs. Fitzgerald and Horatio might keel over in co-dependent shock, and the strain on Ange’s joints for an eight-hour workday would be extreme, but as a fantasy, it was a hell of a good one.

  “Is that your box, like in The Littlest Angel?” Ange started to lift his head, but Robert put a hand on it, held it down, a command to be still. Ange settled, though his gaze remained curious.

  Robert took out the pair of padded cuffs, the matching collar that went with it. Ange’s expression was immediately swept by that same yearning look he’d had when Robert had been wrapping the lights. The boy was fair starved to be collared. It made Robert think of what was tucked in the bottom of that box, but that was going way too fast. If not for Ange, for Robert himself.

  “Lift your head.” He ran the collar around Ange’s throat, buckled it closed, and ran two fingers beneath it to be sure it wasn’t too tight.

  He put his hand on the construction paper bracelet on Ange’s wrist. “I’m going to remove this so it doesn’t get damaged.”

  Robert un-taped one of the cuffs, reconnected it and laid the bracelet on the table, aware of Ange’s attention upon how reverently he treated the evidence of his sub’s devotion. Then he put the padded cuffs on Ange’s wrists and guided his hands behind his head, snapping the cuffs into a lock with each other before he hooked them to the back of the collar. Now Ange’s cheek was pressed to the mat, elbows bent and dropped on either side of his head. “I want those hands out of the way.”

  Rising, he put his foot on Ange’s bare backside, bearing down so his pelvis was pushed down further. From his dancing, the boy had a mouth-watering flexibility. Plus, the pressure increased the hold of the ball clamp. Ange let out another groan.

  “I’ll be back. I’ll just be in the next room.” In fact, he wasn’t gone long, knowing what he was seeking. It was a wall decoration, an ornament from Victorian times, but a very functional one. Ange jumped at the crack of the buggy whip, though it happened about two feet above his body.

  “We were talking about ways to warm that cold ass of yours,” Robert said pleasantly. “How many times have I told you to alarm the store when you’re here alone at night?”

  He could tell Ange hadn’t expected that. “When I’m awake, I don’t need—”

  It had been a while since he’d used the whip, but at one time it had been an extension of his hand rather than a fixture on the wall. That first crack had re-familiarized him as much as necessary. He landed the pop right on the meat of Ange’s ass and won a satisfying yelp. Ange’s fingers flexed against the back of his head, his ass rising and then jerking back down in reaction.

  “Not what I asked. How many times?” Robert repeated patiently.

  “A lot.”

  “Hmm. Tempting. But I’m going to say it’s been eight times. Why don’t you count that off for me, prove you remember? If you’re not screaming like a little girl when I’m done, we’ll talk about what you need. And why you keep leaving that system off when you follow every other command I give you like it’s the word of God.”

  He thought he heard Ange mutter “Fuck” into the mat, one of the few times he’d ever heard the boy curse, but those gorgeous buttocks flexed, ready for the punishment. Robert let him have it.

  “One.” Ange didn’t scream, but the word had a strangled, strained sound to it. On the second one, he sank his teeth into the mat, leaving some interesting teeth marks for the kids and their parents to ponder.

  “Three...four…” Every muscle from shoulders to thigh rippled, shuddered, constricted, and then his backside rose to take even more. Robert practically had to wipe the drool off his own chin.

  “Five...fuck. Six!”

  On that one, Ange was in danger of biting through the mat to the wood floor. Whether he knew it or not, he’d had enough.

  For now.

  Chapter Three

  Setting the whip aside, Robert squatted down next to him again. It wasn’t in everyone to react with pleasure to what he’d just done, even Ange. For that reason, he gave the next order with the anticipation and hope a kid carried on Christmas morning, wanting to know what was under the tree.

  “Lift up. Let me feel that cock th
at belongs to me.”

  Ange obeyed, his avid gaze on Robert’s face. Robert reached under Ange’s body, closed his hand around the boy’s dick. Holy Mother of God. Like the Grinch, it seemed something on his sub had increased three sizes, but it hadn’t been his heart. Ange’s heart was already bigger than the rest of him, though, so Robert had no problem with this. No problem at all.

  “Please... Master.”

  Robert saw the glisten of tears. Yeah, a hard whipping did that to some subs at first, even the strongest ones. Over the past few months, he’d learned Ange was an odd mixture of fragile sweetness and street tough. So seeing those tears wrenched his heart like nothing else. Sliding to his hip, he stretched out next to Ange, covering his trembling hands with one of his own. Ange’s attention riveted on his mouth, his eyes begging for it. Robert denied them both, though it was hard as hell to do so.

  “I’m not a kind Master, Ange. I make my sub beg, and beg hard, before I give him relief.”

  “Even at Christmastime?”

  “Scrooge had nothing on me.” Robert caught a finger in the collar wrapped around Ange’s throat and tugged on it. As he did that, he wrapped two fingers over the connector between the cuffs on Ange’s wrists. He swept his thumb along Ange’s jaw.

  “You think you don’t need that security system because you’re a grown man. A fucking gorgeous, one-of-a-kind man. But you’re also mine. If you don’t want me to go to prison for killing someone, you’ll take preventive measures to protect the ass that belongs to me. Because if anyone ever broke in here and hurt you, I would kill them.”