Hard Way (31 page)

Eyes open, heart pounding, he twisted the end of the vibrator. Its seemingly innocent hum was like throwing the switch to an electrical grid. Sunny rewarded him with a scream that ripped him open. Pure, unfiltered lust hit him like a roundhouse to the gut.

Purity, yes. Instinct,
yes
.

He pounced onto the bed, tossed the vibrator across the room and stripped the barriers that kept her from seeing him, hearing him. She blinked against the sudden revelation. Her dark eyes were still hazy, half crazed.

“Fuck me,” she gasped.

“You think you’re in charge here? Still? So goddamn stubborn.” He hovered over her, but his dick was thick and heavy, pulsing, resting on the smooth swath of skin above her navel.

“You want to hear me scream. Then make me scream again.”

That he was able to keep up this pretense was a hellish, delicious miracle. “I will. When
I
want it.”

“Oh, Christ. Please. Enough.”

“Enough of what?”

“You talked to me.” Her voice was nothing but a series of rasps. “In my ear. I’m begging you like you knew I would. Cunt, ass, mouth. Yours.
Please
, Liam.”

He pushed sweaty hair back from her temples. Had she been any more aware of her surroundings, any more in control of her senses, she would’ve seen how badly he trembled. “My slut.”

“Slut,” she whispered on a shudder.

“Do you remember what I said I’d do if you moved?”

“Gag me. Your cock. Fuck, Liam. Give me that.
Anything.
”

He’d never heard her like this, as open and free as he was. It wasn’t her fight he’d been craving. He’d wanted to break her shell. She fought every day, one way or another—be it law school or legal cases or elections, or smiling her way through a military function where the color of her skin was cause for mistrust.

Fighting him was another battle to be won. Nothing new, except for their one-on-one ferocity.

This
was ferocious.
God, yes
. All-consuming. The Ice Queen of Bangalore was a raging, thrashing mass of nerves and desires. She’d always held something back, even from him. Not anymore.

What would she do if he got up and walked out? Even that reaction would be honest. Complete meltdown. She’d cussed at him, screaming, shredding her wrists by tugging the ropes. But to leave her would breach the trust they’d steadily established when playing so roughly. No matter how he taunted, he was made of those same raw, twitching nerves, and he would satisfy his wife. Any man who could walk away from her was made of titanium and granite.

Which meant, yes, it was time to make her scream again.

He lay fully on her. Their height difference meant his cock was a hot pipe pressing her stomach.

“Be still. Right now.”

She shuddered from head to heel. He felt every shift of skin and muscle and bit back a groan.

“And be quiet,” he growled.

She pressed her lips together. The determination on her face was mind-blowing. Sure enough, she managed to calm her breathing. Nearly silent.

Dash had never felt more powerful. He tucked his head down by her ear and conjured the softest, most intimate whisper he could manage. “You’re my slut.”

“Yes.” The word was equally soft but firm, as if all that pent-up breathing only needed permission to burst loose.

“You’re my wife.”

“Yes.” Her eyes rolled closed on a sigh that sounded very much like his relief felt.

He bucked his hips. The gratifying part was how she bit her lower lip and didn’t move. “Which hole should I use, wife?”

“No choice. Yours.”

“Not so stubborn now. Tell me, what are you supposed to remember?”

“Quiet. Still.”

He scrambled down her body and put her to the test. Fuck, he put himself to the test. He was three heartbeats away from coming on the comforter like a kid with his first erection. That she didn’t move until he forced her legs apart was what he needed to keep it in check.

She was too wet to fuck. How insane was that? So he licked and sucked. He reveled in her taste. The ropes creaked a telltale sound as she tensed against that implacable hold, but her lips were mashed together in a fierce white line. Her eyelids were equally tight.

He dove back between her legs, using his tongue to find her secrets—not the kind she spoke, but the kind her body revealed. Micro jerks and twitches. She couldn’t hide those from him, no matter how good she was trying to be.

Scraping his jaw stubble along the inside of her thighs nearly undid her. She arched her neck and inhaled with an open mouth. This was violence of another kind, all in the mind. Dash had done to himself what he was doing to her. He couldn’t hear for the blood pounding in his skull. The parts of his body that had nothing to do with his tongue or his dick had lost all sensation. Now he couldn’t even speak. He was action and reaction. She was reaction and action.

Free. Free us both.

He knelt between her legs and hooked his forearms behind her knees. Dark eyes burst open. Their gazes collided.

“No more rules, Sunny.”

He drove home. Cock in cunt. Thrust and withdrawal and thrust again. She shrieked. The knot on the rope ends must’ve slipped because her hands flew free. The tension they’d built turned him into a crazed, craving…
thing
.

Once she found his eyes again, Sunny never looked away. Her lips were red and puffy for having held in those sounds—for him. The skin at her wrists was abraded. Every thrust pulsed pleasure out from his dick in fast, sharp spikes. His senses were back. Magnified. He could see individual flecks of color in her irises, even as his hips met hers in a relentless climb toward release.

But not yet.

He pumped once and stopped, deep inside her, fighting his body’s howling instinct to keep pounding her until he filled her cunt with his come. Before she could fight him again, he grabbed the ends of the rope. Manhandling her was simple when she was so strung out and broken. He wrapped the rope around her arms and shoulders—nothing tight, nothing that would hold her if she tried to break free.

“Yes,” she whispered, barely audible.

Permission. Like she’d given him from the start.

He took a last glance down at her body and shivered from the rightness of it. Golden flushed skin. Hair damp with sweat. Pert breasts with nipples like light brown pebbles. A white rope bound her arms in a crisscross over her stomach. The illusion of control. The illusion of ownership.

The illusion of rape.

It was all he needed.

Dash bowed low over her, forehead to her sternum. He held the ends of the ropes in one hand, tangled up in the mass of her hair. He shoved the other hand between her hips and the mattress, trapping her, binding them together. His body did the rest. He was a piston, a machine set to one purpose. Fuck her. Make her come. Make him come.

In that order.

Her pussy sucked at him with each withdrawal, pulling him back home. Every time he thought about the ropes, he tightened them. The hemp cut between them. She gasped against the crown of his head, with her lips in his hair. “Harder, Liam. Here with me.
Harder
.”

Prick or the ropes, he couldn’t tell. Just gave it more. More of him. Until there wasn’t anything left.

“Yes. My Sunny, fuck.
Yes.
”

Her scream wasn’t so clean and pretty as when he’d controlled her reactions. This was stripped and ragged and the most erotic thing he’d ever heard. The muscles deep in her pussy clamped down as she came. He had to push past the barrier her body created. White sprayed across his vision. He burst from the inside out. Nothing remained but the knowledge that she was all around him, would always own him in every way he tried to own her. There was no control. There was no chaos. Only two imperfect people trying to hold on.

The pulses and shock waves of his pleasure were hard to release. His mind was throbbing and didn’t work right. He only heard chanting.
Yes. Mine. Wife. Sunny.

Slowly, he lifted from her splayed body. She was a mess. With tenderness he rarely let himself feel, he set about caring for her. The ropes went first. Although his bones felt like whipped cream, he found a washcloth in the bathroom and wet it with warm water. Petting her face, her torso, her breasts—she moaned. Satisfaction of a different kind.

As gently as he could, he cleaned her damaged wrists. The skin wasn’t broken, but it was damn close.

“Don’t,” she said softly.

He stopped cleaning and tensed. “Okay.”

“No, not my wrists. Look at me.”

Apparently he was a damn coward after the fact. He took a deep breath and forced himself to meet her eyes. She was…luminous, and as free as he’d felt in those moments before claiming her.

Claimed.
What bullshit.

They’d shared a fuck. That was all he knew for sure.

Yet her gentle, dazed, awed expression belied all his doubts.

“I meant don’t start pulling away now. You didn’t do anything wrong.
We
didn’t. What we did was beautiful.”

“Look at your wrists.”

“Collateral damage.” Her smile was as enigmatic as always yet tinged with a sort of humor. “You said it on the recording. You helped me let everything go. Tell me, Liam. God, tell me I wasn’t alone in that.”

He reveled in her open expression. “Not alone.”

“Then finish doing what you think needs doing. I need to be in your arms.”

Dash found a lopsided grin. The washcloth hit the carpet somewhere over his left shoulder. He gathered her close until their heartbeats and their respiration matched. Slow, calm, satisfied.

She smiled against his neck. “Tell me you didn’t break the TV when you flung that vibrator.”

“I can’t tell you that,” he said, mock earnest. “I’d need to lift my head.”

“Never mind.” She petted his chest hair and sighed deeply. “Can I tell you something?”

“Hm?”

“I love you.”

He was hit with that roundhouse yet again, but right against his heart. The ropes he’d bound her with had nothing on his embrace. Just…clinging. And she clung back. They were holding on to each other like lifelines, but not some desperate, last-ditch thing. More like they’d be each other’s lifelines forever.

“Sunny,” he rasped against her temple. “My Sunny. I love you too. Tell me what this means. What you really mean.”

She pushed up on her elbow with what looked like considerable effort. Her eyes were sleepy, lazy. Sated. She curled her lips into the smile that frustrated him and assured him both. That smile was
her
.

“It means I love you. I don’t want a divorce. This…
us
. We need time and work, but I’m not giving up.” She took another deep breath and with a nod—a solid nod as if convincing herself of something—she leaned down to kiss him.

Sweet. Beautiful. Something priceless after they’d tried their damnedest to break one another.

When she pulled back, she nodded again. Trepidation skittered over Dash’s skin, although he couldn’t for the life of him understand why.

“I’ll call Jake tomorrow. He’ll fly to DC by himself. I don’t want him, Liam. I never really did. I was just so scared I was looking for any way out.”

There it was. The thing. The thing that was
off
.

“Jake.”

“I have to be honest, right? That meant saying that I love you, and saying that you’re the only man I want. The only man I’ve ever wanted. We don’t have a shot at this if we can’t be truthful.”

She was giving him all the words he’d dreamed of hearing, but foul, sunken anger was bubbling in his gut. That anger stole what should’ve been the first words of their fresh start.

“Jake.” His voice was as dead now as it had been that first day, when she’d dropped a nuclear bomb in their living room. “You were going to fly out with him? Does that mean he’s been here? In Vegas?”

She lowered her dark eyes, which were shaded by thick lashes. For the first time in all the ten years they’d known one another, past all their obstacles and sacrifices, Sunny looked embarrassed. She looked ashamed.

“Yes, he’s here. He got back from his conference in L.A. earlier this month. Aside from one trip to Miami, he’s been here the whole time.”

Chapter Thirty

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Sunny knew what she’d done was wrong. It was the truth and it was a truth that he’d deserved to know, just as she’d known it was wrong to keep that from him.

Liam went deadly still. His gaze fixated on her with burning fierceness, although her skin was chilled. Only moments ago, amazing lassitude had made her believe everything was right with the world. With
their
world.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her elbows around them. That didn’t calm the way her stomach roiled.

Liam hadn’t said anything—just watched her, a distorted echo of the way he must’ve watched her while she’d been tied up. After a long minute, he retrieved his pants and hitched them up, hiding the delineated angles of his hips. He sat on the arm of the couch.