Caged (6 page)

If he were whole, he would long since have leaned down to lift her into his arms.  As it was, he had to stand, which wasn’t easy, lean down and grasp her arms just above the elbows to encourage her to get up.  By the time he was able to stretch out—utterly exhausted on the bed not only from all his efforts, but also from the terror her visitors had inspired—she was back where he always put her.

As much as Cage knew they needed to leave this place as soon as possible, he figured they had at least a day or so before they came back. They’d probably watch the place for a while, as he would do if he were in their place, to see if her fabled husband returned.  And he needed that time to heal as much as he could before he set out again—this time plus one.

Not really caring any longer what he did to her, Rachel voluntarily put her arms above her head, waiting for him to bind her again. Cage did so, but her easy acquiescence made him very suspicious.  He did make sure that the gun was well away from her, should she somehow get free.  He didn’t like her frame of mind right now at all.

Not that his body was taking any notice whatsoever.  It wanted more of her—much more of her, and the sooner the better. 

She hadn’t even bothered to turn onto her side away from him, but he turned on his to face her, leaning his head on his hand and reaching out to tug the comforter over her when he noticed that her nipples were peaked and there was gooseflesh on her arms.  “You should tell me if you’re cold or hot. I’ll adjust the covers,” he chided.

Rachel continued to stare straight up at the ceiling, as if it held the answers to the meaning of life.

Cage found himself entirely unable to stop from tipping her face towards his for a soft kiss.

Her mind screamed, “No!” angrily, but her body had begun to hunger for him again as soon as the last round had ended last night, she was thoroughly ashamed to realize, and the fact that he was being gentle with her almost made it worse.

No, it definitely made it worse.

If he had hurt her in that horrible way—like her supposed husband had—she could have hated him through and through.  But he had been even crueler than that disgusting old man—he’d forced her to pleasure, even as he took her virginity.  At least she had known exactly what to expect from Mr. H., and therefore exactly where the blame had lain for all of it—squarely on his frail, pale shoulders.

But Cage had done something no other man in her life had ever even attempted to do to her, and he had succeeded at it in spades:  he’d turned her own body against her, creating an ally within her own realm that was damned near impossible to fight.  Even now, when she surmised that he wanted more of the same, her body was quite eager to give it to him—even though there was definitely some residual soreness between her legs, where he undoubtedly expected to access again, to say nothing of the way the swollen skin of her poor beleaguered behind felt, and was undoubtedly going to feel as he pressed her into the bed again.

That wasn’t, however, the first thing he did. Instead, he reached up and massaged her arms, which had gotten a bit achy and tired last night while sleeping.  Then he dragged his fingertips down over the sensitive, vulnerable insides of each arm, raising gooseflesh again but for a very different reason.  His fingertips delved into her hair and massaged her scalp, then down over her face, exploring her slowly and thoroughly, even stopping to kiss the tears as they began to drip out of the corners of her eyes.

He kissed her as she would have imagined a lover to, with passion and hunger, making certain to coax her tongue out to play with his. He licked her lips, sipping at them, then nibbled down each jaw line to just barely bite at the spot where it ended. He razed each earlobe with the edges of his teeth, and then licked up and down the slender column of her neck until his lips hit her collarbone.  Those knowing hands massaged as much of her shoulders as they could get to, then down her sides, avoiding her breasts entirely until he had kissed each rib on either side, then licked his way up her sternum. 

When he straddled her with not a little difficulty in assuming the position, he took a breast in each big hand, squeezing and massaging somewhat less than gently, not that she minded—although she really, really did.  But in this, in the way that he could awaken her and expertly draw out her physical side, she knew she would lose every time—even if she wasn’t bound. 

Cage knew about the war that was raging within her—but the only one he cared about right now was the one he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to win.  There was no way she could hide her responses to him; she was too innocent, and he loved it.  It went well beyond how she tried—unsuccessfully—to modulate her breathing, tried to swallow back the gasps and anguished cries of pleasure—things he knew to look for that she would have no knowledge of or control over and he wasn’t going to enlighten her about.

He had seen how tightly peaked her nipples had been yesterday and had known that it was because of the awareness of them that he had brought to her, and now as he grasped her breasts, pressing them up even further into the air and into his waiting mouth, he could feel his cock rise as his lips caught them and began to suckle hard.

Her unchecked groan served to spur him on as he treated her other nipple the same way, tugging it into that warm wet cavern and pressing it hard against the roof of his mouth, then gently razing it with the edges of his teeth before releasing it.  She began to arch unconsciously but then remembered she wasn’t supposed to like what he was doing to her and sank quickly back down onto the mattress.

Then he surprised her by moving off her and turning her onto her side, facing away from him, the way she might have positioned herself.  She felt him moving around a bit, and when he pressed himself up against her again, she knew he was naked.

Rachel could feel the extent of his desire—the portion of him that he had put inside her last night—pressing against her sore bottom.  Part of her wanted to try to wiggle away from it, but the other part—the surprisingly stronger one—didn’t even want to acknowledge either her own discomfort or the existence of that insistent part of him.  Her mind wanted her body to completely ignore him, and it was outraged and incensed when she didn’t—when she absolutely couldn’t make it happen

Cage himself was ignoring the knock-him-to-his-knees pain in his side in favor of having her again.  Parts of him overruled everywhere else in his body at times, and this was definitely one of them.

Her still quite warm bottom pressed back against him and he almost succumbed to the urge to take her right then and there, but managed to clamp down on his own desires in favor of the challenge of stirring hers. His hands came up to take possession of those beautiful breasts again. Teasing and tugging at her nipples, he listened closely for the point at which her passions overrode her better thoughts.

One hand slipped down her front and Rachel knew exactly where he was heading.  She did her best to try to keep her thighs tightly together, but there was little she could do against his sheer strength.  Cage easily pulled one leg away from the other and back over his, where he pinned it easily as he reached forward to boldly cup that which he coveted most. His fingers worked themselves between those puffy lips with a casual familiarity that she both resented and reveled in, and she tried to prepare herself, tried to steel herself against his intimate touch, but, as if he had known exactly what she was going to do to resist him, he simply held her for a very long time as he lifted the heavy curtain of her hair and kissed the back of her neck.  When she shuddered and his chest puffed out with satisfaction, he continued down that elegant line to lick and suck his way across her delicate shoulders as his free hand continued to tease and torture her breasts, first capturing one nipple then the other between his thumb and middle finger, then using his index finger to drag across or tap the very tip, over and over until she positively squealed with it.

And when he did, finally, begin to move the fingers that were resting over the heat and heart of her, they didn’t immediately touch her anywhere that was blatantly itching for his attentions, but rather they wandered down the outside of her outer lips. He noted the differences in textures from where she had a certain amount of surprisingly soft hair to where there was none but tender skin. Then he moved his hand back up to the very top of her mound, tracing the arc there at the inner top of her lips, brushing his fingertips over her mons, and then separating those pliant folds to plow down her groove. He kept her lips wide apart as his fingers flowed down over her to the point on her body that was still a bit achy from its use yesterday, but the condition of her bottom easily overrode it as her chief complaint—although she had a feeling that those discomforts were going to be entirely blotted out momentarily.

As his fingers hovered over her entrance, she felt his question disturb the hair near her ear.  “Are you sore?”

It surprised her that he would even ask, and she considered lying and saying that she was in horrible pain, but then she figured he’d know she was lying because she’d not shown any sign of it while she was up and about, and he would have been alert to that kind of thing from her, she thought.

Although, perhaps she was reading too much into it.

“Some.” It was the absolute truth.

“I’ll be more gentle this time,” he promised.

Not, “I won’t do anything to you,” or “I’ll release your hands and bow out of your life without ruining it any more than I already have,” but “I’ll try to hurt you less this time than before.”

But to be fair, her body reminded her, it hadn’t been exclusively painful.  Some of it had been terrifyingly wonderful.

Rachel didn’t want to think about that right now, thought, while she was already incredibly mad at him.  It was kind of funny, though, that her ripped dress was what had gotten her good and angry at him—not any of the other stuff he’d done to her, really.  Just an old, long since out of fashion, terribly worn scrap of material.

His fingers didn’t enter her much, merely dipping into her as he breathed, “You’re wetter than you were last night.  That’s a good thing.”

She didn’t know why that was good and she didn’t much care.  She felt detached and tried to encourage it, hoping it might keep her from making a fool of herself again while he molested her.  She didn’t feel much of anything except sore, front and back, and completely and totally angry, through and through.  There wasn’t room in her to feel anything but that.

But then those slick fingers began to drag over that area of her body that was so blasted sensitive to him that it startled her every time he touched her there, and this time was no different, despite her supposed imperviousness to whatever it was that he was going to do to her.  She couldn’t ignore that.  She just … couldn’t.  Her body simply wouldn’t allow it.

And neither would he.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know she was angry at him, and that she was doing her level best to ignore him.  But he was pretty sure he had a remedy for that.  His fingers attacked her clit mercilessly, rubbing and flicking it, using the entire pad of his middle finger, which more than dominated the intended area, to swirl every bit of her, pressing slightly, demandingly, flicking the tips of both index and middle fingers sideways over her until he got what he wanted out of her.

A groan.  And it was a deep, sustained one at that, until she caught herself doing it and clamped her mouth shut.

It was a good thing she couldn’t see him smiling behind her. 

But despite his success at overriding her cultivated reticence, that was far from the only thing he subjected her to.  He varied his technique quite considerably, learning what she liked and what she didn’t, what got him a startled, indrawn breath until she squelched it and what she was perfectly able to be silent and stoic through, which he hated.

He did always go back to the moaning technique, though, and, to her disgrace, it never failed him.

As his fingers were having their way with her, the rest of him was clamoring to do the same, and Cage had finally gotten to the point where he felt he had to give in or he was going to disgrace himself all over her. Touching her like that did that to him, to more of an extent than exploring any other woman had.  So he guided his rock hard self to where it needed to be, pressing insistently against her, and feeling her body stiffen as a result.

He kept his tone soft and soothing as he said, “I told you I’d be gentle and I will.  I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“Yes,” she answered acerbically, although she was panting as she did it, so it kind of dampened her efforts, “but the effect is the same.”

He had half a mind to simply drive himself into her as almost any other man, including, he’d bet, her non-existent husband wouldn’t hesitate to do, but he just couldn’t.  He didn’t want to bring her pain, he wanted to bring her ecstasy, and alienating her with that kind of move wasn’t the way to do it.

So he reigned in his temper and very slowly began to slip inside her.  She was even slicker now than she had been, and besides a quickly caught breath and a slight moan, which both had him stopping for a long moment to allow her to acclimate herself to him, he didn’t gather that it was that horrific for her.

“All right?” he asked when he’d claimed as much of her as her body would allow.

She sniffed but didn’t deign to answer him.

He took that as a “yes” and pressed just a bit further, which had her yelping a tiny bit.  Far enough, then.

He kept his rhythm slow and undemanding at first, not allowing himself to forget about his fingers and their very important role in making this easier for her, or at least more pleasant than it might be.

His mouth wasn’t lazy in this, either, kissing up and down her neck, his tongue tickling her ear, teeth gently nipping their way around to her nape, thoroughly enjoying the involuntary sounds that were escaping her at his ministrations.

Cage couldn’t believe how amazing she felt around him—so hot and soft and clingy, so terribly, terribly tight that he was again in the situation where he didn’t think he was going to be able to last very long. He wanted to see to her before he indulged himself in her, so his fingers picked up the pace.

Rachel’s head fell back onto his shoulder as if it could no longer support the weight of her head, not if he was going to keep doing this to her, anyway.  She was making her best effort to try to keep her mouth closed, but it was a losing battle.  Everything he was doing to her—yes, even the fact of his invasion itself—seemed to stir quite a bit of passion in her, although she would be loathe to admit it to him.

It hadn’t hurt her nearly as much this time as it had last time, despite the lingering soreness.  It actually felt very good—and that was the last thing she wanted.  She was hoping it would be agonizing, and then the way his fingers were molesting her would be moot, but she wasn’t that lucky.  Instead, one fed off the other.  Being filled and stretched repeatedly around him only seemed to contribute to the maelstrom that he was creating by teasing that bit of flesh he seemed obsessed with, until she rapidly got to the point—once he’d mounted her—that she had felt before, this tightening of a spring within her.  His big fingers were relentlessly driving her towards the ultimate, undeniably blissful release of all that built up tension.

Even though she’d already experienced the glorious culmination of it all, she was still a bit trepidatious about it, and she couldn’t stop her body from tightening, as if against the inevitable.

And it was then that she heard him issue a cry of pure pleasure, and she suddenly had the consciousness altering thought that she wondered if
she
could affect
him
in the same devastating manner as he did her.  Seconds later, she deliberately contracted her lower body as a test, and was immediately rewarded by another even lower groan that was almost more of a growl.

She couldn’t continue her research, however, because his fingers were just too distracting, and before she knew it that coil had wound down so far that there was nothing for it to do other than to release itself within her.  Rachel had the strange, random thought that she desperately wished she could have been holding onto his arm while he made that agonizingly pleasurable storm rage within her, causing her to shout her culmination to the world, the sound of her ecstasy echoing off the walls of the small cabin. His groans followed hers seconds later, but she was much too far gone to make the obvious correlation between the two.

As he pumped into her, that frighteningly all-consuming pleasure went on and on, his fingers not missing but a few beats, taking every bit of ecstasy he could from her and leaving her devastated in its wake.

Rachel was horrified to find her thoughts so scattered afterwards—much worse than before, even, perhaps because it hadn’t hurt as badly as it had then, and, because of that, both parts of what he did to her had brought her to new, depressingly blissful heights.

Cage wasn’t much better off.  He was practically asleep already. He was jarred to awareness by the slamming of the barn door.

“Something’s wrong—I think those men are back.  I’m going outside to check things out. You stay right here and
be quiet
.”

He was already on his way to the door when she cried out in a sleepy tone, “You’re leaving me here tied up?  What if they come in?”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll take care of them—and you.”

She watched in stark terror as he ambled out of the house, and after a quick debate with herself that didn’t even include a worry about disobeying him in the least, she began to scream for help, praying that the two men would capture Cage and be of assistance to her.

She heard gunshots outside and did what she could to protect herself—tipping the bed over so that she could hide behind it, although her wrists were still tightly bound.  At least there was
something
between her and the door, and she was never more grateful for anything when the door did burst open and she heard the sounds of spurred boots, recognizing immediately that it was not Cage.  Suddenly she realized that the devil she knew might be the better choice, in that instant coming to thoroughly regret having called for help.

Seconds later, another pair of footsteps joined the first and she knew the two strange men were in her house.

Before they could get to her, before they could even call out to her, though, she heard a tremendous roar in her ears and then another one right after it, and then the sounds of two heavy things falling to the floor.

“Rachel?”

It was Cage’s voice.  She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not. 

“Are you all right?’

She wanted to tell him no, that she could barely hear for all of the din around her, that the gun blasts had nearly left her deaf, that she was so scared that she’d nearly peed herself, and that she still wished it had been him because he’d left her there bound to the bed until they’d almost discovered her.

“Rachel!” his voice was sharp and she could hear the terror in it, but she didn’t dare to make a peep, and she refused to look over the barrier at what she was quite sure were two dead bodies bleeding out in her once pristine house.

“Rachel Hemmingway, answer me!  Are you all right?”  He stalked into the cabin, saw how she had smartly arranged the bed and went over to peer over it at her.  “Why didn’t you answer me, woman?  Here I was thinking they might have killed you, and you’re sitting there right as rain–”

Her sobbing wail interrupted him berating her, and he immediately reached down to cut her bonds and hauled her into his arms, holding her very, very tightly against his good side for a long moment, brushing the hair back from her face and murmuring stupid, soothing things to help her calm down.

When he tried to put her back in her little hidey-hole, she made as if to hold onto him. 

“No, honey, I have a few things to take care of.  I want you to stay right there.  You’re safe, but I don’t want you to look at what’s in the cabin.  Let me get things straightened away outside, and then I’ll come back for you and hold you for a while, okay?”

She nodded more automatically at what he’d said than because of any real comprehension on her part.  He’d seen that look before.  She was a bit shell-shocked.

“Rachel, I want your word as a lady that you’re going to obey me and sit there like a good girl while I take care of a few things.”

“I will.”  Her voice sounded very far away and little.

“Good girl.  I want you to turn around so that you’re looking at the wall.”

As she did as he said, he went to the bookcase and took out the most well worn copy there,
The Pickwick Papers
.  “Read this until I get back,” he said, looking down at the bodies of the two men he had shot. 

His first order of business was to take care of them, and then he wanted to have a look at the barn where a lot of the fighting occurred.  He didn’t think there was much left alive in it, but he had been proven wrong about things in the past and he hoped, for Rachel’s sake, that he was this time, too.

It took him quite some time to dig graves for the men, who were definitely not Rangers of any sort.  No, they were—according to the papers that one of them had on him—in the employ of his father’s archrival.  He was not surprised.  Cage thought that the taller of the two—the one who had done the talking to Rachel—was the one who was responsible for the hole in his side.

The situation in the barn was at least as bad as he’d thought it might be.  If Rachel was poor and having to live on half rations before, she was downright destitute now.

Exhausted, his wound bleeding and hurting like a bitch again from all of the exertion, Cage made his way back to the cabin, throwing dirt from outside over the bloodstained dirt of her floor so as to minimize the shock of her seeing what he and the two men had wrought.

She was, he was glad to see, exactly where he wanted her to be—facing the wall with her book in her lap, although she wasn’t reading.  She was sitting there rocking herself back and forth, and that had him worried.  He’d seen that behavior before in men who had been mentally broken by the War.  He hated to think that Rachel might end up like them.