Claiming Lauren (eXclave) (2 page)

He pulled her hair back from her ears and covered her eyes with a folded
length of satin. The material warmed to her skin by the time he finished
knotting it behind her head. She didn't have to maintain control over her
desire to see him anymore—he'd taken responsibility upon himself.  She
could barely breathe past the pounding of her heart as he took her hand and led
her into the corridor.

Chapter Two

"Do you need the bathroom?" He continued to disguise his voice
with a whisper.

She shook her head. The heavy outer door clicked shut and he turned her
around, pulled the hem of her sweater until her arms were forced into the air.
He left her bra, which didn't hide anything anyway. Her nipples stood eager and
desperate above the quarter cups. He lingered in front of her. His shadow felt
like a tangible weight. Even though she couldn't see it, she could feel the way
it wrapped around her half-naked form. Lip caught between her teeth, she
imagined him studying her curves.

He didn't compliment her or touch her skin. Disappointment tangled with
her desire. She cupped her breasts, embarrassed, and he finally uttered a
single, soft curse. His duffel thumped on the bed.

He moved around the room, preparing, not speaking. The longer he left her
unattended the smaller her field of awareness shrank. Her calves ached,
protesting the tension forced upon them by her high heels; her thighs itched in
the confines of her skirt. Her lower back burned. Her clit throbbed.

The most urgent plea came from a deeper place. The fullness he'd created
inside her whispered to her spine, which murmured to the nerves at the base of
her skull. She clenched her teeth together. As much as she wanted him to come
back and give her more, she'd outlined a specific sequence of events and he'd
promised to follow the course. He wasn't 
supposed
 to touch
her. Not yet. She'd trapped herself within the boundaries of her own rules—not
for the first time.

Her self-imposed boundaries weren't working. They'd begun to fall apart
without her notice. She could stop it now, draw a line and call this the extent
of her sin—naked for another man, but not engaged in full passionate play. She
should stop it. She had no good justification besides long-denied want. Need.
But her tongue refused to obey her conscience; it was more interested in the
demands of her body, which still, despite acknowledgement of the wrong she was
committing, cried out for release.

He opened the balcony door. Traffic sounds interrupted the quiet of the
room. This high, what had been a cool breeze on the ground floor turned into a
frigid gust. Goosebumps raced down her legs and up her back, trying to escape
the cold. She lowered her hands to her sides and clenched her fists to keep
from hugging herself for warmth. She didn't want warmth; her entire life was
climate controlled. Just this once, she wanted sensation.

His breath chased her shoulders up to her ears. A small sound caught in
her throat—apology, regret. She hadn't meant to jump but he'd surprised her,
skirting the outside of her awareness and slipping in on a blind spot. Big
hands cupped her elbows, slid down to her wrists, held them together and
fastened soft, furry leather cuffs around each one. She turned her hands in the
cuffs. Her pulse raced at the base of her thumbs. Her second guesses ebbed away
as he once more claimed dominion over her body.

Silent, he turned her to face the cold and pushed her onto the balcony.
His body warmed her back but he did nothing to shield her bare breasts from the
wind. He did the opposite, pulling her shoulders back and forcing her chest to
rise.

She balked. This wasn't part of the plan and for the first time since
she'd booked her flight, fear roared in her ears. He'd promised—

"You promised to trust me," he rasped before she could finish
the thought. Childhood rules said he won—he said it first. But this wasn't a
childhood game. Together, they had set out upon a very adult mission.

"I'm freezing," she snapped, angry that he'd beaten her to the
words, angry that she'd been stupid enough to surrender control over her
personal safety.

"Cold is a sensation." His voice didn't change.

Apprehension coiled in her stomach. He could do anything to her—push her
off the balcony, or...her imagination hit a wall. For the first time since
she'd decided to do this—to submit—real fear shook her.

As if he sensed her reluctance, he put his arms around her waist and drew
her stiff back to his chest. "Tell me to stop and I will. I don't want to
scare you. I want to push your limits, to claim your edges as my domain. I've
wanted to give you this freedom since the first time you told me you felt
trapped."

Emotion tightened her throat. She didn't want to think about that e-mail,
tapped out in the middle of a long, lonely night. Wives of her social standing
did not divorce—they figured out ways to escape. Shopping,
travel...long-distance affairs over the Internet, where they had the illusion
of anonymity.

She didn't want to talk about it with him. Her muscles were relaxing, her
fear ebbing, her arousal reviving. A moment later, he turned her again. Her
nipples brushed his shirt. He reached between their bodies, the backs of his
fingers caressing the soft swell of her abdomen, and caught the chain that
sagged between her handcuffs. Drawing her hands up over her head, he pressed
his cock against her stomach. She inched backward, closer and closer to the
balcony's rail.

Embarrassed heat burned down to her ankles. Did their room open onto the
parking lot? Had he left the light on inside? An image of herself—nearly naked,
bound, backlit by cheap yellow light cast by old bulbs in older lamps—flashed
behind her blindfold. Her lower body clenched.

She hoped someone was watching.

Master pulled her hands up so high that she stood on tiptoe inside her
shoes, back bowed, breasts pushing the lean breadth of his chest. She couldn't
help herself; she rubbed up against his groin, straining for closer, deeper
contact. She got close enough to feel his hardness twitch but then he trapped
her.

His palms glided down the undersides of her arms, squeezing her triceps
and tickling the hollows at the sides of her breasts, but she couldn't move her
hands. He'd somehow connected the handcuffs to the ceiling of the balcony. She
wanted to ask him how—but didn't want to know how. She just wanted to feel.
This way. Stretched out, exposed, helpless, trapped. Her ribs pulled up tight
against her lungs. Breathing became harder. More shallow. Quicker, although she
didn't know if that was a physiological side effect of being hooked onto some
makeshift suspension device, her body pulled long the way it would be on a
medieval stretcher, or if it was because she was so turned on that she couldn't
keep up with her body's responses. She had to choose between breathing and
relishing the hard, heavy, fast throb between her legs.

When Master clasped her face between his hands and kissed her bottom lip,
she decided she could breathe later.

"I know you're thinking," he whispered. The rough tenor scraped
down between her shoulder blades. "I'm going to fix that."

He didn't need to tell her. She'd chosen him because he'd been promising,
for months now, to fix her, restore her sexual desire, make her feel wanted,
sexy, feminine, free.

Visible.

And so much more. She felt everything as he shaped the mounds of her
breasts. Pinching fingers sent heat through her body. The sudden bite of his
teeth arched her back, preparing her nipples for sharper teeth than his. He
lingered, drawing hard upon one peaked, straining point. Cold metal touched her
stomach, dipped into her navel. He wanted her to anticipate the clamps, to fear
them, and she did, but more than she feared the pain, she 
wanted 
it.
She wanted the shock of sensation, the sting that would make her gasp.

Tongue flicking hard over her right nipple, Master moved closer. The heat
of his body, more than the attention of his mouth, drew a moan up her throat.
She smothered all but a squeak as he lifted her knees to his hips.

Somewhere in the hotel parking lot, a two-note car alarm beep said a
guest was going out to his car. Suddenly the idea of being watched wasn't as
appealing as it had been moments ago. Emotion slid in to change the nature of
the experience; she wanted this private thing between them. She wanted to know
Master's generosity, to keep it a secret all for herself.

Master moved between her knees, assuaging her fear. The hard bulge
nuzzling her heat wasn't for anybody else. Locking her ankles behind his back,
she shamelessly rubbed her bare sex against his fly. She wanted to give but she
also wanted returns...and she hated the blindfold, suddenly and violently. It
shielded her from his expressions, the interest in his eyes, the breadth of his
shoulders. The possessive set to his mouth when he rotated her on the
suspension and, she calculated, put himself between her and the parking lot. He
didn't want to share either.

An unwanted voice off in a small corner of her mind whispered that their
selfishness was bad. Said they'd taken a turn she hadn't banked on. Instructed
her to put an end to it, to tell him it wouldn't work, to pull away before she
couldn't walk away. That voice cowered, though, when he ran his fingertips
between the spread cheeks of her ass and twisted the toy he'd set inside her.

Every inch of her skin came alive. Even the nerves in her elbows tingled,
responding to that pulling, stretching fullness. Distracting her. She didn't
feel the bite of the clamp until Master tugged the chain and fastened the
second one. Pricks of biting pain shot from her nipples to her toes. The pain
dissolved as soon as it hit each nerve ending—pleasure followed it, bright as
the light tailing a shooting star. Her eyes popped open behind the blindfold,
searching for that light. She wanted to watch him swirl the tip of his tongue
around first one nipple, then the other, drawing out the pain, encouraging the
star to shoot a little further.

 The breath exploded from her chest, a gasp layered over a groan,
when he closed his teeth over the clamps and bit down. The alligator clips
nipped at hyper-aware nerve endings, chastising her sex for its continued
emptiness. Shouting a need, issuing a demand to fill it. Her hips responded,
arched, and her legs climbed up his body, her knees burrowing into his armpits,
all propelled by a pounding, deafening sense of urgency.

"Stop." He slapped the back of her thigh. The crack of flesh on
flesh reached her ears before the sharp sting reached her brain.

"You didn't say you were going to hit me," Lauren whispered,
frozen. Her muscles locked up of their own accord, soaking up the burn of that
smack. Quivering for a repeat.

"
You
 said you wouldn't try to take control," he
answered, his voice equally low.

How could she respond to that? More important, how could she provoke him
into another slap? A series of them? A full-blown spanking? Should she ask? But
she didn't want to ask. She wanted to be given.

Master disentangled himself from her gripping knees. She feared he had
mistaken her awe for objection, that he'd decided to back off and end it, but
the scrape of chair legs dragging across cement gave her the response that his
lips didn't. His beard stubble rasped down the front of her body, between her
breasts, his chin leading his mouth down to her dripping core. He grasped her
ankles, swung her knees to drape over his shoulders.

"You're going too slow."

He stilled. "Would you like to direct this?"

The question—his tone—made her swallow. She'd pushed too far. Her arms
and shoulders ached with a need to cover herself; her knees quivered with an
urge to hug up against her stomach. Master palmed her knees, pushed them wider
apart until the cool night air stirred between her thighs.

"Answer me."

Lauren hid her face against her raised arm. "What do you want me to
say?"

"Something honest." He shrugged free of her legs, allowing her
thighs to close and hide her sex. Her feet returned to the balcony's cold concrete,
tips of her toes recoiling from the stone as she swayed in the restraints.
Master's arm came around her waist.

Angry, aroused, wanting to hurt him for rendering her so vulnerable, she
dug deep for her most brutally honest confession.

"I'm afraid."

He jerked away. She'd known he would. The two words hung like wasps'
spikes because Master valued her trust. He placed her sense of security high on
his list of priorities. Hurting him...thrilled her. She expected him to make a
full retreat. Wanted it. Needed this to be over, because she 
was
 afraid.

Instead, he asked why.

She didn't want to answer. In response to her silence, he cupped her
breast, fingers threatening the clamp she'd really come to adore. "Tell
me, or we stop."

Alternating desires for control and surrender struggled in her chest. Why
should she have to say? She wanted to feel, not communicate. Communication was
for dinner time, counseling sessions, not sexually charged scenes on motel
balconies.

Master disagreed. "You have to learn to do this."

I know.

"I'm afraid I won't want you to leave when it's time to go."

His fingers gentled, soothed her nipple, glided down her stomach and
cupped her ass. He kissed her throat. Each touch filled her with new agony, new
fear.

"You don't have to be scared by that. Your wants are directing much
of tonight, but the end is already set. It's my responsibility to make sure you
go back to your life."

He'd taken on so much responsibility that her throat closed up. She
couldn't respond. Master didn't seem to need anything more than silent
acceptance. Soon, he returned to her, focused entirely on her body. His hands
roughed up and down her thighs. His mouth found her clit, which he tormented
with the edges of his teeth. She moaned, loving the harsh scrape of his
whiskers between her filled-to-distraction anus and her yearning pussy.