For the First Time: Twenty-One Brand New Stories of First Love (57 page)

And then his voice filters through my consciousness and I realise he’s moved up the bed and positioned his cock at my entrance. “Fuck, Callie, I need to be inside you,” he rasps as he slides through my wetness.

I wrap my legs and arms around him, digging my fingers into his back.

I need you inside me, too.

Over, and over, and over.

Turning my face, I find his neck and suck it, letting my teeth gently nip him.

“Fuck me, Luke.”

Oh, for the love of everything good, fuck me hard.

He doesn’t wait to be told again, and growls as he thrusts inside. There’s no slow and gentle to this, which is exactly how I want it.

He thrusts in and out, over, and over, and I hold on tight as our bodies move together. He’s lost to it as he works harder and faster to achieve his release.

And then he comes. He thrusts deep one last time before his body shudders and stills. I cling to him, needing my own release. It’s so close. Teasing me in that way where you want to scream out – ‘For fuck’s sake, just let me have it’.

“Oh, God…oh, God…” When it finally hits, all I can do is chant my way through it. The orgasm rushes through me, wiping out all my bad memories of the last three months of nothing but bad dates and vibrators.

I let Luke go, and fling my arms out to the side and close my eyes. I have no more energy left to even hold onto him anymore. That orgasm exhausted me completely.

He pulls out and chuckles. Brushing a kiss across my lips, he says, “You look beautiful when you’ve just been fucked.”

I summon enough energy to open my eyes and pout. “Only when I’ve just been fucked?”

He grins and drops another kiss on my lips. As he moves off the bed, he alters his previous statement. “Let me clarify – you are beautiful to me all the time, but when I’ve just fucked you, you’re off-the-charts sexy.”

I watch him walk to the bathroom as happiness whooshes through me.

Not only have I broken my dry spell, but I broke it with Luke.

The man I’ve been dreaming of for almost a year.

The man who wants me just as much as I want him.

The married man.

Oh, dear Lord, what was I thinking?

To Be Continued

I hope you loved Luke & Callie. I’ll be publishing the full novel in early 2016.

I let him steal my breath and I want to give him my heart, too. But, it’s complicated

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Shoshanna Evers

R
apunzel stuck her
head outside the west window, one of only two in the tower, and breathed in the cool night air. The windows were positioned across from each other, one on each side of the cylindrical stone prison she called home. As long as there wasn’t a storm outside, she always kept them both open. That cross-breeze was one of the few bits of the outside world she was allowed to enjoy.

This evening, the breeze made her silver wind chimes ring like bells, a sweet tinkling sound. When she was little, Rapunzel pretended the tinkle of chimes meant fairies were there with her. Invisible, but still perfectly acceptable for playmates. All of her invisible playmates had, in her imagination, looked just as Rapunzel did in the looking-glass—perhaps with shorter hair, or dark hair like the illustrations in her books. The faces, however, all looked like her own.

After all, the only other face she’d seen outside of storybooks belonged to the witch.
Mother
.

The witch told her of another sort of face—that of a grown man. Now she knew: Men were dangerous. More dangerous than a wild wolf or beast. A man could kill a woman with his bare hands, and often did.

As awful as it was being under the witch’s thumb, the idea of being in the hands of the sort of men the witch described was undoubtedly worse. Rapunzel had come to accept the reason the witch kept her confined, high up in the tower. So no man could ever reach her.

Until the night one did.

“Rapunzel,” a voice called. A deep baritone voice…unfamiliar. “Let down your hair for me.”

It was exactly what the witch always said, but something was off about the
way
it was said. It didn’t sound like her usual sing-song voice.

Still, Rapunzel took her heavy golden braid off the spotless floor and shoved it out the window the moment the words were spoken. In fact, she hadn’t even meant to do that. Had the witch enchanted those words so Rapunzel would have no choice but to obey her?

That would be very typical of the witch, certainly.

“Mother?” she called out.

There was no response, just a heavy tug on her hair as the witch grabbed on and climbed. It was too dark for Rapunzel to see her form, but she must have been carrying a parcel. A big, heavy one. Almost…
too
heavy.

As dark as it was in the woods, she didn’t realize that it was
not her mother
who slowly, steadily climbed up her hair until he had nearly reached her.

He.

The man looked up at her, his body bigger and more threatening than even the witch’s had seemed to her when Rapunzel was just a toddler. No curves or softness like on her own body, or thin bones and saggy skin like the witch’s—the man had huge muscles and sharp angles instead. His face was shrouded in darkness as he looked up at her.

“Where is the witch?” she demanded, shouting down at him.

“Far away till dawn,” he grunted, pulling himself up another several feet. “She’ll never know I was here.”

“Get off of me,” she shouted. Rapunzel tried to shake her head, to throw him loose, but his weight was too much.

The man kept climbing. He’d be inside the tower soon.

Who was he, and what would he do to her? Did it have to be awful?

Well—potentially, he was someone to converse with, someone new. Whatever he had in store for her might be worth it, just to break up the monotony of her nights. It would be an adventure, and the memories of that evening could fill her imagination with brand-new thoughts for years. Having never met anyone before, the old thoughts were getting a bit stale.

Men are dangerous. He’ll kill me or worse.

She just wasn’t sure what the “or worse” that Mother spoke of could be. What was worse than death?

Curiosity warred with fear inside of her, but fear won out.

Rapunzel stretched her foot to the side, as far as she could reach. She had to get her sewing basket into her hands. The small scissors inside weren’t much, but it was a start. The witch never allowed her to keep anything that could be used as a weapon against her. It was as if she could read Rapunzel’s desperate thoughts after each of the witch’s disciplinary sessions.

Sessions that left Rapunzel bruised and crying, and alone. Wishing she had a way to make the witch hurt as much as she’d hurt her.

The scissors were so small that they’d be no help as a defensive measure against the intruder. But they were all she had.
Trying is better than dying.

Rapunzel cried out as the man came closer and closer, and her outstretched leg strained beyond comfort.

Finally!
Her foot hooked on the basket and she swooped it in to her like a dancer.

The man’s weight on her hair as he climbed pulled on her head, keeping her from being able to peek back inside the basket—but she found the scissors by feel alone. Somehow, though she’d used them just this morning, the scissors were even smaller than she’d remembered them to be.

Or perhaps the man was even bigger than she’d first thought? Yes. He was definitely getting larger the closer to her he climbed.

There was no way she’d be able to attack him with the scissors; they were so dainty as to fit entirely inside her palm—the man was much too big. Would her scissors even penetrate that thick wall of muscle he had in place of a bosom?

I can cut off my hair before he gets to me
.

The fearful thought of losing her braid sent chills down her spine. Without her hair, how would she ever let her mother back up to the tower? How would the man, if he got in, ever get down again? By cutting off her braid, she could end up stuck with this man in the tower forever, and her mother unable to come and help…forever.

I’ll starve to death without Mother to bring me supplies
. The witch had drummed that nightmarish thought into her brain time and again. Rapunzel had spent long nights awake in her bed, praying nothing terrible would befall the witch while she was out in the world. Starvation, as she was told, was an awful way to slowly die. If the witch wanted her to have sweet dreams, as she so often said, then why would she tuck Rapunzel in with a warning that the girl was as good as dead without her—and then leave?

Would losing her braid really lead to starvation, though?
After all, Mother is a witch.
Maybe she could make Rapunzel a hair-growing spell to repair the cutting.

Maybe I’m already under a hair-growing spell
.

There was no more time to wonder. If she didn’t take decisive action, Rapunzel would have to face a real, live man in only a few moments. She took a deep breath, and started cutting. The scissors were slow and dull; the thickness of her braid and the pressure exerted on it enabled her to only cut a few strands at a time.
Snip
.

The sound made her gasp. The snip of her hair falling free from the braid had—prior to this moment—only occurred in her nightmares. Now it was real, and she was doing it to herself. Maybe instead of cutting off her only connection to the ground, she should just let the man come in, do what he will, and let him leave?

No one would have to know
. She’d never tell Mother, and no one would know. So simple. It would be as if it had never happened. Everything could go back to normal after that.

But there was no telling what he would do. Her mother had never explained exactly why men were so dangerous (other than the random fits of violence, and the great strength they had over women to carry it out), but she always held true fear in her fiery eyes as she spoke of how terrible it would be for a man to get his hands on Rapunzel. If a powerful witch with black magic was afraid of men, then men were to be feared.

Maybe he would torture her. Kill her. Eat her up like a lion.

Her hair made tight ripping sounds as she cut more. She was cutting as far down as she could without falling out the window herself. As pieces broke free from the braid, parts of her scalp felt light, released from the heavy weight of the man. Sections of waist-length blonde hair billowed around her hips.

The more she cut, the harder the tug on her scalp from the rest of the braid was. And the man was gaining on her.

Snip
.

“Stop cutting your hair,” he ordered. “Or I’ll fall to my death.”

Don’t look at his face, just keep cutting. Don’t watch him fall.

“You’ll be charged with murdering a Knight of the King’s Army.” He paused. “And sent to…prison.”

Rapunzel laughed through her fear, and for a moment she thought she heard his own chuckle of amusement, though it was quickly silenced. Had he realized prison was no threat to her? She’d lived her whole life in solitary confinement.

“All right, sir—I’ll stop cutting if you start climbing back down,” she offered. “You can use my braid to leave me be.”

“That’s not happening, beautiful.”

The moon shined onto his face as he came closer. She got a glimpse of hair black as pitch, and dark eyes lined with heavy lashes. His white teeth gleamed in the moonlight as he grimaced, struggling to get to her before he’d fall.

“I gave you a chance,” she said. “You should have taken it.”
Snip
.

“I have rope,” he warned. “I’ll get up either way.”

Could he?
Would that work?

“I’m here to rescue you—whether you allow me to or not.”

Rapunzel paused with the scissors, peering at him in the darkness. All she’d ever learned of men was that they would hurt her. He could do terrible things to her, things that were worse than death.

The man grunted as his foot slipped. “Do you want my blood on your hands, girl?”

“I’d rather yours than mine, sir.”
Snip.

With a growl befitting a beast, the man launched himself up with his powerful arms and threw himself through the window.

This can’t be happening!

The man’s arm wrapped around her head, simultaneously trapping her against him and shielding her from breaking her skull on the cold stone floor. They collapsed in a heap with his full weight on top of her.

The air rushed out of her lungs on impact and her scream came out as a gasp.

He sat up, straddling her body, and kept her wrists imprisoned in one of his large hands. In seconds he had the rest of her long braid snatched up from the window, and lying at her side in a tangled heap.

How could he treat her prized possession—a part of
her
—so with such rough nonchalance?

“Drop the scissors, Rapunzel,” he ordered.

Her moment of hesitation earned her wrists a tight squeeze, and the pressure made her only weapon of defense fall uselessly to the ground.

It didn’t even occur to her to wonder how he knew her name. In her small world, everyone (the witch) knew her name. Why wouldn’t this man know it as well?

“Princess—are you injured?”

“Yes,” she gasped from beneath him. “You’ve crushed me.”

With quick, practiced movements, the knight kept one of his hands around both of her wrists, and used the other to boldly touch her. She tried to breathe through her shock as he palpated her scalp, the back of her neck, running his hands along her spine, ribs, and arms. Was he doing one of his awful man-things to her? She lay frozen, silent as he touched her hips, her legs, and feet.