Knowing the Ropes (10 page)

The other couple wasn’t out of the room before Nick had Selene bent over a sturdy-looking table. “Was going to use your mouth, but I couldn’t let Alison’s fingers have all the fun here,” he said, his voice harsh and choked with lust as he ran his fingers over her dripping pussy, making her gasp and buck.

Garth’s and Alison’s footsteps stopped. She didn’t dare look, but she knew they were frozen in the doorway, watching.

Nick didn’t take the time to undress all the way, just unzipped, pulled a condom from his pocket. It was a matter of seconds before he was pounding into her, filling her completely, riding her hard. With each thrust, her breasts bobbed, and she was so hot and sensitive that the movement of air over her nipples felt like the touch of a hand. As Nick’s body crashed into hers, she felt the lingering tenderness in her bottom, sending more thrills through her.

Hard but patient, not a quick, brutal fuck but an extended, brutal one, and she was loving it.

She wasn’t sure she could come again, but she didn’t mind. She was on a wonderful plateau, riding the sensations, savoring his fat cock slamming into her, and it was all good.

Then Nick slapped at her breast, and as the bright red shock of good pain layered with all the other sensations, she realized she was wrong. She could come again.

Deep convulsions tried to suck Nick’s cock so deep inside her it would never come out.

Nick froze, buried to the hilt in her, then roared something that might have been words. Although she knew it made no sense with the condom on, Selene swore she could feel his come burning into her.

When her head cleared enough for curiosity, she glanced toward the door.

Garth and Alison hadn’t made it out of the room. He’d picked up his tiny slave and was fucking her against the wall, her legs and arms wrapped around him, his hands under her ass, moving her up and down.

Nick collapsed onto the couch, then patted his lap to indicate Selene should sit there. “Might as well enjoy the rest of the show.”

Chapter Ten

The next weekend, the heat continued unabated. It peaked on Sunday, prompting another barbecue/pool party at Garth and Alison’s. This one was smaller, just their closest friends from Kinksters United.

“So, you ever hear anything from Nat?” Betsy asked Nick as she plopped some marinated tofu onto the grill at a safe distance from the burgers.

Nick liked Betsy, but he suddenly wanted to dive into the pool fully clothed, drink and grill tongs in hand. “Not really,” he said, knowing that there was more to the question than idle curiosity. Always was with Betsy. He flipped a few burgers, hoping to dissuade the line of conversation. He was in a great mood after a wonderful, sex-drenched Saturday night with Selene. Why spoil it by thinking about his ex? Right now the most serious thing he wanted to ponder was whether his linen shirt was actually fusing to his skin thanks to sweat.

“I was afraid of that.”

He shrugged. “She dumped me. ‘Asked to be released’, but yeah, dumped me. We don’t have a lot to talk about anymore.” Especially now. A few months ago—hell, a few weeks ago—he’d have been thrilled to hear from her, especially if she was showing signs of wanting to come back. He’d have known it was a stupid idea, but he’d have still been flattered, and face it, hard as a rock at the thought of her slender, pliant body kneeling in front of him again or wrapped around him in bed. But Selene had changed that. She might be Ms. Right-Now, but Ms. Right-Now had done a number on any remaining illusions that Natalie was anything close to Ms. Right.

Oh, Natalie was two hundred pounds of pure sex in a one-hundred-pound body. He still got turned on remembering some of their better times. But Selene had reminded him of something very important: sane chicks were just as fun and a lot less stressful.

“She’s disappeared off the face of the earth,” Betsy said. “Last I heard, she’d met some new dom on the Internet and was going to North Nowhere New Hampshire to move in with him. Which scared me to start with because it seemed awfully fast, and you know Natalie’s not the type to make sure the guy’s not on America’s Most Wanted. And now her blog’s deleted, her e-mail bounces, her cell phone’s been turned off, and maybe that’s just because she’s practically in Canada and had to change services, but as far as I know, she hasn’t given anyone a new number or e-mail. Not me, not Janna and Steve, not Debbie, not Alison and Garth. No one. Hell, I even swallowed the urge to barf and asked Craig yesterday. He’s tried to track her down and couldn’t. It’s like she stopped existing.”

Craig might be the world’s biggest asshole, but he knew his way around the Internet, including, rumor had it, some creepy stalker’s tricks that could find people who didn’t have a listed phone number. If he couldn’t find her, it wasn’t a good sign.

Nick tried and failed to shut out the ugly images that started flashing through his mind: Natalie in trouble. Natalie trapped in the home of some psychotic redneck. Natalie locked in a cage for real, not as part of a sex game, starved and abused.

Natalie’s body stashed in the New Hampshire wilderness somewhere, never to be found.

“You know Natalie gets one hundred percent focused on whoever she’s with,” he said, trying to convince himself. “When she first started seeing me, I had to remind her it was okay to get together with her friends, even to take the time from me to call you guys. If she’s found the dom of her dreams…”

“You mean the psycho control freak of her dreams?”

Despite his worry, Nick laughed. “From me, that would have sounded bitter. From you, it’s just the truth. I could see her letting someone encourage her to cut all her old ties and start fresh. It’s weird, but not necessarily bad,” he added, not believing it. For someone whose old friends were drug-addled losers or otherwise poisonous, sure, but Natalie’s friends were mostly good people, people a lot more sensible than she sometimes was.

“Oh yeah, it’s bad. Maybe she wouldn’t think to call me. It’s a classic girl thing to get so into a new relationship you lose touch with people. Queer or straight, kinky or vanilla, we all do it sometimes until our friends are like, ‘Are you dead?’ But Debbie says she’s missed two scheduled photo shoots.”

At that news, Nick could only say, “Oh shit.”

Natalie was a flake but not about professional responsibilities. Once she committed to something, whether her day job, her work as a fetish model or a volunteer activity, she took it seriously—too eager to please, he thought, to let anyone down. If she’d blown off her commitments to Debbie, something was very wrong.

“I’ll call her mom,” he promised, “see what I can find out. She’d have told her mom where she was moving, even if she didn’t tell anyone else.” Natalie’s mom had probably been more upset by the breakup than either Natalie or Nick had been. Apparently, he’d been the first boyfriend who didn’t set off all of Mrs. Sherman’s mom-alarms.

“Thanks.” Betsy blinked, and he realized she was fighting back tears in a very un-Betsy-like way. “I’m sure I’m overreacting, but one of my friends from high school dropped out of sight like Natalie has. We all thought she’d run off to New York with her new boyfriend.” He had a sickening knowledge of what was coming before she said it. “They found her body out by Quabbin Reservoir six months later.”

Wordlessly, he offered Betsy his margarita.

And Betsy, who didn’t normally drink anything more potent than iced coffee, took a big slug.

Selene climbed out of the pool and headed, dripping, over toward the grill or, more to the point, toward Nick. “Please tell me summer in Boston isn’t always like this!” she moaned melodramatically, throwing herself onto a redwood deck chair with a squish of her waterlogged bikini.

“If it’s any consolation, it’s probably ten degrees hotter farther inland.”

“That’s not much of a consolation, seeing that we’re not there. You ready to take a break from grilling and swim?”

“Actually, I think I’m ready to take a break and find someplace quiet inside for a few minutes. I need some downtime.”

“Heat getting to you? Or something on your mind?” His expression was too serious for a party. Grim, almost.

“Just thinking on some stuff I heard today. Nothing to do with you.”

“Can you be more unclear, or would that be painful?”

Nick forced a laugh and discovered he didn’t really need to force it once he started. “It’s kind of complicated, and I’d like to bounce stuff off you. Want to go inside?”

They ended up in the small game room off the living room. Nick closed the door, sat down on a well-loved couch. Selene, still damp around the edges, opted for the floor.

“Okay,” Nick said. “Short version: Betsy thinks a mutual friend is in trouble. Half of me thinks Betsy’s overreacting, and the other half is convinced she’s right and wants to ride off to the rescue even though I don’t know where I’d go or what I’d rescue her from.”

“What kind of trouble?”

He hesitated, not wanting to say, as if saying it would make it real. “She met this guy, a dom, on the Internet…”

“So it could be anything from a broken heart to a broken neck? Or maybe nothing?”

Nick nodded. “Pretty much. Only, I know her, and she’d be more likely to end up in the broken-neck category. Natalie thought…” He corrected himself quickly, not liking the implications. “Thinks limits are for wanna-bes, and wants to give herself totally to someone, and her ideal dom was a hardcore sadist who would treat her like a toy—a thing.”

“In other words, she’s an idiot.”

“Not an idiot. Half broken—she lost her dad really young, and I think some of her weirder ideas go back to that—and half dedicated to this lofty ideal of submission. Like a nun or something, only…a sex nun, if that makes any sense. If she met someone who was worthy of that devotion and knew what to do with it, it would be sweet and romantic in a bent sort of way, like what Garth and Alison have, only even kinkier, but the broken part means she’s just as likely to meet a nutcase and think it’s okay.”

He thought he’d sounded detached enough, cool enough, but evidently not. “An ex of yours?” Selene asked. When he reluctantly nodded, she said rather than asked, “The pretty blonde in all those pictures in your house.”

He nodded in confirmation.

For some reason, his instinct was to say,
I don’t love her
, but he bit it back.

For one thing, he wasn’t sure it was true. He was pretty sure he wasn’t in love with Natalie anymore, but he still felt something, or he wouldn’t be as concerned as he was.

For another, he figured saying that when the question hadn’t come up was the best way to make a woman assume he
was
still in love with Natalie.

Selene put her arms around him, slipped into his lap. “I can see why you’re worried something bad happened to her. Hell, she’s a thin, gorgeous blonde stranger you used to date, and I’m still worried something bad happened to her.”

“That,” Nick said, “isn’t exactly reassuring.”

But the feeling of Selene’s body against his, clad only in a tiny bikini, was.

Or maybe distracting was a better word.

It didn’t seem fair to Natalie—even if she was fine, just in the thoughtless stage of infatuation—to be so aware of Selene’s round, creamy breasts almost popping out of the minimal little black-and-white top, the curve of her hip and heart shape of her ass so nicely accented by the bottom. Something about an almost-naked woman got to him every time, and never mind that in this case he’d seen Selene naked, had gotten to explore the now-hidden mysteries of breasts and pussy pretty thoroughly.

He wanted to explore all over again, just in case he’d missed anything.

“Are you trying to distract me?”

Selene pulled away, looking torn between guilt and mischief. “To distract myself, actually. Otherwise, I’m going to keep wondering about your friend…”

“Natalie.” Saying the name made the situation feel that much more real.

“About Natalie. About how easy it is to be dumb even if you’re smart. I went to those Internet sites sometimes. I kept meeting guys who were obviously more clueless than I was, or who didn’t know where the shift key was, or who couldn’t type because they had one hand down their pants, so I gave up pretty quickly. But if I’d met someone who talked a good game? I like to think I’m not stupid, but I can be impulsive. Think about how we met. Not exactly reasoned and thought out.”

She stopped, then turned to look up at him, eyes like a doe’s—that big, that nervous. “I’m babbling,” she said. “Please give me something else to do with my mouth.”

She tilted her head, obviously hoping for a kiss, but acknowledging that it had to come on his whim, not hers.

And Nick gave her one.

Oh, he gave her one. A rough kiss, harsh and demanding, hands pulling at Selene’s hair.

Because he was drowning out images of Natalie, of all the bad things that could happen to…well, to any unlucky woman, but especially one whose major masturbatory fantasy was losing her identity, becoming a mere thing for a man’s pleasure.

And Selene moaned deep in her throat, wrapped around him, opened to him as if she were using him to drown out ugliness too—maybe worry for a woman she didn’t know, maybe belated nerves for some close call. Maybe fear that she too had jumped too quickly and she’d better enjoy herself while she could, in case she needed to make a rapid escape.