Knowing the Ropes (7 page)

“Oh, you are so asking for it!” Nick wheeled around, raised his hand as if to give her a good smack on the ass. “But I liked the sir. Keep using it for the rest of the day.”

Selene dropped the soap, letting it fall into the water without even trying to recover it. She could feel every muscle, every nerve, every square inch of skin, yearning toward Nick’s hand, craving the sharp sting and the fire that followed in its wake. Without even really meaning to, she turned around and cocked her ass out, presenting a better target.

He lowered his hand to his side without touching her. “Which is why you’re not getting it right now. You want it too badly. Don’t you, girl?”

With the last sentence, his voice shifted to that deep and ominous timbre that make her clit tingle.

“Answer me, Selene,” he insisted. “Were you hoping for another spanking?”

It took her a second or so to find her tongue, which seemed to have cleaved to the roof of a mouth as dry as her pussy was drenched.

She hung her head, studying the off-white enamel surface of the tub as if it were studded with emeralds, watching the soapy water swirl its way down the drain as if it were an oracle. “Yes, sir,” she finally admitted.

Why was her voice so small? It wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. Nick knew what she liked. That was why she was here. And he couldn’t be under any illusions she wasn’t…well, she preferred the more elegant “wanton” over “horny”, but they both described the way she felt around Nick. He seemed to like her that way, like that she wanted him and what he had to give her.

But she couldn’t speak up.

“I couldn’t hear you.” He raised her chin, and that gentle, proprietary touch made her tremble.

This didn’t help her ability to talk.

“Well, if you can’t answer me,” he said, affecting nonchalance, “I guess I’ll have to find someone who can talk to take to Garth and Alison’s today. Pity,” he added with a hilariously languid gesture that looked like it belonged in a costume drama on a debauched aristocrat played by someone along the lines of Ralph Fiennes, “they were looking forward to getting to know you better. But a woman who can’t talk is no fun at a party. Unless she’s gagged, of course, and it’s not that kind of a party.”

The hand that had imitated Ralph Fiennes reached for her nipple, pinched hard and deliciously. “Last chance, Selene. Were you trying to make me spank you?”

He twisted as he pinched, sending a shock of sensation, painful and exquisite, through her. Her “yes” was less an answer to his persistent questioning than an affirmation, a proclamation, a cry of delight. But it was audible, all right.

And saying it broke the dam. After that, she was able to look into Nick’s amazing blue eyes and admit, “Yes, sir, I was hoping for a spanking.”

“Greedy, aren’t you?”

Was that a trick question?

She decided that it probably was, and that it didn’t matter.

“Yes I am…sir.” She took a deep breath. “I feel like a kid in a candy store. A weird, twisted kid in a strange candy store, but you get the idea.”

Nick grinned, the kind of grin most commonly described as either “shit-eating” or “cat that got the cream”, depending on who was talking. “The candy store’s not going to close on you. But sometimes you need to eat something besides candy.”

He tweaked her nipples affectionately, then moved his hands to her shoulders. “I’ll redden your lovely ass another time. But I’ve been thinking ever since dinner last night about using your mouth—and since you’re such a self-confessed greedy, impatient little thing, it’ll do you good to wait awhile.”

He pressed on Selene’s shoulders, but she was already sinking to her knees, trying to do it gracefully, like she could imagine the fragile blonde in the pictures in his living room doing. It didn’t quite work, but she didn’t wobble too badly.

Nick didn’t seem to care. At least, Nick’s cock wasn’t voicing any complaints, and the rest of him seemed inclined to go along with it.

Selene tried to remember if she’d ever sucked cock in the shower before. She must have. Her sex life might have been fairly non-kinky until last night, but not lacking in adventures of other sorts. But she couldn’t remember when, where, with whom.

Not now. It was as if, at this moment, she was newborn, brought into being by Nick, for his pleasure—and hers. Definitely for hers.

The water fell on them like warm rain. Drops temptingly beaded on Nick’s cock.

She licked them off, feeling the heat of him through the cooling water.

A teasing lick around the head, circling him like a lollipop, savoring the pleasure.

She’d been thinking about doing something like this long before they’d gotten to the Barking Crab, and the calamari incident had made certain she’d keep thinking about it.

She wrapped one hand around the base of his cock, cupped the other around his balls. She opened her mouth wider, stretched it around the satisfying thickness—not too much, just enough to feel right in her mouth—and began to work him over, slowly and deliberately taking in his length.

Hands clenched in her damp hair, he pushed her head forward onto his shaft, then yanked her back again.

The fantasy from the restaurant.

He
had
been thinking what she’d been thinking. She’d known it.

“I said I wanted to use your mouth,” he said. “When I want it leisurely and sweet, I’ll lie down and get comfortable.” He punctuated his words with thrusts, pushing himself into her mouth. His hands controlled the movement of her head, and his grip on her hair hurt, but in the good sense of hurt, the sense she was learning that she craved even more than she’d imagined, and she felt helpless, but that was the way it should be right now. It was as if he’d put a collar on her with his words and his touch and the callous way he was using her mouth.

No, not callous, because it was exactly what she needed, exactly one of her fantasies, and it seemed clear to her that Nick not only knew that but was turned on precisely because of it, because her fantasy and his collided so precisely.

Nick’s cock became Selene’s world: all she could taste, all she could feel, all she could hear, even the little noises it made as it moved in and out of her wet mouth. The warm water pouring over them layered a soft sensuality over the harder, raw sexuality of the moment and locked them into a private tropical paradise.

Vision didn’t matter; she closed her eyes. The strain in her thighs didn’t matter; in fact, it felt strangely good, a little sacrifice she was making for her dom. He pounded into her mouth, and it should have been uncomfortable—okay, it was uncomfortable, but it was also remarkably good. She could feel the answer building between her own legs, lava hot, slick, needy. Yet she didn’t start playing with herself, as she’d often done in the past while giving her boyfriend du jour a quick blowjob. She was getting a lot of pleasure from his sleek length, the musky hints of precome, the calculated brutality of his thrusts.

Was it possible to come without being touched, to explode from a fantasy fulfilled so perfectly?

Her legs started to shake.

“My balls,” Nick gasped, and she understood. She stroked, a gentle caress with a hint of fingernail. Repeated it. Found the spot between his balls and ass where many men liked a bit of attention and applied pressure there.

Nick thrust faster, using her mouth like a pussy. Selene could barely breathe around the force of it, but she could tell she wouldn’t need to for much longer.

She shimmied her hand, vibrating on the sweet spot as she took a particularly deep thrust, one that hit the back of her throat enough that she should have gagged but somehow didn’t.

“Oh sweet Jes…” His words broke off into a roar that echoed around the confines of the bathroom, and her mouth flooded with Nick’s come.

Selene convulsed as pleasure passed through her, a quick, shimmering shock that was a shadow of Nick’s loud explosion, a shadow of the staggering orgasms she’d had the night before.

But unmistakably an orgasm—hands-free—from the sheer amazing rightness of the experience.

Weak, she sat back in the tub, letting the water and the joy wash over her.

“Wow,” Nick said quietly, and “Wow,” she echoed.

And then, once they’d both started breathing again, Nick drew her to her feet and washed
her
back.

Chapter Seven

She hadn’t known what to expect from Garth and Alison’s house. Something about Garth suggested that he ought to be living in a British manor house to match the lord-of-all-he-surveyed air, but she knew that was about as likely as Nick’s condo really having turned out to be the debauched pleasure palace of her most fevered imagination. Back in central New York, she wouldn’t have blinked at the pleasant early twentieth-century house set in a wooded lot. It was charming—lavender lining the front walk, a big side porch looking out over the side lawn, and modest wooden columns by the front door that suggested that the original builder was going for the upwardly mobile market with pretensions of elegance—but not spectacular.

She’d done a bit of house-hunting, though, before realizing that with the proceeds of selling her house in Rochester, she would be lucky to find a tiny condo in an outlying town that wasn’t even on a commuter rail line. This close to Boston, a house this nice on such a large lot might as well be a lordly manor as far as she was concerned. Either they’d gotten it years ago as a fixer-upper, or they were…not exactly rich but more than comfortable.

The driveway and the street were already crowded with cars, everything from oversized, overpriced SUVs to hybrids to classic soccer-mom minivans to a few beaters held together with bubblegum, duct tape and the power of prayer. Many of them sported the same small sticker: black-and-blue stripes with a red heart.

Selene suppressed a giggle at that and wondered if she would have figured it out if she hadn’t been clued in.

The backyard was hidden, the view from the street blocked by a tall wooden privacy fence—made sense with a pool, she supposed—and as they approached the house, Selene could hear a buzz of voices from behind the fence. There was a gate in the fence, but instead, Nick guided her to the porch steps. Several strangers and Betsy from yesterday were ensconced in chairs on the porch, drinks in hand, chatting. Betsy was drinking what looked like iced tea; the others had beers or mimosas.

“Hey, Nick, Selene,” Betsy said calmly. “Herself’s out back, imitating a very small force of nature and somehow making food magically appear from the air. You know the Alison magic—you think, just
think
that chocolate chip cookies might be nice, and suddenly they’re there, and don’t ask how she baked them in this heat, but apparently she did. Himself is around somewhere.”

“Grill,” one of her companions, a boyish Asian woman with her short hair slicked back like a dapper Jazz Age gentleman, said, gesturing in the appropriate direction. “Since the man who said he’d help with grill duty was running late.” The woman winked at Nick as she said it, but Nick looked a little guilty.

The expression, Selene decided, didn’t suit him at all. She much preferred the gorgeous, confident alpha-male face. And that made her feel bad for making him late, although certainly he hadn’t been fighting back when she joined him in the shower.

They headed into the backyard, following Betsy’s gesture.

Nice new pool.

Slightly straggly plantings clearly stuck in to disguise the aftermath of construction, including a couple of potted ficus trees that looked like they’d been appropriated from someone’s office for the weekend.

A deck so shiny and new that she guessed it had been put in with the pool.

Various people milling about and a few splashing in the pool. Not a huge crowd, maybe twenty people.

Garth was manning a stainless-steel grill that would give Selene’s dad a heart attack from barbeque lust.

Alison was just stepping out the back door with a pitcher of what looked like margaritas in one hand. She wore a long, floaty turquoise silk-gauze skirt, a little matching halter, bronze sandals with moderate heels, a copper bracelet set with turquoise on her left arm. It looked gorgeous with her coloring but more formal than what most of the other guests were wearing. She seemed to find it as comfortable as shorts and sneakers.

It made Selene feel a little better about her dress and utterly inappropriate high-heeled sandals, although she still planned to kick them off as soon as possible so she wouldn’t sink into the lawn.

Alison put the pitcher of drinks down on a long table set up by the pool and met them halfway.

“It’s my fault we’re even later that Nick thought we’d be,” Selene told Alison breathlessly. “I begged him to stop at TJ Maxx on the way in; I have no idea where my bathing suit is right now and I…” She stopped talking at Alison’s knowing smirk and just held up the TJ Maxx bag to prove that part of the story, at least, was true. “I’ve never picked out a bikini so fast in my
life.
Didn’t even try it on. I hope it fits.”

Nice outfit
, Alison mouthed before adding out loud, “No problem. I knew you guys weren’t dead in a ditch.”

Garth joined them, slipping his arm around Alison’s waist. “Morning, Nick. Oh, sorry, afternoon.” He didn’t smirk at the two of them the way Alison did, just maintained the same calm half smile, but his dark eyes were knowing, and there was a world of kindly teasing in his voice. Oh yeah, he knew what they’d been up to last night and why they were late today. Thankfully, he seemed to approve.