Ride 'Em (A Giddyup Novel) (12 page)

“I always do this,” she lied. “It’s fine.”

He looked skeptical, but after a second he shrugged and kissed her again. “Okay. Time for bed.”

He unhooked her feet from the spreader bar first, tossing it onto the covers, then frowning and leaving her side for a moment while he whipped the quilt and blanket from the bed to the floor so only the sheets and pillows remained. Then the wrists. He left all the cuffs in place.

When he pointed to the center of the bed, Mindy crawled up, feeling the pain in every inch of her body. It ached like a fever, making her skin feel taut and oversensitive and too full of every type of feeling. The bed squeaked with each movement. She trembled on all fours until Logan yanked two pillows, settled them under her hips, and pushed her shoulders down. Mindy stretched out gratefully, the top half of her body sinking into the mattress while her butt stayed high, her legs spread.

After yanking his lounge pants off, Logan pulled the lead ropes from the dresser and secured them around the headboard, then clipped Mindy’s wrist cuffs to the ends. The ropes were soft, thick nylon, and felt good under her hands when she gripped them. Sturdy. Inescapable. Safe.

The whole room was safe—the ancient-seeming iron bed, the plush mattress, the man who knelt behind her, chucking a strip of wrapped condoms and a lube bottle down as he sat. Even the Lucite rod he was holding didn’t scare her. He might cause any number of injuries to her
body
, but he would never
harm
her. Mindy had never trusted a Dom so quickly, so easily. But then, none of her former Doms had ever taught her the quadratic equation. None of their moms had ever sold her homecoming mums or bought her fund-raiser candy. She’d never helped any of them scold their little brothers for inappropriate remarks.

Logan rubbed the makeshift cane over the ball of one of her feet—too firmly to tickle—then tapped it there. “Is this okay?”

“Yes, sir.” She could hear the tears in her voice, and hoped he would ignore them. The melancholy would leave her when the pain came back.

He smacked the ball of her foot harder, a quick, stinging blow. Again and again, varying the spot but never the pressure. Ball, heel, the sole to the side of the arch. He covered the bottom of that foot, then left it for the other side. By the time he was done, both her feet were throbbing and sensitive but she was so relaxed otherwise she could have almost gone to sleep if she hadn’t know what was coming.

He wouldn’t have brought the cane to bed only for a round of light bastinado. When he left off her feet, Mindy braced for impact higher up. She didn’t get it, but wasn’t disappointed. Instead, Logan put the implement of destruction to one side and raked his nails over her ass and thighs again, lighting up all the spots where the pain had started to ease.

“It’s nice and red, but you need some more accent marks back here before I fuck you.”

She tried to laugh, but the sound she produced was more like a strangled
Gaaah
. Logan had shifted his attention to her pussy, stroking his fingers alongside it, spreading her wide, slipping one thumb inside her while his fingers fanned over her clit. She felt swollen, exposed, ready to ignite at any second. He rocked his hand back and forth until she moaned and ground against his touch. It was irresistible. And maybe this was it, maybe this was when she’d finally get to come.

She lost herself in it, pumping her hips harder, fucking herself on his hand, until the swirling pleasure inside her focused behind her clit like a shimmering ball of potential.

When he yanked his hand away and smacked her ass, she started crying again. “Pleeeeease, sir? Please?” She yanked on the cuffs. So close. She was dizzy with how close she’d been.

He chuckled and retrieved the cane, moving a little to one side of her. “You can come when I do. Or thereabouts.”

“Please?” But it was just a hopeless whisper into her pillow. Followed hard by a wordless scream as the cane met her sore ass. An expert blow or a very lucky one, right across both cheeks. The next one angled across the back of one thigh, and she bucked and sobbed. The movement brought her clit against the pillow, and she tried to get enough leverage against the soft surface to bring herself off, riding the pain and pleasure as they combined inside her.

“Not yet, Melinda.” Logan hauled her hips up, repositioning her. “You know better. I hope you know better, anyway. What do you say?”

“S—sorry, sir.”

“I don’t believe you.” He braced one hand on her hip and lined the cane up against the other cheek, tapping once to show his intent. “Let me hear how sorry you are.”

He brought it down hard on the meat of her ass, and she screamed her apology as the agony rattled her skull. Bliss, it was bliss, being filled entirely by that pain. It was
life
.

Slick, careful fingers brushed her pussy. Then cool liquid, trickling down. And then Logan’s hands were on her hips, and his cock was pressing for entrance, and she pushed back to meet him, and it was everything. He completed her.

She’d been too keyed up, too ready for too long. She started to come before he was even fully inside, a slow implosion of delight she was powerless to stop. She tried, clawing at the sheet, making a futile effort not to move.

“Sorry, sorry, oh fuck, sorry, gonna nnngggghhh—”

“Go. Do it. Fuck, yes.” He slapped her haunch and started thrusting hard. Fast, deep, wild, and absolutely perfect.

Mindy shattered. Her whole body spasmed as the orgasm took over, rolled through her, shook her soul like a rag doll. Then left her grudgingly, first with a series of aftershocks, then with a flash of sensitivity so keen that every movement of Logan’s cock inside her became a swift agony of remembered pleasure.

He came with a shout, a curse, then leaned over her, shuddering and still working his hips. Then moving more fitfully, slowing his manic pace to a crawl, and finally to a stop.

They breathed at each other like the winded animals they were, for a period of time Mindy felt in no state to measure. Could have been seconds. Could have been forever. Eventually Logan leaned over and dropped a kiss to her shoulder.

“Holy fucking fuck.” He pulled back, groaning, and worked his way off the squeaky bed. Dealing with the condom, Mindy assumed.

She might have fallen asleep. The next thing she registered was him unclipping her wrist cuffs from the leads, and starting to unbuckle one.

“Want ’em on,” she mumbled. They felt so good.

He rubbed the back of her hand, then lifted it to his lips for a quick kiss. “We need to take the wrist ones off, they might leave some marks if you have them on all night. But you can keep the ankle cuffs, okay?”

She sighed. “’Kay. Thank you, sir.” For everything. For the beating, and the astonishingly good sex. For remembering she needed to keep her arms unmarked. For taking her out of herself, however shortly. She didn’t have the words to say it out loud. She barely remembered her own name.

Then she was startled awake again by a warm, wet cloth being stroked between her legs. Thunder rumbled and the windows lit up, rain pelting the glass as though the storm was gaining a second wind.

Then she was snuggling a pillow, while a quilt was tucked securely around her, with an extra few careful tucks around her throbbing feet.

Then Logan was under the blanket with her, spooned against her back with his arm over her waist and his lips pressed to her hair.

I
t was probably not the best way to run a business.

Logan was exhausted the next morning, and not just because of the hours of deviant carousing. It was all the nights before that with almost no sleep, as he’d stared at spreadsheets, at all the unpromising numbers. He’d studied the figures in every spare moment, he’d tried to adjust as he went along now that people were actually
here
and he could see how it all worked. He’d done everything but cartwheels trying to entertain the customers, and he could only hope it would be enough to somehow conjure up more business. And he really should have either done more of the same, or gotten some damn sleep for once, instead of kinky shenanigans.

At least he was too distracted to be nervous about satisfying the rest of the guests anymore. He only really cared about pleasing one of them, and he was pretty convinced that Tuesday had its own time-space continuum because it seemed to last
forever
. After dark, after everybody else was asleep, that was when he could get more alone time with Mindy. Until then, it was all excruciating wait time and trying to restrain himself from grabbing her ass.

He succeeded. Mostly.

The morning had been . . . weird. She’d been gone from the bed when he woke up to his alarm, and his heart had plummeted like a stone. No note, no good-bye text. She’d said she planned to go, and she was gone, and everything was terrible.

But when he walked down to help Robert and Diego set up breakfast, there she was. Laughing, carrying a stack of plates. Wearing a blue “Bolero” T-shirt, probably the one she’d mentioned the night before when he’d offered her the robe instead.

The guys barely spared him a glance. He had no idea what backstory Mindy had given for being in the main house so early, or what his two friends-turned-employees knew about their relationship other than what Robert had already witnessed. So he could only silently thank her for staying, and start setting out the silverware.

She vanished after eating a stuffed three-egg omelette and half a pig’s worth of bacon, and Logan figured that was it. She’d pack and go and that would be the end of the strange saga of Logan and Mindy and their kinky one-night stand. He took a group out for a trail ride, and tried to concentrate on the paying customers he
wouldn’t
give an eyetooth to scene with one more time. The folks he
didn’t
want to fall asleep spooning against.

When she showed up at his and Lamar’s bullwhip demonstration after lunch, he was almost annoyed. He wanted closure—if she was set to leave, she should just leave. It hit him like a brick, halfway through whipping a line of cans off the top of the corral fence: Maybe she wasn’t leaving.

He didn’t miss a beat. Half a dozen cans, half a dozen strokes, just like he’d practiced it a million times. The guests applauded and whistled, Logan took a bow. But when Lamar stepped in to do his bit—a lasso trick, for a sneak preview of the next day’s entertainment—Logan held up his hand.

“Who wants an encore?”

The obliging group responded favorably, and Logan held up a hand to shade his eyes, pretending to scan the crowd. “Can I get a volunteer. . . oh, you there, the young lady in blue. Step right this way, please.”

Mindy lifted her eyebrows at him but obliged, walking to the front to stand next to him.

“Waiver?” Lamar muttered, shaking his head.

Logan shrugged. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”

Or Mindy’s. While he spoke to his stable hand, she took an elastic off her wrist and put her hair in a low ponytail, securing it from the fitful wind. Logan flipped it forward of her shoulder and positioned her with her back to the audience, her hands clasped in front of her. He lifted her chin with a finger, and made the mistake of eye contact. Time swirled, the audience faded, he almost leaned in for a kiss then caught himself and took his hand away. Found the nearest can, brushed the dust off it, and placed it carefully on top of Mindy’s head.

He caught her eye again. “Don’t move until I say.”

A smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Yes, sir.”

God
.

He paced off the range, pretending to count his steps for the crowd as if he actually had to think about it. It was simple math, really, just measurement and knowing the length of his own stride, practicing until he could do it consistently. But the whip was loud, and potentially dangerous, and people
loved
the drama of it. This was really no different from doing a demo at a club or play party. Except it was outdoors, which was nice because it gave him a lot of room. And nobody was in fetish gear. There were zero Doms secretly fondling their subs in this crowd. Exactly no naked breasts or buttocks were on display. It was also—as far as he could tell—a dildo-free environment. But other than that, pretty much exactly the same as a club.

Better than a club, really, for all those reasons. What a shame they couldn’t just turn the whole place into an open-air kink free-for-all. Forget selling logo caps and make a fortune price-gouging participants on sunscreen and bug spray.

He turned and assessed Mindy’s back. Her ruddy hair contrasted sharply with the blue shirt, but his eyes were drawn down. Her ass was such a tempting target he had to wrench his gaze up to the can on top of her head.

“
Can
I do it?” he called, smirking at the inevitable groans and swishing the whip suggestively a few times to loosen his arm. “I think I can, I think I can, I think I—”
Whip!

The can flew off, and the crowd went wild. Logan allowed himself a mental pat on the back. Mindy stood completely still. He couldn’t help himself.

“A round of applause for my victim—I mean, assistant! Mindy, everyone!”

They clapped, but she didn’t move a muscle. She was smart. And well trained, sweet Jesus, so well trained. Logan grinned and swished his whip around again.

“Clever girl,” he called out.
Swish, swish.

She yelled out, “Ha!”

It had snapped a good foot from her ass, but close enough she
had
to have had a moment of panic. That was built into people. Only training could explain her ability to keep from flinching. But whoever had bullwhipped her hadn’t trained the adorable fear-squeak out of her. What would she sound like when the whip actually connected?

He had to stop, or he was going to be sporting wood in front of a crowd of paying customers. Not his jam. “
Now
you can move! Thank you for volunteering!”

Mindy turned with a grin and took a bow, then waited a beat and stuck her tongue out at Logan. The audience ate it up.

Logan remembered the noise she’d made when he’d bitten her tongue. And the way she used to grin and whoop when she finally got a math concept right and demonstrated it perfectly. And how she hadn’t let him kill the spider. All of the memories, old and new, jumbled together as if she’d been there by his side the whole time.

When the crowd trailed after Lamar to hear Ethan talk about nineteenth-century blacksmithing techniques, Logan held Mindy back with a hand on her arm.

“I thought you were leaving.”

She eyed the backs of the other guests as if she would rather join them than have this talk, then turned to him with a cockeyed smile and an exaggerated shrug. “I thought so, too. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Her face went serious, and she repeated it earnestly, with a whole new weight. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Me, I hope.” Probably the wrong tone, but what the hell.

“Sure. But
why
?” Then she must’ve realized how that sounded, and frantically waved her hands, shaking her head. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, you were great. I mean, like . . . at what cost. Oh God, no, that’s—”

“It’s cool.” He stilled her hands with his, then released them before he got tempted to pull her in for a hug. “I knew what you meant. Sort of. It’s weird.”

“It
is
weird.”

“Unexpected.”

“For sure.
So
not how I planned all this.”

A tiny voice in the back of his head questioned that, and he hated himself for it. She’d expected—what was it again?—a “pathetic, balding, drugstore cowboy.” That was who she’d planned to flirt with if she needed to. He didn’t like to toot his own horn, but he figured he was at least some level of upgrade. And her preferred flavor of dominant to boot, apparently.

That was where his suspicion crumbled. He could believe flirting, maybe even sex, to get a deal. Not from Mindy, necessarily, but in general—he knew it happened, that men and women alike resorted to that as a business tactic in all sorts of fields where people would never expect it. The news was full of those stories. But once the whips came out . . . there was no way she would’ve gone that far on the off chance he was still down for a deal. The kink was real, at the very least.

If she was staying, he probably ought to assume it was for more of that.

But that wasn’t why he
wanted
her to stay. She fit in at Hilltop. She lit the place up. A woman’s touch, maybe? Hell if he knew, but something had been missing in the mix of the whole setup until she’d started helping out. He would have considered asking her to stay even if it weren’t about wanting to take her on a date or something—someplace away from here, to see whether their connection lasted outside the perimeters of the ranch. And even if it weren’t for the kink, which had been . . .

Well, it hadn’t all gone completely smoothly, in truth. Something they had to address if there were to be more scenes.

He reached for her arm again, sliding his fingers down to encircle her wrist. Not to make her feel trapped, but to help her feel safe. “Mindy, why were you really crying last night?”

It was the pause that did it. That was a giveaway. If she’d just said, “I always do that,” without thinking it over first, he’d have bought it. As it was . . . no.

“It’s better to have things out in the open,” he reminded her.

“If you must know, your magic spooge got to me a little.”

“Why am I not flattered?”

“Crushing self-esteem issues stemming from an unhappy childhood?”

He took her other wrist, shackling her firmly. “Melinda. Can you just be honest with me? If you don’t want to tell me, say you don’t want to tell me. Say it’s none of my business. But if it was because of something I did, I need to know.”

She’d already been looking down, avoiding his gaze. Now she glanced off to the side. He wanted to tell her never, ever to play poker. She was one big tell. He couldn’t bring himself to believe anybody had an act this good.

“I lied . . . a little.”

“About . . . ?” He tried to ignore the sinking feeling in his chest.

“I wasn’t homesick for Dallas,” she explained. “I’m homesick for
here
. For Bolero. These trees, dirt this color, the way it all smells, the damn pie at Minnie’s. Just . . . all of it.”

He tried to piece it together, but just couldn’t. “Okay. But. You’re
here
.”

“I know. That’s the problem.” She finally looked up, her brown eyes almost amber in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m here, but I’m not supposed to be. And I have to go back home. That’s hanging over me. Once I realized how much I wanted to stay here, and that I
couldn’t
stay, I thought I’d get it over with fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Then the storm happened. And I thought, well, I should have seen that coming. So did I set myself up by not keeping a close enough eye on the weather? Then I ran up to say good-bye because I thought it would be really shitty to leave without saying goodbye. And of course you weren’t going to let me run back out of there with the sky falling. I knew that
afterward
. It was so obvious
afterward
, but at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing. Then that scene, and the whole thing, it was . . . good,
really good
, and it’s not that I
want
to leave. It’s that I feel like I’d be smarter to? But I don’t
want
to.”

Her eyes pleaded with him, and he wished like anything he had an easy answer for her. Something to make it all okay. But he didn’t want her to leave, either, so he wasn’t really qualified to advise her. He wanted her to stay. Or at least to come back. That much, he’d figured out, and he didn’t care how stupid or ill-advised it was. “That’s a lot to sort through.”

“I know. So when I say I don’t know what I’m doing, I mean all of that. It’s such a mess.
I’m
a mess.”

Her wrists felt vulnerable in his hands—strong, but only relatively so. He could snap her if he wanted to. But all he really wanted was to help her feel better about whatever she decided. He was too sleep-deprived to feel confident he could give good counsel, but he had to try. “It’s kind of late now. If you start this late, you’ll be driving at least some of the way in the dark. So I really hope you at least stay tonight and hit the road tomorrow. And we can maybe talk more after supper, and get to feeling better about at least some things?”

After a second or so, she nodded. “That makes sense.”

He told himself not to do it.
Don’t do it, man. Do NOT
. But he did it. “You know the isolation stalls? The old barn, I mean? Ethan went through there earlier, swept out the creepy-crawlies, but he ended up putting his horses in the big barn.” The ranch was full of old and new versions of the same thing—sturdy old rock buildings in need of repair, and newer structures his grandparents had installed a few decades ago, when their customers had found the old ones too outdated. Now the native rock was part of the retro appeal, so Logan was looking into restoring everything. “He said the ceiling beams are actually in pretty good shape. In terms of load-bearing.”