Submissive Desires (20 page)

He hated the way she looked. “Are you hungry?”

A slow shake of her head. She seemed to be avoiding looking at his bed, although that was damned hard to do because of its size.

“Tired?”

More shakes.

“Cranky? Grumpy? Sleazy? Doc?”

No smile.

81

Now he knew something was up.

Well, he was happier than he wanted to be with her here. He’d thought that having her at his fingertips might alleviate some of his constant ache for her, but he was wrong – yet again – about this woman. She affected him like no other had.

Impulsively, he barreled towards her, scooping her up in his arms and carrying her to the bed, laying her down beside him and trapping her there with amazing efficiency. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Not a question. A demand. An order. Maura knew she’d be in deep trouble if she didn’t tell him the truth – or come up with something plausible. “Just new, and feeling distinctly like a fish out of water.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, and her apathy surprised him, making him even more concerned about her. “If’ I’d come down here before and seen how rich you are, I’d’ve never agreed to move in.”

He thanked whatever fate prevented him from having her down here before, and said, “I’m not rich.”

“You’re waaaaay rich compared to me. I’m one step up from trailer trash in my dilapidated little Victorian. You’re living large here, and it makes me uneasy.”

Simon sighed. Contrary woman. Why couldn’t she be the type who would demand access to his checkbook so that she could redecorate and remodel to her heart’s content? Or wondered out loud when he was going to buy her a wardrobe, or a car?

He could more than afford to do any of those things for Maura, yet she didn’t want them, and he knew she would never accept them.

Unable to soothe her any other way – his words, he knew, would fall on deaf, stubborn ears – he made love to her, as tenderly and gently as he could, cuddling her to him afterwards and falling asleep before her, which should have been a clue to him that she was still not okay.

Maura was up much later, wondering what the heck she’d gotten herself into – and with whom, exactly. He’d told her that he couldn’t tell her much about his work. He’d always been very secretive about it, and has always maintained that it was something like freelancing for the government. He often carried a gun, and flew off to places he couldn’t name, either. He lived like this, and now she did too.

Whatever he was doing, it certainly paid well. She just hoped that he wasn’t working for the other side, although she sincerely doubted it. He was too patriotic for his own good.

Knowing she wasn’t allowed to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom, she didn’t fall asleep until dawn.The first day that they were together in his house, she spent it unpacking the multitude of boxes that had followed her down. Simon helped as much as possible, but then he got a call and came back into the room wearing a frighteningly dark grimace. “I can’t believe it. I’ve gotta go.”

He pulled her up from where she’d been sitting tailor-fashioned on the floor and tucked her against him. “Now, you have the keys to the front door that I gave you, right? And keys to the cars – except the ‘Vette?” As he’d shown her the car he adored so much, he’d told her that if he ever caught her driving it he would warm her bottom for her every single night for a month. She got the idea that she wasn’t to drive it.

But then, she wasn’t likely to drive any of his cars, despite the keys he’d generously given her.

It was as if he’d read her mind. He looked sternly down at her. “And if you go out, you’re to take one of my cars, not drive your own. That thing is a disreputable rattletrap.” He hadn’t realized how mechanically unsound it was until he’d had the guy who drove it down to the house – who was a demolitions expert friend of his from way back and also a pretty darned good mechanic – had handed him Maura’s keys and shook his head, giving him a rundown on what he thought was probably wrong with the car, and why it shouldn’t be driven until the problems were fixed.

Maura had shrugged her shoulders at that pronunciation when he’d given Ray’s diagnosis to her, saying that the car drove fine as far as she was concerned. When she turned the key, it wheezed to life, and that was all she needed.

82

Saying that to him hadn’t eased the look of consternation on his face one bit. He had caught her chin firmly and said, “You are not to drive that car until I can get it taken care of.”

She hadn’t said a thing, and, having laid down the law to her, he didn’t beleaguer the fact. He expected her to obey him, whether or not she verbalized any sort of agreement.

“If I find out that that car has move so much as an inch from where it is now – and I can, believe me – you will regret it.” Despite his tight hold on her chin, his kiss was gossamer. “Damn, I wish I didn’t have to go, but I do.” Simon kissed her again. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep the alarms armed at all times,” he warned seriously. “If you have a problem setting them, call the number above the keypad and they’ll walk you through it. Your name is already on the account.”

“Yes, Sir.” She watched him walk away from her, sighing deeply, returning to the endless collection of boxes – the contents of which she really wasn’t sure she knew what to do with, not wanting to take up too much space, somehow, as if this was all very impermanent.

Maura went out to the local airstrip with him and saw him off, melting under his obviously hungry kiss goodbye. Well, she thought as she got behind the wheel of his behemoth Lincoln Town car, moving in with him was turning out to be a lot like living alone. Here she was again, by herself, and even more lonely than she would have been at home because she was so far away from all of her friends.

She signed online and chatted for a while since she didn’t want to drive one of his cars that far to go see someone. It took her several days to get herself acclimated to the size and expanse of the huge ranch house. Maura secreted her office in one of the back bedrooms, the ugliest room she could find considering the quality of the furniture she owned and how nicely everything else was decorated. She moved the desk herself from where he had had the movers put it – which was in his big, library-esque study, where it stood out like a sore thumb. She wasn’t able to write much at first, but then eventually –

more due to financial necessity than anything else – she got back into the swing of writing every day.

And then he returned, and raised hell with her. He was not happy that she’d moved the desk by herself, and was even less happy with where she’d put it.

Simon was bone tired and irritable when he got home. He’d been in a country where Americans were not welcomed – which was a huge amount of places nowadays – and that was hotter than the hammers of hell. He’d done the job in record time, amazing his superiors, and gotten the hell out, able to think of nothing besides getting back to his woman, whom he’d barely had the chance to finally install in his household before having to go save the world again.

It was the first time in a long time that he resented the hell out of his job. The last time had been when he’d decided to get out of it on a full-time basis and do it only on as a consultant – not that he wasn’t kept hopping busy just consulting.

But now he was chafing that even the consulting was cramping his style, and it worried him a bit.

He was getting downright obsessed with Maura, and rarely wanted to be anywhere but with her. Was this a crush? Nah. He was way too old for crushes. An infatuation? Well . . . that sounded a little better, but was essentially the same thing.

He didn’t know what to call it, but he knew that he hated the idea that he’d only had her in his bed for one night before being called away. Maybe he’d tell his boss to stop throwing so many assignments his way . . . at least for a while – until the novelty of having her around wore off a little.

Or a lot.

Simon planned on it easing off a lot, so that he could get back in control of his life. He didn’t much like how helpless he was feeling about her sometimes. Especially when she seemed to feel no particular interest in coming here to live with him. It took her forever to decide what he considered to be the inevitable – that she would live with him.

And there was little he hated more than to be made to wait.

And this blasted assignment was making him wait to be with her, and when he walked through the door – noting with excruciatingly bad humor that the security alarm had not been set - he was dirty and grubby and cranky because he’d just split as fast as he could after the debriefing to get back here.

83

But she was nowhere to be found. Literally nowhere. He checked the pool – she’d seemed intrigued by it, being a water baby from way back – and then the bedroom, the living room, and finally his study, calling out for her all the while, and getting angrier by the minute.

He found her in the last place he looked – the back bedroom, one he’d barely ever opened the door to except to check that the maid was doing her job and cleaning everything. There she was –

headphones in her ears, humming along to a song he couldn’t hear and typing away on whatever it was that she was working on lately.

Simon walked in and lifted the headset from her head, making her start and stand up. Before she had a chance to recover, he had her elastic waist shorts and pretty pink lace undies down to her ankles.

Without having said so much as a hello, he bent her over his raised knee – propping his foot on a file crate near her - and began to spank her with great gusto.

Maura was, at first, much more frightened by his appearance than hurting from his spanking.

Why was he disciplining her? What had she done?

She wasn’t going to find out any time soon, she guessed, as he increased both the tempo and the strength of the swats he was delivering, since the others didn’t seem to be having much effect. Within three strokes, she was crying, and a feeling of immense satisfaction washed over him.

This was what he needed. To correct her. Ceaselessly. Mercilessly.

Within ten strokes, she was begging, and that feeling merely intensified.

God, he wanted her! But not before he delivered a good spanking for scaring him like that – and moving the desk without his permission to a dull, dreary room where she was hiding herself away like a servant.

Now, the alarm system being most definitely disarmed – after he’d expressly told her to keep it armed at all times. That was going to earn her a very, very hard session indeed.

But later. Right now, he wanted her in the worst way, and, since he had no need to deny himself, he finished giving her a good hard licking then stripped off the rest of her clothes and put her on her knees on the bed, facing away from him, with her bottom waving in the air, and her head down on the mattress, leaning her right cheek on the comforter, her arms folded behind her back as she’d been taught.

By him.

She was slick, but not slick enough to make it really easy for him to penetrate her, and he was glad of that. He wanted her to feel every millimeter of him scraping along her insides. This time was purely for him, and he rode her hard, nudging her knees further apart just to increase her humiliation, grabbing a hold of her hips and preventing her from moving when he plunged forwards, forcing her to take him as he raped her from behind and exploded into her with a long, hoarse moan.

It was over much too quickly, he thought, suppressing the urge to lean down and press a kiss to the hollow at the small of her back as he slipped out of her.

“The alarm wasn’t set.”

Maura’s face fell and her eyes squeezed shut, knowing that she was in for it.

“I’m going to grab something to eat, and some sleep, and we’ll deal with this tomorrow. I intend to make sure that you don’t make that mistake again.”

He disappeared down the hall without ever having even said hello.

It was hard for her, hours later when she was exhausted and needed to sleep, to get into that big bed with him, knowing that he was going to hurt her badly tomorrow.

But, as quiet as she’d tried to be, he’d been awakened by her movements, and rolled over to spoon her, as usual, and she fell asleep quite naturally without another thought about the trial that might lay ahead.

Simon didn’t make her wait very long for her punishment, in fact he did it at what she considered a very unusual time – just after breakfast. She was taken to one of the spare bedrooms that he hadn’t shown her on the tour, and when he opened the door, she knew why: it was very obviously a place of pain.

There were bolts in the ceiling with chains hanging down, there were rows of progressively more 84

terrifying implements proudly displayed on the walls, a St. Andrew’s cross in one corner, a straight backed chair in the other, and a big horse with four large, heavy cuffs attached at the legs to hold the miscreant still for whatever punishment was necessary.

There was an exam table up against one wall, complete, she noticed, with the embarrassingly familiar stirrups at the end. He had told her that, along with being punished weekly, she would also be examined thoroughly any time the idea struck him. Somehow, she had dismissed that thought from her mind, but the presence of that doctor’s office table brought it throbbingly back into her mind.

As he’d said to her so many other times, he again through it casually over his shoulder. “Strip.”

Maura knew better than to delay in responding once he’d given her an order, so she quickly divested herself of her clothes, folding them neatly and putting them on the horse.

“Over here.” He was standing in front of a wall that had four padded leather cuffs bolted into the wall, dangling on chains that could be shortened easily and adjusted using speed clips. There was also a large leather belt at about waist high.

And that was exactly what he did, backing her against the wall and attaching a cuff to each wrist, merely holding her in place at first, then tightening the chains so that her warms were stretched high above her and there was absolutely no play available to her – she could not move her arms down even an inch.