The Foster Family (21 page)

“I think that’s the other way around. The drink and….”

He eyed me like I was a complete dunce.

“Right. Whatever.” I studied his face. “You know that isn’t true, don’t you?” I sat up straighter, gripping his wrist, and his hand froze where it rested on my face. “I am not here to push you out of your home.” I pointed at the patch on the ceiling, not painted over yet. “Not even part of the toy room anymore, am I?”

“At least then I knew what you were.”

Me too.

“So now wha—”

Before the question was fully formed, he had leaned down and covered my mouth with his. Bad idea. We’d catch hell from Malcolm for this. My brain told me as much. The rest of me sighed and ignored the signals from my brain in favor of the ones coming from Charlie.

He knew how to kiss. He knew how to melt flesh and bone with those lips and make it feel like burning in hell was worth it.

Long, long moments after he started, after his heat had soaked into my skin and his force into my being, he pushed his tongue demandingly into my mouth. I opened, subdued by just his lips. Most of my cognitive function deserted me, and he pulled back slightly. Not enough for me to escape, just enough to feather the kisses over my face and down my jaw, avoiding the bruises and changing this from a passionate, longing kiss that might get us into trouble to a full-on make-out session. Enough to cross the line from an innocent, if slightly desperate kiss, to deliberate invitation.

Miraculously, I found two stray thoughts to rub together: “Malcolm” and “Rules.” Turning my head, trying to escape the temptation, I managed a weak push at his chest. He just grabbed my wrists and pinned my hands against the smooth, dark wood of the headboard and kept kissing. The pain from my still-sore sprained wrist barely even registered.

The bed shifted as he did, my knuckles ground against unyielding wood as he moved. He had taken my lips again and didn’t break the kiss as he climbed up, swung a long leg over both of mine, and settled his weight across my thighs. The cats mewled at him in disgust, leapt to the floor, and padded out of the room.

That was me, pinned and letting him kiss the breath and rational thought right out of me. I didn’t need to be rational to know this was bad. Certainly, I had never had a sit-down and been told all the rules, but the very base instinct in me that yearned for the rules in the first place told me this was flagrant shattering of at least a dozen.

“Charlie,” I tried, but the sound was buried, distorted under his kiss. “Mmmf!” I tried again, wriggling under him, squirming until he had to stop and look at me.

He stared, his eyes dark, filled to brimming with lust. His fingers tightened, reminding me of my own capture. He curled his lips. “Tell me to stop.”

I didn’t have the power to tell him anything. I wasn’t a kink virgin. Less experienced than him, maybe. Ignorant of the household rules, definitely, but not completely clueless. I had no power here. Not with him, not with Malcolm, not in this house.

I stared back at him, silent.

“Tell me,” he grated, jaw tight, the grip of his fingers beginning to hurt.

I licked bruised lips and tried. I tried. I wanted to tell him this was the wrong way to go. Pinned under him like that, I couldn’t ignore my own cock, my own racing heart, my own blazing need to
be
pinned.

He had to be the one to stop. He had to be the one to not go where we were going. Didn’t he?

My heart thumped against my ribcage, and I twisted my hands.

“You want me to let you go?”

“No,” I whispered.
Should
he let me go was a different question than did I
want
him to let me go.

“What do you want?”

I could only stare at him. What did I want? Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?

“I know what you want,” he told me in a whisper as rough as sandpaper over skin. “Only you’ll never ask.”

How could he know what even I didn’t know?

“Now who’s tongue-tied?” His voice remained gratingly low, forced through a stiff jaw and out the cracks of his shell. Guess it had never occurred to him that encasing himself in all that titanium not only kept new hurts from getting in, it stopped the old ones getting out. Whatever those old hurts were, they writhed around in his eyes and made gravel out of his voice and let him pin me against both our better judgment.

“Are we going to do this or not?” I asked finally, daring to point out what it was we were doing and maybe stop it before it was too late. Or prod it to the conclusion that had been building since the very first morning in their kitchen when I’d been so audacious as to ask his Dom for a cup of coffee.

Letting one of my hands go, he cupped my chin and lifted my face, and his lips curled again into that tense snarl. “What is it you think we’re going to do?”

“You tell me.” I ignored the flare of pain through my bruises.

He pursed his lips, the curl flattening to thin, straight line.

That’s when it occurred to me he maybe, really, honestly, didn’t know why he was here. Didn’t know what he wanted. Didn’t know how to ask for it. He maybe, really, had no clue how to get from a guy anything Malcolm didn’t tell him he could have. Or maybe even without Malcolm telling him what it was he wanted.

“Let my other hand go, Charlie,” I ordered.

And just like that, he did. He was good at following orders. I was not great at giving them. I didn’t like giving them. I wasn’t one to be on top. I was a bottom. I didn’t even like topping from down there, but he was lost. Zigging when he should be zagging, and he had no idea how to get back on course or avoid the disastrous collision that was coming because he could not look up from his path.

Gently, I pushed his hand off my face because it was still sore, and because if I let him hold on to me like that, I’d easily fall into step with him and we’d both zag right out of sync with our lives.

It was hard to breathe as he let me guide his hands to his thighs, rest mine over his wrists, and after a moment, he flipped his hands so he was gripping my arms from below.

“Come here,” I whispered.

He did, leaning forward until I could plant a kiss on his forehead. His lashes fluttered and his eyes closed, and I measured time by the faint puffing of his shallow breaths.

“What are you doing here?” I kept my voice low but insistent and as gentle as I could make it.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” he asked in return. “I want to hate you and I want to fuck you and—” His breath caught and he moved back so I could see his face, pale in the glow of the bedside light. “You’ve had enough of that shit.”

“You don’t hate me, though,” I reminded him.

“Why don’t I hate you? You’re taking over my life. My photo albums. My garden. My boyfriend.”

“It’s not like I’m the first guy to walk through that door and catch Malcolm’s eye, Charlie.” They hadn’t necessarily given me details about that, but I knew I was right. “Not like I’m the first guy to catch your eye. And you know he’ll give you anything you want. No matter what it costs him.”

He blinked at me.

“Don’t believe me?”

“Maybe I hate him,” he said very softly. Very brokenly.

“Come here.” I held out my arms and he collapsed into them, squashing me under his bulk and fear. “You don’t hate him.” I made it a promise. “You don’t. We can figure this out.”

Like I was a part of it. Of them. Presumptuous of me, but then, what was I supposed to think as Charlie sniffled into my shoulder lying in a room Malcolm had made for me, personally, out of the room he’d set up for his playthings?

“We’ll figure it out,” I said again.

When he started kissing and nibbling again, I didn’t try to stop him. His lips and tongue running along my neck, dipping under the collar of my T-shirt, sliding along my jaw felt nice. It felt exactly like the first time I’d ever kissed a boy, lying in the dark in his room for a sleepover and feeling his body squirming against mine, his lips exploring me.

I’d lain passively then, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do, floundering through feelings I didn’t think I was supposed to have and letting that guy have his way with me. All his tentativeness had fallen away when I hadn’t protested, and when he’d told me what I should have been doing, I’d done it. The rush of seeing him get hard, feeling him get excited because I’d done what he’d wanted, had sealed the deal for me. He’d rubbed himself to orgasm on my bare skin. All I had done was lie there, legs wide, pinned under his weight, arms clamped to the mattress by his big, strong hands, and nothing on earth had ever gotten me so hard so fast as being held down and used to please another man.

Now, Charlie nuzzled at me, nipping and licking and kissing, and all his careful exploration reminded me of that very first night. I stretched under him, and when I moved, he clamped down. Hands wrapped around my wrists, careful of my injury now, he tightened his legs on either side of mine, and he lifted his face to look down on me.

“This is what you want,” he said.

I nodded at him. I didn’t have to say anything. It was obvious from the way I gave in immediately, the stiffening of my cock, the flush heating my skin, that I was exactly where I wanted to be.

“Any guy who comes along and pins you down?”

I stared up at him. Once, maybe, that had been a fair thing to say. “Not anymore.”

His smiled, and it was a possessive, hungry look. “Good.”

For many heavy heartbeats, he just stared at me. I stared back. I had nothing else to say. I was his. For the moment, for the night, for however long he was going to keep me, he had me, and we both knew it.

Slowly, his hips began to rock, and the hard length of him prodded at my stomach. “Stay very still,” he ordered.

I went rigid, muscles so tense I quickly began to shake. I barely noticed. His weight held me there, his hands on my wrists kept me from participating. His gaze kept me from wandering. This man rubbing off on my body was the whole world, and right then, I knew what it was Malcolm could not give him.

I trembled, my entire body heated and shivering at once as he thrust harder and my own cock ached for more attention.

“You going to come?”

I didn’t know. I barely cared. Looking up at him, at the concentration on his face, the sweat beading on his brow, I didn’t give a flying fuck if I ever came again. As long as he did. As long as all that pent-up tension and worry and stress could be exorcised from him, I didn’t care about anything else.

There were only a few scraps of cloth and a slight shift of position keeping the rock-hardness digging into my hip and stomach from sliding into my body. I trembled with wanting it but kept my lips tightly closed around the desire. It was his call. I was in his hands.

Then his body was shaking worse than mine and tightening, and his face went lax, lips parted, and warmth bled over my clothes between us. He moaned, a low, frantic sound, and a heartbeat later, he collapsed. All his weight pressed me into the mattress, and it was all I could do to draw a breath, suddenly, completely aware how very much bigger than me he truly was.

“Such a cliché,” I muttered, shoving at him and gasping for enough room to fill my lungs.

He chuckled as he rolled off, to the side away from the door. Quietly, he lay there facing me, staring at me, watching my face, caressing lightly over the bruises and tracing my lips with his fingertips.

“How much trouble do you think we’ll be in?” I asked after a while.

He looked so sad. “First let’s see if he even notices I’m gone.”

“Charlie.”

His smile was damaged, but his touch remained comforting on my face. “You won’t be, Kerry.”

“Why? Because I’m just the sub? No mind of my own? We could have not done this. I could have said no. Don’t make me into a victim here. I’m just as much a part of it as you.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

He kept watching me, stroking my skin, and I wondered if I dared get up to go change, but I was too comfortable despite the dampness to move. Too much still pinned by him, by his gentleness now, as much as I had been pinned by his force before.

“Wait here,” he said after a while and pushed himself off the bed to sneak into the hall. He was back in a minute with warm cloths, and when I sat up to take my clothes off, he didn’t even let me do that. He stripped me himself and ran the warm cloths over my skin, cleaning me up and getting me hard all over again. Not through any desire on his part to renew the sex, but because his touch, his gentleness, underlaid with all that strength and need, did it for me.

“I can take care of that,” he offered with a small, crooked grin, tongue darting out to lick his lips.

Tempting, but this time, I did say no. I shook my head and lifted his chin so he looked into my eyes. “Not this time,” I said. “Just give me a kiss and go back to bed.”

“I’m staying here.”

“Charlie, you should really—”

“If you can walk into his kitchen, as subby as you are, and demand he pour you a cup of coffee, I can sleep one night in your bed and he can deal with it.”

“Why hurt him on purpose?”

Charlie dropped the cloth he was holding onto my soiled shirt on the floor and got up to find me new shorts and another shirt from my dresser. “Who says it would hurt him?”

“You don’t think he’ll care?”

He came back with the clothes and held them out as he sat back down. “Like I said, let’s see if he even notices I’m gone.”

He had a pair of my stretchy boxer briefs for himself, and his T-shirt and boxers joined my clothes in the pile. When he lay back down beside me, he stretched out on top of the covers, and I curled up facing him underneath. He went back to tracing his fingers over my face, and I watched his eyelids slowly get heavy and close, and listened to his breathing even out.

When the door finally did open what seemed like a lifetime later, I was still awake.

“He okay?” Malcolm asked.

“Go back to bed,” I told him, straining over my shoulder to see him standing in the doorway.

“You forget your place?” he asked, anger etching his voice.

I settled back around to face Charlie and stretched an arm awkwardly over his broad shoulders. “I don’t really have one,” I reminded him. “Not officially. I think maybe you’ve forgotten yours. Go back to bed. Get out of my room.”