Yield (11 page)

She stilled. “It does?”

“It does. I think I’m figuring out your language. You know why you didn’t remove it?” I tightened my grip on her wrists and pulled her into me.

“No.” The soft word could barely be heard above the wash of the sea. Her mouth stayed parted as she waited for my answer. The longer I held her in this iron grip, the more tension ebbed from her muscles.

“For the same reason you shouldn’t have called me an idiot. The penalties. Want to know what they are, my princess whore?”

I felt her fingers flex and watched her let out a long breath. Hypnotized, and so cute when she fell into this spaced-out place of hers. Then she shivered and seemed to awaken. “I’ll pass. By the way, princess and whore aren’t compatible.”

“For you, an exception is made. Come.”

I pulled her, protesting, up to the beach. My thongs were not the best footwear in the sea and I almost left them behind, stuck in the shifting wet sands. I threw the backpack onto the firmer sand then towed her to where a fallen tree had left a convenient trunk looping into the beach at chair level. I sat and put her facedown over my lap, in spite of her nonstop attempts to argue her way out of this.

“No. Wait. No. What are you doing? Glass?”

I did a last check of our surroundings. This was a beach in the Far North of Queensland and nobody was likely to be here, except my friend who should’ve dropped off the car and left by now. Nothing moved or made a sound except the sea, the terns and seagulls, and a lone crow on a pandanus palm.

When I pushed up the skirt, her pristine ass appeared, as if by magic. In pretty white lace panties too. I sighed. “When did they make it legal to look this sexy? This ass, I need to make mine.”

“Sorry. Prior owner. Me.”

“Guess I need to re-educate you on that.” I wiggled the panties down until the line of lace revealed a hint of her pussy. Having something inside her had definitely aroused Wren and her labia were puffy, as well as soaked with her moisture. I smacked her hard, on one cheek.

“Ow!” Wren arched and tried to peer at me.

With a palm on her upper back, I pushed her down again.

“Should I be letting you do this?” she grumbled.

Letting? Now that said a lot. Mainly that she had a choice. “You already chose to let me do what I wanted to do to you, so yes.”

“That was for one night.”

She’d stopped trying to get off my lap, so this seemed more her checking where we were at.

“And I haven’t heard you revoke that. So until I do...” I grabbed a handful of her hair. “I’m doing what I like.”

I took off one flip-flop and smacked it on my leg to knock off sand and test how if felt.
Ouch.

Maybe she was right. This was a good time to rearrange what we were doing, just a bit. I wasn’t Pieter. I wanted something different, but he’d taught me the ropes, so to speak. I could speak kinky language like a Dom with the best leather pants.

“You know what a safeword is? It’s a word that says stop to your Dominant, your Dom. If anything freaks you out, you say it.”

“Dom?” Tentatively, she put a hand up to where I’d tangled my fingers in her hair, as if to check I really held her. After a shiver, she added, “We’re going there?”

“We’ve been there since we met, Wren. You like me doing things like this.” I gave her head a shake and she was silent for several seconds, her hand slipping from her hair to support her on the sand.

“Oh. I guess...”

“Give me your safeword.”

“Sand.” She gave that funny snort I heard her often make when something struck her as funny.

I caressed her ass in big circles, loving the give and the shape of her flesh. “Sand. Fine.”

A safeword was another step. A good one.

I smacked her with the flip-flop, heard her yelp, and an under-the-breath curse then I watched the thong-print go from white to pink. Pretty, but even better was the whine as she wriggled on me.

She was letting me do this – punish her. If my cock didn’t poke a hole in my shorts it would be a miracle.

Spanking, or was this flip-flopping or thonging? It had a definite appeal.
Fuck.
Honestly, it rocked my world having her where she was, and taking it, semi-happily. I did nine more until I had her panting in between her screeching at the whack as the rubber came down on her.

Some grains of sand had abraded her skin and a little blood seeped. Oops indeed. I shouldn’t be going that far. I touched her skin below the tiny bleb, intrigued that I’d caused this.

No, I shouldn’t.

She was panting still, her head low, and her outstretched arms propping her up off the sand.

I drew her into a sitting position on my lap and dusted the sand off her. After kissing her hair, I rested my chin on her head. My hands found places on her to move upon and pat. This sort of cuddling with her in my arms satisfied some deep need I never knew I had.

“How did that make you feel?”

“It hurt.” She sniffed then shifted her butt. “Still does. I think you bloody well sanded my butt.” She inhaled then let it out steadily, as if giving herself time to think. “It turned me on, sometimes.”

I grinned into her hair. “Good to know. It turned me on too. Your little cunt tempted me, every time I smacked you, but fucking you here would lead to cock abrasion or pussy sanding, or worse.”

“That statement,” she muttered. “Is so dirty I don’t know where to start complaining.”

“Nowhere, if you’re smart. Unless you want more flip-flop?”

“No! It was different but no.” She buried her face in my shirt. “Even if it got me hot.”

Such an adventurous woman, if this was her first time exploring kink. Some of my previous girlfriends, I’d been lucky to get more than
fuck me
out of them. I rethought that. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, call Wren a girlfriend. She was something more, if I could manage to keep this functioning as a relationship.

Was it just first lust? Did I truly want to keep this going? Did she? Why the hell would she? I was a hired hand who’d shown her some kink.

My own head was still wrestling with what we were doing. Hers? Perhaps more so.

Like I’d told her, we could always change our minds later. Try my fucking hardest. I never was one for aiming for failure.

“There’s a car waiting for us beyond those dunes, but I want to talk to you. I want, Wren, to make this last. Me rolling over the top of you is only going to get me so far. I know that. Even if right now I have you so turned on I could get you to hand me the keys to the Bank of England. You’re rich, studying to be a veterinarian, and have probably never gotten worse than a parking ticket. I’ve shot a lot of people for money or my country, and I’ve got more illegal activities under my belt than a monkey has eaten bananas. I’m a bad man for you to be around.”

“Ah.” She paused and her reply came out in a hard focused tone. “I’m not all good, far from it. I could tell you stories. I don’t care about your past, Glass. Really. There are reasons, but I hate labelling people. Hate it.” She shifted my hand, from where I had rested it on her hip to her lap, and toyed with my fingers. “And I don’t have a key to the Bank of England.”

“Damn. I was betting on that.”

I waited to see if she’d address the core of my statement.

Another wriggle before she plunged in. “I would like to keep this, us, going. I think I would.”

Think? That was a good beginning. I could work with that.

“Then tell me more about you. Let’s begin somewhere cute. You must like puppies. You’re going to be a vet.”

“Puppies! Of all the things.” Wren giggled. “I do, though I’m as interested in other animals. Like I know this time of day is bad for croc attacks and that over there is a mark in the sand that might be a crocodile drag mark.”

“Fuck.” I sat forward. “Where? I missed it.”

“Got you. Made it up. Told you I was bad.”

“If we weren’t in chat mode... I’ll save that one up for later punishment.”

“It was a joke!”

“A bad one. Now. Puppies? Or would you rather I flip-flop you again?”

I was going to get to know her, even if I had to extract it by torture.

“Pfft. Won’t work. ’Sides, You don’t hit that hard.”

“Yeah?” I gave a short rendition of an evil laugh. “Next time, I won’t hold back.”

“Then I shall rephrase that. You’re a fantastic flip-flop wielder.”

The next few days were going to be fun.

My one niggling problem was that I was the man responsible for killing her father, and here I was supposedly helping her investigate his death. I was lying to her, bigtime. If I put a foot wrong, I would lose her. If I told her that her father’s last act before he died had been to force his cock into Jazmine’s mouth and to order Pieter mutilated, would that have altered things for the better or for the worse? Her father had been methodically torturing Jazmine. Hard to see any of him in Wren. Thank god.

She might simply think I was lying. We were on the edge of making something good from this relationship. Shocking her might make her turn away from me. Now wasn’t the time to tell her anyway.

Those thoughts made me sit there cuddling her for way too long. I couldn’t see a simple solution, though I turned my dilemma this way and that. A darker air shrouded the day despite the brightness of the sun.We were both sunburnt by the time we drove off in the rust-bucket Subaru toward Cairns. My old army mate wanted the car in Cairns, within three days.

I clunked through the gears as we bumped over the road leading out to the Bruce highway.

“I’ll take you to a restaurant once we get to our final destination. There’s one on the water, looking out over the strand. The Red Gecko. Unless it’s shut down.

As long as no rivers flooded on the way down the coast, we could make it easily. The weather at this time of year was often erratic.

Moghul

I pulled over to the curb on my bike to check the text that’d come in, propping my foot on the pedal to steady the bike. I had an offer for the Magnetic Island house from a Chinese buyer. The man would be over in two days to see it in person. Some of them bought off pictures, this guy didn’t. It was a good price, though.

I texted back the okay to the real estate agent and set off again. The road was quiet this early on the island – steep inclines in places as it rose into the hills, but I liked pushing my muscles to the max.

I could imagine the Chinese buyer turning my pit of despair into a big goldfish pond. After all, there was drainage and a water supply already installed.

Or I could imagine
her
in there. I wheeled to a halt again, took the water bottle from the carrier and drank.

I stared ahead, focused on nothing.

She’d be crying, looking up at me, tears running down her face. Only not from that happy mixture of pleasure and pain my subs normally had. I was a good Dom to them.

Wren was simply crying.

Fuck.

I jammed the bottle back into the holder.

She and this Glass had arrived in town yesterday. My best option might be to let the surveillance be run by my men so I could forget about them entirely.

No. That was a step too far. Since my operatives didn’t know who I was, it was impossible for them to accurately assess the information they gained. I’d have to keep looking at it, audio transcripts and all. Put a transponder on their vehicle too, if it seemed safe. They wouldn’t be expecting their target to be tracking them by satellite. The wonders of science.

I pushed away, wobbling at first until I built up some speed, my legs burning as I plowed my frustration into working the pedals.

Obsession. I knew all about obsessive men. It never ended well.

Don’t mess in your own backyard.

I had to keep it clean though and there was a difference.

*****

Wren

I paused on the front doorstep and watched Glass hike across the deserted road to the path that led between houses to the beach. The fishing rods led the way. We’d bought them yesterday along with bait, other fishing gear, knives to cut up the fish we meant to catch, as well as various holiday stuff such as sunscreen and a bikini. This had segued into a beach holiday as much as a detective affair. Surreal, at first, but it had simply happened. We stepped off the ferry and tumbled into this languid tropical paradise.

Six AM and no one sane was up yet. The crazies included a few joggers and people into fishing, and possibly, from their accent, a couple of German tourists who’d forgotten to get blind drunk the night before and wanted a beach walk.

I didn’t know how Glass managed to get Australian cash and the two cars we used to dogleg our way here and I didn’t care. Hugh would’ve cared but it didn’t seem worth getting curious about. The house he’d magicked up was in a street one back from the beach at Horseshoe Bay on Magnetic Island – a very average house, even by my student experiences.

No credit cards were allowed to be used. Nothing that required anything that might be tracked. Someone else was doing the renting. Always a friend. If we drove and were stopped for a minor traffic offense, did he have a fake license to show police? Glass hadn’t said, but neither of us was supposed to be in Australia.

So here I was with a man who by his own admission was bad, having illegally entered my own country. Maybe because he wanted me here on his terms? I think mostly he wanted me for a few days without Hugh, my security nanny. If anything went wrong, I might end up with a police record.

It had made me stop and think, last night, while we sat out in deckchairs on the upstairs balcony, feeling the sigh of the wind and watching the palm trees sway and the white tops of the waves as they rolled in.

Bizarre, feeling so relaxed. I should’ve been excited about being closer to finding the man who’d orchestrated the slave house where my father was murdered. Instead, I was in a prolonged state of contentment.

My search for Dad’s killer had been more about assuaging guilt and finding closure than revenge or a true need to know. It had taken this, a revelation about my sex life and a man who seemed to understand me and, at the very least, like me a lot, to let me see my reasons.