Brutal Game (Flynn and Laurel #2)(36)

“Take your top off.”

She undid each button on her blouse, revealing a plum-colored bra patterned in white vines. Her panties matched. She’d dressed as she’d felt only hours ago—womanly, sexy, confident. She couldn’t say what she felt now or what underwear would best embody it, only that this wasn’t quite right.

“Your bra,” he said.

Reaching back, she freed the hooks. She let the straps fall from her arms just as he reached down to grab one of her legs. He lifted it, unzipping her boot, sliding it off. It hit the floor with a thump, a little jangle of its decorative buckle. Next came her sock. Again, on the other side. If it excited him, that face didn’t give away a thing.

She expected her skirt to come next, but he said, “Hands and knees.”

She obeyed, moving to the middle of the mattress on all fours. The belt was there, close enough to touch if she splayed her fingers, and she doubted its presence was accidental.

His weight shifted the mattress beneath her, an ages-old trigger that had anticipation winding tight inside her. Heavy hands sought her thighs then rose, pushing her skirt up, kneading her ass, her hips, roaming along her sides and ribs and finally cupping her breasts. He taunted with grazing caresses of his calloused, workingman’s palms, then mean tweaks of her nipples. She gasped from the pleasure and pain equally, that balance he could navigate like a tightrope walker.

Her skirt had fallen back into place and he shoved it roughly up to her waist. His thumbs slid under the hems of her underwear, bunching the fabric into a strip between her cheeks. She waited for it—the first spank. Instead she got his short nails dragging over her skin, then the teasing, pleasurably demeaning sensation of her panties being pushed up farther, wedged tight in her cleft, damp cotton cleaving her labia.

“You look good, girl.”

She swallowed.

“You wet for me?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme the belt.”

She passed it back, nerves flashing cold, then hot.

“All the way down.”

A familiar order. She lowered, laying her shoulders and one side of her face on the sheet. The rumpled cotton smelled of Flynn, of both of them, and she extended her arms back along her sides. A muscle in her neck whined as he brought her wrists together at the small of her back and wrapped them in the leather. It had always been an awkward position for her, but she settled into the discomfort as she’d learned to. There was a tug as he secured the buckle, then he let her hands go.

He pulled her underwear down some but didn’t take them off. Instead he yanked the crotch to one side, and there it was—the smooth, blunt head of his cock, seeking entrance. She was mindful to take a deep breath and release it slowly, to will her body to relax. She’d been crampy on and off since she’d had the IUD put in, and she didn’t relish that pain on top of the contortion.

“Yeah,” he muttered, pushing inside. “So f*cking wet.” He wasn’t patient, but as he sank in fully on the third thrust, her body settled without a twinge. He felt obscene, the thick intrusion of his cock underscoring the scent of the sheets, the sounds of his deepening grunts, the true bondage of her wrists and the added constriction of her twisted panties.

Laurel had a private name for this sensation—trussed. It unleashed a flurry of emotions when they took things here, the experience at once humiliating and exhilarating. The sort of thing she might glimpse in pornography and find both demeaning and titillating, but on balance feel too squicked by to keep watching. The sort of thing she’d always held against a lover, should she discover it was his taste. Until Flynn.

He was so up front, so guileless, his desires didn’t threaten her. She followed him places she never would have imagined she might, never bumping up against a kink that didn’t repay her discomfort at least twofold in pleasure or gratification.

At least not until tonight. As the thrill of the initial penetration faded, her excitement ebbed, outshone by a growing strain in her shoulder, a nagging itch where the wool of her skirt’s waist rubbed her skin. A nagging worry in her head, one she’d never encountered in this bed before.

Even deep inside her body, he felt so far away. It made her ache to free her wrists and turn over, to wrap her arms around him, hold him tight. But that was merely what she wanted. What he needed tonight looked far different, but she’d give him that all the same. She’d endure it, and come out sore and probably uncertain, but not hurt. Not where it counted. Under all the worry, she felt strong. Strong enough to be whatever release he needed. Strong enough to trust this was still the same man she loved, even as he felt undeniably like a stranger.

She was sweating now, the wool chafing, the elastic of her panties pulled taut against the seam of one thigh and promising a mark. She shoved those details aside and instead pictured his face, cheeks stained dark with effort, eyes at once wild and stony, lips parted and flushed. The image struck that flint deep inside her belly, the first spark that told her an orgasm was possible. It’d take more though, and it felt foolish to hope that her pleasure was on his mind, tonight.

“You feel good,” he told her again, his voice like water to a woman lost in a desert. She drank the words down, dying for more.

“I want to plea—ease you,” she said, jolted by his hammering hips.

“You do nothing tonight but get f*cked.” His reply was coarse but quenching all the same.