DELIVER(33)

“Once a day, Mistress.” At night, alone and dreaming of girls half as pretty as she was.

“I bet you think about touching titties when you stroke yourself. When you’re worked up enough, you fantasize about banging a * with your finger. Then you replace it with your cock. Probably missionary position. Hard, fast humping. You take her without guilt, because it’s only a dream, a fleeting thought that vanishes when you come.”

She only had it partially right. He didn’t want to take a girl. He wanted to give himself to her. He wanted to watch his touch soften her eyes, hear it in her breathy exhales, and feel it shudder over her body as she arched against him. The fantasy of a sated smile on a pretty face was what sent him spinning over the edge every time.

An inferno raged in his body, and his hands clenched on her waist. It was Liv’s face he’d imagined just now. It was her smile that made him tremble and harden. So very, very hard. Were his fantasies forever changed? The need to look into her eyes, to put a sated smile on her face, had his molars sawing together and his muscles straining to hold her.

He pushed his chin to his chest and focused on his breathing. Our Father who art in heaven…

“You used up all the hot water.” Her voice was soft, distant, then she seemed to snap out of it and rubbed a soapy hand between her legs. That done, she pivoted to rinse and twisted the lever. The shower stopped, and she breezed past him.

The sheen of water on his skin chilled. With his body flushed and battling arousal, he hadn’t noticed the change in water temperature.

She returned to his side with a rope of chain. “Well, you’re horny enough.” She snapped the ends on his wrist cuffs. “On your feet. Van is waiting.”





Chapter 16




Liv led the boy into the outer chamber and inhaled the intangible fume of rage seeping from Van’s fists-on-hips stance by the door. She steered the boy around him, her defensive hackles shooting her shoulders to her ears.

Anything could’ve set him off. She’d sneaked from his bed the previous night. She’d made him wait too long for her to emerge from her room, and she’d come out without clothes on. Or it could’ve simply been one of his cruel-for-the-hell-of-it days.

She could handle Van’s venom when it was directed at her, but the way he glared at the boy made her stomach knot. Granted, he was as uncertain as she was on how to convert a straight boy into a woman-hating sex slave, but she still expected him to be better than this. She needed to defuse him before they began the planned training session.

Across the room, the girl knelt on the cot naked, chin tucked to her chest and hands secured to the wall behind her. She seemed invisible to Van at the moment, and in two weeks, she would be out of his reach completely. Thinking of the man waiting to buy her wrung an entirely different wrack of tension in Liv’s shoulders.

She was a fool to dwell on it. After the delivery, the girl would be dead to her. Just like the others.

Angling her back to Van, she shackled the boy’s wrists to the chains hanging from the apex of the room. He must’ve sensed Van’s volatility, because his muscles contracted against his skin, and his eyes bore a fiery path over her shoulder. Dammit, there was only one place his eyes should’ve been.

The simplest commands seemed to be the hardest for him to remember. Van would expect her to whip the boy for it, and of course, the sadistic buyer anticipated a battered body. But there would be enough of that after lunch.

A dull pound ignited in her skull. Her logic didn’t even make sense in her own head. If she were honest, she was putting off whipping him. She dreaded it down to the marrow of her icy core. This boy was f*cking with her detachment.

Using her body as a barrier between him and Van, she tapped the boy’s steel jaw and whispered, “Eyes and knees down.”

With slack in the chain, he descended to the floor, his exhales a hot caress on her chest. She knew he was in self-preservation mode, but the way he leaned toward her, as if trying to enfold her in the limited cage of his restraints, breathed an irrational warmth through the hole inside her.

All of the slaves had become protective of her at some point during their captivity. The captor-captive bond was just one of the many ways the mind dealt with trauma. But this boy hadn’t been under duress long enough to develop that kind of psychological response.

His calm focus and rugged linebacker build was so unlike the mold of previous slaves. He looked at her like he thought he could save her. Maybe he could.

Except he was supposed to despise her. The hammering in her head increased. What a hopeful, romantic idiot she was.

When she shifted to meet the eyes burning into her back, Van flung a sleeveless sheath dress at her face, the most demure outfit from her costume closet. She kept her casual wear in a trunk in her room, but her frayed jeans and printed t-shirts endowed her with human qualities and expressions she couldn’t possess in that house.

She stepped into the black nylon sheath and rolled it over her hips and ribs, tucking her breasts in the top. It wrapped her from nipples to upper-thighs and clung to every dip and bend of her body, revealing more than it covered.

Van crossed his arms over his chest, his lips in a flat line. His unusual reticence meant he was holding in something particularly unsavory. The sharpness of his eyes matched his razored tone. “Let’s get started.”

The knot in her belly intensified with the pressure in her head. To soothe it, she hummed the woeful melody of “Pretender” by Sarah Jeffe, the lyrics reinforcing the roles they were playing. Van was supposed to be a passive bystander, but his foul mood tainted the already unbreathable air. So she left the boy on his knees with his wrists padlocked to the chains in the ceiling and paced to the outer door. “I’m hungry.”