DELIVER(80)

Looking up into the face of a man who would damn himself to protect her, she knew she’d found her sanctuary, her deliverance, her future.

He swooped in to kiss her, and she got a lungful of his nourishing scent. Clean, pure, Josh. She kissed him back, licking his mouth, tasting the familiar intimacy, and clinging to his love.

His tongue trailed fire around hers, leaving no part of her mouth untouched. It was impossible to be afraid when he was so close, so intense, that the barriers between them burned away. He moaned against her lips and kissed her with a pressing necessity, stoking a flame in her belly and coaxing a curl of something she hadn’t felt in years. Joy.

Guilt breathed through her, a foul-smelling intruder, whispering her failings. Seven years of slavery, chained by a threat, and she still lost Mom.

Her lips stretched back. Their teeth tapped. She turned her chin away, but he caught it. Then he caught her eyes.

Fingers pinching her jaw, his expression swam in contemplation. He stared at her, panting from the kiss. “What would your mom say to you right now?”

A quiver interrupted the rigid set of her chin, her lungs pumping to hold in a thousand clogged tears. She closed her eyes and saw Mom laughing, jumping into the wind, her hair whipping around her smiling face. “She’d say, use a condom.”

He huffed. “I think your mom was much more profound than that. Try again.”

She opened her eyes, diving straight into his. “She used to say, what defines us is not how we fall but how we land.”

He leaned in and stroked his nose along her scar. “You’ve survived the hardest landings. You’ll survive this one.”

Was that what she’d been doing all these years? Landing? “Feels more like plummeting out of control.” Every harrowing moment was chained to the next one. What if the cycle was finally broken? If she could find Mattie, then what? She’d never considered a future outside of the attic walls. Until Josh.

He stood and adjusted the towel at his hip, watching her. “You’re hurting, Liv. I want you to give it to me. All of your hurt.”

Her eyebrows snapped together, her chest pinching. “What?”

He studied her, rubbing his jaw, gears spinning behind his eyes. Then he turned and paced to the cabinet. The round brawn of his ass flexed beneath the towel. The muscles in his back compressed and expanded as he worked the combo lock. Clearly, he’d figured out all her lock codes were the same. He opened the door. What the hell was he doing?

With a length of chain and a flogger in hand, he returned to the mattress. “You feel like you’re plummeting? Like you don’t have any control? Then control me.” He grabbed her wrist and put the implements in her hand. “Do this on our terms. Not Traquero’s or Mr. E’s or anyone else’s.”

She glanced at the flogger and chain then searched his hopeful eyes for a long moment. He wasn’t just new to sexual submission. He was new to sex. He might not have consciously known what he was asking, but it was a request voiced from a sequestered part of his identity, one she’d seen rise to the surface with the first cut of her cane. Of course, he wanted her to f*ck him. But he also wanted her to hurt him. His hard powerful body seemed to crave the rough handling, being pushed to its limits.

Letting the chain spill into her lap, she slapped the leather tips of the flogger against her palm.

He didn’t flinch, his eyes hooded and penetrating as he crouched before her. The towel separated at his thigh, the downward angle of his legs hiding what was beneath.

“You want to explore your naughty side, Josh?”

His chin tilting slightly, his cheeks sucking in with a steady inhale, he traced a knuckle over her nipple where it tightened against her t-shirt. His eyes didn’t waver from hers, a luminescent glow beneath the determined mantle of his dark eyebrows. “I want to explore everything with you.”

The idea sent a tremor through her, fanning a needy blaze between her legs.

It was around three in the morning, but they were both too restless to sleep. They had nothing but time on their hands until Van returned. She could either spend the days wallowing in misery or…

She let her gaze take a leisurely stroll over the messy spikes of black hair raking away from his forehead, the stubble roughing his jaw, the vein pulsing in his thick neck, and the taut skin stretching over bulges of shoulders and biceps. His cock jerked beneath the towel as he watched her devour every gorgeous detail.

Fuck, he was a lot of man. Chiseled, powerful, perceptive, and his attention remained resolutely fixed on her. She gathered the chain and rose to stand beside him. He’d said she needed control, but he’d initiated this, and he held the power to end it. The moment he said No she would stop.

There were a few things she could regulate, however, and she would use her mastery of dominance to help him find his boundaries. Her ratty, thigh-length t-shirt didn’t exactly exude an authoritative air, but she didn’t need a costume or mask. Not with him. “You want me to have control? I’m taking it. Now.” A stillness swept over her, measuring her breaths, loosening her shoulders. “I decide the how, the intensity, the purpose, all for my pleasure.”

The depressions outlining his shoulder blades twitched. His hands flattened on the mattress. “Yes, Mistress.”

The appellation was shockingly arousing, fluttering through her belly with nipping tingles. The title had never stirred a response in her. But now, it was given willingly, on his terms. For her and no one else.