In His World: His #8 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) (2 page)

Several times, I tried to cuddle against his chest, tried to bury my face in the crook of his neck, but Adrian made me sit up each time so he could feed me another bite. “Don’t be willful, Chloe,” he said and inclined his head to regard me as he might a naughty child. “If you’re going to insist on fighting this battle for me, you’ll need to eat.” After providing me another bite of cheese, Adrian let his thumb trace the curve of my cheek while his fingertips curled under my jaw. “And I’m quite enjoying feeding you. Being the one giving you what you need, everything you need.”

And he did; he did give me everything I needed, even if sometimes he made me wait.

This time the wait was too excruciating, though. I leaned in and stole a quick, firm kiss from him. Despite his hands closing around my upper arms as though he’d push me away, he let me have my few moments licking and sucking his parted lips, peppering the edges of his smile with small, adoring kisses that could never quite entice him to reciprocate.

When I whined under my breath and kissed my way up his jaw to hide my face against his neck, Adrian chuckled low. “So anxious and impatient today, Miss Bloom.”

I tried not to think about all the reasons I had for being impatient—all the things I still needed to do if I was going to get Adrian acquitted of these federal charges, the possibility that I was going to lose him, the fear that these were our last few hours together. The fact that we already tried to say goodbye to each other several days before at the hotel, and yet here I was holding tight to him, and here he was letting me, had me feeling more addicted to Adrian than I ever had. Though the situation couldn’t have been much worse, the irrational hope that I could reclaim what we’d built here had rooted itself inside me more deeply than ever. Right at my heart.

“I think it’s time my submissive had a lesson,” Adrian muttered low against my cheek.

“Not correction?” I asked, mindful that I was being mildly disobedient. Maybe even a little hopeful.

Adrian let out an amused sigh. “That depends on how well you follow instructions, Miss Bloom. I seem to remember being impressed that very first time we were together at how well you took direction. It’s time to see if you’ve lost your discipline.”

I could’ve told him I had, all self-control utterly depleted, patience exhausted. The yearning was in charge now, my craving for him. It was far stronger now than my capacity for obedience, I was certain.

“Up,” Adrian commanded, and I stood and stepped aside so he could rise. He had taken only a couple of steps toward the bedroom, his submissive at his heels, when the tone signaling a message chimed from my PDA. I reached for it as Adrian reached for me. He was faster, catching me by the wrist and drawing me away before I could grab the device off the couch cushion.

“Oh no you don’t, Miss Bloom. That’s one strike against you. This is what we’re doing—us. Pay attention, or correction might have to become punishment.”

“Adrian, I have to check that. It could be—”

“Not right now,” he replied with force and finality to each word. He was looming over me again, with both of my wrists in his hands now, dragging me up against his body and reminding me how divine every contour and angle felt against mine. “You need this. And I need this. And that message will still be there in two hours.”

“Yes, sir,” I responded reluctantly, still leaning toward the couch as though I might consider bolting if he turned me loose.

Adrian’s smooth lips brushed mine but not in a kiss. “If that pouty little frown weren’t so alluring, that would be strike two, Miss Bloom,” he whispered against my mouth.

“What happens when I get to strike three?”

“I don’t think you want to find out.”

Punishment, I thought as I followed him now through the low, dim hallway to the sanctuary of his bedroom. That huge cream canopy bed dominated my attention as soon as I saw it. A part of me really did wish I could climb into it with Adrian and never get out, just spend forever cuddling and dozing, whispering and laughing, wrestling and fucking until we fell asleep again. Adrian said nothing, watching as I approached the bed, as I warred with the urge to throw myself into the middle of the exquisite linens and feathery comforter.

Apparently, I was just where Adrian wanted me, I realized as he came up behind me and closed his warm hands around my upper arms. Where Penn’s grip had been angry and threatening earlier on the steps of the courthouse, Adrian’s hold was gentle but far more compelling, commanding.

Into my hair, he breathed, “You haven’t displayed much in the way or patience or restraint lately, Miss Bloom.”

Running away from Adrian in the middle of the night. Swearing I was done with him just to end up in his hotel room with him only days ago. Abandoning my workload back at the office to fly to Brazil on the off chance that I might pry some useful information from Penn Ellison. Getting myself fired—it was no doubt coming even if a call from Frank Ullman hadn’t made it official yet. No, not much restraint.

“No, sir.”

“You’re going to have to display both for me now if you want me to let you have your pleasure. Do you understand?”

I tried to twist to look into Adrian’s face, but I only caught the briefest glimpse as he released me. “Not completely,” I admitted.

He headed toward the wooden chest where he kept the most wicked and luxurious assortment of toys and torments, saying, “You will soon enough.” Adrian specialized in making the simplest of statements seem ominous, dreadful, delicious. When I started to follow him, he snapped, “No, stay there. Precisely as I left you. Face the bed.”

And waiting at the foot of Adrian Knight’s broad bed, I craned for a hint at what he was fishing from that chest. He slipped something into the pocket of his suit pants, but I didn’t see what, and that worried me. Tensing, inside and out, I bounced lightly on the balls of my feet.

Without looking over from the chest, Knight admonished, “Patience and restraint, Miss Bloom.”

I never understood how he always knew what I was doing without turning to look at me. Was I that predictable? Did he know me that well? That last thought settled over me with an unexpected calm—the idea that Adrian understood me, possibly better than I did myself. Nina had said that about him, that he “got” her, never made her feel dirty or ashamed for what she wanted him to do to her. I wasn’t prepared for a single hot tear to streak down one cheek from the corner of my eye at how terribly fortunate I felt to be the woman here with him now, at the agony of thinking he’d ever touched anyone else, at the loss of the month I could have been with him instead of moping in an office in a gloomy city still fighting off a winter that had overstayed its welcome. I wiped the tear away quickly.

“Be still, Chloe,” Adrian huffed, letting the mildest tinge of annoyance sharpen his tone.

“Yes, sir.”

When he had finished at the chest, he returned to me with two leather, mink-lined wrist cuffs in one hand and long black leather leads dangling from the other. Adrian took his time buckling the cuffs onto me, knowing full well my mind was racing at the thought of him restraining me and what he’d do to me when I couldn’t shy away. “No fidgeting,” he warned without looking up from his work.

The leads went around the posts at the foot of his canopy bed, catching and pulling taut high along each turned pillar of dark wood where it curved into a series of knobs. Metal rings at the end of the leads snapped into matching rings on the cuffs, so that my arms were spread and extended above my head. I could just avoid straining by standing with my feet together, as tall and upright as possible.

“Legs apart,” Adrian demanded as though he’d read my thoughts. From behind me, he tauntingly, teasingly murmured into my ear, “Always open and available to me, Chloe. You remember that.” I obeyed, walking my feet apart little by little. Only when I had come up just off my heels did he say, “Yes, good. Like that.”

Just far enough to throw off my balance. Just awkward enough to make me grip at the leads to steady myself. Just tensed enough to keep me from sinking into the languor of any pleasure Adrian might now have chosen to grant me.

I felt Adrian move away from me and suppressed a whine, with only partial success. He cautioned me with the arch of a brow as he came around the bed post and knelt on the mattress, facing me. The defined muscles of his abs, visible through his unbuttoned shirt, flexed as my gaze slid over them, making me wonder if he was half as calm as he appeared. Besides that hint of tension, he seemed unruffled as his hand slid smoothly into his pocket. He withdrew a pair of delicate gold clamps. At the end of each hung a tiny gold bell.

“Be still,” he muttered, his attention hard-focused as he pinched my perked right nipple between the gold, rubber-coated pincers of a clamp and tightened it ever so slowly. I sucked in a sudden breath as I felt the pressure build, making the tender nib ache and then sting and then throb lightly. Only after taking great care to still the tiny gold bell did Adrian withdraw his hand. “Steady, Chloe,” he said, peering into my face now. “I don’t want to hear that bell.”

Didn’t want to hear…? Good lord, he couldn’t have been serious. I’d practically have to hold my breath, I protested to myself. And if he touched me, if he kissed me… But that was the idea, I realized just that abruptly. Patience and restraint. Rapturous torture. The man was an utter bastard, but not for any of the reasons the rest of the world thought.

Managing not to jerk and make the first bell chime while Adrian was securing the second clamp in place, I sighed with relief. Too quickly. From his other pocket and with a smile on his face, Knight produced a third clamp, designed differently from the first two, and with a tiny gold screw for adjusting the bite. Was it a mercy that nothing hung suspended from this clamp? As Adrian fixed it carefully to my swollen clitoris, I didn’t think so. The stronger the pressure, the hotter the ache at the apex of my sex. The walls of my pussy quavered in anticipation of…in need of…a hard climax.

Then, the coup de maître, the master stroke. He hung a small gold-plated teardrop weight from the clamp and another goddamn bell at the end of that. When he flicked the bell with his finger, it made the weight sway, which made the clamp pull rhythmically on the sensitive pearl of flesh it held captive. I chimed out with the bell, simpering, then comforting myself with a fading chorus of little mewls.

“Sorry,” Adrian quipped, not even trying to sound genuinely contrite. “Couldn’t resist.”

But I had to, had to resist squirming and arcing my breasts up for his attention or my hips in a plea that he use me. A feverish heat had already risen to my cheeks, drawing small beads of sweat to my forehead, and I blew out a thick breath through trembling lips…very carefully. My eyes sank closed—for only a moment, I could have sworn—and when I opened them again, Adrian had left the bed.

I jumped when I felt him behind me, felt his fingertips tracing that sensitive span of flesh between my wet sex and my nervously tightened anus. All three bells tattled on me, emitting high chimes like vindictive laughter.

“Shh, let’s not have any of that,” Adrian cooed to me as I swore under my breath. He didn’t have the decency to stop teasing me with his fingers. An utterly indecent man. Then to make matters worse, he scraped one earlobe with his teeth—a moment playing at it with his tongue—before whispering, “That’s strike two, Chloe.”

One more strike got me punishment, but could it have been worse than being stretched and tensed like this, hesitant to breathe and desperate to writhe against him?

Adrian kept stroking his fingers between my legs, and every muscle in my body kept winding tighter and tighter. I came up higher on my toes so that I could angle back for him, hoping he’d slide his fingers into me and stroke that particular spot that always made me dissolve into a shuddering heap of mindless pleasure. The position made my arms burn. Much more of this and I knew I wouldn’t be able to move them in the morning.

Never one to leave well enough alone, of course, when he could add blissful torture to gentle torment, Knight used the pad of his thumb to massage the bud of my anus. The sensation was maddening. I felt all at once the urge to buck back at him, to shake off his touch…or to force penetration, I couldn’t decide and neither could my body. The pressure disappeared for a moment, before Adrian gently pushed one wetted finger deep into my tight back passage. The other hand left off stroking me to reach around in front of me and graze—just graze—the very tip of my pinched and pulsing clitoris.

“Oh, god. Please, sir,” I was begging so abruptly and shamelessly. “Please make me come. I need it.” I needed Adrian Knight to take me, in every sense of the word, with his fingers and his tongue and the full length of the smooth, rigid cock between his legs.

Just as the tremors wracking my body began to rise, vibrating at an ever higher rate and pushing me farther and farther up onto my toes until I was practically on point, Adrian withdrew from me. His fingers, his touch, his nearness. From somewhere behind me, as I sagged with frustration, he said, “That’s for strike one, Miss Bloom.”

Which meant… Dammit, it meant he was going to do that to me again, work me up and leave me begging, for strike two.

“No,” I mewed, sounding every bit as pathetic as I felt. “Not again. Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay still, I promise, sir. A-Adrian, please.”

His breath hissed against my ear again as he returning to me, shushing me gently. “It’s not really that bad, is it, Chloe? Don’t you rather like it—the overpowering hunger and the ache? Strained taut reaching for that perfect release?”

I shook my head no, then stilled myself when I felt the bells start to sway. “Too much. Too long.” But he was right, and we both knew it. Making Adrian stop was not the point of the begging. I needed that release as well. The blamelessness, the helplessness, the total vulnerability of being under his complete control. To keen and plead for mercy when he was giving me exactly what we both knew I wanted but couldn’t grant myself.

Adrian kept hushing and reassuring me as he trailed kisses down my body. I felt like melting at the warmth of his satiny lips but bristled and shivered at the light scrape of his whiskers. Pulling as hard as I could on the straps, so hard the wooden bedposts creaked, I barely managed to keep myself still enough to avoid ringing the bells again. He was right; I didn’t want to know what he had in mind for strike three.