Naughty Bits Part IV: The Highest Bid (11 page)

“Faith . . . judgment . . . language . . . pure action . . . the right livelihood . . .” Alice paused at that, her eyes twinkling as if at a private joke. “Spirit . . . spiritual application to all aspects of the law . . . the right memory, and the right concentration . . . meditation. Don’t make a face. I know you hate meditation. But eight is a very good number, Madison. Remember that. It’s the number of infinity, eternity, self-destruction. And sometimes self-destruction isn’t a bad thing. It’s the final moment, when everything is revealed.”

When Alice turned her head on the pillow, Madison couldn’t pull herself away from the intensity in her sister’s eyes, as if Alice was struggling particularly hard to make this point.

She raised her other hand, showing Madison the tattoo on the inside of her forearm. The figure eight, the symbol of infinity, was surrounded by lovely vines and scroll work. Madison passed her fingers over it, caressing her sister’s fragile skin as Alice’s eyes stayed fastened on her face.

“I got this a few months ago, when I realized where my path was headed.”

“Oh, Alice.” Madison circled her wrist, then bowed her head, her grip slipping away as Alice laid that hand on her hair.

“Don’t forget, MadGirl. Eight . . . the sign of infinite possibilities. Promise me.”

* * *

Madison had, even though she’d thought it ramblings due to illness and medication. Now she knew differently.
Eight.
Logan would be Madison’s eighth significant relationship. He’d had Shale and Troy give her eight switch marks. Always before, she’d thought of her seven previous relationships as a map of her failures. But Alice’s words suggested they’d been necessary preparation for the most important relationship, the infinite, final one. She just had to have enough faith. One more leap. One more time.

After her refusal, her declaration that she only wanted him, Logan had pulled away from her. At her moan of protest, he gave her hair a reproving tug before moving to her legs. Bringing those machines to a halt, he withdrew the dildos slowly from her convulsing body. She moaned again, knowing if he touched her clit, she’d go into mindless, screaming orgasm for an hour. Instead, he raised the table to an upright position, undid the straps. She was woozy, too messed up to sit up on her own, but he slid his arms around her back, brought her up against him.

Had she screwed up? Should she have said
Alice
instead, invoking the safe word? Did it fit, if it was the truth inside the scene as well as out of it? With the dildos gone, she felt how slick she was, how needy for a different kind of penetration.

“Say it again,” he demanded, and though she was afraid she would be punished for it, she did.

“Only you, Master. I only want you. In fantasy or reality.”

Logan framed her blindfolded face in strong hands. “Good answer,” he growled, right before he crushed his lips to hers.

It was like the first taste of food after starvation, every sense heightened, everything he’d denied her now given in one sweeping, overwhelming rush. If ever she could come from a kiss alone, this one would be it. In fact, she did, rubbing herself against him involuntarily. That bare touch of her clit against his body made her explode.

She screamed into his mouth, working herself against him like a pure animal, wishing he hadn’t fastened his trousers and tucked himself away, wishing he’d shove balls deep into her. However, he put a firm hand on her ass, holding her against him as she let go against rough wool, rubbing shamelessly, coming endlessly from nothing more than the overwhelming pleasure of him holding her.

Every time she was with Logan, she thought it wasn’t possible for him to give her a more emotional and erotic experience than the last one. He kept proving her wrong. And apparently it was only the beginning.

* * *

When that climax started to ebb, eons later, he was still holding her just as tight. His lips brushed hers once, again, then he was kissing every inch of flesh exposed around the blindfold. Forehead, cheeks, jawline, down to her throat. Her head fell back into his hands, his fingers tangling in her hair as he worked his way down her throat. She didn’t need restraints, only the limp state of her body to show him she was all his.

She remembered how Troy almost went lax in Logan’s grip, when he’d held his throat, told him he was helpless, he had him. The message being
I’ve got you, I have the control, there’s nothing you control here, you’re completely under my Dominance
. Just like the fantasy she nursed so often, that she’d called to mind the very first time she pulled up to Naughty Bits, trying to find the courage to go inside without Alice.

Now she knew just how potent such a fantasy could really feel, and she was in a far deeper state of relaxation, of total surrender, in his arms. She could sense how Logan fed off of it, how deeply it met what he needed from her.

He picked her up once more, and this time when he settled her, he put her in a deep, comfortable chair, perhaps a recliner. Draping her legs over the arms so she was wide open, he pressed her back flush against the reclined upper part.

“Hands over your head. Hold on to the cushion and don’t let go. Don’t move a muscle unless I order it.”

Sure. And she’d work on that whole water-to-wine thing while she was at it, because a moment later he was kneeling between her legs, his mouth taking over her wet cunt like a man sitting down to a seven-course meal. One he planned to spend all afternoon enjoying. He licked, sucked, nibbled, stroked, swirled . . . it was like she was made of water, all the sinuous ways she twisted in that chair. He stayed with one rhythm only long enough to have her crazed, her fingers digging into the cushions, her body shuddering at the effort not to arch up against him, grind herself against his face; then he’d switch it and build her up all over again.

He left her incoherent, sounds coming from her that meant only one thing.
Mercy. But don’t stop.

He shifted, put his knee against her pussy. She sucked in a breath, not expecting it, and when he wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her up against him, she rubbed hard against the blissfully bare layers of muscle, the blunt cock pressing insistently against her hip. He was naked.

He took her place in the chair so she was straddling him. With his hands bracketed just beneath her rib cage, steadying her, he barked another order at her.

“Hands laced behind your head.”

Oh God, he was trying to destroy her. She obeyed, her arms still twitching like she had a palsy, and he controlled it all, lowering her onto his cock, keeping her swaying body steady with his strength, pushing her all the way down as a sound of guttural need wrenched from her throat. She’d never had anyone strip her so raw emotionally and physically. She had no restraints upon her except the blindfold, but the fact she was obeying his every word said he didn’t need them, did he? He was all of it. Every restraint, every device. He was her Master, and she’d do anything he commanded, feeding off of the same energy that was driving him to even crazier, more intent demands of her. He would push and push, because he needed her submission as much as she needed his Dominance. Neither of them ever sated.

He lifted and lowered her, brought his own hip movements into it, making another orgasm threaten in a matter of a few strokes. But he kept it as long and drawn out as a glittering strand of a spider’s web, holding her in that net as he ensured she got ever closer to climax, but not to the edge of the cliff. It was like dividing a number by two into infinity.

She kept coming back to that figure eight, didn’t she?

“Please . . .” she whispered. “Please, Master.”

“Not yet.” It sounded like his teeth were gritted, gratifying evidence he was holding on to his own control by that same fragile set of threads. “You have no idea . . . how fucking beautiful you look.”

Who knew words could push one beyond the point of no return? She tried her best, but she couldn’t hold out, not before the power of the emotion in those words. Possession, reverence, devotion. Need, to the point of pain. Love, a visceral, raw, not beautiful thing, but as miraculous and spellbinding as a naked beating heart.

Why hadn’t she ever seen it, what was so clear now? All the wrong guys she’d chosen before, they hadn’t been the wrong choices merely for nurturing the Dom/sub side of things. They’d been the wrong choice for all the important parts of a relationship, all those things as interconnected as those eight paths of Nirvana. She was as sure of that as she was that the right man was holding her now.

“Go, love. Go over.”

She had to drop her arms, grab hold of him for support. Yes, he had her body, but she had to have the contact through her palms, feel the ripple of muscle as he drove harder into her. As a result, she felt him shudder beneath her fingers as he released with a hard groan. Reaching up to catch the back of her neck, he yanked her down against him, cinching his other arm around her hips, driving into her deeper, the strokes becoming so short there was almost no movement at all, just a straining against each other, trying to crawl inside each other’s souls as they both shattered.

* * *

Another one of those long ebb periods, where it could have been four minutes or four hundred, like they’d stepped into a magical world where time was merely a passing thought, nothing that could touch their reality. He’d continued to hold her tight like that, and she did the same, her fingers curved over his biceps, her cheek against his throat, forehead against the recliner. She breathed in the heated space between his shoulder and neck. She loved feeling him like this against her, nothing between them, no clothes. She realized the blindfold only enhanced all of it. She had no desire to remove it. She liked relying on him totally in her dark world and wondered if it was somehow a primal return to before birth. When, whether one was held in the womb or the hand of a god, there was naught to do but feel . . . and trust.

“This is your house, isn’t it?” she asked at long last.

He was stroking her back, teasing the bumps of her spine with his fingertips. “Yes. I want you living here, Madison. Starting tonight. I’ve already cleared room for your things. We can move them in tomorrow.”

That should have startled her, maybe panicked her a little bit, and perhaps it would in the morning. Instead she made a quiet noise, but one that wasn’t a refusal. “That doesn’t mean you get to order me around all the time. You do know that?”

“Why, no. I assumed one unforgettable orgasm would change God’s original plan and turn the female mind into a docile bowl of oatmeal.”

She chuckled against his shoulder, giving it a feeble thump. A climax that powerful left no energy at all. Of course, the manly specimen beneath her wasn’t acting ready for an Iron Man contest himself.

His arms tightened around her, though. “I do mean it, Madison. I know it’s going to take a while for you not to fear intimacy, for every argument we have not to be a rehashing of your past. If I have you here, living with me day to day, from that first brushing of teeth in the morning, to the last kiss at night, I’ll prove it to you, every moment.”

“Plus you’ll have a sex slave within reach of your fingertips.”

“There is that.”

Another thump, and this time he chuckled as well, shifting her so she was cradled in his lap. He unlaced the blindfold, removed it, stroking her hair away from her face. “Not going to open your eyes for me?” he queried tenderly.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Open your eyes, Madison. I need to see them.”

The order gave her the strength. She raised her lashes to meet his brown gaze. The intensity of the emotions they’d shared still lingered in his expression, which did a great deal to quell any butterflies in her stomach that were trying to resurrect themselves.

“They say, after people turn thirty, it’s really hard for them to change their ways,” she said. “Makes it hard to live together.”

“Which is why I want to start working on the adjustment period as soon as possible. Because after forty, it’s completely impossible. I’m thirty-nine.”

Reaching up, she touched his mouth, making his gaze soften. “I felt like I was all yours,” she whispered. “I want to always feel that way.”

“It’s the truth,” he promised, his gaze becoming fierce, immutable. “Give me your faith and trust, Madison, and I’ll never betray it. I promise.”

Faith. One of those eight paths that Alice had mentioned. A way to the infinite power of this, a love that she could believe wouldn’t end. A love as strong as her Master’s will. And her own.

“How come you never doubted? You were so sure that I was meant to be yours.”

Giving her an affectionate look, he traced her throat, the side of her breast. “Alice was good at seeing deep inside of people. I saw her do it for her customers, over and over. You have a lot of her in you, though you have your own lovely style. I learned never to doubt her. When she told me that you’d be mine, I believed her. She also said I’d be yours. Not sure if she told you that, but it’s true.”

She shook her head. “I want it to be true.”

“Then say it, because it is.”

His gaze could turn fierce in a blink, his hands on her waist, lifting her. Remarkably, she found he was still hard enough to push inside her, hold her on him, his hands bracketed on her shoulders, thumbs rubbing against the base of her collar, the sensitive part of her throat.

“Say it, Madison. Who does your Master belong to?”

She swallowed, holding his gaze. “Me. You’re mine.”

“Yeah.” Those mesmerizing eyes held her as powerfully as his hands. “Move for me, sweet slave. Stroke my cock.”

They both began to move then, slow, easy, like the rise and fall of the tides. She held his gaze, and felt everything that was wrapped into this denouement. Logan and Madison, love, Dominance, submission. It wasn’t the labels that defined what they would be to each other. . . it was who they were, deep in their souls. All the rest just tangled with it in a glorious tapestry that would become their love story.

Hopefully a love story that would never end.