Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries (The Crystal Fragments Trilogy) (21 page)

“What have you done that’s wrong?” he asked. His face looked pained, as though he believed that she was tormenting him with some subtle psychological ruse, fucking his mind. Kris’s memory, however, was full of another room, drunk and disgusted. She wanted it fucked away.

Moving her hand to his mouth, she placed a finger on his lips, silencing him, then kissed him. Walking away, looking over her shoulder as she did so, her long hair over her shoulders, rich and shining, she gave him a look of such innocence and lust combined that she could see immediately the effect it was having on him, his trousers expanding even as he watched her move.

Slowly, she bent forward and placed one knee, then the next on the bed, her hands moving forward onto the cover and sliding down so that at last her head rested beside them, her back arched and her buttocks pushed upwards.

He came behind her on the bed, one knee resting between her legs, her thighs parting slightly for him. Her sex was wet, eager, and she turned her head forward, resting her chin on the soft pillow, her fingers digging into it to ready herself.

He knew what she wanted, and his hand moved softly over her buttocks, smoothing them with the warmth of his fingers. After a few moments of this, she felt him lift his hand and then, a second later, it came down hard on her skin, making her jump even though she was prepared for this. She emitted a small groan.

He slapped her again, slightly harder this time, and the skin of her rump felt warm and hot. But it was still not enough. “Your belt...” she gasped. “Your belt, sir.”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the back between her shoulder blades, his lips slightly wet against her skin. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

She nodded and glanced back at him. His face was calm, his eyes watching her. Nodding her head, she returned her face to a forward position, gripping the pillow more tightly.

She heard the sound now of leather unfurling from his trousers, and the next few seconds seemed to pass very slowly. She could hear her own breathing, hoarse and ragged as she pushed her mouth into the pillow. Time stood still for an eternity.

When the leather made contact with her buttocks, she bucked and her sex flowered, lips unfurling and a droplet of her juices forming at the pearl-shaped entrance of her vulva. It hurt, but that made her desire it even more. “Again!” she gasped. “Harder. Harder, sir.”

He struck her with his belt once more, and then again. She whimpered at this, biting the pillow, her fingernails claws against the feathers and cotton. Her rump was burning, but she shifted it around, pushing higher into his blows rather than cringing away. Her breasts, squashed beneath her, were as soft as the cover of the bed, but she could feel the sinews of her thighs tightening as cords in her legs.

The sight of her there, defenceless before him, was too much for Daniel now, and he reached down to his trousers, unzipping the flies and drawing out his erection. Her head sideways on the pillow, Kris watched him, her blue eyes glistening, the cheeks of her face flushed with her own blood.

“Oh God,” she moaned when she saw him. “So... big. So fucking...” She had seen it so many times before, but tonight, here, it seemed even more massive. Her memory was like a blank canvas, and every sensation was as a new brushstroke painted on her mind.

He brought the smooth head of his cock to her sex and rubbed it against her. She struggled, however, falling forward even deeper into the pillow on her shoulders, seeking to push her hand up between her legs, snaking her arm beneath her breasts and up through her open thighs. In this uncomfortable posture, she could just about grab hold of him, stroking the thick girth of his member, just about closing her small fingers about it.

With her other hand, she pushed her fingers into her mouth, making them wet with her spittle. Reaching behind now on the other side of her body, over her back and between her buttocks, she rubbed the saliva into her anus. Seeing what she was doing, Daniel gently released her fingers from around him and bent down, licking the dark hole, probing and penetrating her. Sometimes he dipped his head further down, tasting the hot, salty sweetness between her lips, rubbing his face into her and making himself wet.

When she moved her hands next to her head, turning away from him once more, he brought the tip of his erection to her anus. He fingered her gently, extending her sphincter, then placed himself back into position and slowly pushed into her.

She groaned as he penetrated her, her fingers clawing the pillow and her hips contracting, bucking up slightly as he pushed in. He went slowly, but with each of his hands holding her buttocks, pulling them apart so that he could see the tight ring of her muscle stretching around him, he was relentless.

“Fuck me,” she groaned. “Fuck my ass! Oh God, oh God!”

Her thighs began to tremble, her buttocks shuddering as another inch went in. Reaching beneath his cock, he could feel how wet she was, sliding his fingers along her lips towards her clitoris. Then he returned his hand, his fingers slick and sticky, to her backside, holding her open as he took her there on the bed.

Kris’s eyes were screwed shut, her mouth open and her face bright red. She could see nothing now that her eyes were closed—not this room nor the other hotel that had haunted her memories in drunken flashbacks. This hurt, but the pain was good as he began to move deeper into her. It was a burning that seared away all her guilt and shame.

“Fuck me!” she whispered again. “I’m yours. Fuck... Oh God!”

She moved one hand between her legs, began to rub herself and slap her opening flower as he thrust into her, more firmly now. Her words had descended to grunts, and she struggled to keep her buttocks aloft as he used his weight to drive in deeper. As her orgasm started, she bit the pillow, strangling down her screams and slapping herself between the legs, punishing, fucking, cleansing.

When he was on top of her, she was blind though her eyes were open. Lights were flashing all around her, and she could feel beads of sweat forming between her breasts, along her thighs and her belly, her forehead soaking. One of his arms was half around her neck, grappling her breasts and forced down beneath her cleavage, mauling her soft flesh. He was inside her fully now, his own breath rasping in her ear, and he began to move with slamming motions that made her want to scream as she bit the pillow hard, and then turned her head so that she could bite him.

She forgot everything as he began to swell inside her. The burning was consuming her alive from her loins up. She howled at last, a primal scream, and he began to cry out as well, vibrations and ripples moving along his cock as his seed began to burst and burn. Nothing else mattered now, just this, two bodies bound together.

Chapter Eighteen

For a day they simply enjoyed each other, not moving from the bed. Daniel had cancelled all other meetings and they took each other in every way that they could, sometimes tender, sometimes hard. Food was delivered to their room, and the porters gave them sly stares as they unloaded plates of food and coffee onto the table. They barely stopped fucking long enough to be civil, but nothing else mattered in the slightest to them.

On the second day, very reluctantly, Daniel went through to shower, telling her that while he could perhaps be forgiven one day two would be seen as a cardinal sin. She watched him rise from the bed to take a shower, his back criss-crossed with the blind map she had traced with her nails. Her own buttocks felt sore and bruised from their own beatings, love bites and marks across her breasts, neck and shoulders, and her loins felt used and abused. But as she lay back on the bed, the sodden sheets pushed down over her thighs, she felt happier than she had for a long time.

For the first time in a day, Maria came into her mind but she dismissed the thought. What did the Gosselin woman know? Nothing. If she tried to come between the two of them, Kris would tear out her eyes. It did occur to her that it would be better for her to tell Daniel what had happened rather than Maria, but not now, not yet.

Daniel himself looked weary but happy when he emerged from the shower, water dripping from his long, muscular limbs as he crossed to his clothes, rubbing a towel through his short, dark hair and along his back.

“You’ve never been to New York, have you?” he asked. As he was drying himself, Kris wriggled along the bed, lying on her front so that her head was only a foot or so away from his thick, dangling cock and tight buttocks, a sight that was making her wet again between her legs. She reached out her hand to grasp for him, but he batted her away, laughing.

“The park is beautiful at this time of year, with the snow. It’s pretty impressive at any time, but now, you’d like it there,” he told her, skipping back a step out of the way of her grappling fingers. “And you’ll love the Museum of Modern Art, I can promise you that... Are you paying attention to a word I’m saying?”

Kris looked up at him grinning. “I’m enjoying all the tourist attractions I need right here,” she told him. “Do you think we can make it as big as the Empire State Building if I’m really dirty?”

Daniel rolled his eyes in exasperation, trying not to look down at the streaks across her buttocks, the curving, sinewy line of her spine, her lips wet where she had just licked them and her eyes glittering and bright.

“It’s moving!” she yelped. “I can see it. Come back to bed and fuck me!”

Sighing, he sat down beside her. “I can’t, not now. Give me a few hours and I promise, I’ll come back and give you the hardest seeing to of your life before dinner—if I still have the strength for it.”

“I’m not tired at all,” Kris said, placing her head in his lap and gently kissing the tip of him, savouring the slightly salty taste of him. “He wants it.”

“Yes, yes he does,” Daniel sighed. “But later.” He extricated himself from her hands and finished getting ready, slipping into a dark blue suit that made him appear as distinguished as ever. “A few more meetings, but I’ll complete them early today. I’ll be back for five. Sex—then dinner.”

By the time she had showered herself, washing away the aches and delicious pains of her body, Kris felt more alive and invigorated than she had for a long time. Their passions, so animalistic, had achieved what she had hoped for and more. The canvas had been primed, but now the dirt and muck was wiped away and fresh new strokes—brilliant vermilions and cerulean blues, golds and sweet bronze colours—scored it back and forth.

Central Park was indeed a spectacle to behold. The city was immense. London may have stretched out equally as far, but the height of the buildings as they rose up, mighty and sublime, was a sight that took her breath away. Snow had fallen through the night and the tips of the trees, the snow-covered lawns and icy lake, looked like a Christmas scene as she followed the pathways beside other walkers, all wrapped up warm against the winter.

Daniel had insisted she take his card and she did indeed relish shopping now. If they were to stay in New York for a time, her clothes really weren’t suitable. As such, she spent an hour shopping, delighting in new coats, hats and warm sweaters before racing back to the hotel to change.

She was slightly disappointed that he was not there to meet her, but a message on her phone hoped that all was going well with her, and she happily replied. In any case, she had a few hours left to see the Museum of Modern Art. The building itself was not so very far away, on 53rd street in Manhattan, and she caught a taxi there, admiring the clean, silvery white lines of the building, so stark and pure. Just like a Stone residence, she told herself with a smirk as she entered.

The building was fairly active, with visitors making their way between exhibits and installations, and Kris was in a pleasant daze as she wondered without purpose through the different rooms. She found herself before a photograph of a dark lake, rippled and silvery beneath a sombre sky. The print, untitled, was by a photographer Trisha Donnelly, and something about the darkening surface, so tranquil but with a vague threat of future unrest beneath those waves caught her eye.

But she allowed herself no dark thoughts. She was simply a tourist, now, caught in a drift as she passed from place to place. Her clothes were a little too warm in the gallery itself, but when she returned outside she was glad of them. She did not rush and so, when she returned to the hotel, she was rewarded with the sight of Daniel, naked in bed, and she fell on him like a laughing, giggling thunderbolt.

“Can’t we just stay here?” she asked, tracing a finger along his chest, a warm, sticky sensation between her thighs.

“Don’t be such a lazy slattern,” he chided her, moving sideways and leaping out of the bed before she could rake her nails across his buttocks. “I’ve booked us a table at the Waldorf. Do you know how difficult it is to get in there? And at this time of year? Don’t you want to pretend to be Ginger Rogers for a night? They have Cole Porter’s Steinway in the lobby.”

Convinced that she would regret this, Kris dressed herself in a Jaeger, Japanese-style cocktail dress that exposed her stockinged legs and showed her Jimmy Choos to best effect. She had wondered at the wisdom of dressing this way, even with a long faux fur coat to cover it, but Daniel, once more in a dark suit though slightly less formal than black tie, had assured her that Frank would take them virtually from door to door. “A moment’s fresh air will be enough to liven you up,” he told her with a smile.

While a blast of frosty air did indeed remind her that she was alive, the moment she entered the Waldorf-Astoria she felt that she had walked into a film set. Large, cream drapes fell from the high windows that rose up beyond the huge, crystal chandelier, and subtle art-deco motifs decorated the walls and furnishings. Inside was a phantasmagoria of New York high life, while outside the flakes of snow falling against the window created a scene straight out of a Christmas fairy tale.

Not so very long ago, such a setting would have overawed her. This time was different not so much because she had visited several such locations with Daniel as for the fact that—even for him—this was a special occasion. A large Christmas tree stood in one corner of the restaurant, of such a size that in any other building it would have dwarfed the diners, though here it seemed somewhat dainty.