In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) (5 page)

Just as the daylight was taking on the orange cast of approaching sunset, I nodded to the security guard and slipped through the front door of the villa. The house was dark and quiet, the long, low spaces pressing close. Despite my need to have it out with Adrian Knight over my suspicions, I felt a measure of relief. But then dread. Where was he? Was he that angry with me over last night at dinner? I wandered down the hall chuckling bitterly at myself, the righteously angry victim of Adrian’s manipulation one moment, a submissive fearful of her lover’s displeasure and disappointment the next.

I flipped on the bedroom light and jumped a fraction of an inch, like I had felt the instant when Adrian’s silvery brown eyes focused on me. The shutters were closed tight, and he’d been sitting in the dark in one of the two white leather chairs beside the antique round table in the corner. Just the sight of him made my stomach bob with both nausea and painfully familiar anticipation. He was wearing nothing but a towel slung low around his muscled hips, baring his smooth chest, falling between his spread knees. My body’s reaction to his near nudity vied with the mental flare of warning when I saw the alcohol bottle at his elbow and the glass of dark amber liquid in his hand.

“My wayward Miss Bloom returns,” he murmured softly, and I was grateful that he did not slur. Drunken men made me nervous. “Should I ask you what you did today, since you weren’t at the project site and you weren’t in the villa?”

This was it. Time for answers, if I was brave enough to ask the questions. “I needed time to get my thoughts together,” I told him, my voice starting out unsteady but strengthening as I spoke.

He put his drink down and rested both elbows on the scrolled wooden arms of the chair. The fingertips of one hand curled loosely, brushing his thigh where the towel had fallen back to reveal it. I couldn’t help licking my lips, remembering what it felt like when those muscles flexed, as he worked his way into me.

“You’re forgetting something, aren’t you, Miss Bloom?” His brow low and eyes dark, Adrian stared at me, pointed and nonplussed. My breath hitched with a surge of adrenaline, a shot of anxiety over the possibility that he knew I’d spoken to Penn. He raised his brows. “Sir?”

“Sir,” I sighed out despite myself and my irritation.

“Please continue, Miss Bloom.” The businesslike tone in his voice should have made me more angry, but it had me starting to slick myself instead. He always began that way, cool and aloof, before he let himself touch me and tease me and purr about how beautiful I looked naked at his feet with my hands tied behind my back and his swollen cock in my mouth.

“I want… I want you to tell me why. Why this?” I opened my arms to motion to the bedroom, to the space between us, to this intangible I felt binding us. When he grew still but did not respond, I folded my arms defensively across my chest and shook my head. No more beating around the bush. “Did you know I was Penn Ellison’s ex-girlfriend?”

The gently defined muscles along Adrian’s abdomen tightened. He reached for the glass and took a carefully measured sip. “I did.”

For a moment, I started to argue with him, until I realized he had actually answered my question, just that simply and bluntly. My voice was a rasp as I asked, “You did?” I felt like the floor came out from under my feet, like I was falling, tumbling. And all I could think was…
Oh, Mama, what have I done
? Adrian had once referenced the saying about apples not falling far from the tree, for fathers and sons, but it was also true for mothers and daughters. She’d have understood this pain, this humiliation, of loving with such willful foolishness. She wouldn’t have regretted it, though. With searing anguish sawing through my insides, by god, I did. I had promised myself I’d never let this happen to me, and now…twice…

“Penn said… He said there had been a woman, back in college. Is that what this is about?”

Adrian Knight slammed his heavy crystal glass against the wooden tabletop so hard that the offended shriek pierced my ears, and I drew back a step as he came up out of that chair. “Penn said, did he? Not really appropriate, is it, Miss Bloom? Consorting with your former lover when you’re supposed to be
my
submissive?”

The rise of his anger stoked mine, and I suddenly found myself waving my hands in furious gestures as I bit back, “And what’s appropriate about using me like a weapon to get back at somebody else?”

Knight’s hand darted out, and his long fingers tangled in my hair, pulling me toward him while forcing an arch to my back. “My motives are my own, Miss Bloom, and none of your concern. So long as I dominate you the way you
need
to be dominated, the whys and wherefore are for me to worry about.”

I dug my nails into his bare shoulders, wishing I had the nerve to push him away or at least draw blood. How could my body burn for him, wet itself for him, even as he confirmed how little I meant to him? “Bullshit,” I hissed, at myself as well as Adrian.

“Bullshit,
sir
,” he reminded me and ground up against me. I could feel the swell and size of his erection even through the towel and certainly through the thin cotton of my dress. God help me, I wrapped one leg over his hip without thinking about it. “Let’s get back to basics, shall we, Miss Bloom?” He abruptly released me and took a step back. “Take off your clothes.”

I did, ripping my dress over my head and casting it to the floor in one hard whipping motion, as I glared him down. My body was bare underneath it, perfectly vulnerable as Adrian scooped me up against him and my ankles locked at the small of his back, as his mouth went after the aching peaks of my stiffened nipples.

“Fuck,” I gasped as he sucked firmly on the tender nubs. My head lolled and rolled against my shoulders as I fretted and whimpered, caught in a moment of decision. Again in the arms of a man who could possess me but couldn’t love me, there was only my pride to salvage. But did that mean wriggling out of Adrian Knight’s arms right now, slapping him across that gorgeous face, and marching out of the villa? Or proving to us both one more time, perhaps one last time, that I could give him my body while withholding my heart? It was damaged, that heart—wounded—but I could still feel it beating, fluttering wildly as Adrian Knight’s warm, wet tongue trailed from one nipple to the other. His towel dropped, pooling on the floor, and the broad head of his member, just the head, pierced the lips of my all too willing sex. The need at my core made the decision for me, and I tightened my legs around Adrian’s waist to force him deeper.

Adrian lifted his head. “Oh, no. Not that fast, Miss Bloom, and not that easy.”

He carried me, semi-impaled on the punishing warmth of his erection, across the room to the iron-banded wooden chest where he kept the tools of the torment I found so irresistible. Adrian lifted me from his cock and settled me on the floor, commanding, “Kneel.” There was no rug here, and the prickly swirls of textured concrete lightly gouged my shins. The subtle scraping sensation as I shifted restlessly was a welcome counterpoint to the hot, steady ache between my legs.

My gaze traced the contours of the muscles along his thighs, the perfect tan of his skin, as he spent several moments gathering quite the collection of chains and straps from his toy chest. If I was thinking about more than the stunning beauty of his body, smooth and muscled and lean, it was to satisfy my urge to memorize every detail for later. For a time when I would not see this again.

Knight twisted to dump an armload of restraints onto his wide, cream canopy bed. Then he turned back and immediately bent over me to fasten a fur-lined, stainless steel collar around my neck. I opened my mouth to protest that this wasn’t the collar we normally used, the thick, soft leather one with the three buckles, just tight enough to keep me from retreating from the pleasure he inflicted upon me. Though the metal did flex, this one was too stiff and hard, like Adrian’s manner with me now. There were small shiny rings spaced all the way around this collar, so I found it even more annoying when he snapped a metal leash onto a rung to one side of my throat, making it awkward when he used it to pull me to my feet.

“If I can’t trust you to stay where you’re told, I’ll have to tighten the leash, won’t I, Miss Bloom?” He drew the chain upward, taut, until I was on tiptoes with my naked body stretched the length of his. I held his upper arms to keep my balance, my fingers curling around the curves of muscle. Face-to-face with Adrian, I couldn’t hide the quickening of my breath at the way he was speaking to and handling me, at his pronounced possessiveness. At the same time that I loved it, I steeled myself against it, refusing to be seduced again into the fantasy that Knight desired me for more than revenge, as more than a casual plaything.

“You are mine, Miss Bloom. Say it.”

My breath shuddered haltingly out of me, and I sucked my bottom lip, glaring up at him and refusing to respond.

Adrian tilted his head, looking stunningly and so alluringly dangerous. “You don’t think so, Chloe? If you won’t say it, I’ll have to demonstrate.”

I lost my balance and couldn’t resist as Adrian grasped my hips and set me forcibly down on the feathery soft bed. Though I may have been looking daggers at him, I still allowed him to lock metal cuffs that matched the collar to my ankles and my wrists. A moment’s doubt, a simmering panic, stole a heartbeat as he used what appeared to be tiny platinum-plated locks to bind my wrists to two of the rings at the back of the collar.

“Lace your fingers together,” he told me flatly. “It will be more comfortable.” I had no chance to react to this suggestion of concern for my comfort before Adrian pushed me onto my back and bent my knees up hard above me. “Stay in this position, Miss Bloom.” With legs spread and my pussy offered so lewdly. “Or we’ll be covering the difference between correction and punishment again.”

He should’ve known better, that in my present state of mind I’d take that as a challenge. Instead of holding the position, I planted the ball of one foot square in the middle of his chest and pushed him away.

“Brat,” he growled and closed his hand around my ankle like a vice. With his other hand grasping me behind my knee, Adrian flicked and rotated my body almost as though he would a whip, putting me on my stomach with my face buried in the downy comforter. He dragged me backward onto my knees, my ass perched high in the air in offering. I grunted out my distress. “Safe word?”

“Fuck you,” was my muffled response.

“I didn’t think so. Let’s go over this again.” With his large hands planted on the curve of my bare butt, kneading the full cheeks, Adrian ran his wicked tongue the length of my excited slit. He wriggled it into me. He dipped inside and licked deep. He made circles and flicked and teased. After the first minute, maybe two, I stopped swallowing back my moans. Adrian let the promise of a hard orgasm creep up so close, just beyond reach—before he drew back and let it die. Once, twice, three times… He left me quivering and embarrassingly wet, both from my own juices and his saliva.

“That would be correction, Miss Bloom.” He required and awaited no response before he snatched up a thin, rigid riding crop from the chest. There was no warm-up, not as far as I was concerned. He striped my ass firmly, in a constant rhythm that started and ended as a vigorous flurry, a demanding physical metronome beat. He played me to an angry crescendo, until my body twitched and I flinched away from the hot lashes that drew the flow of blood up in a pulsing surge under the surface of my skin.

When I was ready to cry out, when I was ready to beg, he relented. One more hard stroke against the top of my thighs to make me squeal, and he tossed the crop aside. “And that’s punishment.” He ran the smooth palms of his hands and the rough cheeks of his face along my abraded skin. Over-sensitized, my flesh stung at the touch. “Do we understand the difference now, Miss Bloom?”

Panting into the bed linens, I nodded.

“Good. So you’ll know which one you’ll get if you push me away again. Use the safe word or obey me, Chloe.” He flipped me over onto my back and smothered my cry of surprise with a deep, probing, open-mouthed kiss. I recognized the taste of very old, very good whiskey, so dry and earthy and smoky that it took my breath away. The urge to drink it from his mouth, lick it from his skin, left me salivating.

My eyes wouldn’t focus right at first when Adrian finished kissing me and retreated into the haze of desire frosting my vision. I blinked repeatedly, wishing I could rub my eyes. My gaze cleared just as he started binding my calves and thighs with more of the shiny metal, fur-lined bands. More platinum locks fastened the restraint at each calf to the restraint on the corresponding thigh, so that I could not straighten my legs. And finally, he strung a short chain from each thigh to the collar. That position he had ordered me to hold, knees bent to my chest with legs spread, was no longer a matter of choice.

Knight stood at the side of the king-sized bed, one hand slowly working up and down the length of his impressive erection, so smooth and thick and lightly ruddy over full, heavy balls that attested to his virility. I looked down the trembling planes and curves of my helpless body as he lined his cock up with my eager entrance. His free hand rubbing my hip and the gentle curve of my stomach sent ripples of tension through my torso and my bent limbs, until I lost my balance and sort of teetered, sort of squirmed, almost rocking to and fro on the bed.

“Spread wide open,” he groaned low from the back of his throat, gazing down at me from the shadowy well beneath his brow, from under the waves of sable hair curling in a loose wave over his forehead. “This is how you should always be, Chloe.”

“No,” I chimed in a high voice, almost chirping, almost whining.

“Yes,” he countermanded, and he answered my defiance with several quick, firm strums of his thumb over my exposed clitoris. I huffed through them like it was Lamaze training. “I own this, Chloe. I own your desire and your body. I own your climax, when I wish to give it to you.” He angled himself over me, his cock prodding my pussy again, his weight pitched forward on one arm planted beside my shoulder. “And you. I own you. Swear it to me.”