Takeover: A Step-Brother Romance (The Legacy Book 1) (28 page)

It should have enraged me.

But the proposition was too good to be true.

Darius Bennett, displaced by his own son. A secret takeover, a humiliating and degrading act of aggression that made resting naked and exposed on my hands and knees seem pleasant in comparison.

“Will you submit?” Max whispered.

His hand warmed over my flesh. The fingers drifted too close to my slit. I squirmed—mostly to escape, but a part of me desperately needed a reassuring touch.

He spanked me again. My cry echoed in the room.

“What will you do if I submit?” I asked.

“I’ll fuck you, baby.”

“But…why? If Nicholas takes over—”

“I’m not Nicholas.”

The warning was sealed with a harder strike. I shuddered, my fingers digging into the carpet. Max wove his hand over my body, touching every place I had been bruised or welted. He didn’t offer his touch to soothe me. He explored. Pushing. Pinching. Earning my protesting squeals and watching as I twisted in my own agony.

Was it agony?

Nicholas didn’t frighten me. He had no need, not when a single touch, his heated glance, and the oppressive weight of his body over mine dominated me so thoroughly. I allowed myself the pleasure of submitting to a man so formidable, confident, and
assertive
that it wasn’t humiliating. It was
right
.

But Max?

He beat me, and whatever natural reaction I had for Nicholas mirrored in the stinging bite of Max’s hand. The constant strikes confused me. Slap after slap stung, but my skin faded the harshness into a heated protection. What began as pain and fear prickled away, leaving only the pure sensation of his aggression.

I swallowed. “Nicholas didn’t hurt me.”

Max’s hands gripped my hips. His hardness ground against me.

“Baby, I’m always going to hurt you.”

I believed him.

“If you do this for me, no one else will ever lay a hand on you. I promise. Every lash, every spank, every agony will belong to me.”

His words tangled in my mind. How could something so horrible reassure me?

“Can you really promise that?”

“My father is looking for a reason to frighten you,” he said. I stilled as his hand looped over my waist, traveling down, down, down. “And he knows I can and will frighten you.”

He captured my slit in his hand and smacked it hard enough to earn my squeal.

I flinched away, but his fingers found every humiliating and earned wetness caused by his attention. I whimpered, but he ignored my protest. His touch wasn’t possessive like Nicholas’s. He sought my clit and rubbed. Hard.

Why did I get wet for him? His intentions were dark. His hand ground my most sensitive area, just to watch how my body pulsed and shivered. I arched as he thrust a finger within me. The tightness gripped him, and I prayed he didn’t feel my shudder.

A fool’s prayer.

The quick pleasure enhanced the flogger’s bite. Every sensation—pain and pleasure—centered deep inside me. His finger sunk in deep and captured the confusing feelings.

“I’m going to fuck you,” Max admitted. “Are you gonna fight me?”

“I don’t know.”

He tested me, withdrawing slowly enough to earn a protesting moan.

“Listen to me, Sarah. We need you to behave. You can distract my father so Nick can make his deals and take this company. That means you doing what we brought you here to do. Last long enough, and we’ll keep you safe.”

His hand slipped back to my stomach, caressing the part of me he thought he’d own.

“Not a bad trade, baby. You give us an heir, and we get rid of my father. He won’t be able to hurt you or your family ever again. That’s worth a little fuck, isn’t it?”

He had no idea.

What should have been a punishment and horror became my greatest opportunity.

My head rested upon my hands, and my fallen hair hid a revealing smile.

Max demanded I submit, but he didn’t know the power that submission offered me. I’d do anything to protect my family—that included indulging the Bennetts.

And it also meant deceiving them.

I bit my lip, hiding the tease in my voice. “I…guess I have no choice.”

“You never did, baby.”

His growl heated the air. His hands claimed my hips once more. The leash tugged, and he pushed my head against the carpet.

I shuddered. He wasn’t like Nicholas. Not in his demands. Not in the way he positioned me and readied himself for the taking.

I pinched my eyes shut as his pants unzipped. My stomach fluttered, and I counted my staggering heartbeats. It’d be quick. Hard, but I could handle hard. Nicholas was gentle, but even his strokes had verged on overwhelming.

My core clenched in a good way. In anticipation.

I took an unsteady breath. It was all the permission I could give.

Max’s cock pierced inside me.

And the undeniable pleasure of his invasion shocked us both.

I hadn’t prepared to accept his entire raging thickness—not so soon after Nicholas claimed my virginity and took me in the morning. I stretched, and the heat blistered through me. His cock filled me in an instant.

I groaned. So did Max.

It didn’t hurt.

The slickness coating my thighs betrayed me. Whatever Max did, whatever games he played and pain he caused, wasn’t the sadism I expected. I thought he’d want me to hurt and cry and beg. God, was I wrong.

Max forced my submission and rewarded my surrender with pleasure. He grunted, slamming deeper inside of me as my body rejected everything sane and logical and embraced the ache created from his hands.

He twisted my pain. Max invaded my mind and shattered my every hope of self-preservation.

What should have disgusted me heated my blood.

What might have harmed me wetted me in preparation.

I didn’t submit because I chose to surrender. I submitted because I
had
to. Because Max was too powerful, too strong, too overwhelming to refuse. I reacted to protect myself, forging desire from fear.

I quivered under him. My fingers clenched in the carpet, and his thick arms pinned me, teasing with the leash binding me to his body. But I was too small to oppose him and too weak to escape from the barrage of his thrusts. I’d never be able to fight him.

But I wouldn’t have to.

Max promised he’d be the one to hurt me. And I believed that promise. I held onto that promise. It was easier to fear one man than defend myself against Darius’s unbridled, murderous rage.

Max wasn’t Nicholas.

His pace drove me to the floor. His strength slammed against me, as if he wished to hear the scrape of air from my lungs as he fucked. I had no support. No hope. No escape from his thrusts.

Who would choose to escape such passion?

The untamed and wild dominance stole my fear. I couldn’t fight, and I couldn’t stop the swirling tightness from crippling my body with the shadow of pleasure’s final crest. I fell limp as Max demanded it from me. He positioned my hips to steal my strength. His cock reduced me to a trembling, shivering, desperate shade of myself. I whimpered as my pussy claimed even more of his thickening length.

So different from Nicholas. So much rougher than Nicholas.

Just as pleasurable. Just as confusing.

Was this always how Max fucked? Did he take his pleasure from women as they writhed and begged and
endured
? This wasn’t sex, it was aggression. He thrived on the power taken from spread legs and animalistic mounting.

I wished it hadn’t excited me.

I wished my core hadn’t squeezed.

Max picked me up, holding me against him as his hips drove his cock deeper, harder, faster, unending.

His hand twisted under me, and his fingers teased the sensitive, aching nub. He flicked my clit and thrust faster as I murmured in protest and encouragement.

“Come for me, baby,” he whispered.

I shook my head.

“You said you’d submit.”

I said a lot of things. I couldn’t remember any of it now. Max slapped my thigh. The sharp pain dizzied me. I accidentally clenched, and we both surged with the sudden bliss. His cock slowed as I fought the intrusion. He liked that and slapped again.

“You’ll lose this fight,” he warned. “Take me. Come on me. Let me break you.”

He couldn’t. I was already broken—enraptured and bewildered and absolutely lost in the Bennett’s power.

“Sarah,” Max panted my name. “You gotta trust me. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll give you pleasure. I’ll protect you.”

I had no idea what he’d done to me, but one undeniable truth existed in his rampage.

I believed Max. And I believed him when he promised Nicholas could end the Bennett cruelty once and for all.

Nicholas’s victory was worth offering myself to his brother.

The orgasm was meant to shatter, break, and destroy me.

The pleasure only strengthened me and revealed both of us to each other.

I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t matter. The agony that teased me was better served in utter silence. I arched and tensed as Max pinned me to his chest. I let the humiliation of his punishment coil into something primal and natural. Again and again he struck me. I offered my wetness and reveled in the enraged pounding of his cock.

His final thrusts lost me in a haze of passion.

I surrendered to pleasure.

He came.

The squeeze of his hands would bruise my hips. The shudder of his body would forever sear in my mind. The shared passion would bind me to him in a way I didn’t understand.

This was submission. So different from the bond with Nicholas, and yet, so physical with Max.

His endless heat jetted within me. Again and again, as desperate and forceful as Nicholas. Max fucked as though he were determined to be the one who claimed my body for his own. And maybe he was. The Bennetts promised many things—my safety, my protection—but they all wanted something damning in return.

I fell onto the carpet as Max pulled away. A shiver of delicious pleasure rolled though me. I wondered if he’d touch me again.

He didn’t.

Sadist.

I panted, trying to force myself up. The adrenaline and indulgence swirled into a dizzying promise of peace, but the aching bruises and welts crossing my skin tightened with each passing moment.

I’d hurt soon.

It didn’t scare me.

Max tugged the belt from my neck, his fingers rubbed where the leather had bruised.

“You won’t regret this, baby,” he said between harsh breaths. “Nick’s got a plan. If it works, my father won’t ever harm you again.”

“But you will.”

“I’ll have to.”

I briefly touched his hand, but the intimacy frightened me more than anything Darius might have done. I looked down, seizing the moment of submission, the control he so desired over me.

The control all the Bennetts wished they had.

“Do this for us,” he whispered. “Let us take you and accept what happens to your body. You’ll earn your revenge over my father.”

I already had it.

Nicholas secured it for me. If I survived, I could have it all. I’d win.

And, while I waited, my step-brothers promised me the pleasure of a lifetime.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “However I can.”

My conscience prickled. I ignored it as Max hiked me in his arms to carry me to my room. He grunted against his leg, but I admired his determination. The injury should have slowed him, just like my asthma complicated everything. But Max wouldn’t let an illness or injury define him. I knew the feeling.

He didn’t hide his limp.

Christ. He trusted me.

Who was making the worse decision—me or my stepbrothers? I only hoped I’d earn their forgiveness as easily as their trust, if only so I’d live to see the end of this madness.

But deception was the only way to survive. Until I could punish Darius, see him rot in jail, and watch him suffer at the hands of his eldest son, I’d have to keep my secrets from my step-brothers.

But mine wasn’t a secret that would stay hidden for long.

My brother was a dead man.

I crashed through his doors, cracking the frame against the heel of my hand. The bone might have splintered as much as the wood. I didn’t care.

Max possessed an animalistic strength, but he wasn’t quick. I hauled him from a chair and jerked him enough to unbalance his good leg. His glass of whiskey shattered against the floor.

I slammed him into the wall and cursed.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Max swung at me.

I wasn’t as easy a target as the girl. I dodged, shoving my forearm into his throat. Max grimaced, but he ceased struggling.

“Get your shit together.” He held my stare. “And get your fucking hands off of me.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“What?”

I pressed harder. “Did you
hurt
her?”

“Jesus Christ,” Max hissed.

I let him up, watching with mindless satisfaction as he rubbed the soreness from his neck—not unlike the leash he strapped over hers.

The belt had bitten into Sarah’s pale skin. She’d be bruised for days.

Everywhere. Her back. Her neck. Her entire
body
.