The Cherished One (7 page)

When she was finished, he turned the television off.  He ignored her indignant look, saying, “You asked me earlier if I thought that my...possession of you might have driven Dag away from you.”

Suddenly, Fawna, who had been determined to pay him as little mind as was possible, was all ears.

“And yes, I think that was exactly why he left.”

“Why?”  Her voice broke before she could control it.  Breaking down was the last thing she wanted to do in front of him, but she couldn’t seem to stop it.  “It wasn’t something I had any control over – I couldn’t stop it – I didn’t want it –”

As much as Max didn’t want to admit it, her pain made his heart clench.  He was feeling empathy for a human for the first time in a very long time, and that was the last thing he wanted to feel for her.   But there it was.  His voice was soft, almost soothing.  “Dag knows that better than anyone else besides me.  But he also knows how vulnerable you are to us – to our kind.  Even more so than humans.  You’re only half faerie, and I’m not at all sure how that would affect you, but vampire and faerie blood are not meant to mix.  It didn’t hurt me, but –“ he hesitated for only an instant here “- I had intended that it be the death of you.  Your half human blood saved you.”

“My guess is that he realized how close I had come to killing you, how vulnerable you were to me, to death, that probably my next bite – or his – or any other vampire’s – would be the end of you, and he couldn’t take that chance.”  Max looked Fawna directly in the eye.  “I’d’ve done the exact same thing, in his shoes.  He was probably hoping that I’d follow him, and not you.”  He smiled, and it was not a pleasant sight.  “He was wrong.”

She had been going to get a brownie slab, long since baked and frozen by her mother, but that look turned her stomach.  She took a deep breath and shrugged her shoulders.  “So you’re going to kill me.  Why don’t you just get it over with?”

Max bowed his head to her.  “Those are brave words, Fawna.  I wonder.  Do you mean them?”  He could fell her depression, and the fatalism that it drove her to, although he knew that she was too strong to give in to it for long.

She shrugged.  “I find myself at a bit of a crossroads, and I have to admit to feeling somewhat fatalistic.  I’m no spring chicken.  I’m thirty-two.  Dag and I had been together for almost eight years.  He was the love of my life, and yet he’s chosen to leave me flat,” she eyed him warily, “whatever his possibly altruistic motives.  And if those were his motives, he could have written me a letter or something, told me about all of that. 

“I’ve never been particularly afraid of death itself; faeries don’t believe in Heaven or Hell.  We believe in the cycle of the planet, and that all living things are a part of that,” she put her soda on the coffee table nonchalantly.  “If you’re going to kill me, I wish you’d just do it.”

Max, who had been sitting a ways away from her, moved much closer, a bit alarmed by her statements.  “Unfortunately for you, you don’t have control here.  I do.  If you die, and how it happens are things that are in my hands.”  He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers.  “And you know just how capable my hands are, don’t you?”  Max reached down to squeeze a still throbbing bottom cheek as his lips captured hers, one hand deftly creeping beneath the curtain of her hair to curve around the back of her neck, holding her in place, so that she couldn’t move away no matter how hard she tried, the other snaking around to her mid back, forcing her to arch against him, pressing her generous breasts against his chest.

The hand at the back of her neck ventured down to those well-presented breasts, seeking and finding the already peaked tips and lazily running the tip of one finger over them, teasing her, that strong arm across her back not allowing for any escape, no matter how hard she writhed.

And her wiggling was testing his own control, which he liked, so he didn’t even try to dissuade her from it.

Chapter Five

It was, as it would happen, just the wrong time of the month, and Fawna’s breasts were excruciatingly sensitive.  Dag could, and had, on numerous occasions, brought her to orgasm merely by stimulating just those raspberry buds.  And talking to her.  She responded to his voice as if he was stroking her clit with his tongue rather than using it to talk to her.  His words flowed over his skin like a physical touch, bringing her to a place of pure physical sensation.  Sometimes, she’d actually had to ask him to tell her to stop contracting, because she’d gotten scared of the strength of her reactions to him and felt like it would never, ever end.

Suddenly, all of that stimulation, which had her very close to the edge, was withdrawn, and he pulled her up against him, holding her so tightly that she couldn’t move unless he allowed it, keeping her bottom pressed obscenely against his crotch.  “Tell me how you and Dag met.”

“He – he was a friend of a friend of mine, and we met at a party at her house.”

“And you were the life of the party?”

Fawna snorted.  “I was hiding behind the potted plant, looking at my watch and wondering what was considered a polite timeframe to stay at an acquaintance’s engagement party.  I’m a very happy hermit, thank you.”

Max was surprised, and that didn’t happen often.  He would have pegged her for the party girl type.  Apparently, he was wrong.  “And what was my old friend Dag doing?” he asked sarcastically.

That got her angry.  “Don’t put it like that.  You were never friends.  I don’t know anything about your relationship, but I know that without asking.”

Max didn’t take kindly to being corrected, despite the veracity of her statements.  “Answer me,” he warned in a growl.

Fawna was too lost in her reverie to note the warning.  “Hanging around near me.  He struck up a conversation, took my number, and we went on a date about a week later.”  Max watched her face closely as she was lost in memories, and saw the tear that rolled down her cheek, which she tried unsuccessfully to hide from him.  “He sent me a big bouquet of roses the next day.   I didn’t know what to do with him.  He was so different from any other man I’d met.  He never pressured me to sleep with him, and he was so protective and caring, almost too much so, especially when he—”

“When he what?”  Of course he’d pounce on that.

Her face was bright red, and he already knew the answer, but he wanted her to say it to him. 

Her voice was halting as she said it, and he knew just how embarrassed she was to admit it.  “W-when he began spanking me.”

Max found himself inordinately intrigued.  “So how does a woman who, from what I can gather about women nowadays, must consider herself an absolute equal to men, with all of the freedoms and responsibilities therein, who believes in - what’s the phrase - women’s liberation, and all that, reconcile herself with the fact she allows her lover to paddle her very gorgeous bottom for what she must entrust him to decide are infractions?  Doesn’t that fly in the face of modern convention?”

She was squirming again, and he liked it almost as much as when she wiggled, since she was almost directly up against his groin.  “It does, and yes, I believe in equality.  But one of the things that women fought for is the right to do what you want.  To get your needs – whatever those are – met.  And what I want in my life – what I had in my life –“ she stopped there, because she simply couldn’t go on.  The lump in her throat was just too big, and she couldn’t speak around it.  She was crying, of course, yet again, in front of him, and she didn’t give a damn.

He was surprisingly patient, and gave her enough time to get around it, as long as he didn’t think she was avoiding answering him. “What I had was a man who was strong enough to do for me what my parents hadn’t.  He held me to account for what I did.  I was doted on, but not disciplined at all.  I was spoiled.  Luckily, I didn’t choose any really bad paths as I grew up, but frankly that was simply a matter of dumb luck.  And I mean it, pure, unadulterated dumb luck.  I just didn’t happen to fall in with a crowd that was doing anything worse than having the occasional under-aged beer, rather than hard core drugs, and skipping the occasional day of school to go to the lake.  I didn’t end up hanging out with people who shoplifted or I don’t know – did any number of things a lot of kids I know did that got lead them eventually either to jail or rehab.”  She shrugged those delicate shoulders. “I just lucked out. 

“But Dag made sure I knew that my bad choices – however small they might be - had consequences that he made damned sure I didn’t like.”

“Did he spank you first, or did you make love first?”

It was an interesting question that she seemed to need to consider whether or not she wanted to respond, but she knew he wasn’t about to let her do so for very long. 

In this case, he knew she was choosing not to respond, rather than having a physical and emotional problem doing so.  Max didn’t yell or spank her.  He simply reached down and squeezed her butt.  “You seem to be functioning under the misconception that you have a choice in whether or not you answer my questions.  Do you really think that I’ll hesitate one second in throwing you over my knee and spanking you again, just because I’ve already spanked you?”  He glanced casually at the coffee table, where there was a wooden ruler left over from one of her mother’s many – failed – craft projects. 

Fawna sighed, not bothering to cover her exasperation at having been forced to answer.  Why bother?  He could read her mind.  He knew she was pissed.  Why try to hide it from him?

“Why do you make me tell you things that you already know?”

“Because it makes me hot, and I know you don’t like it.”

“And knowing that I don’t like it but that you can force me to do it anyway makes you hot, too,” she intuited absolutely correctly.

He wasn’t going to deny it.  “Yes.”

She was beginning to hate that almost smile of his.  “You’re a control freak.”

“Most dominant men are, to a certain degree.”  Before she had a chance to answer him, or distract him further, he turned her over, so that she was lying directly on top of him.  Her worn jeans didn’t offer much protection, and those flimsy panties offered even less, and considering that he managed to spank her the slightest bit harder, he figured he’d offset any help her clothing offered, and, if the tone of her yelps was anything to go by, he’d gotten it right.

“All right!  All right!  He spanked me because I went into the wrong part of town.”

She had him there.  He stopped spanking immediately.  “The same part of town I found you in this evening?”

Fawna nodded.

“And what, pray tell, where you doing there at that point in time?”

She grimaced, realizing he was probably going to have much the same reaction as Dag had when she gave him her reason for going there.  “I went to stop a dog fighting ring.”

Max tipped her chin with his finger so that she was forced to look up at him.  “You, all five foot nothing of you-” she wasn’t going to correct him that she was actually four eleven “- went into that part of town to single handedly take on a dog fighting ring.”

When you put it that way...  And come to think of it, his speech sounded alarmingly close to exactly what Dag had said, and with the same tone of incredulity, too.  “Yes.”

Max actually found himself shuddering at the thought that she had done something so foolhardy, and he didn’t blame Dag in the least for having taken her to task for doing something that stupid.  In his place, he would have done exactly the same thing.  In fact, he might well just do it again, to make sure she had gotten the point.  “And what special powers do you harbor as a half-breed faerie that I don’t know about that would make you think you could come out of a situation like that alive?”

Something about the way he said “half-breed faerie” set her teeth on edge.  He said it to cause insult.  It made her not want to answer him, but she was already wearing the blazing red badge of not answering him promptly enough.  Her bottom was going to be fairly black and blue around him if she couldn’t get rid of him.  What worried her almost more than that, though, was the fact not only was it burning quite briskly, but it was also tingling, as was the entire front of her where it was naturally pressed up against him from lying on top of him.  He refused to let her down, and had opened his legs to include hers between them, so she was lying directly on top of what she hoped was his very swollen genitals.  If that was him at rest, she pitied whoever he slept with.

“Thank you,” he said gravely.

“Stop that!  It’s really annoying, and very discourteous, to say the least.”

It was the first time she heard him nearly giggle.  “Yes, and courtesy is always one of my utmost concerns.”

“Sarcasm noted.”  Before he raised his hand again to start spanking her, she answered, “I can call animals.  None of the dogs in that room would ever touch me in a violent way.  Instead, I set them against their masters.  I had the element of surprise, and most of the men were dead by their own dogs before they had a chance to get to their guns.”

He, of course, pounced on the same word Dag had.  “Most?”

“Yes.  I lost two dogs, though.” He could feel how deeply the loss of those two dogs, dogs she didn’t even know, effected her.  “I rescued everyone else and either got them rehabilitated into good families or placed where they could live out their lives without worrying about harming humans.  And the cops arrived right when I expected them to.”  She had alerted them to what was going on, and had given herself just enough time to do what she needed to do.

He should have asked what the police thought about a dog-fighting ring that was absent the dogs, but he didn’t really care.  “And you escaped unscathed?”

Damn.  She’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask.  Dag had had a fit when he’d found out she was injured, even though it was hardly life threatening.  “I was fine.”

“Unscathed?”

“A bullet grazed me, but it was just a flesh wound.”

“Where?”  It was suddenly very important to him that he know where she’d been wounded.  He didn’t know why, and he didn’t want to question his motives any too closely, but he wanted to see her injury.