Matthew Lord Kensington was unsettled. Nervous, if he was being entirely truthful with himself.

He ran a Fortune 500 company he’d expanded tenfold from his father’s oil field operations. He’d embraced his identity as a sexual Dominant at nearly the same time he’d taken those reins, so whether in bed or in the office, he remained in control, in ways that contented and challenged him. He’d recovered from enough mistakes in his life that missteps didn’t fluster him. They didn’t derail him from achieving his goals.

He didn’t get nervous. Ever.

Though admittedly, many husbands might feel jumpy if they were being confronted by his current situation. Two astoundingly beautiful women—neither one his wife—were kneeling at his feet. They were also naked, except for tiny golden waist chains that proclaimed them slaves. His slaves.

Apparently thinking he hadn’t heard her, the redhead with milk-white skin and amazingly generous breasts repeated their purpose for being here.

“You ordered a bath and massage, my lord, to remove the dust of the battlefield. You wished to be clean before bedding your conquest.”

“I gave no such order.”

The two women remained silent, bowing their heads. They of course would never dispute his word. Then it clicked. Some days, Savannah knew how to outplay even his best move.

This part of their trip had been planned as a special surprise for her, but she would have been made aware of it a few hours ago. As a result, he expected she’d made her own alteration to the session.

Savannah Tennyson Kensington was the only force on earth who could unbalance or take him by surprise. Or make him nervous. She’d done all three tonight, though he would manfully do his best to make sure she didn’t know it.

Or at least not until after he offered her the fantasy she hadn’t expected him to fulfill.

Up until coming to The Resort, a private Caribbean BDSM pleasure island, they’d enjoyed their Dom/sub interactions mostly in private, but when she’d told him how she wanted a safe place to explore that side of herself even more deeply, he’d gifted her with a visit for their anniversary.

He’d initially intended to reveal it as their destination once they were on their way to it, but after learning all the offerings the resort offered, he told her a few weeks before, so he could learn what interested her the most.

During that time, they’d discussed a variety of experiences they wanted to explore as Master and sub. The Resort could accommodate any aspect of the lifestyle money could buy. They both could afford a lot, though Matt had refused to let her pay for any of this. For once, she’d acquiesced without argument about a large purchase. She understood the important nuances of what they were exploring here, a space where she’d relinquish total control to him in an undiluted Master/sub environment.

As they’d lain on their bed at home one night and looked through the comprehensive booklet and a variety of glossy supplemental brochures together, they’d discarded those things not compatible with either of their interests. But when she lingered on the role play section, a tiny smile on her lips, he’d asked her what was going through her mind.

“It’s nothing. Just a memory.”

He tipped up her chin and met her blue eyes. During the years he’d known her, he’d come to the conclusion the shade was as indescribable as the endless blues of water and sky, changing with the shifting of moon and sun. “Tell me.”

Her smile became shy, reminding him of the child who’d been her father’s shadow until she embraced her own identity and became the formidable woman she was. She was three times the CEO that Gregory Tennyson had ever been.

The child who had grown into an incomparable woman had never had bedtime stories. But now she told him one.

“Do you remember the night I came to your office and you revealed your feelings for me?”

The humor in her expression was reflected in his own. As if either of them would ever forget that night. “My feelings for you were always obvious. You just required an aggressive takeover move to notice.”

She chuckled. The sound always gave him a sharp spurt of gut-level pleasure. She laughed so much more now, and yet he cherished every instance, because he remembered when her laughter had been as rare as a blue moon.

“When I walked into your board room,” she continued, “I sensed right off something was different. The way you were sitting at the head of the table, all alone, the room cloaked in shadows, the lights of the city behind you. There was this moment, don’t laugh, when I looked at you and realized the trappings were a façade. Instead, I saw the walls of a tent, with armor, shields and swords propped against them. I had walked into the domain of a conqueror.”

She took a breath, her amused expression disappearing to reflect a warmer, deeper pool of emotions. “When you looked at me, I trembled inside. You say your feelings were always obvious. Maybe they were, but you didn’t push hard until that night. Hard enough I couldn’t keep them at arm’s length, or pretend not to see what was there.”

“You weren’t ready before then,” he replied, though her words made him want to draw her closer. “I knew it, tried to respect it.”

She shook her head. “There are times I’ve wished…you’d pushed harder, sooner. But then I think, if you had, it might have been too soon, and we wouldn’t have made it here.” Her gaze sought his. “It terrifies me sometimes, thinking how something that’s everything we ever wanted can be balanced on the head of a pin. A confluence of timing, luck, and the right amount of courage. Plus, the ability to change something about myself I never thought I could.”

He trailed his fingers along her jaw, slipping down to caress the pulse of her throat, which tripped intriguingly under his touch. “You’re the bravest woman I know, Savannah. You’d never miss that kind of moment because of lack of courage.”

“Nor you,” she said, with a trace of a smile. “You’re right. You were concealing nothing that night. From the moment I stepped into the board room, your desire to claim, control, invade was right out front. I thought I had to resist it, like a captive queen, because if I succumbed, everything would be lost. I didn’t realize I was on the cusp of finding everything I needed.”

The blue of her eyes had darkened, telling him she was aware of the heat her words were generating between them. He dropped his hand to her waist, the slick brochures tumbling off the bed as he pushed her to her back amid the pillows. Her golden hair formed shimmering waves on the linens as she spread her long slim legs. Her cream-colored satin robe parted to allow the motion, so when he laid full length upon her, there was nothing between him and the damp softness of her sex except the cotton of his drawstring pajama bottoms.

Her hands framed his face, her touch like flower petals. Her scent was the same type of haunting fragrance. As he’d promised her that night in his board room, there were always fresh flowers in their bedroom. She handled them frequently, cupping the blooms, brushing her cheek or lips against the silken texture. The current bouquet, sitting on the glass table where they both sometimes did some work before bedtime—or shared an after-sex delivery pizza—was a mix of blue, purple and yellow blooms. He’d added a couple gardenia blossoms he’d cut from their backyard this morning, before she woke.

“I had to fight you that night,” she continued, her chin setting resolutely. “Because that was my nature, too. I was your conquest, brought before you in chains, but it wasn’t my subjugation you wanted. Surrender, yes, but surrender with a fight, because winning the castle wasn’t enough. You had to prove yourself worthy to be my Master. You wanted me to fight, to make it a fight worth winning…for both of us.”

She caressed his biceps in a languorous way, her eyes misted with the fantasy imaginings. He could see it in his own mind with surprising clarity.

He slipped the sash of the robe, lifting off her enough to spread the garment out on either side, revealing her lithe, nude body. Reaching down, he found the smoothness of her sex. The dampness was fast moving to slick wetness. His cock hardened in reaction, pressed against her thigh.

“Was your conqueror worthy?” he murmured against her lips.

The tip of her tongue moistened her mouth, her eyes sparking with both humor and arousal. “You’ll know, the day I call you ‘my lord,’ and mean it.”

She reached up between them to touch his lips. Her next words were more serious. “Had you been born centuries ago, you would have been one of those conquering warlords. But your heart…it would still be your heart. You are that man, now or a thousand years ago. But don’t worry. It’s a fantasy that can stay a fantasy. I like the way it plays out in my head.”

She understood him, understood how practical a man he was. Role playing was make-believe, and that was for children. He excelled at certain things because they were true to who he was. He was a leader, and yes, maybe somewhere inside him was the fire of those ancient conquerors. But he wasn’t a fanciful man. When other boys had been reading comic books and sword-and-sorcery novels, Matt was reading business success biographies and standing next to his father on oil rigs.

He saw himself as a leader in the context of the here and now, a contemporary setting, familiar landmarks. Yet as she’d told him her imaginings about that night, he realized he’d been pulled into how she told it.

He got the pajama bottoms out of his way, her agile feet helping, heels pushing the cotton off his ass, and he slid into her, her sweet cream making it a deep glide and lock. Her chin lifted, her throat moving in a swallow as her gaze held his.

She didn’t say a word, and neither did he, letting their eyes say everything. Conqueror, conquered. The lines blurred as to who was who, when they were joined like this. But as he embedded himself in her, he didn’t deny his surge of possessive pleasure, or the primal need to claim her through claiming her body. Thrust in the way that won her surrender, her body lifting to his movements, gasps coming from her lips.

Looking at all the possibilities The Resort offered, imagining them partaking of those offerings, meant that foreplay had been handled. But he realized her revealing her fantasy had also contributed to her aroused state. And maybe not just hers. Her responsiveness pleased him fiercely, her body already rocking urgently against his, her nails biting into his shoulder.

“Come for me, sweetheart,” he whispered, and savored the cry that broke from her pale pink lips as she obeyed his command. She tightened on him like a fist, and he followed her right over, thrusting into her harder, more demanding, egged on by the clasp of her legs and the sharp scrape of her nails.

They moved together even afterward, riding those smaller crests, taking the last ounce of pleasure out of the experience. They’d been close to her normal bedtime when they’d decided to look at The Resort paperwork, so now, as she eased out of the climax, he noticed her lids were already drooping.

“We’ll pick this up tomorrow night,” he said, and she made a murmur of agreement. He turned them, cradling her in his arms, her leg hooked over his hip. He stayed inside her until he softened, feeling the rise and fall of her breasts against his chest as she caught her breath. When she nestled closer and he saw goosebumps on her skin, he knew the chill of the ceiling fan was affecting her.

Holding her with one arm, he pulled the comforter over them, keeping her warm. She adjusted, one arm folded against his chest, the other curled under his arm, her fingers caressing his back. “I love you, Matthew,” she said, her voice a breath against his skin. “It may be hindsight through romantic glasses, but I think I always did. Long before I realized or admitted it.”

“Of course you did,” he said placidly, and smiled when she closed the hand against his chest into a fist and beat out a gentle tattoo against him.

Her breathing evened out. He liked that, too. When they first were sharing a bed, she didn’t go to sleep easily or stay under peacefully. Now, unlike most women who seemed infused with energy after sex, she rode the aftermath like a welcoming boat, sailing into dreamland.

He wouldn’t be far behind her, but for now he held her while she slept, his own storytelling Scheherazade, and remembered that night she’d talked about.

Though a serious gamble, it had brought the relationship simmering between them for years at last to volcanic life. Matt had picked up on Savannah’s submissive side, long before she had done so. That night he’d frankly exploited it, pulling it to the surface in a dramatic way to ensure she confronted her feelings for him and his for her. It had resulted in marriage, and a deeper connection with another person than either one of them had ever experienced.

His gaze shifted to the scattered brochures and he smiled, shaking his head mentally. Yeah, he wasn’t into role play, but he was going to give her that damned fantasy. Because she might view him as a conqueror, but he was a conqueror whose only desire was ensuring his conquest had everything she could every possibly want.

* * *

Being a thorough planner, Matt had sought out the man on his executive team most able to help him learn how to take a step away from his hardcore reality into fantasy play.

Jon had suggested doing the role play scene last, after Matt had all the other Resort experiences to bolster him. He’d also recommended Matt come to his house to discuss the challenge face to face. Matt had half-expected—and feared—some crazy-assed visualization exercises. Well, no matter foolish he’d feel, if that was what was needed, he’d do it. He trusted his man to get him where he needed to be to achieve his objective.

Instead, Jon had invited him to sit on his back porch and share a bottle of Jack. Rachel had a Saturday morning yoga class, so it was just the two of them, but Matt had noted the pleasing signs of her presence. Her scent, a new set of pillows on the couch with a bamboo tree print, a romance novel on the coffee table.

But the most important sign of it was in Jon himself, the relaxed attitude of a male who had his forever mate, and was comfortable in the home they’d made together. Matt had no doubt, before she’d left that morning, Jon had enjoyed the many delights his sub had to offer. The contentment of a sated Master and male rested on Jon as obviously as the other clues to her presence.

“You’re overthinking this,” Jon said, pouring Matt a drink and sitting back.

“So says the man who doesn’t feel or look like an idiot standing on his head and saying ‘ohm.’”

“Because it reflects who I am.” Jon gestured at him with his glass. “And therein lies my point. You don’t need to doubt yourself on this, Matt. It keys into the type of Master you’ve always been.” He tapped his temple. “Up here. When you tune in to what she needs, you’ll just open that door inside yourself, and it will be there.”

“So your advice is not to prep at all?”

“Not for that end of it. Get the staff on board with all the trappings, give them some leeway so you have the spontaneity angles, the unexpected variables that you relish when we’re tackling a new project. Beyond that, don’t even think about it until the time comes. And when it does, think about her, how you feel about her, deep down. It’s in you, Matt. The fantasy wouldn’t have persisted so strongly for her if she didn’t see elements of it in you every day. It was all there, out front, the night you made her yours. It all comes back to that.”

A smile touched Jon’s lips. “If you’re going to meditate on anything, meditate on that. No ‘ohms’ required.”

* * *

He had thought about it. As dramatic as it might sound, he had claimed her like a conqueror.

He’d do it here.

Giving himself another minute to figure out what to do about the naked women at his feet, Matt swept his gaze over the interior of the large tent, with its dark red curtained walls. Shields and swords were propped against a wooden frame, armor threaded onto the arms of it. A big table held a weathered map, pieces placed upon it the way they would be for a conqueror contemplating his army’s strategy.

Yet there were things in the tent that a battle commander wouldn’t have—unless he was ensuring the comfort of his lady and maximizing the best ways to enjoy her. The large, luxurious bed, draped in gold velvet and piled with pillows, was a nod to that.

Bidding the women to remain kneeling with a short gesture, Matt moved to the entrance of the pavilion tent. Two of his “soldiers,” muscular men clad in leather and armor, stood silently at either side of the entrance. They didn’t address him, but straightened their already military perfect stance.

He was looking out at the incomparably romantic view of the Caribbean, only thirty feet away at high tide. Moonlight formed a lightning track straight down to the shoreline, but it felt like it stopped in the center of his heart.

God, he loved her so. Maybe that was the hardest part of “role play” to him—having to act for even a minute like she wasn’t his reason for breathing.

And yet…would a conquering warlord be nervous about the queen being brought to his bed? A queen whose castle he’d just conquered, whose father had been willing to sell her to save that castle. His fortification of stone was worth more to him than his daughter’s virtue…or her heart.

“The best fantasy lies upon a foundation of truth.” Jon had also said that, and he was right. Truth was the key to getting into this. Matt turned and went back into the tent, to the women. “Prepare my bath,” he ordered them.

As they rose, he had to give credit where credit was due. Their training made every movement a sexual invitation. Hellfire.

Perhaps Savannah had known his innate pragmatism would come back to hinder him at the final pressure point. His wife loved him enough to help him get into character, in a way he was pretty damn sure no other wife would. Savannah trusted him.

He was going to spank her irresistible bottom for teasing him like this. His lips quirked. He trusted her, too, but if a pair of straight, handsome men were preparing her the way these two women were offering to do for him, there’d be two dead males on this island.

Hypocritical or not, there it was. But he wasn’t worried about that. There’d been a lot of hard-limit, soft-limit stuff he’d had to submit to The Resort staff about this fantasy, prior to arriving. Allowing another man to touch his wife sexually was in the titanium steel category of hard-limit.

Unless it was one of his four-man executive team, and they were different. Lucas, Peter, Jon and Ben were his brothers, not by blood, but by everything that mattered. When a woman was chosen by one of them to be his forever, she was also all of theirs, in certain ways.

As Savannah had realized that fateful night, when all four of them had helped Matt achieve his goal to claim her.

The women had tied back the tent flaps near a clawfoot tub. Other slaves arrived and started pouring hot water into it for his bath. The redhead brought him ale as he settled onto a couch to watch the preparations. He stretched a long arm along the back, his legs in a casual sprawl before him. Tipping his head back, he let himself get lost in the memory of Savannah’s voice as she’d first told him her fantasy. The sensual tags and softening purr, as the vision aroused her.

He could have involved the others in this fantasy. Lucas and Cass were here, as well as Dana and Peter. Jon and Rachel had been invited, but Jon had felt Rachel wasn’t quite ready emotionally for this much immersion. While a bone-deep submissive, Rachel had been badly damaged by her first husband, so Jon was taking slow steps with her, making sure her decisions as a submissive were based on the right feelings.

Ben had decided to tag along, but hadn’t imposed on the pleasures of the three couples, instead availing himself of as many submissives as could handle him. Which, knowing the lawyer’s appetites, meant The Resort had probably had to import a few more.

Matt could easily see Ben, Peter and Lucas as captains in his army. However, using the island staff, much more skilled in the theatrics involving role play, was the better plan. Not because his men couldn’t pull it off, but because having his closest friends as part of it would have made him absurdly self-conscious. It was far easier to have strangers handle the support roles. Plus, this way, his men and their wives could enjoy their last night in the way they wished.

Control was a funny thing. When he fell in love with Savannah, he’d learned even his formidable control had its limits. The night he’d made her his, he might not have been nervous, but he’d been strung taut as a wire, because the stakes were so high. Even the most controlling Master knew love was the best kind of surrender. If he had any sense at all.

The bath was ready, and the redhead approached, a slight smile on her full mouth. “May I help you disrobe, my lord?”

* * *

They gave him the most thorough bath of his life, followed by an equally intense massage, rubbing oil into his skin. At one point the golden-haired one knelt before him, her eyes trained on his erect cock—no help for it, since he wasn’t dead—her moist lips parted. God save him.

“May I have the honor of bringing you release, my lord?”

He was going to put his hands around Savannah’s throat and strangle her. Or demand a medal for his self-restraint. Or both. He declined the slave’s offer, as well as their help dressing. His skin felt heated and tight, and though the two women were beautiful, and their hands were what any man would want upon him, he desired the touch of only one woman. His muscles might be loose and relaxed, but he was aroused and impatient for his wife.

He donned a linen shirt and a pair of laced fly trousers, apparently appropriate casual attire for a warlord. He decided to hold off on the boots for now, but as he put on each piece of clothing and threaded the belt into the loops of the pants, he found himself moving into those deeper levels Jon had described. Not away from his reality, but onto a whole different plain of it.

The belt was heavy and thick, capable of bearing a sword or dagger. Or leaving red marks on pale globes of flesh. An interesting thought. His defiant queen over his lap, her tempting ass quivering as he held her down…

Torchlight flickered outside the tent opening, drawing his attention back to the guards. They were men who’d fought with him, who watched his back in battle. As he watched theirs. They gave him loyalty, not only because he took them to victory, but because he fought with them.

He was a warlord who’d won the right to take the daughter of a king as the spoils of war. But when he truly took her, she’d be willing.

He had no interest in causing her fear or harm. He recalled how she’d sat her horse next to her father, a father who treated her as no more than a bargaining chip. He’d offered her to Matt as a bride, only to keep him away from the gate. Coward.

Matt’s scoffing response to the pathetic monarch was that he would be given nothing. He would take the castle and then take the daughter.

Because she deserved better. Her cool, remote gaze had never wavered, her body still as a statue. Yet he’d noted the subtle swallow that moved her throat when her father spoke his callous words. Her hands had tightened on the reins while her back, jaw and chin never yielded. She met Matt’s stare in a way her father had been unable to do.

“You may be able to force yourself on my body,” that stare said. “But a thousand bloody battles will not win you what lies beneath the flesh.”

He knew treasure when he saw it.

He lazed back against the couch cushions once more, one knee drawn up to brace his arm as he sipped his refreshed ale. He heard other guards coming and a faint smile touched his lips. He was being fantastical if he thought he could smell her scent from here. But he could, couldn’t he?

He picked a scarf up off the cushions. He’d brought it with him tonight, a scrap of sheer cloth Savannah had worn tied loosely around her throat and crisscrossed over her breasts at lunch, but as he lifted the scarf to his nose, inhaling, he imagined it had come into his keeping another way. When the now de facto queen had been brought before him after the battle, she’d been wearing it. He’d used the ends to pull her close to him, tightening it around her throat while inhaling her scent. She’d wrinkled her nose at his battle stench, a deliberate snub, while her eyes went a million miles away.

He’d released her, but as the guards reached for her arms to secure her, he lifted a hand, stilling them.

“Summon two female slaves,” he ordered. “You’ll guard her as they prepare her at the women’s tent, but you remain outside. No man but I will touch her, or look upon her bare flesh. Am I understood?”

Her gaze had slid to his as they’d responded with a crisp and immediate, “Yes, my lord.”

Then she’d been taken away.

She hadn’t been captured as a ransom hostage or marriage prospect. No. She would be prepared and delivered to him as a pleasure slave, to do with as he desired. It underscored his dominion over a king who’d been willing to sell her under the guise of marriage. Even beyond the grave, he’d leave the man no pretense that he wasn’t a coward.

Now he felt a twist of regret at the way he’d set those terms in front of her. He was a conqueror who spared no mercy toward his enemies on the battlefield, but it was her father who was his enemy, along with his soldiers and warlords. But this woman was not. He wondered if she was afraid beneath that cool exterior, and realized he didn’t like that thought.

They were approaching. He forced himself to remain in his casual pose on the couch, quelling the desire to turn and watch her come through the tent opening. Instead, as the guards and female slaves entered with her, he took another swallow of his ale and studied the map which laid out his next attack plan.

In his peripheral vision, he did note she was at the center of the women’s protective circle, to ensure there would be no incidental brush of contact from one of the men.

“Guards, leave us,” he said. As the guards filed out, leaving only the women around the queen, he appeared to keep his attention on his battle plans an additional, unbearably long ten seconds. In reality, he closed his eyes, drew a deeper breath. Yes, he could smell her. He’d know her anywhere.

Setting his goblet on the side table, he leaned back and gestured, so the women would bring her before him. He would look at his prize now. Assess his conquest.

When they complied, and his eyes fell upon her, his brain simply stopped.

She wore a dress that was a waterfall of slim golden chains, fixed to a gold collar like a cuff around her neck. Some of the chains were connected under her arms to give the “dress” a front and back, but there was nothing under that curtain of glittering strands. As the women made her turn to show him all sides, the chains split at the tips of her breasts, showed him glimpses of thigh, hip and sex. When she was brought to a halt, the chains settled, a shimmer of color and flesh.

Her hair was down, a flow of silken gold, a lighter color than the jewelry.

It was no wonder he’d had to lay siege upon, invade and take a whole castle to obtain her. In no universe could he look at the vision before him and think he would have won her with anything less than a full siege, an inarguable show of strength.

He was ready for battle. A different, much more pleasurable kind of battle.

He’d left most of her garb to the discretion of the slave girls, having no desire to interfere with their excitement about dressing their lord’s newest possession. There was only one item he’d specifically mandated, and seeing her wearing it made his heart hammer blood into his cock.

She wore a falcon’s hood. Or rather, a head mask designed like a falcon’s hood, the supple material shaped over her delicate nose like a beak, the crown of the mask embellished with a plume of feathers. Jesses were wound around her wrists, the tiny bells making noise as she moved. Though she could see nothing, because the eye flaps of the hood were securely closed, the lower part of the mask was like an open skirt of more looped gold chains, separating at the bridge of her nose and accentuating the shape of her jaw, the fullness of her lips.

Her fingers in the jesses were tight, though her shoulders were back, just as they’d been when she sat on the horse. The posture only directed his gaze to her exposed nipples, taut from either nerves or the friction of the tiny chains moving against them.

He wanted to act like the barbarian she thought he was, toss her down and suckle those peaks, drive into her cunt and take her.

Instead, he held his position and spoke. “Leave her. You did well.”

The women dispersed, whispering and giggling. He noticed she showed no reaction, aloof. They’d been instructed not to speak to her, but he was sure she hadn’t stooped to begging them for answers to her questions. She was the real thing. A true royal, and she would adhere to every aspect of that to drive home what she considered him.

A dirty, filthy barbarian.

His lips curved in a wicked grin. She was about to get dirty. And he was going to make sure she liked it.

He rose, circling her, letting his fingertips glide along her skin, capture and stroke the golden chains. He tugged on them, enough to put pressure against her slender throat from the attached collar. She quivered under his touch.

“It’s difficult to conceal attraction, isn’t it? My slave.”

She stiffened. “Revulsion can make the skin shudder as much as attraction.”

“Is that so?” As he completed the circle around her, he passed his hands through the waterfall of chains so his palm brushed the curve of a buttock, her hip. He dropped his touch, easing his fingers between her legs. But before he could tease the truth from the treasure he sought, she shifted.

She stomped her wooden-soled slipper on his insole, sending a bolt of pain through his foot. At his curse, she jerked away.

Fuck, he really should have remembered that move. At least she hadn’t been wearing spike heels this time.

Despite the mask blocking her sight, she made a dash for the open flap of the tent. He lunged after her and caught her around the waist. She’d given no thought to the risk of hurting herself from such an attempt. Brave, but foolish.

“Not wise, slave. My guards would stop you.”

“How?” she retorted hotly. “You forbade any of them to touch me.”

He grinned. Sharp-minded and using his own words against him. She shoved at him, but he ducked under the move, and folded her over his shoulder, straightening and lifting her off her feet. She spat several curses at him, as he enjoyed spreading his hand over her quivering buttock. He dug his fingers into soft flesh revealed by the convenient parting of the golden strands of chain. She might have great strength of spirit, but she was no match for him physically.

Striding to the center of the tent, he put her down before the support post there. When she attempted to yank away from him, he grasped her wrists and hooked them to one of the chains hanging from the post. The dangling jesses were the long ends of straps buckled around her wrists, and the cuff part of the straps had D-rings that allowed for the quick attachment. The chain had some slack, but not enough to let her go more than several feet from the sturdy pole. Even with the mask blocking her sight, she could likely figure out how to unhook the chain, but he wasn’t going to give her enough time and space to work that out.

“That’s one punishment earned,” he said. “You should save your strength. I’ve survived enemies gutting me with poisoned spears.”

“Give me the same weapon and opportunity,” she said, baring her teeth in a saccharine smile. “I’ll succeed where they failed.”

He believed it. The words were backed by a steel core. Thanks to her bastard father’s influence, he suspected over time that steel had become too inflexible, and it had imprisoned her. But now, freed of the negative effects of it, she would use the ferocity in other ways. She was a warrior. He wanted to give her the chance to prove it.

Gripping her nape with a firm hand, he returned his other hand to her thighs again. She made a quiet noise of anger and protest, but knowing she couldn’t escape, this time she chose to go rigid as a board. He rubbed his fingers against her smooth labia and eased his fingers between them. She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, and the golden waterfall rippled from her reaction.

“You are despicable,” she said tightly.

“You, my slave, are wet.” He withdrew his touch from her body but continued to hold the back of her neck as he brought his fingers to his mouth. “And your honey is sweet.”

“It’s the oil the slaves put inside me to ease your passage.” Her voice dripped with scorn. “They wished to look after my comfort. I told them I doubted you were of a size for it to be necessary.”

“I will have them beaten for their interference.” He tasted the light honey flavoring of the lubricant, but he also tasted her. However, he stepped away to pick up a cloth and placed it in one of her bound hands, tightening his grip over hers when she would have dropped it. He hardened his tone. “Get rid of it. The only honey between your legs will be what my touch creates.”

The mutinous set to her mouth was enhanced by the mask. It made him want to force her to her knees and put her lips to other uses. Grasping her chin, he dipped his head close enough to speak against her ear. The hood was thin enough to ensure her hearing wasn’t obstructed. “Do it. Or I’ll use my mouth to remove every drop of their honeyed oils. When I’m done with you, you’ll be dripping with your own, unable to deny it. You’ll also be moaning from my kindness to your tender flesh.”

She turned her head, quick as a snake, her teeth snapping. He drew back in time to save himself from being bitten, but that was a distraction. The slack in the chains that would allow her to reach between her legs with the cloth allowed her another attack angle. She brought her hands in front of her, clasped them together, and swung the doubled fist into his body.

He expected she’d been aiming for his balls, but her lack of sight hindered her. Instead, she hit his abdomen with admirable force. His captive followed that up with another swing. She was doing a blitz attack, moving forward until she ran out of chain.

That was easy enough to counter. He simply stepped out of range. When she realized it, she stopped, though her fists remained clenched, her mouth a hard line.

“That just drove your number of punishments up past where I can count,” he noted.

“I’m surprised you can count at all.”

“That would be unfortunate for you, because then I’ll just keep going until my arm tires.”

She spat more curses at him. Foul words he wouldn’t tolerate from her. Warrior she might be, but she wouldn’t talk like a common soldier.

He pinned her to the pole, his fingers wrapping around her slim throat. Her breath suddenly shortened as he leaned in and let her hear menace in his low voice.

“There’s nothing you can do to hurt me, my lady, that will cause me to hurt you back the same way. I won’t injure you or take your life. What I’m going to do is something you’ll think is far worse. At first. I’m going to make you cry out with pleasure against your will, over and over, so all my men will know your body is mine to command.”

Her lips curled in a sneer, as if she were about to retort, but he tightened his grip on her throat and captured a sound there he knew was erotic response. She was proud, an incomparable prize, but she desired surrender. Most submissives couldn’t help but react strongly to their Master’s hand collaring their throat, and this queen was no exception, no matter how she tried to hide it. He lowered his voice even further, a whisper against her fair cheek.

“Before this night is done, you will willingly give me both a slave’s obedience and a queen’s heart. The type of torments you’ll experience at my hands are the kind that will have you begging. For the mercy of my touch, for my cock to fill your emptiness. For me never to leave your presence, because you will not feel complete except when I am in your sight.”

She’d stilled, and he touched her lips with his thumb. “You push me, and you’ll find out how ruthless I can be. You’ll stay in that falcon hood for days, taking food and drink from my hand, until all you know is the care of your Master and no will of your own that doesn’t obey mine. If you think I can’t do it, that I can’t find the way to your soul, you should think again. When I’m done with you tonight, you’ll need me to carry you, for your legs will no longer support you the way my arms can.”

Her skin had flushed, her lips parting. He traced her temple with his lips and moved down to her neck. When he bit, he heard her draw in a breath, make a little moan. Fuck, she’d made him hard as a rock, how still she’d become. He’d gotten through. He was a Master. He wouldn’t be played with, and she was his. His only.

He skimmed his fingertips down her back, over her buttocks to her lower back, pushing the curtain of chains out of his way. Resting his thumb in that dip just above the crease, he spread out his fingers to cover, stroke.

“Your father gave you to me, thinking it would save his precious kingdom,” he muttered. “If you were mine, they would have had to tear down my castle, brick by brick, overthrow my empire, kill me. Go to the afterlife and destroy my soul, before they could get to you. Even then, I would make whatever deal with the devil was necessary to protect you from harm. And to keep you as my own.”

“So I would be in hell with you,” she said sullenly. She’d rallied. His lips curved.

“It would be warm there. But you can find warmth here, in my arms.”

“Sugared words from a man wanting to rut between a woman’s thighs.” She tossed her head, the feathers on the mask fluttering. “As meaningless and quickly gone as his seed spilled upon them.”

“I’ll spill that seed in you, my love, and fill you with my child. Our child.”

She quivered, a reaction he felt low in his gut. They’d been trying. If they conceived here, Matt couldn’t imagine a better outcome to their fantasy. He wanted her to bear his child. He wanted to cherish and raise the life they created together.

Matt bent, sweeping her hair to the side to bare her neck, fingering the heavy collar. “This is beautiful, but you’re mine now. I want to adorn you in other jewels.”

Beneath the collar was a slightly thicker chain, the true support for her glittering dress. When he released it, leaving the wide gold collar in place, the waterfall of strands slid down her body, over her breasts, out from under her arms, to land in a pool around her feet. The sound was like a shower of coins.

He took two steps back, to better appreciate the view. And to reach for and pull on his polished calf-length black boots, a prudent defense against any other attacks from her agile feet.

As he did that, his gaze moved down her body. Proud, firm breasts, the pink nipples drawn taut. Flat abdomen, gently swelling hips. As he’d already felt, her sex was smooth, the neat folds reminding him of a furled flower he wanted to probe, tease. She was almost a foot shorter than him, and a blessed amount of her height was her long legs.

While he expected his captive was well aware she had a face and figure men would find attractive, her father would have taught her it was a tool. She was heartbreakingly unaware of her sexual appeal. Or how, combined with her many other amazing traits, she was a treasure a man would want to love for his whole life.

Moving back to her, he unhooked the chain from her wrist jesses and turned his hand palm up before her. “Put your hand in mine, in front of you. Let’s get that punishment out of the way first.”

When her lips tightened, he injected warning in his tone. “Easy or hard. Up to you.”

She seemed to consider that. Setting her chin, she reached out. Yet as he closed his hand over hers, she threw her weight back against his and tried her best to land a groin kick with one of those wooden-slippered feet.

He turned fast enough to deflect it, though he could hope Savannah hadn’t intended an exact hit. But she didn’t like to lose; he knew that.

That made two of them. Snapping to his full height, he shifted his grip to her wrist and spun her toward the pole, pinning her other arm behind her back.

“You bastard, you’re not going to—”

He put his body up against hers, making sure his intention was solidly pushed against the seam of her bare buttocks. She drew in a breath. “Yes, that’s all for you, my lady. You’ll be taking every inch of it before the night ends, in whatever orifice I choose. Because I am going to do whatever I want. You are mine.”

She snarled at him, and he turned her back around, just as quickly. He pressed her between him and the post, so that she couldn’t use her knees again. Taking her wrists, he twisted the jesses together to bind her hands before her. Their bodies were so close together, her knuckles pressed against his groin. Realizing it, she twisted her hand around, trying to grab at or claw his more vulnerable parts. In response, he stepped back and hauled on the jesses, making her stumble forward, toward him. He kept moving, using the same repeat tactic to bring her toward the couch. All while his hand was a breath away from her body to steady her. He kept her off balance while not letting her fall.

Not until they were at the couch. Then he sat down and yanked once more, this time putting her down over his knees. Her snarl was interrupted by a gasp. He pushed her down even further, her face toward the floor, her gorgeous ass centered over his lap. The tangled jesses dragged the ground and he stepped on them to hold her in that position.

“What are you…” She bucked, looking gloriously angry. She was a sight for a conqueror to salivate over, her pale buttocks writhing and quivering, her breasts rubbing against the side of his leg, her lovely legs struggling for purchase. He caught one ankle and pulled off the shoe, tossed it, then did it for the other kicking foot. No more danger to him from those.

Whap! The first blow he landed was a solid smack that left a crimson hand print on milk-white skin. She squealed indignantly and tried to bite his calf. Since it was now covered by his boot, he was protected. He proceeded to administer a very thorough and satisfying spanking. He knew the stinging sensation was intensifying when her legs were shifting restlessly, and she was muffling her aroused cries by latching onto his booted calf again, for a different reason this time, an anchor point. When the pain level increased, testing her threshold, the cries began to be broken by little yelping notes.

As her soft flesh received his punishment, he could see her arousal marking her thighs, as clear as his handprints on her ass.

“I heard you curse me again when I started this, my lady,” he said, with a mildness he didn’t feel. “Still being far too discourteous. I think in addition to punishment, you need a deterrent against future bad behavior.”

Crudity was a defense. A way to push him away from her, or pretend what was happening inside her wasn’t. And he’d never abide that.

Holding her down with one hand, he reached between them and freed the heavy belt. She went still again. Doubling over the strap, he trailed it along her flesh. Gooseflesh followed the movement.

“No,” she whispered. But he knew what lay behind that no, and it wasn’t a desire for him to stop.

“I told you I’ll do what I want. Until you know who your Master is.”

When he brought the belt down on her ass, he knew the impact sent an arrow of pain slicing through her arousal. Yet her strangled cry held longing, need…and a desire for more.

He gave her ten strikes, turning her already reddened buttocks crimson. Her struggles were balanced by the clawing hold of her fingers, her mound pressed hard against his legs, telling him she was absorbing the desire throbbing there. It was a temptation he couldn’t resist.

Setting aside the belt, he gripped her ass hard, making her stiffen and hiss from the discomfort. He slipped two fingers inside her cunt.

“You’re slippery as that oil now. You’ve made me hard, slave queen, with your squirming. Behave, or you’ll be fucked even sooner than you dread it happening.”

“No worse than I dread being in your presence now,” she managed. A whimper caught in her throat as he pushed those fingers in deeper. Her voice was shaky, a reaction to the force of the punishment, but still impressively derisive. “You may be able to do whatever you want to my body. But that’s all you’re getting.”

“Think you can hide from me, somewhere deep inside? Inside that fortress you’ve built for yourself, far stronger than the walls your father built?”

Hearing the words said out loud gave Matt pause. Despite his desire to keep this about the fantasy he wanted to give her, such a statement resurrected a shadow impossible to ignore. The one that lent too much truth to the image of a queen sitting on her horse next to her father, her expression fixed as her sire offered to hand her over to a brutal barbarian to save his own ass.

Savannah turned her head. Even with the falcon mask hiding her eyes, he could tell she’d sensed his mood shift.

These were emotions he’d dealt with, but which still had the ability to resurrect themselves with the right triggers. But Matt wouldn’t let himself be used by his own head. He’d use those emotions the right way. For her.

His fingers still penetrating her silken heat, he leaned over her, bringing his mouth to her neck, her shoulder.

“I won’t harm that fortress,” he murmured. “Not a single brick. I will build one all the way around it, so you can open the doors and windows, come out and still be safe. Until you know for certain you don’t need your walls anymore.”

Her lips parted. He thought she might have whispered his name, the way she said it when her heart spoke to his. Matthew.

She felt that overlap, too, between past, present, and this. But he wanted her to have the best of all of it, so he changed his tone, bringing her back into the fantasy. “I’ve heard you cry out from my belt, slave queen. Now I’ll hear you cry out in pleasure.”

“Never.” The cold scorn in her voice brought a smile back to his heart.

“You will deny me nothing.” He stroked his thumb over her clit as he began to move his two fingers in a slow, thrusting rhythm, slipping another finger in to add to the sensation. His other hand, spread out over her back, moved up between her shoulder blades and then to her nape, curving over it and holding her down at that point, a pressure that added to the reminder that she was overpowered. Dominated.

When other sensations started to rise within her, she started to struggle again, resist the arousal. He tightened his grip. As he kept fondling her, she found and clutched his booted foot, still pressed down on the tether to her wrist cuffs. He kept fucking her with his fingers, teasing her clit with feather-light brushes of his thumb. A moan escaped her.

“Your cunt is clenching around my fingers, my lady. It knows what it wants. What do you want? Tell me you want me to make you come. Call me Master.”

“I…would…rather…die.”

Despite the words, she was so aroused, she needed little else to bring her to the brink of orgasm. The desperate note to her defiance revealed it.

“I’ll settle for hearing you scream. Be sure and call me a bastard again as you go over, my lady. If you dare.”

She didn’t, though he expected it was because she didn’t have the time or focus left to test him. Her voice broke over cries that grew in volume, his thrusts and the rubbing pressure on her clit becoming even more aggressive.

As she teetered on that edge, he shifted his hand from her neck, sliding his touch beneath her hips to lift her off his lap, enough that he could dip his head and sink his teeth into the globe of her enticing buttock. He didn’t miss a single stroke with his fingers from the adjustment.

He tightened his jaw, increasing the clamp, and she broke. Her cries transformed into that scream he craved and demanded. Her pussy rippled over his fingers and gushed further cream as the climax gripped her. He held her firmly while she writhed and bucked, her hands all the way around his ankle and calf, a counterpoint to his grip around her hips and between her legs.

As much as he loved to come inside his wife, he thought he might love this even more, listening to her lost to a mindless pleasure she couldn’t control. She didn’t need to do so. She could give herself to it fully, not fight it, because she knew she was safe. She could trust him, trust being under his control.

Inside the fortress his love built around her.

* * *

“You’re still shaking, my love. That tells me you gave me more than your body, for your climax is done.”

She said nothing, but he didn’t expect her to do so. After a climax that intense, she was a quiet submissive. He didn’t need to talk; just hold her.

He took his boot off the tether and turned her in his arms, the small bells on the wrist jesses making a pleasing muted chime. She latched onto the front of his shirt, pushing against it with the heels of her hands. She wasn’t trying to push him away. She was pushing upward, moving the fabric, an unspoken request. He took it off, and she put her palms flat on his chest, the side of her face against his heart.

The brown-feathered, tufted plume of the mask quivered, teasing his jaw. He felt the tiny bite of the decorative chains, scalloped along the bottom edge of the hood. Their drape over her cheek was interfering with what she wanted as she pressed that part of her to his heated flesh. But he would deny her wishes until he was certain he’d won her complete submission. A slave’s obedience and a queen’s heart. A falcon wasn’t freed until it was certain that she’d return to her Master’s hand.

Though he wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her, he would care for her first.

“My falcon needs to eat and drink.” He touched the bell that would bring a slave girl. As she appeared at the opening to the tent, he sheltered Savannah in his arms. Though she couldn’t see, he didn’t want her to feel like anyone she didn’t know was staring at her, his proud queen.

“Food and drink,” he said. The woman bobbed her head and disappeared.

He rose, carrying his captive to the bed, and eased her onto the pillows. She was reviving, so he’d made a good call, leaving the hood upon her. As he put her on the bed, she tried to wriggle away from him, shrugging off his assistance in moving her.

“I obviously haven’t tired my slave out enough,” he observed coolly. “You’ll be put on a perch, to keep you from trying to leave the bed without my permission.”

There was a trunk at the end of the bed, and he left her on the mattress to go to it, keeping a sharp eye on her as he opened the chest and pulled out what he wanted.

When he closed his hand around her ankle, she tried to pull away, to kick, but he was putting up with none of that. He saw her lips part, a startled reaction at how quickly he overpowered her. Beneath the hood, he imagined her eyes might have widened, her pupils darkening.

“I’m bigger, my lady. In many ways. Save yourself the effort.”

Her lip curled in a new sneer, and she chose a different tactic. Her demeanor became haughty, her limbs rigid, as he positioned the spreader bar between her ankles and strapped the cuffs on either end of the bar around them. The bar was telescoping, so he slid it out another six inches and locked it there. He noted how the tip of her tongue touched her lips in anxious and intrigued reaction as he forced her legs open even wider.

Returning to the bed, he put his knee on it so he could curve his arms under her and lift her body into a more upright position against the pillows. He untangled the jesses so her wrists were free of one another. Then he bent her upper body toward her knees with a hand on her nape, a non-verbal command to stay folded forward that way.

But when he slid his hands down her arms and began to pull them behind her, she stiffened and tried to yank away. It didn’t alter his grip in the slightest, and he brought them behind her with a little more insistence, a reproving jerk.

“Are you looking for another beating, my lady?”

“Typical.” She sniffed. “A brute seeks capitulation with force and violence.”

“I see.” He released her wrists, putting his hands on her shoulders as he bent over her, spoke against her hair and the thin substance of the hood in a husky voice. “Should I do it like one of your pretty, fawning courtiers? Please put your arms behind you, my lady. I’m going to bind your wrists there.”

“You said you were going to give me food.”

“I am going to feed you. From my fingertips, same as I would my beloved falcon, to teach her who her Master is, who she can expect to care for her.”

“I’m not a child, incapable of feeding myself,” she said indignantly.

“You are most definitely not a child,” he observed, his eyes coursing down her back to her buttocks, pressed into the mattress. Her breasts hung full and tempting in her forward position. “Obey me and put your hands behind your back. Or you’ll earn another punishment. A worse one.”

Her mouth tightened mutinously. “Worse than taking my body against my will? I’m unimpressed. And owe you no obedience.”

“I would rethink that.” His tone laden with stern warning, he tightened his hands on her shoulders, bringing her up straight. Putting a firm hand to her chin, he brushed her lips, her jaw, with his thumb. “I have a device, a metal ring, that I’ll put inside your mouth. It will open your lips, stretch them wide, and keep me from the danger of your teeth. I’ll put you on your knees like a slave in truth and make you service my cock that way. Last time. Obey me. Give me your arms.”

Her jaw had tightened to the point of cracking. He wondered if she was going to test him that far, but then she tossed her head, a whatever, fuck you gesture that had him biting back a smile as she put her arms behind her back.

He ran his hands down her arms, indulging a squeeze over her wrists before he clipped the wrist cuffs to one another, wrapping the dangling jesses around them, under and over, to reinforce the binding.

He eased her back to the pillows, ensuring they supported her upper body and provided a yielding cushion for her cuffed wrists, so she wasn’t uncomfortable lying on them.

Rising from the bed, he stood at the end, studying his queen. With her legs spread wide on her “perch,” he had a perfect view of her still glistening pussy, the damp folds. Her arm bindings had the intended effect, lifting her breasts high before his appreciative gaze.

He returned to her side, stretching out on his hip next to her. As he stroked her breasts, she bit her lip again, her breath shortening in an absorbing way.

“Nothing to fear from being touched, my lady. Not by me. Especially when I’m touching something this magnificent.” He curved his fingers over them. Stroked, kneaded.

When he finally closed his fingers on the nipple and squeezed lightly, she arched up as if he’d bitten her in passion.

She’d climaxed not long ago, but he was pleased to see she was well on the path toward that cliff edge once more. He was still at the top himself, his aching cock ready for whatever he was going to do, and not being subtle about its frustration with his pace. He ignored it. He wanted to hear her begging again before he took her.

“When my child takes hold in your womb,” he observed, savoring how valiantly she struggled to stay quiet when he thumbed her nipples, “your breasts will get even fuller and heavier. I’ll suckle them, keep them bound in nothing but the lightest silks as you move around my palace, your ripe body mine to view as you swell with my child.”

“What if I get cold?” she managed.

His answer was simple. No need to use many words when a blunt, irrefutable statement would do.

“I’ll warm you.”

The slave returned with the food and drink, quietly left it on the side table, and disappeared again. Picking up the glass of honeyed mead, Matt brought it to Savannah’s lips. “Drink, fierce queen. Keep up your strength against your captor. You might gain the advantage yet.”

“You assume I don’t already have it.” She sipped. If her hands were free, would she have put them around his to steady the cup? Maybe.

“You have to sleep sometime,” she said. “I’ll gut you with your own dagger and escape.”

“I look forward to that attempt. I’ll disarm you and retaliate by piercing you with a different kind of weapon, over and over, until you have no strength in your limbs to run.”

She set her lips to a thin line when he brought food to them, but he persisted, brushing it in a caress against her mouth until she relented.

He would never allow her to eat with her own hands again. Watching her mouth close over each morsel, sometimes over his fingers, as he gave her bits of bread, meat and cheese, spawned a wealth of different feelings. All good. The pleasure of having her take food from his hand was too intense to imagine denying himself the future indulgence.

But he was no fool. The way her tongue was occasionally brushing his skin was either unintentional, 0r his captive was trying to win his trust with deceptively innocent seduction tactics.

His cock had very strident opinions and desires about her, but it would never override his brain. When she at last shook her head, telling him she’d had enough, he tested his suspicion.

“You seem to be getting more relaxed with me, my lady.” Setting aside the plate, he slid his hand up her thigh. “Perhaps you’re more willing than you portray, your rebellion merely an act, meant to provoke me toward what we both want?”

Her backbone stiffened instantly, as he’d expected. “I am merely regaining strength. I’m immune to your touch, my lord, same as if I was covered in ice. Encased in it.”

“An interesting theory to test.” He brought a napkin to her lips. When he nearly got bitten for his trouble, he tsked.

“I don’t mind reddening your luscious backside again, my lady. Or introducing you to that ring gag I described.”

“I’m not afraid of your punishments.”

“No, I expect that’s not what you’re afraid of.”

The fears of a woman like her lay behind doors in her heart, rooms that held raw and vulnerable needs. Those needs had always been locked in the dark. A woman who shrank from nothing else could be paralyzed by the lights of love and trust. By the thought of someone who would care for her, not out of obligation, but because it was the most important damn thing he’d ever done or wanted in his entire life.

Get out of your head and into hers instead. “Let’s test this frosty theory of yours.”

Thank God they weren’t actually doing this in a tent centuries ago. It would have been devoid of amenities like a full ice bucket, discreetly placed on the side table. Propping it between two pillows within easy reach, Matt picked up one of the heaped, frosted chips. He glided it over the top of Savannah’s breast, to her nipple. He relished her writhing, the little gasp at the ice’s first contact, before he took it to her navel, and lower. “Your skin heats so much at my touch, it’s leaving a trail of glittering drops from your magnificent breasts to your gorgeous cunt.”

She shuddered as he let the ice graze over her upper thighs. He bent to breathe on her labia, brush his lips over her clit. His hands clamped over her thighs as she made a half-hearted attempt to struggle, mostly thwarted by the spreader bar. When he glanced up her body, he lingered on the slope of her abdomen, the rise of her breasts, the nipples tightened to tempting points. The quiver of her chin and arch of her throat with the gold collar still clasped around it.

“No chance of any ice surviving on your flesh, my love. There’s a furnace here, wet heat just throbbing.” He slipped the ice inside her and put his mouth over her sex fully, thrusting his tongue inside to play around the cube and over her silken walls.

She cried out, rocking her upper body, bowing up even further than having her wrists behind her caused. Her thighs trembled, unable to close, thanks to the spreader bar. Even with that, he held her thighs down, making the sensation build and become so intense she was fighting his hold. She wasn’t climaxing, but she was crying out as if she was. And her incoherent pleas told him he couldn’t deny himself another moment.

He rose and unlaced the trousers, freeing his cock. Because of his size, the relief was equal to barbed wire being unwrapped from his ready flesh. He wouldn’t be surprised if the lacings had left a crisscross impression up his length.

Gripping the spreader bar, he lifted her legs up straight, and then guided it over his head, down, so the bar crossed his shoulder blades, her heels resting to the outside of them.

He put his hands to her hips and pressed his cock to her opening which, as he suspected, was blissfully wet again.

“Tell me you want me. That I’m your Master and you’ll obey my will, now and always.”

She shook her head, so fiercely her upper body rocked, her breasts quivering. He wet his fingers in his mouth and dropped them lower, fingering the opening to her backside, caressing the rim. Her hips bucked, brushing her sex against his cock, and she jerked in reaction.

“I will fight you…every time,” she said breathlessly. “Until you give in and agree…that you’re my slave.”

He dropped to brace himself on one hand next to her shoulder, and brushed his lips over her mouth. “If you won’t beg me now, slave queen, you will soon. My cock will bring pleas for mercy from your lips.”

He could tell she was about to use some of that crude soldier talk to respond, but then she thought better of it and bit it back. He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “You’re learning, my lady.”

He pushed his cock just inside her opening, and nearly groaned from the bliss of it. But he stopped there, despite the involuntary twitches of her hips, a strong signal she wanted him to impale her further, no matter her protests. Instead, he captured her breasts again and indulged himself, squeezing, stroking, pinching, making her writhe, which moved her upon him. He locked his hips, not letting either of them go deeper, though he had to grit his teeth against the raging desire to do so. He knew his goal here, and he wouldn’t lose sight of it.

He loved her gorgeous breasts, the weight of them, the way the nipples grew even tighter under his ministrations. He would do exactly what he said he would, if she became pregnant. He would worship them, along with every inch of her.

“Stop,” she said. “Stop.”

Her skin was flushed, her throat working.

“No,” he said ruthlessly. “Call me what I am. Or I pull away, put that ring gag on you and I’ll climax in your mouth. I’ll keep you so hot and aroused, you won’t be able to think beyond needing release.”

He’d lost his mind, throwing down that gauntlet. He was so close to shoving into her like a damn battering ram…

Then she confirmed he was an idiot, with her strangled yet admirably resolute response.

“I’ll never call you Master,” she gritted.

Shit. He couldn’t allow her the advantage of calling his bluff. “Ring gag it is,” he said, with deep regret.

“No,” she protested, but he’d already pulled out. His cock had words for him that would make his soldiers blush. Fucking hell.

“You sealed your own fate, my lady,” he said roughly, lifting the spreader bar from his shoulders. He backed away, holding onto the bar to lower her legs to the bed. When she thrashed, he put his weight against the bar to hold her legs down, keep her from kicking him in the face.

“All you had to do was call me Master, my lady. Simple enough.”

“Not simple,” she shot back, her voice strained. “A full surrender.”

“Exactly.”

One handed, he pulled the straps out from either corner of the mattress that were conveniently here for just this purpose. He tied her ankles down using them. She rocked, struggling. She wasn’t going anywhere, but she was the most erotic woman staying in one place he’d ever fucking seen, her body twisting and writhing, quivering and flushed.

He retrieved the necessary item from the trunk, and put his thumb to the corner of her mouth, prepared to open it and slide the ring in place, hopefully without her biting him.

“Matt.” She said it in a whisper, her body stilling.

He immediately stopped. They had no safe word between them. They’d never needed it. He’d always known from watching her, from her tone of voice, the look in her eyes, when things changed, or she needed something different. Like in this second.

He bent to her, brushing his nose over her lips, then brought his mouth to hers, telling her he was there, he was hers. A tremor went through her, and her lips moved against his, questing.

He cupped her head, lifting her enough to deepen the kiss. He left the ring gag on the mattress as he used the other hand to stroke her face, her neck and shoulder. No words. Just a deep, spiraling, tender kiss.

Were there any words for what she did to him? Whether waking up to see her face first thing in the morning, watching her frown over a memo in a meeting, or hearing her sigh her pleasure when he was inside her… Did she know how many times he looked at her and tried to figure out what the hell he’d done to deserve her?

They both knew that wishes and reality rarely matched as perfectly as this. It made one doubt one’s senses and created the need to confirm the intel, over and over again.

So he took a good, long time with that kiss. When he finally eased her back, she gave a little nod. She was all right. Which was good, because his own heart was tilting on its axis. She still didn’t understand how much it meant, allowing him to help her, ease her worries. He was fine with spending his life helping her realize it.

He returned to his role with that thought in the forefront. Not that it ever really left. “I think, to make the punishment worse, I’m going to take the hood off. Make you see yourself sucking my cock. Serving your Master.”

When she practically bared her teeth, he had his answer to that. He loosened the mask and slid it off, combing his fingers through her hair. It had left a couple creases on her soft skin, but nothing to offend her endearing female vanity. She had her lashes fanning her cheeks. Refusing to look at him.

“Good slave. Keeping your eyes lowered as you should, unless your Master orders otherwise.”

Blinds couldn’t snap up as fast as her blue eyes did. He bit back the grin at the sparks shooting at him. Because he decided to put the ring gag on her during that rebellious wave, he nearly lost a finger. He supposed he kept it only because Savannah was still hidden within that role, and she liked his fingers. But she was a damn good actress.

After he strapped the ring gag in place, he couldn’t deny it fucking turned him on ten different ways, to see her mouth held stretched open, ready for his cock. Because of his taunt, she was keeping her gaze on him, and that made the hard-on even worse. If she looked up at him when he had his cock deep in her mouth, he was going to lose control entirely.

He dropped a cushion on the floor and saw her expression become ice crystals as his captive queen realized what he was doing. He retrieved a serviceable collar, a simple strap, from the trunk supplies. As he straddled her, his knees pressed on either side of her rib cage, his steel cock brushing her lifted breasts. That caught his attention and he indulged himself. What good was being a conqueror if you couldn’t change course, take a moment to savor life’s most wonderful treasures?

Setting the strap aside, he gripped his cock, ran the damp tip over the valley between her breasts, then used both hands to grip those lush curves and fuck that channel, his pre-come providing the necessary lubrication for a few perfect strokes.

Her eyes were angry, but he could see the reluctant arousal of a submissive warring behind the façade. He could imagine the picture they made. Her arms bound behind her back, her legs spread with the bar, and her mouth occupied by the ring gag, while he was fucking her breasts. One more second and he was going to jet his release against her chest and throat, mark her upper body in a way that he liked entirely too much.

Choking himself back in the face of that image was perhaps the hardest thing he’d done in his life, but he knew how he wanted to come, and he wasn’t going to let his inner caveman take the upper hand. Plus, it was fun to watch how pissed off she was that he was using her this way. He was about to make his captive queen even more furious.

Backing off, he picked up the strap again and released the gold collar. “My slaves don’t wear gold,” he said shortly, as he leaned forward and ran the strap around her throat.

He felt the stillness that gripped her as he buckled it. Mine, he thought. Always. From the moment he’d seen her. Maybe even before then. Deep in his soul, she’d been waiting.

Unhooking the spreader bar, he scooped her up in his arms to guide her down on her knees on the cushion. He snapped a tether to the collar and wrapped it around his fist to keep her standing on her knees, and close enough to him she couldn’t refuse her punishment.

She tried, but he wrapped her hair over the tether around his knuckles and gripped the back of her head, holding her still as he pushed his cock through the ring gag and into her heated, wet mouth. She made an angry, whimpering protest that shot fire into his balls, and he pushed deeper, knowing she wanted the fight, the aggression.

She did fight him, trying hard to bite down in a way the ring gag wouldn’t permit, trying to wrest away, yanking at her bonds so she was writhing on her knees in a fascinating way. He thrust deep and hard a few times to make her behave and, when she wasn’t fighting as much, he slowed, forcing a leisurely pace on himself that made him groan internally.

Her tongue bucked beneath the gag, adding extra teases to his length. The saliva that gathered around the ring gave him lubrication to push deep. He did, to tell her who was in control, making his queen work for it.

The muscles in his thighs and ass tensed, his balls drew up tight.

“First time in your mouth, sweet queen,” he growled. “Next time in your incomparable ass, if you still won’t call me Master.”

He couldn’t help how much it fucking turned him on, knowing not only how helpless she was against his strength, but that her awareness of it was spurring her closer to orgasm. He could hear little noises in her throat, feel their vibration. As he pushed her down on him, her hardened nipples brushed his thighs, rubbed against him. When this was over, he was going to suck on them as he fingered her pussy. Then he’d lick the wetness off her thighs he was sure was marking them now.

Just imagining that was the final straw. He released, shooting hot fluid into her throat, feeling the tether straps pull over his knuckles as he gripped her thick hair even more tightly. He thrust deep, thanks to that ring holding her mouth open, and stroked against the back of her tongue with his movements.

“Fuck…” he groaned through the climax, the power of it a deep pleasure. But it couldn’t compare to how it would feel when he came in her pussy, those feminine muscles tightening on him.

As he finished, he dropped his touch to massage the neck and shoulder muscles he’d abused. She had her eyes closed, her breathing like a bird’s, quick rises and falls of her lovely chest. From the twitching of her body, he suspected she was powerfully aroused.

“There are few things in this world as perfect as seeing you on your knees, your mouth stretched over that gag as I make you take my cock.”

She looked up at him, struggling to maintain the haughty or pissed off demeanor of a captive queen, but having a tougher time doing it right now. He could tell from her scent, the tension of her body, how close she was getting again.

He withdrew slowly, and unbuckled the ring gag, drawing it from her mouth with one hand and dropping it to the side. He used that hand to stroke her lips, the corners of her mouth, easing that strain. She didn’t try to bite him this time. He could feel her raw need, and the desire of a few moments before came back in full force.

He unsnapped the tether and left it on the floor as he lifted her once more and put her on the bed, this time with her legs draped over the side. He knelt between them and saw he’d been right, that her tender inner thighs were marked with new signs of arousal. He was glad she wasn’t wearing the spreader bar, because he wanted it to be his hands alone opening her for him this time. Gripping her above the knees, he spread them even wider and put his mouth on one of those tracks. He licked his way up to her slick center, but deliberately passed over it to work his way down the arousal on the other upper thigh. A tiny moan escaped her throat, and a softly whispered word, bitten back.

“Did you call me Master, slave? Beautiful queen.” He sucked on her flesh, bit, and gave her pussy a chaste kiss that made her shudder and jerk. When he nosed her clit, she nearly came off the mattress. “Say it.”

“You’re…mistaken. I said…bastard.”

He smiled against her flesh and bit her labia, holding on with a tight clamp that had her mewling in surprised discomfort before he eased it and licked instead. Along…across…over… A teasing circle that had her gasping again. She tried to close her legs, but he held her open with his hands, and a warning.

“Keep them open, or I’ll put the spreader bar back on. And that’s the last time you curse around me without getting twice the strikes with the belt as before.”

He lifted his hands, daring her to defy him, his eyes meeting hers. She licked her lips nervously, and looked down again. Satisfied, he bent to kiss and lick her thighs, adding those teasing contacts to her cunt.

She trembled so hard the bed shook, and he saw her swallow repeatedly. He moved up to those lusciously tilted breasts, pressing his abdomen against her sex as he captured the soft mounds in his hands and bent to suckle.

She cried out this time, her legs thrashing as she rubbed herself against his stomach muscles, marking them with her scent.

“That’s my lady,” he murmured, lifting his head to stare at her desire-suffused face. Her gaze flicked to him then away, but he touched her cheek and dropped his hand to her throat, covering the collar there with the grip of his hand. Her gaze snapped back to him. Her lips were parted, eyes luminous with desire and need.

“Say it,” he ordered. Something surged up in him, an unexpected culmination of those years when he’d wanted her so badly but had to bide his time, wait for the right moment. His sudden spike of sharp need went back to the fear she’d spoken in their bedroom, about how everything they’d ever wanted had balanced on the head of a pin, the odds damn scary.

On that fateful night in his board room, a small, dark corner of his heart had known she might not choose to be his. If he’d failed to figure out the right combination of actions to convince her she could trust him, she would never have emerged from the fortress she’d built around herself.

“Say it,” he repeated. His voice reflected every ounce of the Dominant he was. It made the demand a requirement he wouldn’t allow her to refuse, no matter what role she was playing.

She stared at him. She picked up on his moods, the state of his heart, as well as he did hers. She knew where his mind was.

“Master.” She didn’t say it out loud, but she formed the word with her lips. He wasn’t completely hard again yet, but he was hard enough. He drove into her, and she made a soft shriek he savored with a conqueror’s pleasure…and a husband’s love. He thrust in once, twice, three times, and she started to come once more, a gift.

“Scream for me,” he demanded harshly, and she did, wailing out her climax as she thrashed beneath him, her breasts quivering, slender neck arched as he drove in harder. “Fuck…come, keep coming. Let me feel you, baby.”

She obeyed him in all of it, her body his to command. She convulsed beneath him, those cries wrenched from her throat by every wave of the climax that crashed through her. Greedy to keep her going as long as possible, Matt bent and captured a nipple in his mouth, sucking and biting as he plunged into her, again and again. He snaked an arm around her, gripped her ass with bruising fingers, holding her up so she was mounted on him even more deeply, and her screams increased in volume.

Never enough. It was never enough. He kept going after the height of the climax, taking her over smaller crests, but crests all the same, ones that drew softer cries from her, intense pleas that eventually were formless whispers. There were tears on her face, and he kissed those away, too.

“Mine,” he said. “You’re mine, my lady.”

She was still and silent, but her gaze stayed latched on his face. He kissed each eyelid, her nose, her mouth. He hooked his fingers in the strap, held it taut as he kissed her throat with thorough pleasure. Her head tilted back, the curve of her breast brushing his jaw. She always melted when he put his mouth to her throat, her head tipping just like that. If her hands had been free, they would have been gripping his shoulders, holding on in a way he treasured.

He was a conqueror; she a captive queen. He needed to remember that. Easing back to his knees, he slid his hands along her spread legs, though he paused long enough to run a thumb over her pussy, pleased with her tiny jerk of reaction from the sensitized nerves there.

“My queen deserves to wear jewels,” he said.

* * *

He gave them some time first, though. He removed all her bindings except the strap collar, with the warning that the restraints would be put back on if she misbehaved. From the tightening of her jaw, he couldn’t tell if she’d challenge him on that or not. He enjoyed restraining her, so he’d leave that decision up to her.

He laced his pants again before he brought her fully onto the bed, and turned her onto her stomach, putting a couple pillows under her hips. It had a dual purpose, one selfish and the other not-so-much. The selfish part was the pleasing view of her with her round ass in the air. The not-so-much was ensuring he wasn’t putting any undue stress on her lower back. He kissed his way down to that part of her, then continued over her buttocks, and made her part her legs once more, shoulder-width apart. The pillows made the resulting view of her pussy even better.

“You keep your legs apart when you’re naked,” he told her. “A message that your pussy is always available for your Master to take.”

She immediately tried to close her legs again and he chuckled, giving her ass a hard swat that made her yelp.

“Want that spreader bar again, woman? No escape opportunity if you don’t have the ability to run.”

The legs eased open, reluctantly. From the tight line of her lips, he could tell his using the bar on her had aroused her. He knew it sure as hell aroused him, watching her struggle between her defiance and the desires of the submissive beneath. The two elements could work together, though.

He smoothed a hand over her smarting ass. “It’s all right to admit it makes you wet, my lady. Giving up control, being overpowered, your arms bound and legs spread open by irresistible force. It’s difficult, being queen and not having anyone to trust. Not having anyone’s love for a shelter from the storm, all while so many others depend on you to rule and protect them.”

Her fingers curled into the covers. “Even conquerors need that,” she said.

“Of course they don’t. They’re invincible,” he said, and saw her lips curve in a smile. “But they can offer it. Provide it.”

Rising from the bed, he went back to the trunk, opening a separate compartment in front. Withdrawing the carved wooden box, the only item in there, he sat back down on the bed by her hip and opened the lid. He was satisfied to see what he’d requested was there.

She was watching him, but he didn’t let her see what was in it. Instead he curved his palm over her buttock, gave it a light squeeze, his fingers teasing in between the seam. “We’ll put the first jewels here.”

Since they didn’t do a whole lot of anal play, Matt had discussed with Ben, their dedicated ass-man sadist, what ideas might be pleasurable to her. Now he lifted out the result of that discussion, a silver plug with an end cap of diamond chips, encircled by a smooth silver ring that wouldn’t allow the rough-edged jewels to abrade her skin. There was an unmarked tube of lubricant resting inside the blue satin lining of the box, and he used it to cover the business end of the plug. The lube was one of Jon’s concoctions, one that created a heated, tingling sensation when it came in contact with flesh. That effect would be particularly significant on her sensitive rim.

Which would start taking his queen back to a full state of arousal, exactly where he wanted her. He still had her full attention, her lips moistening as she watched him lubricate the plug. Setting the box aside, he adjusted to one knee so that he could better probe between her buttocks with his slickened fingers, massage the rim, prepare her.

He saw the ripple of reaction over her skin, the tightening of her mouth. When she tensed, he knew where her mind was going. “If you resist, I’ll bind your arms to either side of you, and return the spreader bar to its proper place. I’ll also grab a handful of those glittering gold dress strands and make them into a flogger to stripe your ass. They’ll feel like little knife blades, and make a pretty framework for this sparkly plug.”

She sneered. “I’m not afraid of pain.”

“No, you’re not. But be still, my lady. There’s no one here but you and me. No one to see that you might find pleasure at my touch.”

“You said your soldiers could hear me.”

“Well, I said that, but I’ll tell them that shrieking was me. They’ve heard me get into my tub when the water has gotten cold. It will create reasonable doubt.”

Her lips twitched in that near smile again. She pressed her face deeper into the mattress. “Your slave girls would never allow your water to get that cold. You’d have them beaten.”

“I’m not an unreasonable Master. It’s not their fault, if I get distracted by my plans to conquer the world, and forget to bathe before the water becomes cold.”

He stroked his other hand down her spine, exploring the shallow valley above her buttocks. She had a small mole over the right one. He’d explore every inch of her with his mouth, his fingers, his eyes, relishing her sighs and shifts under his touch.

He slid his oiled fingers back to her rim, probed, using several of them to part her buttocks, so he could position the plug.

“This is a reminder of what my cock will feel like in here. I won’t leave any part of you unclaimed, my lady.”

She bit her lip as he slid it in, slow, easing past the muscles. She didn’t tighten up, showing her trust. It was thick, so she had to work with him, lifting a little and making a small noise as it was finally seated, stretching her. He liked the look of it intensely, the sparking jewel nestled between her buttocks.

Withdrawing a slender pair of chains from the box, he fixed them to a small eyelet at the base of the plug. He adjusted her over onto her back, moving her off the pillows. He brought the two chains between her legs and draped them over her thighs.

“Now, to keep your clit stiff and aroused for me…”

He coated the piece of thick bent wire that looked like a curtain pin with more of the lubricant. Her fingers were back to gripping the covers as he slid it over the base of her clit, the two sides of the pin keeping it compressed so the tissues started to swell before his appreciative gaze. Another little noise escaped her throat as the lubricant started to have its effect on her rim. It would only be a minute or two before she’d feel the same effect on her clit.

He hooked the two chains draped over her thighs to the eyelets on the pin. “You’ll keep squeezing down on that plug to ensure it stays put,” he told her. “Else I’ll be punishing you the way I described.”

He took her hands and lifted her off the bed, onto her feet. Her hair was still sexily disheveled from her last climax, her body pliant and flushed. She had the look of a well-fucked sub. He turned her in a full circle, letting her experience how the plug felt, the tight fit of the clitoral jewelry, the brush of the chains draped along her inner thighs.

“Gorgeous,” he murmured. “Come, my falcon.”

Taking a matching pair of diamond chip encrusted cuffs out of the box, he drew her over to the center pole and put them on her delicate wrists, before he tethered her to it again with the chains.

When a sea breeze coming through the open tent flaps made her shiver, he frowned. He wouldn’t tolerate her being cold. Moving to the brazier, he stoked it up further, then retrieved the box.

This time he removed a pair of rose quartz stones dangling from loops of silver wire. They looked like earrings, except for the tiny wires that were intended to tighten around her luscious nipples. He cupped a breast, thumbing the taut bud with pleasure. She bit her lip, making a little sound as she shifted.

“You’re getting hot and wet again, aren’t you, my lady? The plug in your ass and that tight hold on your clit are reminding you of your desire for me to touch and suck your flesh, take it again.”

She shook her head, then gasped as he gripped her throat in a hard hand, tilting her chin up to stare into his relentless gaze.

“You will tell me the truth, or pay dearly.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I hate you for that.”

“That’s another lie,” he said, a quiet threat, his thumb moving over her throat in a caress. “Isn’t it?”

When she didn’t answer, he dropped his hand to the clit pin and tightened his fingers over it, an uncomfortable pressure that made her whimper. “Answer me.”

She wet her lips. “It wasn’t…a while ago.”

There was the past again, the truth integrating itself into their fantasy, making it even stronger and more real. She had hated him at one time, for making her feel ways she’d been afraid to feel. It was one of the first times they’d both realized there was room for hate inside the universe of possibilities that love brought.

“But it’s not true now.”

“No.” Another whisper, and his grip eased, his fingers teasing the flesh swollen by the clamp of the wire.

He put the nipple jewelry on her, pinching the peaks as she twitched and became breathless under his ministrations. He attached chains between them and the clitoral clamp in front.

Stepping back, he looked at her, bound in a web of silver, the rose quartz pieces dangling from her nipples, vibrating from her subtle trembling.

Then, as she watched him, he returned to the box and removed the last item from it. As he did, her eyes became opaquer, her lips softer.

The rose quartz and silver wire collar was her actual collar, the one he’d given her as a gift on the plane on the way here. The formal one between them, Master and sub.

He stepped up to her, the collar looped over his forearm as he unbuckled the strap on her throat. Her gaze was fastened on the collar as she spoke in a throaty voice.

“I thought you said your slaves don’t wear such fine things.”

“My slaves do not. My queen does. Decide, my lady. Are you my slave, or my queen?”

Her gaze lifted to him, held. He saw his answer there.

Both.

Though he’d demand she say it out loud eventually, he put the collar on her now. As he fastened it, his fingers on her nape, he remembered the way she’d looked at him on the plane when he put it on her for the first time. The depth of feeling in her eyes, the press of her soft lips, the way her hands had gripped his sides, fingers curling into his dress shirt. He had closed his hands on her upper arms to kiss her, and felt her quivering. Damn if he hadn’t felt some of the same happening, low in his gut. A lot like the way he’d felt when they’d stood on the back deck of his Texas house and she’d said I do, I will.

He saw those same qualities in her expression now and hoped he would always do the things that would earn him the gift of that look. He ran more slender chains from the collar to the nipple jewelry in front, and one chain down the center of her back to hook to the plug. Tight enough to be a teasing pressure. When she moved, she’d be reminded of the many ways he had her decorated, all to sensually torment and arouse her once again.

He was already on the road to success on that, because her gaze had become unfocused while he adorned her, and her breath was shallow when he finished and turned her around for his viewing.

But he wanted her to see herself. There was a mirror on the far side of the tent. He unhooked her cuffs from the post and took her over there, her bare soles cushioned by carpets. As he brought her before the mirror, he stood behind her, caressing her hip. Enjoying watching her desire-suffused face as he touched her, he fondled her breasts, fingers tugging on the nipple jewelry. Her head fell back on his upper chest and shoulder, her ass pressing against his groin.

Even through the laced pants, he could feel her well enough, and had to bite back a groan of his own as she rubbed against the crisscross of the laces. He spread his hand out on her abdomen, fingers hooking the chains to toy with the clit pin as he reached back and worked the plug, sliding it in and out, a gentle thrust that had her moving with him, hips and torso undulating in a way that met every fantasy he had.

Her body was his instrument to play, and the songs were endless. He never tired of it, never tired of wanting her. Her hair slid against his chest as she tossed her head restlessly.

“Now say it aloud and become my queen,” he whispered huskily. “Because when you do, you’re right; I become your slave.”

Her eyes sparked with heated emotion, and her lips parted. “Master,” she said.

* * *

It didn’t matter anymore. The settings, the role play, all of it disappeared. Savannah reached toward his face, fingertips sliding along his jaw, and Matt dipped his head to kiss her wrist, above the diamond-chip covered cuffs.

“My love,” he said, the miracle of it filling him as he gripped her body, scooped her up and moved them to the bed. He sat down with her straddling him, his arms banded around her. He saw the tightening of her lips, further sparks in her gaze as the position increased the stimulation of her jewelry. He brought her close enough to brush her adorned nipples against his upper chest, increasing that friction. He slid his hands under her buttocks, pressing on the plug. When she emitted a little moan, his cock strained against the laced pants.

“My captive queen, my wife, my sub…my heart.”

She framed his face with her hands, her eyes burning. “My lord,” she whispered, the ghost of a smile on her face resurrecting an even earlier memory.

“You call me Matthew just to irritate me.”

“Would you prefer Mr. Kensington? Or perhaps Lord Kensington?”

“If you like. But I think I prefer Master, or my lord, if you’re using it.”

She spoke again, bringing them back to the present. “My husband, my Master, my truest friend. My savior.”

He shook his head, but she nodded, her fingers tightening on him to match the fierceness of her eyes. They showed a wealth of emotions from past and present that reinforced it.

Suddenly, he decided he didn’t want anything on her body but himself and his collar. Shifting her off him so she stood between his knees, he removed all of it. Her tiny moans and the aroused movements of her body absorbed him as he slid the plug free, took the clit jewelry off her damp flesh, and finally removed the nipple wires. Leaning forward, he used his mouth to suckle and soothe the tender flesh. As he did, he banded his arms around her hips. Her hair fell against his shoulders as she dropped her head on top of his, her lips pressed to his crown. Her hips were against his torso, the pressure conveying an unspoken imperative need he would be more than willing to meet.

He tightened his grip on her hips and lifted her off her feet, turning her to lay her down on the bed, freeing one arm so that he could cup the back of her head, ease the descent. She shifted so her head was on the nest of pillows. Gazing at him with love, laughter and desire in her eyes, Savannah stretched her arms above her, her delectable body laid before him in nothing but his collar.

“I may have surrendered to you, my lord,” she said. “But there will be further negotiations on the terms.”

He grinned, a baring of teeth. “Aren’t there always?” But as he slid his knuckles up her leg, his feelings took a more serious turn. Whatever miracle it was that brought a Master and sub together, opened them up so they had a soul-deep understanding of one another, he was thankful for it.

“Spread your legs,” he said softly, an undeniable command.

She obeyed, revealing her glistening pussy, the pale expanse of her inner thighs, the crease of her pretty buttocks below. With her arms lifted above her head, her breasts were tilted up, the pink tips there for his mouth or hands. Like every inch of her fair skin, as well as her heart and soul beneath it.

He shed boots and trousers at last, now as naked as she was. But as he put his knee on the bed between hers and loomed over her, he detected the unconscious flicker of trepidation in her eyes.

Animal instinct. She didn’t fear him, but there was a scintillating part of her in a moment like this that registered the difference in their strengths, his intent, knowing he would not be denied…unless she truly did not want him.

Maybe Matt Kensington and Savannah Tennyson, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, were the roles, whereas the conqueror and queen were the real truth.

He had to make her his, and she craved his absolute possession, in a way the modern world would likely never understand, especially when such a strong woman needed that surrender the way she did.

He trailed his fingers over her legs. “Wider,” he said roughly.

She complied, pupils getting larger and breath shortening. He stretched out over her, bracing a hand by her shoulder, curling his fingers in the thick miles of hair swirling around her on the mattress. Her lips parted, tongue touching one.

Taking himself in hand, he guided his cock into her. He stayed above her as he slowly pushed inside, watching her shudder, her body rise and fall to take him, inch by blissful inch. Then, seated to the hilt, he began to thrust. He denied himself any contact except that one point, his eyes on her face, hands braced on either side of her shoulders, her trembling legs staying wide as he’d ordered, and open for him, though he could feel her yearning to wrap herself around him. But the obvious way he was doing this, claiming her in a pose of total control, was both the perfect culmination of her fantasy and an experience of the deep, primal connection between them. Master and sub… Conqueror and queen.

Her pussy rippled over him, her eyes glazing, lips moistening, breath starting to rasp.

“Come for me, and prove you’re mine,” he growled. “Keep your legs open and down.”

It made the climax a slow, torturous build for them, because he had to stay slow, careful not to hit his woman at the wrong angle, while still giving her the indirect friction to clit and sweet spot. It took them both up so slowly that he could feel the heat closing in around them, getting stronger, hotter, promising a full immolation when it exploded into climax.

“Matt,” she cried out. “Please…”

Now at last he laid down upon her, let her wrap her arms and legs around him, hold him to her as he also circled an arm around her back and gripped her ass to plunge even more deeply into her cunt. It pulled a full scream from her and a whimper right behind it, the moan of a dove.

“Matthew…”

She was one of only two people who called him that. His mother had been the other one. He needed to tell her that, the bridge between the two women he’d loved the most in his life.

He made her spin off that cliff first, but he was right behind, to catch her as he fell. She cried out her release in his ear as he groaned at the force of it, the spurt of his seed inside her spasming cunt, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her breath against his neck.

They came down the way they’d spiraled up—together—and he stayed in her as long as he could, holding his weight on his elbows, kissing her face, her throat, curling his back to suckle her nipple or tease the cleavage between her soft mounds with his tongue. Until finally, with a reluctant sound from them both, he slid from her. But he wouldn’t go far. He only moved to her side, cradling her in his arms. She tucked her head under his, and they held one another silently, everything that needed to be said in that contact.

Both of them spent.

* * *

“That was perfect,” she said softly at long last. “Thank you.”

Matt grunted, tangling his fingers in her hair. They could hear the rush of water near the tent opening, telling them it was high tide. The smell of the fresh sea air mixed with the scent of sex and her. Not a bad perfume. “The things I’ll do for you. Hope you’re grateful.”

“Never. That would feed your ego far too much.” Savannah tipped her head back and gave him a smile. “Though you probably shouldn’t have done such a good job. I’ll be wanting role play all the time. I have many fantasies about a stern Master.”

Matt chuckled. “I’m afraid drama will never be my forte.”

She scoffed. “What do you call that night you orchestrated in your office?”

“That was a planned takedown. Very different. I’ve employed similar tactics in deals with competitors.”

“Oh, really?” Her eyes sparkled. “If you ever try those tactics during a meeting with Richard Lewis, I want to be there. He’s a handsome man. That whole silver fox thing.”

Matt shuddered. “No more male/male erotic romances for you. I strictly forbid it.”

She laughed. “They’re for Dana. I have to read them aloud to her because she says they aren’t available in Braille.”

“She’s a compulsive liar,” Matt declared. “She just likes hearing erotic literature read aloud to her. Particularly in your sultry voice.”

Savannah smirked at him, but pressed her palm to his, bringing their hands into the air before them as she caressed his fingers and he did the same, idle finger play as they enjoyed lying together.

“Dana has been doing an excellent job on your self-defense training,” he remarked. “Almost too good. I thought you were actually trying to emasculate me with that one kick.”

“Who says I wasn’t?” she teased him. Then her tone changed, a gratifyingly impressed note to it. “You’re better at drama than I ever would have expected. Some of the things you said…they were right out of a romance novel, and you made them sound real, not corny.” She shivered. “Sometimes I think this is exactly who you were in a previous life.”

It was as if she’d picked the thoughts up from his own head. But the right props and mindset could shift a man’s reality, so he did find himself talking like some kind of barbarian conqueror from a romance novel. When he’d think of tonight later, he might wince at some of the things that had come out of his mouth Swell with my child? But judging from his wife’s reaction, she hadn’t had any trouble suspending her own reality and taking that ride with him. If he had contributed to that, maybe he’d just limit his hindsight replay and focus on the present, never regretting what had brought him here.

Besides, her words were a two-way street. He didn’t read romance, but he’d seen the covers, like anyone else. The heroines always looked sexy-as-hell, courageous, intelligent. His wife reflected more than elements of that fantasy. She was that fantasy. To him, always.

He stroked her hair, her neck, and the graceful line of her shoulder. “The staff took pity on me. They drugged your wine, so I’d seem more believable.”

She chuckled again. They settled back into a quiet mode. He thought she dozed for a while, and perhaps he did as well, but he was roused by an unexpected question. She was drawing circles in his chest hair with a fingertip, her breath whispering across his nipple.

“Is this the kind of Dom you were…before me?” she asked. “I know some of the others are into the equipment and restraints, and you seem to know how to use all of that, but…it feels like it’s not entirely you.”

He had to think about it. The longer he spent with her, the more opaque the curtain of memory about other women before her had grown. He had no desire to draw that back. While he would tell Savannah anything she wanted to know about him, in whatever detail she needed, he didn’t care to talk much about his past submissives or relationships, except how they’d led him to this one, the last one he knew he’d ever have.

His mother had died in his teens. Before that happened, he’d taken one girl to a dance, another to a roller skating rink. He’d stolen a kiss or two, been interested in other things normal for a teenage boy, but his heart had stayed curiously separate. When he’d confided his worry about that, his mother had smiled, a lot of things in her gaze he hadn’t yet understood consciously, but did later. She was already starting to show signs that the cancer was winning, but she was holding her own with treatments, so both he and his father were holding onto hope with both fists.

“Don’t worry,” she’d said, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear. He shrugged as if irritated with the coddling, but he didn’t move away. He actually moved a step closer. He was so strong. He was on the wrestling team, was big enough to be on the football team. If she could take any of his strength to make her well, he wanted her to have it.

“You’re your father’s son,” she said softly. Then, he had seen her with a teenager’s viewpoint, but in hindsight, he remembered her gaze seemed to understand everything he was thinking, worrying about, wanting. “I won’t be a bit surprised if, when you find the one you want, she’ll be the one. The one you have to have, that you’re going to have, because you won’t accept anything less than a woman you can love with every dark and light corner of your heart.”

“Matt?” Savannah, so attuned to his thoughts, lifted on her elbow, her hand still on his chest.

“It’s good.” He told her the memory, and her eyes softened with sympathy. He’d held in his feelings about losing his mother for the first several years after her death, intuitively wanting to support his father. As devastated as Matt was, Jonas had a hole blown through his chest that never filled. But then Jonas was killed when Matt was seventeen. Holding in the pain about losing his parents became a war he fought inside himself, using immersion in learning the business of the empire he’d inherited as his most potent weapon.

It wasn’t until Lucas, Peter, Jon and Ben all four became a permanent inner circle for him, that Matt let some of those feelings come to the surface. Sometimes, in limited ways. The son of Jonas Kensington was never going to embrace the modern a-man-can-be-sensitive-and-cry, talk-show horseshit. Yeah, try pulling that mama’s boy crap on an oil rig, and be prepared to swim to shore.

Even so, Jon in particular had helped Matt realize he needed to spill some things off, so they didn’t result in closed-off behaviors that could hurt not just his business practices, but his life and relationships. But it had taken a woman to allow him to really feel it, grieve them as fully as he’d needed to do.

The setting didn’t really lend itself to thinking about parents, but the look in Savannah’s eyes, the memory her question had unfolded, did. And led to another.

He remembered a night Savannah had asked to see a picture of his mother. He’d pulled out a scrapbook, something one of his aunts had given him after Jonas’s funeral and he’d put away in the back of a closet. It was a collection of pictures of both Jonas and Gianna Kensington. It was when they’d reached one of the two of them holding him as an infant, that he did what he never had. He broke down and cried. Just sat down hard on the carpeted floor of their enormous walk-in closet, Savannah curled over him, holding him with surprisingly strong arms, as he wept for the two people who’d loved him and cared for him, as long as fate had given them. Which had been too goddamn short.

“I was surprised I lost control like that, that night,” he said. Coming back to himself, he realized she might have no idea what he was referencing, but from the tightening of her lips and the swirl of emotions in her eyes, he knew he was an idiot for thinking otherwise.

“I’m glad you didn’t say you regretted it. I would have had to hurt you,” she said. “It’s a memory I cherish. Not of your pain; of course not. But it was the night my husband proved to me he knew he could trust me enough to lean. To break.”

“Afterward, I was worried that it had hurt you. To see how much I loved my parents, and how much they loved me.”

She shook her head, shadows crossing her face. “I had a very difficult and cold father, Matt. I’m so glad you didn’t have that same experience. They gave you the ability to love.” Her lips curved slightly. “It sounds like your mom put her stamp of approval on your tenacity about going after the woman you want. Now, are you going to answer my question, or are you deliberately trying to distract me?”

She knew the right moment to tease him. As much as he did trust her enough to have such a mental break, being vulnerable was far from his most comfortable state. Clearing his throat, he made a show of sighing and gazing up at the tented ceiling.

“I can’t remember the question.”

He laughed as she punched his side, and grabbed her wrist, protecting himself from further assault as she made a face at him. “Okay, okay. Give me a second to think about this.”

But he knew a way to answer her that straddled the line between his feelings for her, and information about the past that only mattered because of how it had taught him to pleasure her.

“The very first time I exercised my skills as a Dom, it was on a balcony, with a woman at a party. I told her to take off her panties and give them to me. No ties, no restraints, just feeling that click when I met her eyes and we knew exactly what we wanted and needed from one another. She surrendered herself to me in between one breath and the next.”

He shifted, so Savannah lay under the shelter of his body. Resting his hand on her throat, just above the collar, he bent closer to speak in her ear.

“I’m the kind of Dom that feeds off just this.” His hand constricted. “I close my grip, and I feel your pulse trip. I see your body tighten, then soften, giving way to my will. I hear the whisper of your escaped breath. With only words and touch, I take you over, like the flow of water, carrying you where I want you to go.” He raised his head, met her eyes. “I need nothing but my will to have you, because I know your body and soul better than I know my own."

"How is that possible?" she said, her voice thready, eyes brilliant.

"Because I find yours far more interesting."

She smiled. Releasing her wrist and coaxing her to lie back down, her head on his chest, Matt tightened his arm around her, kissed her head. “I’m okay with the mechanics. Equipment and toys can be lots of fun.” He tossed a glance to the far corner of the bed, where he’d left the ones they used. “But in the end, it’s always been about the mind-to-mind connection. The give and take, psychological reaction. That’s where the charge is, for me.”

“I felt that from you,” she murmured. “From the first time we met. I didn’t know exactly what it was, or why it drew me so, but I can see you doing what you described with that first woman perfectly.” Her lips curved against his chest. “Though I prefer to imagine the woman as me.”

“So do I, no disrespect to the lovely lady who allowed me that honor that night.” He kissed her head again. “I think of it like business skills. You learn as much as you can, so you have a lot of tools in your arsenal, but over time, you find your own style, what’s most effective for yourself.” A smile touched his lips. “Ben, Jon and Peter took my basic understanding of restraints and toys to a higher level, so I could employ them when needed. Or when it added to the pleasure of my partner.”

She became quiet again, but he didn’t sense she was unhappy with what he’d just shared. Instead, she seemed as if she was in a nice, drifting post-coital haze, which he liked, because she was at her most relaxed and trusting, curled in his arms without further questions or worries.

He curled her long hair around his large hand, watching the strands fall. As they did, he inhaled the haunting scents they’d used to clean it. Appropriately, it didn’t overpower the familiar scent of the woman herself.

He thought about buying a place here, a cottage near the beach where they could come back as often as they liked. The Resort had a select number of properties available for purchase on the opposite side of the island.

But in truth, they both loved New Orleans. This would be a nice repeat vacation experience, though.

“I admit, the bathing part took me by surprise,” he said after another long pause. “It’s not every woman who’d have the confidence to let her husband be bathed and massaged by naked women, even if it was to prepare her Lord and Master to be pleasing to her.”

“You’ve had your fun with me, O Lord and Master,” she said sleepily. “I won’t rise to the bait.”

“But you like calling me your lord. Admit it.”

She batted away his tickling hand. “I meant the women. You were in charge of all of this. And you did it…this was beyond my wildest dreams.” She laid her arm over his chest, her hand curling around his neck as she tucked her head deeper under his chin. “I love you.”

It never failed to stir him, hearing it. But now he was getting an uneasy feeling. Best to let it lie, lest his extremely sharp-witted wife would…

Savannah shifted and propped herself up on an elbow. Her curtain of thick blond locks tumbled over one eye, but it didn’t diminish the sudden gleam in the visible one.

“Wait. That surprised you. I could hear it in your voice. What women?”

Oh hell. He cleared his throat. “I assumed you amended the scene plan.” It had fit in with his imaginings of her wrinkling her nose at the stench of the battlefield lingering on him. But he figured now was not the time to point out that his own efforts to get into the scene might have contributed to a serious oversight.

At her expression, Matt gauged how close anything sharp—or even just this side of not-too-blunt to use as a shiv—was to his very exposed sensitive parts. When Savannah slid off the bed, he manfully chose to snag his trousers and put them back on. He didn’t have time to tighten the laces, but he was at least covered by the time she rose, pushed her hands through her hair and pivoted to face him, a flush climbing into her fair cheeks.

“And exactly what did these women do?”

“Just bathed me and gave me a massage.”

He knew the spike in his gut when he’d missed a key piece of information. When it happened as a matter of business, there were usually ways to fix it. Plus, he had the help of four of the savviest businessmen he knew, in their respective fields of experience. In a relationship, reparations were quite a bit trickier, and he had no backup. As his mind scrolled rapidly through all the earlier prep and detail, his bad feeling increased exponentially. His shrewd wife reached the same conclusion only a blink before he did.

“I am going to kill Ben O’Callahan.”

A pair of robes hung on two hooks near the bed, one a feminine garment of textured white silk. She snagged it and swirled it around her like Wonder Woman about to take the battlefield. Matt barely made it around the bed in time to catch her elbow and keep her from marching out of the tent in search of his company lawyer. Who he might just kill himself, but there was judicial process to consider.

“Hold on.” He drew her back to the bed, keeping a firm grip on her. “Innocent until proven guilty.”

“Ha. That…man, has never had an innocent day in his life.” But Savannah crossed her arms, which created an interesting effect with the robe neckline parting to show her cleavage. The thin fabric outlined her nipples. Her color was high, her eyes snapping. He figured it probably wasn’t wise to try throwing her back on the bed and seducing her into forgetfulness.

Yeah. Savannah would merely pop back up after being thoroughly, repeatedly ravished, and ask if he had Ben’s head on a pike yet.

Keeping a light hand on her, he pressed the bell that summoned a servant girl. A blink later he realized he was totally off his game. Because the one who responded to his call was the redhead with the mouthwatering breasts, just as naked as before. And of course she knelt as close to his feet as she could get.

His wife was the most beautiful woman in the world to Matt. No woman could compare to her. That was what he felt and saw when he looked at her. But his wife was closing in on forty, and he knew what she was seeing. A nubile twenty-something, who might have had hands on her husband.

Since they’d been together, he’d encouraged Savannah to show her temper if things happened between them that upset her. He’d wanted her to know he wasn’t goddamn Geoffrey Tennyson, reacting with frosty disapproval if his carefully groomed ice princess didn’t keep every human emotion bottled up.

For the first time, Matt had a feeling he was going to wish he hadn’t made that helpful and loving suggestion.

“Slave.” He cleared his throat over it, but the rules were fairly strict about breaking scene while it was in progress. “Who instructed you to bathe me? Told you of the captive queen’s wishes?”

“Your Lord Seneschal, my lord,” the redhead said instantly. “He said putting such temptation in your way proved your commitment to your queen, confirming how strong and eternal your devotion and love to her would be.”

“And how does it do that?” he asked, hoping Ben had left him an out.

“Because you took nothing from what was freely offered by the both of us, and we are the most attractive and well-instructed of the pleasure slaves at your command. He directed me to remind you of this if you asked that very question. And he told me to say it word for word in the presence of the queen.”

“Does the Lord Seneschal have green eyes, dark hair and a manhood big enough for me to beat him to death with it?” Savannah asked pleasantly.

It startled the girl enough for her to look up, her expression wisely cautious. Matt figured they’d both acquired the answer from her face, however, so he dismissed her with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “It was a rhetorical question,” he murmured as he courteously guided her around his wife, keeping his body between them until the girl exited through the open tent flaps.

“You need a new lawyer. He won’t leave this island alive, and he’ll be severely maimed before he begs for death.”

She was pacing, her color still up, fists clenched. She glared at him. “I know you knew nothing of this, because you’re impossible to surprise, and you looked poleaxed. But how did he know you wouldn’t take advantage of ‘what was freely offered’?”

That he had an answer for. Plus, he was getting his feet back under him. Since the flash of her legs and sway of her breasts were not making him any less distracted, and he couldn’t deny entirely unwise amusement was building in him, he chose to act.

He caught her around the waist on her next turn and tumbled her backward into the pillows on the bed. She fought him at first, but when he pinned her wrists and held her body down with his own, her resistance grew more half-hearted. Especially when he began to kiss her throat, teasing her pounding pulse with tongue and lips.

“Because he knows me,” he murmured against her flesh. “He’s an ass, and a prankster, but he’s right.”

He lifted his head and met her blue eyes. They were still fired up, but his words had softened her mouth, somewhat. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor too, so he also saw some of that making its way through her annoyance. He pressed between her legs and went back to enjoying her throat, pleased when a thready sigh suggested he was helping move her away from anger.

“You could line up every slave girl on this island in front of me,” he said. “There’s only one woman who interests me. Only one who I want enough to kill, live or die for her. Be with her always.”

When he glanced up, he saw her blue eyes had at last warmed fully, her lips twisting. “Charmer.” She took a breath. “I’m not going to ask you about this. About how pretty, or soft, or young…”

“No. You won’t.” Raising his head to lock gazes with her, he released one wrist to touch her face. Now the Master took the upper hand in his tone, quieting her. “Because there’s nothing to tell, and all I want is you. When you walked in here and I first saw you, my knees buckled. I almost knelt at your feet.”

She tilted her head, a little smile coming back to her serious features. “You know, it’s not quite as big a fantasy for me as this was, but there is a part of me that wonders…”

With an impish look rare for her, Savannah pushed against him, indicating she wanted to get up. Intrigued by her intent expression, Matt sat back enough to let her wriggle out from under him and make her way to the side of the bed. When she reached out and took his hand, tugged him to his feet, he followed her.

Within a couple steps, though, she’d turned to face him and reversed their positions. Putting her hands on his bare chest, she backed him toward the center post. She stopped him when his shoulder blades and ass hit it. The impish look became a studied one as she ran her hands down his arms, fingers lingering in appraisal of the musculature in his biceps. Her eyes lighted with what was unmistakably female appreciation, but at a blatant level uncharacteristic for her, like a woman at a male strip joint. Matt raised his brows, bemused when he started to raise his arms to touch her and she shook her head.

Dropping her touch to his wrists, she stepped closer, pressing his arms behind him, guiding his fingers to wrap around the pole.

“There,” she purred. “You’re bound with chains, unable to move.” Her eyes on his, she pressed her mouth to his chest, her tongue teasing over his nipple and firing his blood.

“Savannah,” he growled, and that look in her gaze increased.

“Maybe, if the roles had been reversed,” she continued in that same sultry tone, “I would have been the conquering queen, you the captured warlord brought before me.”

“If you’d been in charge of that army instead of your father, it’s possible.” He cocked his head. A submissive he most definitely wasn’t. No more than she was a Domme. But intrigued by this unexpected development, he took a step back into the waters of fantasy, for her.

“And when I’m brought before you, the moment I see you, all thought of escape leaves me,” he said, still in that semi-growl. “I realize the castle means nothing. The woman is the real prize. Serving her. Making her happy. I know if she keeps talking to me in that cock-stroking voice, I’ll come, just from listening to her.”

Her cheeks pinkened and she fanned her fingertips out over his chest, caressing the coarse dark hair, the taut nipple, the layers of muscle over his ribs and abdomen, following them down to the waistband of the trousers. She played with the loosened laces coyly, wrapping one around a finger and tugging it.

His incomparable sub was a multi-tasker. Even as she was doing that, she was plotting her next move. Recovering the chain attached to the pole, the one he’d used to tether her there earlier, she pressed flush against him to wrap it around his wrists by touch alone. He still was clasping the pole, but with her touching him, it was hard not to try and tangle with her fingers, but he resisted the urge as she tucked the end of the chain in to hold it in place. He could easily get free, but he wouldn’t. Not when she was overwhelming his senses, becoming the provocateur.

Her lush lower lip caught in a distracting way beneath her teeth, she slid her hands back down his chest, along his arms, his sides. Her fingers dipped into the low riding, unlaced waistband of the trousers again. She loosened the laces further, so the pants cradled his cock and balls in an open nest of fabric. Lifting her chin to gaze into his face, she rubbed the tips of her breasts against his chest, a light brush of contact. Her other hand went back to his biceps, nails biting into the flesh, hard. The heated flicker of her gaze registered the flex of muscle as he tested the thin chains.

“Savannah,” he said, a threat.

“My lord?” She murmured it as she reached down to stroke his cock with featherlike fingertips. Her lips parted. “All mine,” she whispered, heat in her eyes. “All for me. I can have and take whatever I want.”

She shot his blood pressure up so fast he got lightheaded. She tugged the trousers down, had him step out of the pants so he was naked, while she remained in the robe.

“Take it off,” he ordered, his jaw tight.

“Soon. It’s intriguing, a slave binding her Master.” Sliding her arms around him, she pressed herself fully against his body once more, his cock against silk and the heated woman beneath.

“What would my lord have felt, if he’d found out male slaves had bathed me, to prepare me to enjoy my captive?” she purred.

“There would be three dead men joining my enemies on the pyre tonight.”

Savannah shivered, responding to the genuine threat in his tone. Keeping her eyes on his, she slid down his body, pressing kisses to his abdomen, stroking his stomach, descending. She’d been on her knees to him many times as a sub to serve him. With his arms bound back and her hands roving over him, his blood was on fire with the need to break free and take. But he restrained himself, again for her. For the obvious pleasure she was taking in being both sub and captor.

Fucking God above, her mouth was as sweet as it ever could be, heated and moist, sucking him, tasting him. She’d said it was a fleeting fantasy. He hoped she was telling the truth, because when her nails dug into his upper thighs—his fierce queen—his control broke.

He snapped the chains with a jerk, bent and lifted her by the waist. Moving them over to the table, he cleared the surface of maps and battle markers with one sweep of his arm and laid her down. No seduction this time. She’d already done that part of things. Untying the robe, he yanked it off her shoulders, gripping it at her elbows to restrict her arms and give him an anchor point as he sheathed himself in her cunt in one strong thrust.

She cried out at the force, her body arching. Her reaching hands caught a couple sheets of parchment that had been left at the table’s edge and crumpled them. He locked his gaze on her face, taking in the needy parting of her lips, the victorious light of her eyes, the way the climax built in her expression, in the wild movements of her body. She reached up, clutched his forearms to bring him down to her further. That wasn’t close enough. Her hands found his ass, pulling him closer, deeper, with desperate but relentless strength. His queen wanted what she wanted.

One day they’d be too old to do this, multiple climaxes in one night, having sex on a table, but it wouldn’t matter. He’d enjoy her at every age, in whatever manner the gods allowed, even if it was just gazing at her in her rocking chair and loving the silver in her hair and the lines on her face that time had earned. As long as they were together, it wouldn’t matter.

But right now, he’d fucking fully enjoy the benefits that being strong, flexible and young enough gave them. He was ready to release, as if even her brief interlude of considering him her captive required his Dominant nature to reassert itself in the most primitive way possible. And she accepted that, thrived on it, his lovely submissive. She clutched him tighter, and her voice broke over the request.

“Please…Master…”

“You can come for me.”

She did, clutching him with the muscles he’d praised earlier. Her hold took him along on the same ride, the two of them rocking the table as she cried out her pleasure and he groaned through his release, thrusting even deeper. As they moved together, he released his hold on her arms so she could let the robe slide free and lift herself up from the table. As she put her mouth to his throat, he banded his arm around her waist, his palm on her hip and buttock, while her legs were clamped over his hips. It gave them a new angle, and their groans and cries reflected the pleasure of the new peak.

It seemed both forever and too soon before they slowed to a halt, hearts pounding together. He pressed a kiss into her hair and closed his eyes. She ran her hands down his back, a light caress, over and over. He could have said something like he would have slave girls bathe him more often, if it resulted in this reaction, but he knew a far better way to say that.

“I love you,” he said.

“Endlessly and foolishly,” she whispered against his chest. “Thank God.” She paused, and he felt her lips curve against him. “It’s like a board room table, isn’t it?”

He glanced down at the oaken oblong circle. He smiled. “Yeah. A bit smaller than ours, but it can serve the same purpose.”

Lifting her from it, he carried her back to the bed and laid them both down. “You’ve carried me a lot tonight,” she observed.

“I like carrying you. Ever since the first time, when I carried you down the stairs.”

It had been at her father’s funeral, but he didn’t want to take her down that road. Instead, he curled up behind her, wrapping his arms around her chest and waist as he spooned his larger body around her, cloaking her protectively. It was how they slept together almost every night. She slept best if he held her like this.

If he had to travel on business, she could sleep, though she did it cocooned in his scent in the bed linens and whichever of his shirts she decided to wear to bed.

He was glad she liked him to sleep coiled around her, because he needed to hold her when he slept. Maybe even more than she needed to be held.

He told her that now, and she pressed her cheek to his forearm, pillowed beneath her head. “I’m glad. I would be worried if you thought I was overly needy, Matt Kensington.”

He chuckled. “Needy is the last thing you are, Savannah Kensington.” Then his arms tightened over her. “But no matter how much you think you need me, I can promise you – I need you more.”

She turned her head to look up at him. His words had struck a chord in her, because as she reached out and trailed her fingers along his jaw, it was as if she were touching him for the first time, or reaching out from a dream. He didn’t like that sense of distance, so he clasped her hand, giving her heat. It brought her back to him. Her words were soft.

“Do you know, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and curl myself around you as tightly as possible, because I remember the person I was before, how cold and lonely her bed was… It makes me want to weep for that woman's loneliness, that she didn't see what a gift you were offering to her.”

His hand tightened on hers. “I should have been like a conqueror in truth,” he said, with sudden resolve. “Taken you from your father the first time I saw you, Savannah. Taken you to my house in Texas, kept you there like a captive falcon until you learned to trust my hand…"

Breaking off, he blinked, registering her slight smile.

The fantasy wouldn’t have persisted so strongly for her if she didn’t see elements of it in you every day.

“I suspect only the thinnest veneer of civility kept you from that very course,” she said lightly. “But I’m glad you went with a different plan. Else you might have gone to prison before I realized I love you."

He chuckled, shaking his head at himself, but then he brushed his lips over hers. After he did, she looked at him, all her heart in her eyes. "I wouldn't have understood or known that I was ready until the night you did confront me with your feelings and my own. I know that. You know it. Because we both know the value of timing. Putting aside instant gratification for the long win. A promise of forever was worth years of loneliness, Matt."

He touched her face. "I believe you, but thinking of you lonely breaks my heart. Even in the past. I’d do anything to prevent that. Even face prison.”

He heard the smile and the love in her voice. “We can face prison together. After we find the right spot to bury Ben’s body.”

“That’s a lot of work. Why don’t we just have Lucas figure out the numbers and let Peter do the grunt work?”

“Works for me.” She nestled her face against his arm. “Jon wouldn’t be involved?”

“Naw. He’s into that whole ‘all life is sacred’ crap.”

She chuckled and was silent for a few more minutes. Matt released her, but only for the time it took to press the button of the control box, mounted on a post discreetly placed behind the mattress. It notified the staff the session was over and they were released from their duties. He’d reserved the tent for the night, so they wouldn’t be disturbed until late morning, when one of the regular Resort staff would bring in breakfast. He thought about a midnight walk on the nearby ocean shore with his gorgeous wife. Or making love to her again. Or both.

“I love you,” she said quietly. “More and more.”

He wound both arms around her again and held her close. “I can’t think of anything better on earth or in Heaven than hearing that. So, you liked your fantasy?”

“Always.” She smiled against his arm, pressed her face more deeply against his biceps, her hands coming up to circle and caress his forearm, his hand. “Every day.”