Chapter Nine
Atticus Noble tells me we’re going to play a little game. Elliot is smart, he says, but if we’re going to trap him, we must be smarter. It could get dangerous. He asks me if I know how to take care of myself, whether I’ve ever had any kind of defense training. I tell him about the shooting range and he barks an ironic laugh, and I know he’s remembering how I couldn’t even work the safety on the gun I found in the lean-to.
I think about that gun sometimes. I know now that it was his. I think of the single shoe and the photo of the little girl, and I wonder if those things in the locker are connected to the work he’s doing. He doesn’t talk about it, but now that I’m spending time with him as a peer and not a possession, I start to see a haunted quality to the big man who is not who I thought he was.
He has a gym in his penthouse. This is where I resume my workouts. He wants me fit and ready for anything. Even if his purchase of me was a sham, Atticus acts like he owns me, drilling me through grueling workouts and self-defense lessons. He starts by teaching me how to break a hold, but every time his arms go around me, I can’t help but be reminded of what drew me here. The man who shows me how to escape his muscular arms was supposed to be wrapping them around me in a passionate embrace. The man who pins me to the mat was supposed to pin me to his bed, spread my legs, and…
Shouldn’t I be relieved that I’m nothing more than a purchased piece of ass? If he hadn’t bought me, someone else might have. I could very well be dead. But at night, as my muscles ache from the workouts he’s forcing me to do, another ache develops between my legs, too, as I remember the feel of his hands, his tongue, as I think of how he put the plug in my ass. I was sure that more was to come, that he’d eventually take my virginity. But he’s been nothing short of a gentleman since his revelation.
He’s been a gentleman, and it’s driving me mad.
It’s three a.m. and I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling. From my peripheral vision, I can see the twinkling lights of Seattle. In buildings around us, most people are sleeping, but some aren’t. Some of them are fucking. I think about that now. Atticus Noble’s bedroom is down the hall from mine. I imagine him lying there, one brawny arm behind his head, his muscular torso half-covered with a sheet. I remember how warm he felt, how small I felt next to him. I remember how the stubble of his strong jaw abraded my soft thighs as his mouth latched onto my pussy. I move my hands down to my lower belly and glide my palm across my panty-clad pubic mound. I shudder, remembering. The tension I feel is not as strong as it was when Atticus was doing the touching, but even the memory of what he did is enough to leave me wanting relief.
I move my hand up and slip it inside my panties. My legs fall apart. The soft folds of my pussy are wet and swollen with desire. I stroke my clit, remembering how his tongue felt flicking the rigid little nub. My lower body rises off the bed. I rub my nipple, recalling the delicious bite of pain I’d felt when he’d pinched it. The hand in my panties slides lower. I rim the opening of my vulva with my finger. I’m still untouched inside, still unclaimed. I’m pulsing there. I’m ready to be entered, a wanton virgin left wanting. It’s a kind of agony, this deep desire, and I moan in frustration.
“I thought I told you not to do that.”
I gasp in surprise as I pull my hand from between my legs and scramble to sit up. In the moonlight, I can see Atticus silhouetted in the doorway. He’s dressed as he was the night he slept beside me in bed, bare-chested with only a pair of low-slung pajama pants for cover. They ride low on his hips. The ‘v’ of the muscles I’d admired in secret points tauntingly toward the hidden part he’d punished me for trying to touch.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I’ve found my voice. “It’s my body.”
“Is it?” He walks over. “The way I see it, that’s my property you’re playing with.”
He walks purposefully toward the bed. His expression is stern. I instinctively know what that look means.
“No,” I say. “Don’t.” But he’s already grabbing me and sitting on the bed. This time I struggle when he puts me over his lap. I’m not going to let him spank me again, not without a fight.
It’s not much of a fight.
“Little girls shouldn’t play with things that don’t belong to them,” he says, and he brings his hand down on my ass, once, twice, three times. I cry out with each one, gritting my teeth in expectation of the agony I know his hand can deliver. But the fourth swat ends with a squeeze. He massages my already burning cheek, swats it again, rubs it. It’s a proprietary rub, and I can feel my pussy clenching hard.
No. This can’t be…
Two more swats. I feel my bottom cheeks flatten and bounce before he begins to massage the sting away, or is he just driving it deeper? Either way, I can’t deny now that this is making me even wetter. I try to shove my legs closed, to hide what I’m feeling.
I hear his low rumble of a laugh. The spanking and rubbing continue. My pussy is all but aching with need.
“Do you like this?” he asks.
“You’re an arrogant bastard,” I say through shameful tears. Because I do. I mean, I don’t, but I do.
He flips me over until I’m on my back once again. He’s looming over me, his expression unreadable. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I am an arrogant bastard. But you want me. You want me to push my cock between your legs.”
“No.” The lie falls quickly from my lips. But he’s not buying it. He works his hand between the fortress of my thighs, and slides them through my slit. I watch, mesmerized, as he brings his fingers up to his face and sniffs.
“My fingers smell like pussy,” he says. “They smell like a warm, sweet pussy that’s just aching to be filled. Virginity is such a burden to a girl born to be fucked. It’s like carrying a weight around. It’s such a shame to bear that load when a simple request could end it all. Here. Now.”
“You want me to ask you to fuck me?” I’m incredulous.
“I’ve spanked you. I’ve played with your pussy and your ass,” he says, “but here’s where I draw the line. You want me to pop that sweet little cherry between your legs? Then you’re going to have to ask.”
“I can’t…” The throb between my legs has returned. It’s stronger than ever. My breath is coming in hot, shallow gasps. I want him. I want him so badly I could scream.
“Sure you can,” he assures me, and his teeth gleam white in the moonlight as he smiles down at me. “Let me tell you what I’ve learned by the way you react to my touch. You’re a submissive, princess. You crave a man’s domination. That makes you perfect for me. I like a woman who yields. But the true mark of an alpha male is that he never, ever takes a woman against her will. He doesn’t have to. Women give themselves to him. And he takes care of them.” He trails a finger down my cheek and I shudder. “He treats them good. Real good.” He pauses. “Tell me what you want, princess. Let me show you how good it can be.”
I draw a ragged breath. I close my eyes. “I want… I want…” My body is thrumming with desire. I open my eyes and stare up at him. I can’t go on like this. It’s torture. I know it. He knows I know it. My resistance breaks. “I want you to fuck me.”
I half expect him to ram into me right away. Instead, he kisses my forehead gently, smooths my hair away from my face, and presses his mouth to mine as he lowers his powerful frame onto my body. He teases my mouth open. His tongue strokes mine and a quiver runs through my body. He’s plundering my mouth, exploring it, and I know this isn’t going to be over quickly.
“I want you to relax, Maeve,” he says. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to train you. Now that you’ve asked for it, I’m going to teach you how to give pleasure. But first, you’re going to learn to receive.”
He moves my hair aside and his hot mouth nips its way down the side of my neck. He trails his tongue along the ridge of my collarbone and lower to my breast. He takes the nipple into his mouth—just the nipple—and begins to suckle with such force that I’m mewling and squirming from the sensation. The noise he makes sounds like a growl, like a warning. I think of his wolf. I instinctively lie still, yielding. Submissive, he called me. I never thought of it, but I’m already feeling overpowered, overwhelmed, and it’s driving me wild.
His head goes moves lower as his hands slide underneath me to cup my buttocks. He lifts me easily, and my legs part as his head moves between them. He feasts on my slick, proffered flesh like a hungry man, worrying the nub of my clit with his teeth before lapping away the juices that flow unbidden from my pulsing core. He nips his way down the inside of my thigh, laps the hollow behind my knee, which is strangely exciting.
He flips me over. He tells me I have the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen.
“It’s all I could do not to fuck you the night after I spanked you,” he says. His voice is gruff, but velvety. “Control is my forte—over my body, over my lover’s. I’ve had women test that control before, but none so much as you, Maeve.”
He kisses the dimples at the base of my back, pushes his face between my buttocks to tongue the hidden rose of my anal opening. I squeal at this and try to pull away, but he doesn’t let me. He’s committed to feeling and tasting everything from my earlobes to my asshole. And all I can do is take it, and moan and moan and moan.
Finally, I’m on my back again and he’s leaning over me. He pulls his pajama pants down, dispelling all notions that my taunt at the cabin had any merit whatsoever. I’ve seen plenty of cock pictures in my preparation for this night, but none of them prepared me for the sight of one so erect, so substantial in both length and girth. It’s jutting toward me, the fleshy mushroom head glistening with a drop of slippery dew oozing from the vertical slit. He’s as ready as I am.
“Will it hurt?” My voice is small and as innocent as I realize I must seem to him at the moment.
“It’ll be quick,” he says. “If it hurts, I promise to make it better.”
He lowers himself between my thighs and suddenly I’m scared. Suddenly I’m that trembling virgin I told myself I would never be.
“Maeve.” He says my name and my heart flutters.
I had expected him to push his cock into my body, but he rises to his knees and begins to run his hands up and down my body. They’re large and warm and strong. They’re the hands that captured me, the hands that spanked me, the hands that have teased me until I was ready for what’s about to happen.
“Beautiful,” he says, and I flush under the compliment. Why? I know I’m beautiful, but hearing him say it sends a flush of something like happiness through me. He’s beautiful, too, if a man can be beautiful. He looms large over me, like a Greek god. Any woman would be happy to worship him, but this perfect man bought me. My pussy quivers. He said I am submissive. Am I?
God, I’m so turned on. I’m so desperate to feel the unknown.
But he’s doing what he said he was going to do. He’s taking his time. His head dips down, and I feel his mouth capture the peak of my breast. His teeth score the nipple, pull it taut. A stab of pleasure pain runs from the nipple like a current straight to my pussy. I feel more of my own arousal flood from within to coat my thighs. He swirls his tongue around my nipple once more before capturing the areola and sucking hard. My upper body arches from the bed. I put my arm around his neck for support. I’m pulling him into me, feeding myself to him. The room resounds with my feral moans. My voice has never sounded like this, but I’ve never felt like this.
“So sweet,” he says as his head moves to my other breast. The just released one tingles with a sweet ache. I’m writhing as its twin gets the same treatment.
I feel his fingers slip between my legs, feel them slide in just a fraction before encountering the sacred membrane that made me so valuable.
“Please,” I say, and part my legs. I’m offering myself to him, begging him. A week ago, I looked at my reflection and told myself that any man would be lucky to have me. Now I’ve all but put a neon fuck me sign above my head.
“Wait,” he says, and I hear amusement in his voice. “Greedy little virgin,” he adds, and I groan again, this time in frustration. “I’m not finished with the appetizers yet.”
He flips me over on my belly and moves the hair to the side. I feel his teeth sink into my shoulder, not hard, but the pressure is erotic. He licks and nibbles his way down my back, setting me alight. He nips the curve of my waist and then his hands are on either side of my hips. He bites my ass, taking a full mouthful of left cheek. I almost come. I’m so close, and grip the pillow in frustration.
I’m suddenly afraid. What if this is another tease? What if he’s going to just leave me hanging?
“Please,” I say again. “Please…” My vocabulary has been reduced to one word.
His huge hands part the halves of my bottom, and I’m too stimulated and wrecked with desire to even be as scandalized as I might otherwise be when he eats my pussy from behind and then moves up to rim my asshole with his tongue. And I do come now, hard. I scream and scream into the pillow, but he continues to torture me through the entire orgasm.
When he flips me back over, I’m dishrag limp.
“You’re being a good girl,” he says.
A good girl? I’m not doing anything, I want to say. I can’t do anything but squirm and feel and plea. But that seems to please him, and I’m starting to realize that this is dominance, that this is the helplessness he said he would show me.
“It’s time.” He moves between my legs, which fall apart in full invitation.
He’s careful, controlled. His hand slips between us. I feel the head of his cock pressing against me.
“Trust me?” he asks. “Do you trust me to take care of you, Maeve?”
“I… yes…” I nod. Because I do. I’m his. I have no choice but to trust him.
He shifts a bit and then covers my mouth with his as he drives home in one swift thrust. I scream into his throat as he bursts through my virgin barrier. The raw, burning sting is cruelly painful. I feel betrayed by the pain after such a buildup of pleasure. I start to struggle, but he holds me fast, sliding his mouth to my ear.
“Wait,” he says. “Just wait.” He’s embedded in me up to his balls, filling me beyond what I could have imagined. The part of me that ached for this moment now feels stung and stretched and hot. But then the pain recedes and my pussy begins to pulse around him. I almost smile from wonder. The pleasure that had been robbed with that one painful moment? It has returned. My eyes widen in surprise. He begins to move, slowly at first. He catches my hands in his, pulls them above my head, restraining me. My pussy pulses harder. I like the restraint. I like being held like this. My hips are moving. Why? It’s not conscious, but my body follows his lead in my maiden lover’s dance. The pulsing becomes a fresh wave of pleasure that crests and crests. He’s looking down at me. He calls me his good girl. He tells me I’m beautiful. He asks me how I like fucking.
I like fucking. I like it a lot. I come, and the cry this time is one of bliss and wonder. A moment later, his huge body shudders and I feel a flood rushing into me. Cum. His cum. He pleased me. I pleased him. I am no longer a virgin.