Bound by the Vampire Queen (Vampire Queen Novels (Quality))

  "What? No. I'm not ready--"

  God, what had he just done with his fingers? Her hand clamped on his leg like a vise, holding on as she leaned forward against the wave of sensation, so strong she had to fight back the climax. Her change in position made it worse, because it altered the angle of his penetration.

  "I'm going to sleep in your bed with you, Madison. I'm not going to fuck you. We'll brush our teeth, kiss one another good night . . ."

  The scissoring of his fingers, the rub of his thumb over her clit, was taking her to the edge. "Logan . . ." she pleaded.

  "I'm not finished. You'll wear this thong, nothing else, and fall asleep in my arms. I'll nurse a hard-on the size of Florida for being the dumbass who decided dealing with your intimacy issues was more important than sex."

  "Okay," she gasped. He cocked a brow.

  "I'm sorry? I'm not sure what you're saying okay to."

  "I promise to try . . . to have a real relationship with you. Please, Master." She caught his forearm then, trying to bring him to a stop, and those eyes became dark and still.

  "Move your hand, Madison. I decide when I stop, unless you're using a safe word."

  She should strangle it out, but that dark, pleasurable craving his Mastery triggered made her take her hand away, set her jaw, try her best to hold out against him. When he at last eased his fingers from her, he ran a fingertip over the edge of her margarita glass, collecting some of the salt. Bringing it to his lips, he tasted it and her with a look of feral satisfaction.

  "That's my baby."

  *

  She didn't care for the fact he was right, that him sleeping in her bed was far more frightening to her than anything else they'd done yet. If he'd suggested taking her to a PTA meeting and publicly fucking her in front of a bevy of appalled parents, she would have jumped at it faster.

  She'd cleaned the day before, which just proved her earlier point about why bachelors preferred going to the woman's house. When she made that acid observation, he just smiled. She was tense as a board when he took the keys from her and unlocked Alice's door, shepherding her through it with a firm hand on her lower back. She put her purse away in the front closet and tried to figure out how not to freak out.

  "Board games." He was standing behind her, looking up at the top shelf, where Alice had kept a collection of their childhood favorites. "Perfect."

  Nonplused, she watched him reach up and withdraw the tic-tac-toe beanbag toss, keeping her between him and his goal, so that he brushed against her back, a casually affectionate contact. Then he took her hand. "Let's go play in the yard."

  The insane man challenged her to a marathon of the game. At first he gallantly attributed her abysmal aim to her nerves, but even after he had her laughing and teasing him right back, she didn't improve. Most of her beanbags ended up in the flower beds. One even plopped into the man-made pond. At that point, he magnanimously gave her what he called a ladies' tee, half the distance he was tossing.

  "Good thing we aren't playing for stakes," she observed.

  "If we were, what would we bet?"

  "What would you bet?" She lifted a brow. "Let me guess. Something related to sex or female nakedity."

  "That's not a word. It's also profiling. If you insisted on sexual stakes, I wouldn't hold it against your gender."

  She laughed. "I'll bet. No pun intended. There. Hit two in a row. I'm getting better." Of course only one turned up her O; the other tipped the cube in favor of his X.

  "Feeling confident enough to wager?"

  She snorted, rolled her eyes. "Why not? Something within reason," she said hastily, seeing his speculative look.

  "Chicken. I win the next round, you give me a foot massage. While kneeling, while naked. Just for the aesthetics. Nothing sexual about it."

  "Of course," she agreed. "If I win, you vacuum my house. Shirtless, in your jeans. "Again, all aesthetics. Not sexual. Though if I decide to get excited watching you and want to occupy myself with a battery-operated boyfriend, you have to stick to your appliance while I enjoy mine."

  He narrowed those appealing brown eyes at her. "Not feeling performance pressure, are we?" she asked.

  "Not hardly."

  "First one to win her toss?"

  "Nice try." He grinned at that. "But I'll still give you an edge up. First one to knock over three consecutive blocks. Doesn't matter if it comes up X or O. I'll even let you go first, so if you win straight off, you win the bet."

  "Pretty fair. Also insultingly confident, thank you very much." She sniffed, joining him at his spot on the grass. "It seems only fair I do it on the same mark as you, since you're giving me such an advantage."

  At his shrug, she studied the board. Tossing the beanbag up a couple times like a pitcher on the mound won a grin from him. Then she did it in quick succession, no hesitation.

  One O, two O, three O. Straight across the center.

  She burst out laughing at the look on his face, the closest she'd ever come to seeing Logan Scott taken off guard. "Sorry. I couldn't resist. You were playing the big, strong man to the hilt. It was just too easy a mark."

  He eyed her. "How many years did you and Alice play this game to make you a world champion hustler?"

  "Quite a few. I was also good at baseball. The boys on the street always had me pitch for their team, because I was that good. Until my mother told me I was too old to play with boys anymore." She grimaced.

  "Alice never told me that."

  "Good. I was feeling like there was no mystery left to me."

  "She could have told me everything she ever knew about you, Madison, and you'd still be a chest of wonders to me." He snagged her around the waist, then, hiking her up his body so she curled her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders. "You are really tall," she observed, as he walked her up her back steps. "And really strong."

  "Trying to salve my male ego?"

  "How am I doing?"

  "Keep going. I'll let you know."

  She curled her arms around his shoulders, rested her head against the side of his, gratified when he increased the strength of his embrace. "I won't hold you to the bet. It was kind of cheating. But it would be really nice to see you vacuum my house in your jeans. Or nothing at all."

  "I might just do it for you. The jeans idea. I have an aversion to being around loud, sucking appliances with my tender parts dangling."

  When she chuckled at that, his arms tightened around her again. "I like making you happy, Madison. There's nothing I wouldn't do to make you smile, and to hear you laugh the way you do when you're playing and not worrying, or being sad about things." As he took them into the kitchen and let her feet down, he held on to her waist. She looked up at him, putting her hand on his face.

  "I'm bad at this part. It scares me."

  "I know. But you don't have to be scared of anything. As long as you're being honest with yourself and with me, there's nothing you can do wrong."

  "I didn't admit to it, but you're right. The one common denominator was me." She shook her head before he could say anything. "I'm not fishing for reassurance. I thought a lot about it, about the things I did do wrong, but I guess I didn't put it together until you said the thing about choice. And not just tonight. You've been hitting that point in different ways, intentional or not. I tried the sub thing with some of them, but I ended up feeling like a freak, or they took advantage of it in the wrong ways. For the last few relationships, I just kept it inside. I figured I could be submissive in ways that fed my need and didn't ask for anything active from them in that way."

  "Anything where you had to trust them to care for you," he said, with that shrewdness that was both one of his most appealing qualities and one of the most difficult, when it came to facing this part of herself.

  "I thought if I did all the right things, tried to figure out how to make them happy, that's all it would take," she said softly. "Like paint by numbers, just fill in the colors. I never really thought about what I wanted, if I love
d them, if I would have picked them out of a crowd and said, 'That's the one I want.'"

  She offered him a painful smile. "Alice tried to tell me once. She said, 'Madison, when you go to buy a pair of shoes, do you buy the first one the sales clerk thrusts at you? No, you don't. You shop. You look at the colors and styles, and wait to see which one tickles your fancy. You choose. You pick them out.' I ignored her, the way I tuned out so many things she said."

  "She was your older sister. It's a given that we ignore family advice."

  She nodded, but then she drew in a deep breath. Even so, the words still came out quiet, so quiet he had to bend his head and she had to repeat them.

  "I pick you, Logan. Whatever happens, for however long we get . . . I pick you. You're my choice."

  He raised his head, but not far, so their eyes were very close. Mouths, bodies, that aura that Alice said vibrated around everything close enough to merge. "Okay," he said. "And I get no choice in this at all?"

  Trust him to know the right thing to say, to help her not feel so terrified, so exposed. "None at all," she said staunchly. "I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is. Do you think . . ."

  When she trailed off, he touched her jaw, that way he had of making her say whatever foolish thing that came to mind. "Can you be just Logan tonight, and make love to me? Does it always have to be the Dom/sub thing? Is there an off switch?"

  She really was an idiot. It came out so wrong, she expected him to step back and close down. She'd just told him she didn't want him to be something he was 120% of the time. "I'm sorry," she added hastily, "I didn't mean it quite like that. It's just--"

  "Madison, look at me."

  When she lifted her gaze to him, his brown eyes were as attentive as ever. She didn't see anger, hurt or anything she'd feared. "Do you stop being a woman if you wear pants instead of a skirt?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "Exactly. You enjoy wearing both, right?"

  She nodded. His warm look loosened the band around her chest. "I am a sexual Dominant, yes," he said. "I'm also a man who is developing strong feelings for you, and those feelings aren't contained in one box. I wasn't going to have sex with you tonight, because I don't want you keeping us in that one box, avoiding the things that a fully fleshed-out relationship entails. You've just told me you don't want to avoid that."

  "So?" A different kind of feeling took hold of her as a wicked grin crossed his face.

  "So that means all bets are off."

  He caught her arm, dipped beneath it and slung her over his shoulder as she laughed outright, though that reaction was quickly turned into something else as he took her to the stairs, but not up to the bedroom. Instead he put her down on the stairs, turned her over onto her knees and covered her with his body, pulling up the skirt so he had one thigh inserted firmly between her legs. He put the other arm across her chest, held her there down beneath him as he put his mouth to her throat and bit. She moaned as he pushed her back against that thigh, working her against it.

  Yes, he could make love to her as Logan. But Logan, with or without the Master honorific, was a take-charge, overwhelming alpha lover, and he proved it now by making her utterly helpless to anything he desired in a matter of seconds. Reaching beneath her, he unzipped the skirt, pulled it off her hips, stripping her down to her thong. She'd borrowed one of his hardware store baby-doll tees to replace the one he'd ripped off of her, and now he worked his way beneath it, unhooking her bra.

  "Take it off. Leave the shirt on."

  She worked the straps off through the sleeves. When she remembered what she'd told Troy during their first session, that she thought Logan's preferred lingerie on a woman would be a T-shirt and thong, she would have smiled, if other things weren't taking precedence.

  Taking the bra from her, he set it aside. His hand on her back told her she was right where he wanted her as he backed down a couple steps. It was the perfect position to grip her thighs, spread them wider and tease her cunt through the crotch of the thong--with his heated mouth.

  She clawed the carpet on the stairs, moaning, driven wild by the way he suckled her clit, traced her labia with the firm pressure of his tongue, rubbed his face in her scent, marking himself with it. She pushed her hips up against him, arching her back, making it clear she was his for the taking in the way she expected female animals had done since the beginning of time. She was wild, suffused with the pleasure of the moment. No fear or worries.

  He pulled her panties to her knees and then she heard him opening his jeans. She could barely breathe. When he dropped the belt on the stairs next to her, her fingers curled over the strap, felt the bite of the buckle. His chest pressed into her shoulder blades, his breath at her ear.

  "I'll have you in your bed tonight, too. But I can't wait. I want you here first."

  To be wanted, desired so keenly he wouldn't deny himself . . . it was a gift she couldn't describe, a balm on every rejection that had ever battered her self-esteem into nothingness. "Can you do it . . . without the condom?"

  His arm cinched around her waist, so her bare ass was against his groin, still frustratingly behind fabric, though the jeans were open. Rubbing herself against the ridged friction of his glans, she made needy noises he answered with a growl.

  "I don't know, Madison. Can I?"

  He was saying he was safe. He was asking her the same, trusting her to be truthful with him. She doubted anyone short of God could lie to Logan Scott when he asked them a direct question.

  "Yes." She was protected from pregnancy, and the last man had been Leroy, well over two years and two annual physicals ago. "Please."

  He slid one finger along her wrist. "Madison, look down at your hands."

  It was hard to focus on anything beyond the throbbing need between her legs, but she obeyed. She saw she'd twisted his belt around her wrists, clasping the ends in her hands so it was as if she'd bound herself. When he'd stripped himself of the belt, her mind had been seized with the image of him binding her wrists with it, hooking it to the banister, holding her there as he fucked her mercilessly on the stairs. She'd acted on her own desires to see it happen, all within the turbulent heat of her subconscious.

  "It's not my switch you need to worry about turning off." He gave a dangerous chuckle, his hand closing over her wrists, tightening the hold of the belt and making her heart beat faster. Holding her like that with the one hand, he adjusted his clothes out of the way with the other and put his cock against her slick lips. "Push yourself back against me, Madison. I want to feel you impale yourself on my cock, and I want you to do it slow."

  Easier said than done. All she wanted was to slam back into him, alleviate this aching need but, by following his orders, that need grew to a greater intensity that shuddered through her with every inch she gained. When she was finally seated on him, her fingers were trembling and those delicate slick tissues were spasming, on the cusp of climax. She whimpered again as he reached beneath her with both hands, cradled her breasts. She arched, her hard nipples stabbing into his palms. "You stay still," he ordered. "Not a single move until I command it."

  With him tweaking her nipples, that was almost impossible, her hips jerking. She put her head down, trying to freeze her muscles, keep herself from reacting, but he made her lift it again, staying open to everything he did to her. Until her self-restraint was shattered, her hips grinding against his, body sinuously moving with the manipulation of his hands, a helpless dance.

  "Logan . . ."

  He pushed deeper into her, and his heavy testicle sac caressed her clit. She put her face down on the carpet again and this time he was rougher about it, tangling his fist in her hair to yank her head back up. He began to thrust in earnest, the other hand moving to her hip to hold her steady as he pumped into her. His cock stretched her, plowed deep, and she was crying out, near screaming at the pleasure of it.

  Just when she thought he was about to go over himself, he brought them to an abrupt halt. Before she could wail a protest, he'
d pulled out of her. Swinging her up into his arms, he carried her up the stairs, the belt still wound around her wrists. In her bedroom, he crossed the room, put her down on her back and removed the belt, dropping it to the floor with a clink of metal.

  Her gaze clung to him as he straightened and shed all of his clothes. She wished he'd turned on the light so she could devour with her eyes every curve and plane, every muscled ridge, the hard, stiff cock curving up over his testicles, but she shared and savored his urgency, wanting to feel even more than she wanted to see.

  Kneeling on the bed, he stripped off her T-shirt and thong. Holding her gaze still, he lay down upon her, body to body, flush against each other with nothing between but the emotions that saturated the air. She closed her eyes, absorbing the heat and strength of him, his weight pressing her into her mattress, his big body spreading her thighs as his hands guided her legs up and around his hips.

  A gasp and moan together broke from her lips as he slid back into her. Her hips undulated, accommodating his size and length again, taking him all the way. She made a different noise then, a quiet, feminine note of question and need both. Bracing his elbows on the outside of her shoulders, he cradled her face in his hands.

  "Put your hands on my arms, Madison. Hold on to me. Look in my face and know it's about way the hell more than restraints or commands."

  She could barely think at this point, but she found some part of her able to latch on to the words as if they were the most important ones ever spoken to her, even as she wasn't in a frame of mind to analyze them. She jumped from rationality to faith in his arms, and knew no fear. At least not in this moment.

  She lifted her chin as he stroked deep inside of her, bent to touch his lips to the line of her jaw. Sighing against his flesh, she gripped his incredible biceps. "I love the way you feel."

  "Same goes."

  The rhythm he set had her rising up to meet him, her teeth biting her lip, her legs locking over his hips, feeling the flex of his ass under her calves, the ripple of his thigh muscles under her ankles hooked over them. The friction of his chest hair against her nipples was just one searing pleasure among many. That feeling between her legs was growing even more concentrated, and she breathed his name against his skin, rearing up to bite his chest. One hand cupped her head, held her there. He braced their weights with one arm, increased the piston of his strokes. So close, so very close . . .