Page 21 of Bound and Branded

I think about that word, and all that it means. I think about how dangerous he feels – how dangerous he’s always felt. The wolf in the woods who eats young women for breakfast – how very fitting. I remember reading somewhere that the wolf in fairy tales is a metaphor for predatory men who want to steal women’s chastity.

And those stories were meant to teach women to run away. To protect themselves. Protect their virtue. It’s a special kind of idiocy to put yourself right in the path of the ravening beast, I think.

But here I am.

He moves almost silently, and I sneak a glance and realize he’s taken his boots off. His hat is gone too. He walks to the dresser and turns on a diffuser, a cloud of vapor rising up out of it as a faint lavender scent fills the room.

He opens a drawer, the slide almost silent, and I watch him as he takes out three coils of red rope and sets them on the surface of the dresser. I remember what he sent me in the text.

He said that for our first scene he wants to tie my hands and arms, and make it so I can’t move. Make it so I can’t escape him when he takes me.

In my imagination, that was a hot, furtive, desperate act, but watching him now as the music swells around us, chimes and strings and sounds designed to soothe, not frighten, it feels incongruous.

He picks up one of the coils of rope, moving his hands over it methodically, as if he’s testing the length and the weight of it. Need slams into me, hot and hard. I want him to touch me. This is torture. This makes me feel like running away. Looking at Caleb Flynn—the man I’ve sworn to hate for all eternity—barefoot and handling that rope while he looks at me in my underwear—planning, watching, calculating—is the single most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had.

At the same time, I feel oppressivelyinmy body. I feel like I’m so aware of every part of myself I want to unzip my skin and run away.

Instead I stand rooted to the spot. Waiting.

He sent me his physical plans, but there’s still so much I don’t know. Will he talk to me? Roleplay? Will he kiss me?

I want to kiss him. I want to lean in and have him wrap his arms around me. Get familiar with the taste of him, touching him.

He moves closer to me and for one moment I think that might be what he means to do.

Then he reaches behind me, takes ahold of my braid and tugs. Hard. “Down,” he says. “On your knees.”

I obey without a second thought, the pleasure/pain intersection where he’s holding my braid tight has my chest tightand my clit throbbing with need. My eyes water as I make it all the way down to where he’s ordered me. He releases his hold on my hair and it falls heavy down my back.

“Good,” he says, his tone low and almost soothing. Reassuring. That puts me even more on edge, because he’s never beensoothingorreassuringto me in my life.

He moves around behind me and I look down at his feet as he does. He pauses and undoes the clasp on my bra, letting it fall loose down my arms. Then he continues the slow rotation around me, coming to the front and pulling it away, a low growl reverberating in the back of his throat as he tugs it free, leaving me exposed to him.

Then suddenly I’m being lifted up off the ground and my instinct is to thrash against him, to fight as he pulls me against his rock hard chest. I’m not scared, and I don’t want to use my safe word, but I want to resist him. I want to do something with the overwhelming energy building inside of me.

And this feels right.

His arms are uncompromising. They might as well be made of iron. I’m so weak against him, like that night he caught me on his property and took hold of me, holding me fast. It all blends together – that night and now – and I manage to wiggle up over his shoulder and then find myself crashing down onto the mattress, his big body over the top of mine, his hands pinning my wrists down to the mattress.

“You can fight all you want, Dove. It’s not going to get you anywhere.”

He pauses then. Waiting. I know he’s waiting for me to use the word. Giving space to the fact that the game took a turn, but I told him already I wanted this. I really had no idea how much I wanted it.

He’s so hot hard and over me, and I arch up against him, feeling his hard cock against my thigh as he pushes me downdeep into the mattress. Then he rises up and grabs my braid with one hand, his other hand splayed on my hip as he turns me over onto my stomach. I make it easy for him, moving with him as I instinctively try to minimize the pain from him pulling my hair.

My heart beats hard against the mattress, against my breastbone.

“I can’t do this to you on the floor,” he says, moving away from me. “Yet. You don’t have the stamina for it. Hold still.”

I can feel him get off the bed. My cheek is resting against the mattress, I can’t see him, but I can hear him moving.

He grips the back of my underwear and drags them down my legs, a satisfied sound in the back of his throat making me squirm. He wraps his arm around my waist and lifts me up slightly, and I try to follow his lead, my face still on the mattress, my ass in the air.

“Like that,” he says. “Let me see that pussy.”

I widen my stance just slightly and hope I’m doing what he wants. God, how weird is it that I want to please him?

“I’m going to bind your hands,” he says.

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