After walking in tense silence through the woods for fifteen minutes, he takes my long wool coat from me and hangs it over a low-hanging tree branch nearby. The trees here are tall and the dense canopy above us blocks out much of the early afternoon sunlight. It was already struggling to break through the thick clouds in the sky to begin with, this combined with the foliage makes it seem darker and later in the day than it really is.
In my simple jeans and lightweight gray pullover, I give my husband a questioning look. “Okay, now what?”
As a precaution, I check the surroundings for anything that he might be planning to ambush me with. With Emeric, I think it’s safe to always assume the unexpected from him. You never know what kind of crazy-ass shit he has up his sleeve. His behavior already seems off to me as it is. For a moment there while he held me against the door of the van, I swear he checked out for a minute. His gray eyes lost their focus, and they darted around like he was hearing something. This deviation in his demeanor didn’t last a full minute before he snapped back into his ol’ domineering self.
He comes to stand before me with a relaxed posture that is palpably artificial. The wild look in his gaze gives him away immediately.
Oh, so casually, he pushes up the sleeves of his waffle-knit Henley as his head cocks at me. “Now you run.”
My eyebrows lift and my crossed arms drop listlessly to my sides. “Excuse me?”
That wicked smirk of his makes an appearance. “You’re going to run and I’m going to chase you. If you find my cabin before I can get my hands on you, I will allow you to walk away without punishment. But, if I find you before you can reach your sanctuary, you will be completely at my mercy and you will accept everything I throw at you with a smile on your fucking face.”
Instantly, a chill of awareness snakes down my spine.
My tongue swipes out to lick my suddenly dry bottom lip. “What exactly do you plan to do if you catch me?”
His eyes darken as his grin grows. “I plan on making you beg for mercy.”
Haven’t we already been over this?
“I won’t beg.”
Emeric chuckles. “You will when I use and stretch you, and then leave you feeling empty and needy for more.” He takes a slow, easy step toward me. “I’m giving you a chance to evade your punishment if you can outrun me, but if you can’t, I’m fucking you until you’re so desperate to come, tears are running down your face, and your pussy is weeping for my cock.”
Oh. Holy mother of God.
My knees feel weak already and he hasn’t touched me yet.
“You’re not fucking me. Not right now, not after you had me abducted off the street and thrown into the back of a goddamn van with a bag over my head!”
“If you don’t want to get fucked, you better run. Fast,” he retorts sinisterly, completely unfazed by my refusal. “I own over one hundred and fifty acres of land, most of which is covered in trees just like this. It’s going to take you a while to reach the cabin—if you can find it, that is—but I’m willing to give you a head start. What do you think, does a minute sound fair to you?”
“Emeric…” I say as he looks at the expensive silver watch around his wrist.
“If you don’t want to end up on your hands and knees in the dirt with my cock buried so deep inside you that you can feel me in your chest, I recommend you start running, princess.” Gray eyes flick to mine. “Your time starts now.”
The adrenaline shooting through me is like a live wire. My skin hums and my heart thunders madly against my sternum.
“Emeric, you’re not hearing me. You’re not fuck—”
“You’re wasting time,” he tsks. “You have fifty seconds left.”
“This is ridiculous,” I continue to argue even though my feet are already moving me backward of their own accord and a thrill is shooting through me. “I told you no.”
Yeah, but did you honestly mean it, Rio?
I’ve said it before, but Emeric taking control and withholding my ability of choice from me does something to me. The very idea of him hunting me down and then taking what he wants from me has my body on the verge of convulsing and my insides turning into a puddle of horny goo. Not once in all my years of searching out things that scare me did a scenario like this ever cross my mind. Now, I know without a shadow of a doubt it’s not only something I want but something I need.
I nearly trip over my feet at the sight of the menacing expression darkening his face. For how many people was this the last face they saw before they died?
A shiver of fear joins the one of arousal already cascading down my body.
“And I told you that you weren’t permitted to leave the house alone and you did it anyway. I suppose we’re both ignoring each other’s wishes today.” His hand reaches into the back pocket of his dark jeans. The glint of metal catches in the minimal sunlight coming through the branches overhead. It’s the same switchblade he used on me after our motorcycle ride. “I hope you’re not attached to your clothes because when I find you—and I will always find you, Rionach—I’m cutting them off your body.” The sound of the blade swishing open has me inadvertently flinching and backing up another foot. Knife twisting in his palm, he reclaims the space I’d just put between us by taking a foreboding step in my direction. “You have less than forty seconds now. I’d get moving if I were you.”
The disconnect my brain has been having with my body finally catches up.
Twisting on the balls of my feet, I take off between the trees like a skittish deer. If I wasn’t splitting my focus between searching for signs of the cabin and making sure my path is clear of any tripping hazards, I might find this animal analogy amusing. In our current predicament, it’s more than fitting. Emeric is a predator, and I am his frightened prey.
I run as fast as my legs will take me. Even when I hear him start to charge through woods behind me, I don’t stop, and I don’t dare look behind me to see how close he is.
The entire time I dart between the good-sized tree trunks, I curse myself for not paying better attention to my surroundings when I first got here and when Emeric was leading me deeper and deeper into the woods.
On gut feeling alone, I keep heading straight on my chosen path, hoping and praying that I’ll get lucky.
A twig snapping not too far behind me has my heart skipping a beat and my stomach clenching to the point of pain. Knowing I won’t have a chance at evading him as long as I’m in his direct line of sight, I push my legs to go faster before ducking behind the thick trunk of a cottonwood tree.
Spine pressed to the rough bark, my chest heaves for my next breath. Not wanting to give away my position by letting him hear my unpleasant and slightly embarrassing wheezing, I force my chest to inhale and exhale painfully slow lungfuls of oxygen.
His steady footfalls crunching in the dirt slow down as he draws closer to the area I’m hiding in.
As gently as I can, I take measured steps to slowly ease to the other side of the tree so I can avoid detection if he stalks by. The quiet—but noticeable—snap of a small stick below my right sneaker has every nerve ending in my body lurching. I turn into a piece of stone as I wait to see if he heard it too.
My gaze anxiously darts between my left and right to make sure he’s not creeping around to apprehend me.
I hold my breath and listen to my surroundings. Rustling movement a little ways away from the tree I’m using as cover tells me I have a couple seconds before he’s close enough to successfully sneak up on me. This allows me to relax just enough that I’m once again able to form coherent thoughts and create a plan for my next course of action.
There’s still no sign of this cabin. As far as I can see in any direction there are only trees and the occasional shrub. Emeric said he owns over a hundred acres of land. For all I know, he’s dumped me in the farthest corner of the property from the cabin. He doesn’t play games he can’t win, and what better way to get what he wants than to set me up for failure?
You’ve been standing here for too long. Move!
On a steadying exhale, I dart out from behind the safety of the large tree and head in the direction that is more eastbound than my original trajectory. My plan is to run this way for a while and once I’ve put some space between us, I’ll swing back and continue down the first path I was on. One of these directions has to be right—
He moves like a dark blur—a phantom—between the trees and by the time I realize he’s found me, his strong arms are wrapping around my middle. His hold is steadfast and it almost hurts with the way he compresses my ribs. Half a second later, my world is spinning rabidly. We’re going down. Emeric takes the brunt of the fall as we land on the dirt and leaf-covered forest floor.
Before my brain has a chance to catch up with the change in our position, Emeric is rolling us again. This time he ends up above me, straddling the backs of my thighs. Instinctually, I immediately try to get up but his hand shoving into the middle of my back locks my torso in place.
I thrash and kick my legs beneath him like I’m a bull and he’s the idiot in the cowboy hat and matching chaps I want to buck the fuck off me.
“Argh!” I scream in frustration. “Get off of me!”
“No. I quite like the view from up here.”
I twist and turn my body, trying my best to dislodge him.
The cold edge of a blade pressing into the vertebra of my exposed spine because of my askew pullover has the fight going silent inside me. One by one, he drags the sharp tip over each bone of my spine and as he does, he pushes my top farther up my back. He pauses when he reaches the band of my bra. It’s a simple cream silk today, and just like the last time we played with a knife, he cuts the smooth fabric from my body without pause.
The switchblade slashes through the cotton of my gray pullover next. From the back of my neck to the hem of the shirt, he slices it all the way open. The cool early Spring air bites into my exposed and heated skin as he starts to press open-mouthed kisses down my back.
I’m angry he caught me so fast, but I’m more frustrated by how my body reacts to him—how easily it yields. He incites a desperate kind of need in me, even when I don’t want him to. Logically, I know I should hate being stuck beneath him, but there’s just something about him taking my choice away that has my blood running molten.
Refusing to give in to him or my unexplainable reaction to being captured, I fight against his hold with a newfound vigor when I hear the knife thudding to the ground next to us. It takes everything in me to do it, but I manage to roll over and topple him off my thighs. With an almost animalistic snarl, I slash my hand out at his face and feel an odd—but not entirely unwelcome—sense of triumph when my nails rake across his upper cheekbone. I don’t wait around long enough to see how deep the wound is before I kick my legs and shove my body the rest of the way out from under his weight. I manage to pull myself upright and onto my knees, a shift in position that has the shreds of my bra and top falling completely off my shoulders.
I’ve just managed to get a foot underneath me to stand when his hand wraps around my ankle and yanks. I tumble forward and my chest and elbows hit the cold, hard earth with an oof.
“I love your fight, princess,” he purrs as he knots his fingers through the loose strands at the back of my head. Pulling my hair tight, he presses the side of my face into the dirt and leaves beneath me as he straddles my hips. As he does this, he grinds his rock-hard arousal into the roundness of my ass. It’s a move that has both of us choking on groans and my thighs pressing together like my life depends on it. “But I think I love it more when you submit to me.”
His mouth closes over my shoulder in a hot kiss. I relax into the contact for all of two seconds before his teeth sink into the skin there. He doesn’t bite me hard enough to actually break the skin, but it’s enough that I know I’m going to have a mark there tomorrow. And maybe the next day, too.
The idea of wearing his claiming mark has me trying and failing to bite back a soft moan.
In quick succession, he removes his weight from my body and pulls me up onto my hands and knees. The rocks and debris in the damp dirt below me dig into my palms. The dull pain nearly vanishes completely when his fingers wrap around the waistband of my jeans and he wrenches them—along with my thong—down my ass and thighs. In this position, this is the farthest he can get them down my legs, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem for him because the part of me he wants to play with is fully bared to him.
There’s no teasing or slow buildup.
His thick, long fingers push inside of me, and he lets out a growl of approval when he discovers I’m already wet for him. Emeric should know by now it doesn’t take much for him to turn me on. He’s seemingly unlocked something inside of me and by doing so, he’s set free that hidden piece I’ve kept tucked away from others. Not only has he found a way to access the secret side of my soul, but he also gets along with it oh-so very well. I can’t help but aimlessly wonder if that piece of me was simply waiting to come out until I met Emeric. That it was made for him.
This fast and fleeting thought disappears just as quickly as it entered my head when his fingers, coated in my arousal, graze over my swollen clit.
I didn’t fully realize how far gone I already was until the walls of my pussy begin to flutter and my inner muscles tighten as an impending orgasm threatens to erupt. He keeps working me, alternating between sliding his thick digits into me and then around my sensitive bundle of nerves until my very being is quivering.
“Oh, fuck!” I cry out, not bothering to try and stay quiet out here in the woods. “I’m so close… I’m going to come.”
My breath quickens into uneven pants and my entire body tremors as it prepares to topple over that heavenly edge. It would seem Emeric has other plans because when I’m one mere caress away from exploding around his digits, he pulls them out of my greedy core and withholds his touch completely.
“Good girls are rewarded with orgasms,” he explains, sounding way too pleased with himself for my liking. “Bad girls are deprived of what they need, and you, my dear wife, have been a very bad girl.”
His palm comes down on my right ass cheek in a blow that has my back bowing and my breath catching in my throat. It hurts, and yet, a choked moan escapes me and the walls of my pussy clench.
“Maybe this will have you thinking twice about putting yourself in danger in the future.” He spanks the left side of my ass with the same kind of ferocity as before. The strangled cry that claws out of my throat is interrupted with a mewling sound when his attention returns to my humming center. My face burns when I can hear just how wet I am for him as he slips his fingers back inside. “Your cunt is ravenous for my touch, isn’t it, Rionach?”
“Y… yes,” I sob. His thumb pressing down on my overly sensitive clit has what feels like electricity shooting through every nerve of my body. “Please.”
“Please, what?” he taunts, his skilled fingers not letting up.
“Please, let me come.”
“Look at you, asking so nicely.” His admiration is nothing but another taunt, but my body doesn’t seem to care. It likes being praised by him. Emeric continues to tease me and as he does, that ball of tension returns in my lower stomach. It pulses and grows with every stroke of his fingers. I’m once again teetering on the cusp of ecstasy when his dark chuckle washes over me and joins the shivers already dancing across my skin. “But no, I don’t think I will. Not until I can be sure you’ve learned your lesson.”
He leisurely pumps two fingers into my soaked channel twice more before removing his hand again.
“No!” My hands claw frantically into the ground and tears of desperation leak from my tightly closed eyes. “Emeric, please. I’ve learned my lesson. I learned it when I thought I’d been fucking kidnapped.”
The sound of his jean’s zipper lowering tickles my eardrums.
“You haven’t learned shit until I’m sure you’ve experienced the same level of desperation as I did when I didn’t know where you were this morning.”
Another pang of guilt that I’d forced those kinds of emotions onto him by leaving tugs at my chest.
“I wasn’t running away from you this morning. I wasn’t leaving you.” I don’t know why I have the sudden urge to make sure he knows this, but something in my chest tells me it’s important he hears it. It’s the stone-cold truth, after all. Since we’ve been married, not once has the thought of leaving him crossed my mind. It probably should have. For a normal person, I’m sure they would have been forming an escape plan since the moment they were forced into saying “I do”, but I haven’t because I don’t hate being Emeric Banes’s wife.
My very soul shudders and shakes when the long, thick length of Emeric’s cock slips through the wetness between my thighs. I’m incapable of making a single noise. My mouth just parts in a silent gasp, and I just about come out of my very skin when the head knocks against my aching clit. I know he knows what he’s doing to me when he does it again. Twice.
“It doesn’t matter if that had been your plan because I’m not fucking letting you go, Rionach. Ever. You can run and I will chase after you. You can try to escape to the ends of the earth, and I will follow you there. I will follow you anywhere. Do you know why?” He doesn’t bother waiting to hear my answer. “Because. You. Are. Mine.”
I’ve never been claimed by someone as much as I have been by Emeric, and I don’t just mean in a sexual way. He tells me every chance he gets that I belong to him. It makes me feel wanted in a way I’ve never felt before. Since my birth, my parents had been searching for who they would pass me off to when the time came.
They never wanted me. They wanted what they could get for me. I wasn’t a child nurtured with love. I wasn’t cherished. I was simply a bargaining chip in a game I didn’t want to play.
Emeric doesn’t just desire me, he wants me. Just… me.
The fear in his voice and expression today solidified that for me, and something about this knowledge has my emotionally neglected inner child settling. The little girl who just wanted to be wanted is finding peace because of Emeric Banes.
“I know,” I whisper breathlessly to him.
“Do you?” He punctuates his question with another slicing thrust through my pussy lips.
“Yes.”
His hands take hold of my hips. “Say it. Tell me so I know you understand who you are.”
I turn my head, making my long, debris-covered hair fall over one bare shoulder. I need to look him in the eyes as I tell him, “I am yours.”
Those storm-filled eyes of his have bolts of lightning flashing in them when he nods his head once in approval and growls, “Yes, only mine.”
Without warning or preamble, he drives into me in one long, punishing thrust. He doesn’t give me time to recover or to adjust to his intrusion either, he slices into me again and again with rapid, breath-stealing movements. All I can do is lock my muscles in place and dig my fingers into the damp dirt below me in a desperate attempt to hold on.
The orgasm that has been threatening to go off since he first touched me minutes ago awakens in the depths of my lower stomach. It builds and grows at a speed I can’t keep up with. Waves of heat that originate from between my thighs race through my body like licks of flames. The inferno continues to expand and I’m nearing the point of no return when Emeric’s hand slaps my already tender ass cheek again and he pulls out, leaving only the thick crown of his cock inside.
“No.” His order comes out sounding more animalistic than human. “This isn’t about you. I already told you bad girls don’t get rewarded for their disobedience.”
“I’m sorry.” I don’t bother hiding the despair in my tone. It’s not a secret anyway. This is the third time he’s brought me to the brink and then denied me. He’s fully aware I’m hanging on by a fucking thread. “I was being careless when I left without you. It was dangerous. I know that now and I won’t do it again.”
He thrusts shallowly, taunting me with his gentle strokes. “I know you won’t, because you’re going to remember this punishment, and what it feels like to be left painfully wanting.”
Emeric’s hand wraps around my throat. He pulls me up until my bare back presses against the cotton shirt still covering his chest. This position has him sinking deeper into me and my head lolling back against his shoulder. His hips start to flex upward, creating slow but achingly deep thrusts.
The hold he has on my neck may remain loose, but there’s still no doubt who’s in control here. Where he could easily increase pressure and threaten my air supply like he’s done in the past, he doesn’t. The pad of his thumb swipes across my pulse point in a way I find endearing.
“Emeric,” I whimper, the frantic tears from before reemerging and falling down my face in warm drops when I squeeze my eyes closed. “Please. I’m so close.”
He ignores my plea and continues to pound into me. This new angle has the head of his cock scraping against the sensitive front wall of my pussy, which has stars starting to form in my vision.
“Refrain,” he grumbles in my ear before his teeth close over the silver hoops decorating my earlobe. “If you allow yourself to come now, I’ll be forced to do this over and punish you again. You don’t want that, now do you?”
Oh, God no. I can’t do this again.
My cry of anguish rings through the trees. To my own ears, it sounds like a pathetic wail. I told him I wouldn’t beg, and I’ve been doing just that, but it didn’t work. He’s not interested in relenting this time. No, he wants me to suffer.
It takes every ounce of concentration and all the shaky willpower I have left to not cross that line. It would be so easy to allow myself to fall into the white-hot pleasure beckoning me, but I fight against its invitation because I don’t think I would make it if he made us start this over. As it is, I’m already a painfully exposed nerve.
I’m full-on sobbing by the time Emeric’s fluid thrusts become uneven and erratic. The hand resting on my hip digs into the flesh there and the hand at my throat shifts upward to grasp my jaw. He turns my head, and his mouth closes over mine in a messy and nearly violent kiss. I’m fairly certain the groan of pleasure that rumbles up from his chest could sustain me for life. Like a woman starved, I swallow the sound and match it with one of my own when his hot cum fills me.
Our ragged breathing is in sync as he presses his forehead to mine. My heated face is wet from tears, and I’m caked in dirt and mud, but the look of approval in those gray eyes makes me feel beautiful. More importantly, they make me feel wanted. And that’s all I’ve ever needed.
