Vagrant Read online

  “Jax is going to be there for this, isn’t he?”

  He caught a teardrop on his thumb and dipped it between his lips. “You threatened to shoot him,” was all he said before shutting the door.

  Answer enough. He started the ignition, and I watched with growing dread as my house faded in the distance. At some point, I dozed off, my head lopsided on my neck and resting against the cool glass. By the time he silenced the engine, my shoulders were on fire from being restrained.

  He helped me from the rig and circled behind me. “Close your eyes,” he said, shuttering my vision with his hands. Slowly, he pushed us forward, and the instant we stepped onto the dock and it swayed, my stomach took a nosedive.

  “Rafe!”

  “I’ve got you,” he said, tightening his hold. “Almost there.” We shuffled a few more feet, our shoes gliding over the slick dock. With a steady hand, he helped me onto the boat. The whole time, I kept my eyes sealed shut. We descended the stairs, and only then did I open them to find Jax waiting in the galley with his arms crossed.

  Rafe gestured for me to sit down, and when Jax saw my cuffed hands, he grinned. At least he had the grace not to say anything about it.

  He passed Rafe a small bag. “Instructions are in there.”

  “I won’t even ask how you got your hands on this.”

  “I know people. Contraceptives are easy as fuck to get when you’ve got contacts in the sex trade.”

  “Yeah, I don’t need the reminder of your underground contacts, but thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “Everything ready?”

  “You bet it is.” Jax flexed his hands, eyes raking over me, and not in a lascivious way, but in an I’m gonna make you pay way.

  “Rafe, what are you gonna—”

  He placed two fingers over my lips. “You don’t talk. You follow orders. If you need to cry or scream, I’m fine with that. But not a word until I say so.” He removed his fingers and leaned down, close enough that his breath fanned over my trembling lips. “When we’re done, I’ll give you your three questions.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he was pissed because I’d disobeyed him, or because I’d talked him into giving me the fucking truth after he finished taking his pleasure from my pain and humiliation. I wanted to ask, wanted to beg him to tell me what they planned to do, but he wasn’t messing around now. He meant every word. Somehow, I knew he was going to hurt me beyond anything I’d ever experienced. This punishment would transcend all others.

  I bit my lip to keep from opening my damn mouth. He was being gentle with me, but an undercurrent of anger flowed into the room, coming off him and Jax.

  I’d made a colossal mistake by running.

  “Go into the bedroom and bend over the end of the bed. Don’t move, no matter how much time passes.”

  Swallowing hard with a loud gulp, I rose and dragged my reluctant feet into the bedroom. I bent over the mattress and winced from the deep ache in my shoulders. And I waited.

  Eventually, they made their presence known. Rafe set the bag Jax had given him on the dresser, then he moved behind me and kicked my feet apart. He released my hands from the metal cuffs and bound them together with rope. Lifting my arms behind me, he tethered my wrists to the anchor in the ceiling. I let out a screech of pain through gritted teeth.

  Jax removed my shoes and tied down my ankles to the rings in the floor. I couldn’t close my legs. I couldn’t lift my shoulders off the bed because doing so hurt too much. They had me spread and helpless. Just like they wanted me. My pulse skittered at my throat, increasing until it blasted my chest with pain.

  No way out.

  “You’re fucking stubborn and reckless,” Rafe said, lifting my skirt, trailing his hands up my exposed bare bottom. He tucked the material around my hips and under my belly. I shivered as he gripped my ass with unforgiving fingers. “I won’t stand for it.” He returned to the dresser and picked up a bowl. “What if Zach had been waiting?”

  A rhetorical question since I wasn’t allowed to speak, but hell if I didn’t want to ask what was in that bowl.

  “You put yourself at risk by leaving Jax’s protection. You put all of us at risk by taking my gun. Now you’re gonna pay for it.” Water sloshed, and a few seconds later, something hard and cold pressed against my rectum. He hadn’t lubed me first. Oh God. The pressure increased, and I clenched my teeth to keep from opening my mouth.

  The smooth object passed the point of burning, giving me a reprieve, and I breathed through my nose in intense relief. Soft footsteps retreated, and I sensed him watching me, his gaze burning a wave of heat over my backside. If he ran his finger up my slit, he’d find it embarrassingly wet. Shit, I might be dripping all over the floor, for all I knew, since my thighs had been forced wide open.

  Whatever he’d inserted grew warm, giving me a feeling of fullness that hurt and aroused. But then the sensation amped hotter…hotter still.

  It fucking scorched.

  “Take it out!” I screamed, clenching my bottom, but that only made the burn intolerable.

  Rafe removed his belt from a drawer, looped it in a fist…then he fucking offered it to Jax. “Unless you’d rather use your hand. Either is fine with me.”

  “No! Please, Rafe—” My voice cut out on a sob.

  “I’ll use my hand,” Jax said.

  Rafe leaned against the dresser, arms crossed, right in my direct line of view. “He’s gonna spank you ten times, babe, and if you say another fucking word, I’ll make it double.”

  Oh god, my rectum blazed—was the most intense pain I’d experienced in my life. The sting of Jax’s hand wouldn’t compare. At the thought of Jax touching me, shame as hot and as swift flushed my skin. My traitorous pussy throbbed in tandem with the agony. I couldn’t control my body, and I wanted to now, more than ever.

  Pain is pleasure.

  My body was whacked.

  “What’d you put in there?” I demanded, despite Rafe’s gag order.

  Rafe closed the distance, bent over, and swept his tongue over my cheek. “Ginger,” he said, voice raw with arousal. “If you can’t be quiet and take your punishment, I will gag you.” When he returned to his spot in front of the dresser, the bulge in his pants had grown even bigger.

  “Give her twenty, whenever you’re ready,” he told Jax with a wave of his hand.

  I wasn’t ready.

  Jax brought his hand down, and I bit on my lip hard until I tasted blood, but I still couldn’t keep from clenching the muscles in my ass.

  “Ahhh!” The more I cried out, the harder Jax spanked me.

  And the wetter I became.

  Rafe inched the waistband of his sweats lower, taking his time, his fingers moving in slow motion…at least, they seemed to. I became obsessed with that torturous slide of material, my concentration stuck on what lay beyond. The strikes receded in my mind. My world narrowed to Rafe’s cock as he whipped it out and pumped a determined fist up and down his smooth shaft.

  “Eyes up here.”

  I raised my gaze to his. Holy shit. His eyes were the greenest of green, turned deep from arousal. Suddenly, I didn’t care that I was sprawled out for Jax to beat. Suddenly…the retribution he took from my skin made sense. I’d pointed a gun at him, left him handcuffed, and had taken off like a brat. Didn’t matter how fucked up my logic was. If watching another man punish me made Rafe look at me like that, then it was worth it.

  The burn in my ass subsided during the last couple of minutes though my skin tingled from where Jax’s palm landed over and over again. Eventually, the swats ceased, and Rafe carefully removed the ginger. I let out a noisy sigh of relief.

  It was over. Except…

  Was Rafe snickering?

  “You’d better brace yourself.” Footsteps sounded, water sloshed again…

  Oh no.

  He inched another piece into my tender hole, and I started whimpering as I realized what I was in for. I questioned my earlier assessment as I waited for
the burn to once again ignite. It wasn’t over at all—Rafe was just warming up.

  I’d seen Alex in so many positions, so many situations. Some perversely fucked up—the kind that brought swift shame because my cock had gotten hard when it shouldn’t have…such as in that tunnel when Cleft forced her mouth on me.

  But this…

  Seeing her bound, her body covered in sweat and unable to squirm without inducing an intense scorch in her ass, this was my twisted version of heaven. I never thought I’d get so worked up over examining the marks left on her ass by another man.

  I clenched the belt, adrenaline coursing through my veins, and ached to bring the strap down on that canvas of beautiful, painful pink.

  “Apologize to Jax for pulling my gun on him.” She sniffled, attempting to hold back her sobs. “Go on, Alex. I give you permission to speak now.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I blasted the leather across her ass. “Not what I had in mind, sweetheart.”

  “Take it out! You’ve had your fun.”

  “No. Jax had his fun. Now it’s my turn, but you’re gonna tell him sorry first.”

  “I’m sorry,” she bit out, her tone suggesting she was anything but. I whipped her thighs this time. She jumped, then screamed from the amped up severity.

  “Fucking…Rafe!” She flexed her hands in the cuffs, stiffened her legs, but God help her—she didn’t dare clench her ass. “I’m sorry!”

  “Sorry for what?” I trailed the strap over her reddened cheeks, enjoying how her legs quivered.

  “For taking your gun.”

  “And?”

  “For pulling it on Jax. I won’t do it again.”

  I dropped the belt on the bed, and when I laid my palms on her warm bottom, she jumped again, letting out a hiss of pain between gritted teeth. But when I slipped a finger into her cunt, I found it soaked. Her body mystified me, entranced me, owned me right to the tip of my cock.

  “You don’t have to stick around for this,” I told Jax, sensing him lingering from the corner of my eye.

  He shifted, gaining my attention, and leaned against the wall with his shoulders slumped. “Mind if I watch?”

  I grasped my belt once more and shuffled back a few steps. “Go ahead.” But would he mind? Would watching me with Alex be too much for him? I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t want to make things worse by implying he leave either.

  “You’re getting twenty more,” I told Alex. “And you’re gonna count them.” Jax had gone easy on her. I wouldn’t, not after the hell she’d put me through yesterday. He’d left her ass a beautiful shade, using nothing more than the angry palm of his hand. But I planned to leave welts—the kind of reminder that she was mine. As I brought down that belt for real this time, my bicep bulging in delivering a brutal crack, I probably hated myself more than she did, because her cry of agony rushed through my blood in a deplorable way.

  “Count.”

  “One!” she shouted, fury drenching that single word. Even though her cunt was dripping, she still had the mind to be furious with me.

  Hell, I loved her even more for it. Her fire, her spitting-nails spirit—she was the strap of leather that kept me in line. I tempered the beast inside me, and for the next few minutes, the world faded; it was just her, me, and the strikes of my belt that captured us in a bubble no force on Earth could penetrate. I was so caught up in the way she responded, transfixed by the lines crisscrossing her bottom, I almost forgot Jax was in the room with us, standing just outside our bubble.

  I let loose another whack, but she failed to count. I rounded the bed and found her staring, unseeing, eyes glazed. Nearly unreachable. I lapped at her tears, running a palm over her hair, and gently grounded her. She sucked in a deep breath, sudden alertness widening her watery eyes.

  “You okay?” How ludicrous a question, but I needed to know I wasn’t pushing her too far. Though the idea that I hadn’t, that maybe I never could push her beyond what she could handle, reeled me in, threatening to send me to the darkest corners of my mind. She was my fucking dream come true.

  “I’m confused,” she said.

  “You’re on eleven.”

  “No, I mean…I need to come…but it hurts too much.”

  I hadn’t been certain how ginger would affect her, but apparently, it was intolerable in its burn…intolerable in other ways too.

  It was fucking perfect.

  “Eleven,” I reminded her.

  She blinked then recited, “Eleven.”

  I returned to my spot behind her vulnerable ass, widened my feet, and prepared to deliver number twelve. As I did so with my cock strutting its stuff, standing proudly above my shoved down sweats, motion caught my attention from the corner of my eye.

  Jax wasn’t staring at Alex or even the belt I fisted. He fastened his gaze on my cock, hastily unbuttoned his pants and lowered the zipper, and his hand went to work. His eyes darted to mine for a second—less than a fucking second—before he dropped his gaze.

  And I realized he felt awkward, maybe even ashamed for ogling me, for being turned on by watching. Strangely, I didn’t feel the same way. I might have before we’d shared a cell for three years, but we’d had so little privacy in that cramped space, there wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen.

  He’d been there all the times I’d curled into a ball, muffling my trauma into the pillow as my ass flamed from a slew of intruding cocks. He’d sat with me silently, not touching, just being there and listening as I tried to hold it in but couldn’t.

  He’d given me his understanding without saying a word.

  Though, at the time, I hadn’t understood how he could grasp even a sliver of the tormented headspace I’d fallen into. But now, having seen firsthand how he’d been raised…he’d known more about it than he’d let on.

  I struck Alex again, and her muttered thirteen broke the trance for me. Though not for Jax. His head fell back against the wall, his lids at half-mast, mouth parted as he pumped his cock.

  I eyed Alex’s reddened skin, yearning to watch her squirm for the last seven lashes, but she wouldn’t do that as long as the ginger tamed her movement. I worked it from her rectum, making her hiss in a breath, and for the final leg of her punishment, I put extra strength into those strikes.

  She shrieked. She bucked. She cried. She pleaded for me to stop. She begged for me to keep going. I sent her spiraling through her mind, unable to stop tumbling head over end. Dropping the belt at my feet with a loud thump, I stood directly behind her, rubbing my cock between the valley of her ass cheeks.

  “Baby,” I ground out between clenched teeth. Oh shit…

  I’d lost my grasp on control. Two rough pumps of my hand spelled the end of me, and I spilled all over her backside. Breathing way too fucking fast, I pummeled her cunt with one hand and rubbed my cum into her silky smooth skin with the other. This took the idea of finger painting to new heights. She arched her spine, screeching a plea for mercy that collided with Jax’s quiet grunts of release.

  And my dick wasn’t done yet, apparently. A sexually charged dungeon of sin existed between these walls, and I was the warden. Before I made the mistake of thrusting into her, I released her arms and legs with jittery fingers, drawing noisy breaths that surely sucked all the fucking oxygen from the room.

  Jax sent me a stricken expression before he left without saying a single word. Shit. After this, we would have stuff to deal with, but right now I had my hands full. Literally. I couldn’t keep them off her gorgeous ass.

  She’d spread her arms out like wings, spent from the torment I’d unleashed onto her body, but also panting with the need to come. She pushed her ass even further into my palms, moaning, practically begging me to fuck her.

  “Please,” she gasped. “I need to come. Don’t leave me like this.”

  I wanted to give her what she wanted; my cock inside her and the air splintering with her cries of pleasure. But this was meant to be a punishment, and I’d already fucked up once when it came to h
er. I strode to the dresser, grabbed the white bag Jax had given me, and pulled out the instructions.

  “Says here I can’t fuck you bareback for a few days.” I let out a low curse. “I’m not about to knock you up.” I helped her to her feet, and something about the way her skirt cascaded to shield her body irritated the fuck out of me. I wanted to rip that flowing material to shreds. Instead, I shoved the bag and the paper into her shaking hands then twirled her around toward the bathroom. “I want you on those pills pronto. And be sure to take the morning after pill too. Get cleaned up,” I ordered, smacking her ass.

  Go, I mentally screamed, before I did something stupid…again.

  The faint sound of the bathroom door sliding shut clued me into his presence. I closed my eyes and let the shower spray run down my face, washing away my tears, hoping it would drive away the filth corrupting every inch of my body and soul.

  I hated him.

  No…I wanted to hate him. But he was Rafe Mason, the one man capable of possessing me. He could get away with murder, and I’d forgive it. I circled myself in the shelter of my arms, attempting to create a fortress even he couldn’t bypass. What a joke. I failed to crack from being used and beaten—instead, I crumbled when denied the privilege of getting off on it.

  God that was messed up on so many levels.

  “Are you okay?” Apology laced his words. Rafe the gentle protector was back, not to say I didn’t love Rafe the twisted asshat too.

  Because I did.

  I loved all of him, and maybe that’s why I was so upset. He’d let Jax lay his hands on me. He’d made me cry, scream, and beg for the burn of ginger to just stop. Instead of showing me mercy, he’d taken his pound of flesh before taunting me with the warm, thick evidence of his release all over my ass. Maybe that’s what I was really pissed about—the throb between my legs that still imprisoned me.

  “I took the stupid pills if that’s what you’re worried about.”