Taunt Me (Rough Love Book 2) Read online

  “I’ll get a job, okay? Is that what I have to do for you to love me?” She crawled over and slammed the door, and leaned back against it, drawing in her knees. I read the body language easily enough: she wasn’t leaving. I thought with longing of my wine and Neruda poems. Damn her and her long, brown, curly hair making a halo against the pale wood.

  “I’ll get a job,” she said. “I’ll design things. I want to design things. Why does that mean I can’t have you too?”

  “Because I want to put you in a dungeon,” I answered in a sharp voice. “It’s not about the job, it’s about this relationship shit you’re looking for. I want sex and slavery. I want you as a toy, not a partner, and it’s not fair to draw you into a dynamic like that when you want love and commitment. Why can’t you fucking see this?”

  “We can’t compromise?” she asked. “There’s no way for us to have the sex and slavery and still have love?”

  I gave a bitter laugh. “You’d love me for about a week before you tried to run the hell away.”

  “That’s not true. I want your intensity and your roughness. I love to surrender to you.”

  I got to my feet, waving away her silly declarations. She had no idea what she was volunteering for. “It wouldn’t just be sessions,” I said. “If I had what I wanted—my ideal relationship—”

  Stop. Stop talking, Price. Just stop.

  “What? Tell me.”

  “It would be about more than sex,” I said, standing over her. “It would be everything. You wouldn’t just be a slave, or a sub. You’d be mine, my possession.”

  “I want that.”

  “You think you do, but you don’t.” I started to pace, desire and angst expended in activity. “I would take everything I wanted from you, everything I needed, no matter what you thought you needed. I’d torment you if I felt like it. An all-encompassing dynamic. That’s what I would want.” I stopped pacing and turned to her. “You’ve never been anyone’s slave before.”

  “I’ve been yours,” she said. “For three years.”

  She looked exhausted, like she hadn’t been sleeping well. I hadn’t been sleeping well either. Something was missing from my life, a person I needed to make me happy. A person I would end up damaging and hurting.

  “Chere,” I said, and it was almost a groan. “Why are you putting me through this?”

  “Because we belong together.”

  She was so sure of that, sitting there with her back against my door, and her knees drawn up in her little pink skirt. She was so fucking sure this was possible.

  “I’ll show you the dungeon,” I said. “I’ll show you what I want from you, and then…”

  I wasn’t saying yes. But she realized I wasn’t saying no anymore either. I was saying maybe, which was fucking careless of me. She gave me a huge smile as I held out my hand to help her to her feet.

  *** *** ***

  I stuffed down nerves and walked her along the hall to my bedroom, and then to my walk-in closet. She watched as I pushed aside a line of suits, revealing a hidden door.

  “That’s why I couldn’t find it,” she said.

  I frowned at her. “You tried to find it?”

  “Yes. The morning you left me alone.”

  “If I wanted you to see it, I would have shown it to you.”

  Her eyes flashed in the harsh closet light. “You’ve shown it to other women, haven’t you?”

  It wasn’t really a question. It was a reproach. Yes, I’d brought other women here but they meant nothing to me, and Chere meant too much.

  “I’ll tell you this,” I said. “No one I’ve ever brought here has elected to come back.”

  With that warning, I turned the knob and walked her inside. On the surface, it was like any other room. It had dark gray walls and a smooth white ceiling, and a polished hardwood floor. But beneath the drywall, I’d had the entire space soundproofed, because I lived for the sound of a woman’s screams.

  I walked around turning on lights. Lamps, overhead lights, paper lanterns, every kind of light to illuminate this darkly perverse world.

  “Wow,” she said. “This is…”

  It was over the top. I knew. I’d repurposed two good-sized bedrooms to create the space, and furnished it with top-tier BDSM equipment. There was a monster of a bondage rack screwed to the wall, capable of restraining a victim in just about any position. There was a broad, padded leather table for horizontal kink activities, and an adjustable spanking bench for forcing women’s asses into the air. There was a sawhorse spreader with interchangeable tops: a flatter, padded one for milder sessions, and a hard, triangular one for punishing a slave who’d been very, very naughty. There was a cage, only one, a low, Chere-sized rectangle with stark metal bars.

  Aside from the various kinky structures, there were two tall chests full of thousands of dollars’ worth of butt plugs, nipple clamps, sex toys and punishment implements, all collected in the three years since I’d met her. I’d collected them for her, because I’d wanted her even when I shouldn’t want her. I’d wanted this, a painful, dark, selfish dynamic that could never fulfill her, no matter how sexy and exciting it might seem.

  “What do you think?” I asked. From the expression on her face, I thought she was probably soaking her panties.

  “So, this is what you want in a relationship? To hurt me here? To keep me locked away in here, all the time?”

  “Not all the time. Sometimes. When I feel like cuffing you to one of these structures and doing unconscionable things to your body.”

  She let out a slow breath. A flush crept up my neck. It had been one thing to admit I had a dungeon. It was another thing to allow her in here to see all the ways I wanted to torture her, to see the sheer magnitude of my perversion in the furniture and equipment I’d bought.

  “I’m not afraid of this,” she said, a little too loudly. She turned to me and repeated herself. “I’m not afraid of this. If this is what you want, I want it too. I mean, we were always moving toward this, weren’t we? You like control…” She gestured around at the racks and chains and leather cuffs. “And I like when you control me. It excites me.”

  “Will it excite you when you don’t like it?” I asked.

  “I can’t…” She gave me a flash of a smile and twitched self-consciously at her skirt. “I can’t imagine not liking it. Am I crazy for wanting this? I’m so turned on right now.”

  I wanted to fall on her. I wanted to fix her to the bondage rack and do a thousand wretched things to her until she begged for mercy. She’d like it sometimes. She’d hate it sometimes, though. She’d hate me.

  “You won’t always feel turned on.” I held out a hand. “Come here.”

  I hadn’t touched her yet, was afraid to let myself touch her, but when she crossed to me I grasped her hand. She was so trusting. I walked her to the far wall of the dungeon, past the solid wood and iron structures I’d use to restrain her.

  You think you know rough, starshine. You think you like it rough and hard and violent. You have no idea yet.

  I took her to stand in front of the two tall chests of drawers, and I started opening them, showing her what was inside. It was a ridiculously massive and lurid collection. Three years was a long time to fantasize.

  There were plugs and vibrators, every kind of nipple clamp, spreaders, and leather gear with clips and O-rings I could use to truss her up however I pleased. I’d accumulated a few serious—and seriously expensive—chastity devices, because I’d imagined her on her knees begging for orgasms. I’d also acquired an ungodly number of punishment implements, because I’d imagined breaking her down into an enslaved puddle of please-let-me-please-you. I’m not even sure she knew what the chastity belts and harnesses were for. She knew what the paddles and crops and straps and floggers were for. There was also a whole drawer at the bottom full of canes.

  “You see what I mean?” I asked. “You see what I mean when I say you won’t always feel turned on? You know I’m a sadist. Sometimes I’ll reall
y hurt you. Not injure you, but hurt you until you cry and scream for me to stop. And I won’t stop, Chere. That’s not how I play. No softness, no safe words. In our relationship, I’ll make you miserable on purpose, because it makes me feel powerful and sexually aroused.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. I had to tilt her chin up to focus her gaze.

  “Are you listening?” I asked. “This is what I want. Not love. Not dinner and a movie. I want your body and your soul. Over the last few weeks, when I hurt you and fucked you, I let you go home afterward. You had that choice, to end things.”

  She stared at me, her breathing shallow. “If we started up again, you wouldn’t let me end things?”

  “No. Not if I didn’t want to.”

  “So if I…” She looked around the silent dungeon. “If I agreed to that level of control… If I let you hurt me and enslave me the way you want, do you think you would ever be able to…to love me in return?”

  Jesus Christ, she was killing me.

  “You know I already love you,” I said, and with those words, my soul went broke. I confessed it. I admitted it. I loved her as I’d never loved anyone, and would never love anyone again. I also had to love her this way, or no way, because this was who I was. I took her in my arms and held her against my chest, touching her wild brown hair and her lovely feminine neck.

  “Really, you wouldn’t let me go, even if I wanted to go?” she asked. “Even if I begged to go?”

  “No,” I said, because love lies.

  “Ever?”

  Ever. A fairy-tale word. Happily ever after. I wanted us to live happily ever after. I knew I’d never find someone like her again, and if she was willing to put up with me....

  “I don’t think I’ll ever want to let you go,” I told her. “If you let me have you, all of you, and then you decided you wanted to leave, I don’t think I’d be able to let you go. It’d be a really tough thing.”

  “What if I had to get away?” she asked. “What if you’re just too awful? I guess I’d have to escape.”

  “You could try.”

  She was so twisted, my kinky girl. She wanted this. She wanted to be my prisoner of love. She wanted me to torment her and challenge her, and make her heart race. At some point, I knew she’d try to run away, just so I’d recapture her and punish her. All these lovely games were ahead of us. All the things in the drawers waited to be used on her body, to make it ache or burn with desire.

  She’d cry here, and hate me, and chafe against my will. She’d also cling to me and orgasm. I could become her entire world, and her eyes would come alive each time I brought her into this room to work her over. It could happen.

  “So, you want this?” I asked. My smile faded. It was time to be serious. If she wasn’t one hundred percent in, I couldn’t risk this kind of relationship.

  “Do you think you could bear belonging to me?” I pressed. “It’s perfectly fine if you want to walk away. It would be better for you to walk away.”

  She didn’t even think before she answered. “I don’t want to walk away. We need to be together. We’ll figure it out.”

  Shit. I let go of her and looked down at her pink tailored suit. I’d cut it off her that first day in a frenzy to get at the body underneath, and spent a fortune on a replacement. She was offering me access to that body all the time, along with her smiles and her spirit...

  There was so much to figure out, so much to worry about as I brought her into my life, and, of course, into my home. I would need her to live here and be available to me all the time, but she’d want to work too. Maybe I could rent a design space for her in my office building. On the same floor, preferably, so she’d be right there. I’d make her rent out her apartment and invest the money into her fledgling jewelry company. My business mind took over, because my heart was overwhelmed.

  There was so much risk, but I’d warned her and rebuffed her, and demonstrated the depth of my perversity, and she was still choosing this. She was choosing me. I didn’t know if it would feel like love to her. All I knew was that I hadn’t taken a chance like this in years, and that I’d never taken a chance where the stakes were so high.

  “Are you okay?” She touched my arm, a light, soothing caress. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be scared right now.”

  “Fuck you,” I muttered. “This is all your fault.”

  “It’s going to be okay. Trust me.”

  Trust me. Women couldn’t be trusted, and love couldn’t be trusted, but I’d let Chere into my dungeon and into my heart. Any torture that resulted was my own fucking fault, even if I blamed all this on her. I should never have opened the door.

  But if I hadn’t, I knew she’d still be out there, ringing the bell for the thousandth time.

  “Want to try some of the equipment on for size?” I suggested, because if I didn’t move around and do something, I was going to die of anticipation. I took her to the spanking bench, bent her over it and swatted her a few times to make her laugh. I showed her the modular parts of it, all the ways it could display her gorgeous ass for punishment or fucking. Next, I fit her wrists into a pair of shackles in the middle of the room. I raised them with a winch until she was on her tiptoes, her shoulders straining in her suit. Practice only. This equipment was made for nakedness.

  She couldn’t have straddled the sawhorse in her tight-fitting skirt. Instead I showed her how the leather-covered top could be inverted to suit my purposes, so straddling it was either comfortable or torturous for her. I left it in the torturous configuration, so she could imagine how the peaked edge would feel digging into her pussy for some future crime.

  And she’d commit crimes, I knew. She’d break rules, push boundaries. She was my fighter, after all.

  I led her to the ladder-style bondage rack and made her stand on the lowest bar, and then instructed her to reach up and hold the highest bar she could. Once she obeyed, I went around to the other side, to the space between the rack and the wall.

  Since she stood on the bar, her eyes and lips were on a level with mine. I kissed her, a kiss for all the ecstasy she’d brought me, and the agony, and the promise of more. When I opened my eyes, she was staring back at me. I closed my hands over hers.

  I’d be able to bind her to this rack whenever I wanted to, with rope or cuffs or leather straps. I’d clamp her tits and loop the chain over the bar above or below, so every time she moved, her nipples would feel it. Then I’d flog her, or hit her with a broad strap or paddle until her ass was scarlet and her legs trembled. Then I’d take her down and carry her to my bed, and fuck her while she was still crying from the pain. Maybe I wouldn’t even make it to the bed. Maybe I’d push her down on the floor and fuck her ass, using the absolute minimum amount of lube I needed to get in.

  I’d do things like that, and sometimes, more rarely, I’d do gentle things like hold her and stroke her. Maybe I’d write her some poetry. Maybe, finally, I’d be able to find the words.

  I kissed her once more and let go of her hands.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see if you fit in the cage. I know you’re dying to get in there.”

  She hopped down off the rack and made for the cage like a kid set loose in a toy store. She was already waiting beside it when I arrived to swing open the door.

  “Go on,” I prompted. “This will be the one and only time I let you in there with clothes.”

  I could have made her take off the clothes, but she’d worn them for a reason, and they were special. If she was going to wear clothes her first time in my cage, it was good and right that it would be these.

  “Wait,” I said. “There’s something else for you to try.”

  She perched just inside the cage’s opening, sitting on her knees. It was exactly the right height—tall enough for her to sit comfortably, but not stand. She could stretch her legs out if she raised them in the air. I’d have her try it in a moment, but first I went to the drawers and pulled out a box from the top left one. It contained another relic from our hot
el sessions: the supple leather collar I’d bought for her, in the same soft brown color as her eyes.

  I brought it over to her, as excited now as she’d been excited over the cage. I didn’t stop to show it to her, beyond holding it in front of me for the slightest moment. I wanted it on her. I wanted to see her wearing my collar again. My pet, my toy, my starshine, my pink dragon. Mine.

  “Let’s try it on for size,” I said, although I knew the size of her neck like I knew the size of my cock, since I’d grasped both of them plenty of times. I knew it would fit. She’d worn it before, during our last session at the Carlyle Hotel. I held the part with the O-ring against the front of her neck and made her lean down so I could buckle it in the back.

  “Oh,” she said. “You made it too tight.”

  “Not tight. Snug.” I didn’t want a breath of space between that collar and her neck. It symbolized control and surrender, and our history together. Three years. That was a long fucking time.

  She sat up and shook her hair back. Holy fuck, she looked magnificent. I’d put the collar on her at the Carlyle, yes, but that meant nothing in comparison to my feelings now. My cock ached, but this moment was more than sex, more than horniness.

  This was, finally, her total surrender—and mine. She touched the leather with her delicate fingertips, and gazed at me, her eyes wide. I wouldn’t have faulted her for looking around for a mirror, but she only looked at me.

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  Jesus. Did I like it? I parted my lips, at a loss for words. I made some motion for her to scoot back, and then I shut her in the cage, locking the door with an audible scratch and click. She stared out between the bars, the same woman who’d come to me, masked and defensive, three years ago, but now she was unmasked, and not defensive at all.

  She loved me. She wanted me. She’d asked me to trust her, but I was more amazed by the trust she placed in me.

  “Look at what you do for me,” I breathed. “You’re so beautiful.” It was the only poem I’d ever written for her, and the one I fell back on now, when all other words failed. I reached through the bars and touched her face, and skimmed my fingers over the collar.